"Philosophy as Poetry" (Page-Barbour Lectures)-AFTERWORD

AFTERWORD, MARY V. RORTY

HE READ A LOT, THAT MAN. HE STARTED EARLY, AND he kept it up. Seeing where it took him, it’s easy to suspect that he persisted in philosophy after his (very) early years at Robert Hutchins’s University of Chicago because, of all possible majors, it was the one least likely to restrict the range of things he could justify reading. But he read not just out of antiquarian affection for the best that has been thought and said—but also with constant attention to the implications of what he read for our time, our moment in history. And he read—and wrote—because of his conviction that words matter, that our language is our world, and that by our words we can change our world. I don’t think anyone ever doubted that he had in fact read all the people whose names fill the pages of his writings, and the scrawling marginalia in his library attest to the attention he gave their work—whether or not his construals of what they meant were uncontroversial. In these three lectures, for instance, he drops twenty-seven names in the first lecture, thirty-seven in the third, and a resounding forty-two names in the second—although, to soften the blow, it’s usually the same names in each. One of the nice things about his cavalier division of the history of philosophy into heroes and villains, and one of the things that helps his international reputation, is that if you aren’t familiar with what separates Pierce and Dewey, or the different priorities of Russell and Wittgenstein, you may nonetheless appreciate his view of what divides Husserl from Heidegger, and thus get a sense of the party for which he wants your allegiance. It is often with American pragmatism, under some—his?—description, a commodious tent, into which he was inclined to drag many contemporaries who might have had little inclination to enter it voluntarily. What strikes me about the Page-Barbour lectures—and indeed about much of his later work—is his vision of philosophy as one form of literature, a novel, rather than a mere biography, about the life of some ideas, tracing the convoluted growth and transformations of concepts over the course of time. In the third lecture he finally gave me a source—Hegel—for one of his deepest convictions: that “philosophy is, at best, its time held in thought.” To hold late-twentieth-century philosophy in thought means to acknowledge its ancestry and its variety—and to suggest a direction for its future development, as well. Ambitious? Hmm. Controversial? I’d hope so. It is, after all, our disagreements that keep us reading our peers and writing about them. Revisiting the Page-Barbour lectures Richard gave at the University of Virginia in the early years of the twenty-first century evokes pleasant memories of the time the family spent in Charlottesville—civility, collegiality, and the kind of intellectual stimulation and freedom that only a great university can provide. He was surprised, I think—even puzzled—by the impact of the publication of Mirror of Nature in 1979 on some of his most valued colleagues and friends; why, and how, could they take this odyssey of an idea so personally? The offer of a university professorship from UVa in 1981 offered a safe harbor of sorts: he could go to two department meetings (or neither); anything the English department didn’t like they could blame on the influence of the philosophy department, and vice versa. One of his heroes (second only to P. G. Wodehouse), the British humorist Stephen Potter, recommended in his book The Theory and Practice of Gamesmanship that the wise man would be a member not of one club, but of two, so that he could “be the other in the other”—wear a beret to the Guards, a topee to the Arts. A transdepartmental university professorship, he figured, was the best thing since the invention of tenure. His post-emeritus move to Stanford at the turn of the century offered many of the same advantages. Some of his most enduring friendships—and mine—were formed in our decades in Charlottesville. The philosophy department and women’s studies welcomed the participation in their programs of a faculty wife; the medical school, to my amusement, was offering a master’s in clinical ethics that encouraged philosophers to add some practical experience to their theory. The idea that philosophy could and should intervene in the world—in as many ways as possible, rather than only as a cloistered academic pursuit—was an idea dear to any Rortyan heart. There is a certain justice in titling this collection of Rorty’s Page-Barbour lectures “Philosophy as Poetry.” For a man as logocentric as Richard, it is easy to think in genres, and certainly he considered philosophy as one literary genre among others—as are physics, or mathematics, or medicine, all representing ways of finding (or imposing) order on the chaos of the world around us, so we could talk about it to each other. His last publication was a short piece for Poetry magazine, titled “The Fire of Life.” Speaking of the pleasure he took in the poems he had consigned to memory, he wrote that he wished he had spent more of his reading time stocking his head with verses to which he could turn at leisure. If philosophy is poetry, then perhaps, when changing how you describe things changes the world, poetry is also philosophy."

"Philosophy as Poetry (Page-Barbour Lectures)" by Richard Rorty, Michael Bérubé, Mary Varney Rorty: https://a.co/hKdCE7J

Mill’s On Liberty provides all the ethical instruction one needs

"Polytheism, in the sense in which I have defined it, is pretty much coextensive with romantic utilitarianism. For once one sees no way of ranking human needs other than playing them off against one another, human happiness becomes all that matters, and Mill’s On Liberty provides all the ethical instruction one needs.i Polytheists agree with Mill and Arnold that poetry should take over the role which religion has played in the formation of individual human lives, and that nothing should take over the function of the churches. Poets are to polytheism what the priests of a universal church are to monotheism. So once you become polytheistic, you are likely to turn away not only from priests, but from such priest-substitutes as metaphysicians and physicists. But such a turn is compatible with two different attitudes toward those who retain a monotheistic faith. One can see them as Nietzsche did, as blind, weak, fools. Or one can see them as James and Dewey did, as people who are so spell-bound by the work of one poet as to be unable to appreciate the work of other poets. One can be, like Nietzsche, aggressively atheist, or one can, like Dewey, see such aggressive atheism as itself a version of monotheism, as having “something in common with traditional supernaturalism.”9"

Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism: https://a.co/elSxNCA

Science and religion two non-competing ways of producing happiness

"For the underlying motive of that theory is to give us a way to reconcile science and religion by viewing them not as two competing ways of representing reality, but rather two non-competing ways of producing happiness. I take the anti-representationalist view of thought and language to have been motivated, in James’s case, by the realization that the need for choice between competing representations can be replaced by tolerance for a plurality of non-competing descriptions, descriptions which serve different purposes and which are to be evaluated by reference to their utility in fulfilling these purposes rather than by their “fit” with the objects being described. If James’s watchword was tolerance, then Dewey’s was, as I have said, anti-authoritarianism. His revulsion from the sense of sinfulness which his religious upbringing had produced led Dewey to campaign, throughout his life, against the view that human beings needed to measure themselves against something non-human. As I shall be saying in more detail later, Dewey used the term “democracy” to mean something like what Habermas means by the term “communicative reason”: for him, this word sums up the idea that human beings should regulate their actions and beliefs by the need to join with other human beings in cooperative projects, rather than by the need to stand in the correct relation to something non-human. This is why he grabbed hold of James’s pragmatic theory of truth."

Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism https://a.co/e5IT8Q6

Hope for a presently unimaginably better human future

"The view that I am offering in these lectures is anti-universalistic, in the sense that it discourages attempts to formulate generalizations which cover all possible forms of human existence. Hope for a presently unimaginably better human future is hope that no generalization we can presently formulate will be adequate to cover that future."

RR, PAA: https://a.co/b0yjLkn

Loyalty as rationality

"...if by rationality we mean simply the sort of activity which Walzer thinks of as a thinning-out process—the sort that, with luck, achieves the formulation and utilization of an overlapping consensus, then the idea that justice has a different source than loyalty no longer seems plausible.19 For, on this account of rationality, being rational and acquiring a larger loyalty are two descriptions of the same activity. This is because any unforced agreement between individuals and groups about what to do creates a form of community, and will, with luck, be the initial stage in expanding the circles of those whom each party to the agreement had previously taken to be “people like ourselves.” The opposition between rational argument and fellow feeling thus begins to dissolve. For fellow feeling may, and often does, arise from the realization that the people whom one thought one might have to go to war with, use force on, are, in Rawls’s sense, “reasonable.” They are, it turns out, enough like us to see the point of compromising differences in order to live in peace, and of abiding by the agreement that has been hammered out. They are, to some degree at least, trustworthy."

Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism: https://a.co/f3dN4r6

RR on a larger loyalty

"...should we describe such moral dilemmas as these as conflicts between loyalty and justice, or rather, as I have suggested we might, between loyalties to smaller groups and loyalties to larger groups? This amounts to asking: Would it be a good idea to treat “justice” as the name for loyalty to a certain very large group, the name for our largest current loyalty, rather than the name of something distinct from loyalty? Could we replace the notion of “justice” with that of loyalty to that group—for example, one’s fellow citizens, or the human species, or all living things? Would anything be lost by this replacement? Moral philosophers who remain loyal to Kant are likely to think that a lot would be lost. Kantians typically insist that justice springs from reason, and loyalty from sentiment. Only reason, they say, can impose universal and unconditional moral obligations, and our obligation to be just is of this sort. It is on another level from the sort of affectional relations which create loyalty. Jürgen Habermas is the most prominent contemporary philosopher to insist on this Kantian way of looking at things: the thinker least willing to blur either the line between reason and sentiment, or the line between universal validity and historical consensus. But contemporary philosophers who depart from Kant, either in the direction of Hume (like Annette Baier) or in the direction of Hegel (like Charles Taylor) or in that of Aristotle (like Alasdair MacIntyre) are not so sure."

"Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism": https://a.co/iVMyPfa

"Not God, but life"

"I turn now to the question of how this view of religious belief accords with the views of James and Dewey. It would not, I think, have been congenial to James. But I think it might have suited Dewey. So I shall argue that it is Dewey’s rather unambitious and half-hearted A Common Faith, rather than James’s brave and exuberant “Conclusion” to Varieties of Religious Experience, that coheres best with the romantic utilitarianism which both accepted. James says, in that chapter of Varieties, that “the pivot round which the religious life revolves … is the interest of the individual in his private personal destiny.” Science, however, “repudiating the personal point of view,” gives us a picture of nature which “has no one distinguishable ultimate tendency with which it is possible to feel a sympathy.” The “driftings of the cosmic atoms” are “a kind of aimless weather, doing and undoing, achieving no proper history, and leaving no result” (VRE, 387–388).y On the view I have just outlined, he should have followed this up by saying, “But we are free to describe the universe in many different ways. Describing it as the drifting of cosmic atoms is useful for the social project of working together to control our environment and improve man’s estate. But that description leaves us entirely free to say, for example, that the Heavens proclaim the glory of God.” Sometimes James seems to take this line, as when, with obvious approval, he quotes James Henry Leuba as saying, “God is not known, he is not understood, he is used—sometimes as meat-purveyor, sometimes as moral support, sometimes as friend, sometime as an object of love. If he proves himself useful, the religious consciousness can ask no more than that. Does God really exist? How does he exist? What is he? are so many irrelevant questions. Not God, but life, more life, a larger, richer, more satisfying life, is, in the last analysis, the end of religion.” (VRE, 398)"

Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism" by Richard Rorty, Eduardo Mendieta, Robert B. Brandom: https://a.co/f3uRbVW

Russell on WJ's WtB

"Ultimately the truth or falsehood of his doctrine would be decided on the battlefield, without the collection of any fresh evidence for or against it. This method is the logical outcome of William James’s will to believe. What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the wish to find out, which is its exact opposite."

Free Thought and Official Propaganda" by Bertrand Russell: https://a.co/hZmK3cg

Will to doubt

"William James used to preach the “will to believe.” For my part, I should wish to preach the “will to doubt.” None of our beliefs are quite true; all have at least a penumbra of vagueness and error. The methods of increasing the degree of truth in our beliefs are well known; they consist in hearing all sides, trying to ascertain all the relevant facts, controlling our own bias by discussion with people who have the opposite bias, and cultivating a readiness to discard any hypothesis which has proved inadequate."

Free Thought and Official Propaganda: https://a.co/gX28O9g

Sin & Reality "Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism"

"I see the pragmatists’ account of truth, and more generally their anti-representationalist account of belief, as a protest against the idea that human beings must humble themselves before something non-human, whether the Will of God or the Intrinsic Nature of Reality. So I shall begin by developing an analogy which I think was central to John Dewey’s thought: the analogy between ceasing to believe in Sin and ceasing to believe that Reality has an intrinsic nature."

Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism" by Richard Rorty, Eduardo Mendieta, Robert B. Brandom: https://a.co/c63oZsq 1