Philosophy as Poetry

Patten Smith

Some months ago I proposed we might sometimes organise our monthly sessions in a different way from usual. My suggestion was that for these sessions were could circulate a text in advance, read it and then discuss its content when we met. This is rather how I remember university seminars working when I was studying for my Masters.

I went on to suggest that we might try out this approach out on some 2004 lectures by Richard Rorty. The lectures provide a good overview of Rorty's mature philosophy, and given his iconoclastic take on the history of western philosophy, I thought they might invite a stimulating discussion.

In what follows I give a very brief account of the lectures' content. Although I have previously read Rorty in greater depth, I have not attempted to fill out the account he gives here. To do this would have taken me more time than I had!

Very brief summary

Rorty's overall thesis can be stated in rough terms as follows. The western philosophical tradition, at least from Plato onwards, has focused on trying to identify the Truth about how things Really are. This is a hopeless endeavour, because in order to succeed it would require us somehow to get directly in touch with real Reality in a way that was not mediated by our historically contingent social practices, the most important of which is language. Rorty agrees with Nietzsche, that our understanding of the world is perspectival all the way down. And this means that all explanations and “truths” are provisional; there can be no stopping point, because it is always possible for somebody to use their imagination to come up with new explanations and “truths” that are “better” (more on “better” below) than their predecessors.

Rorty argues that it is high time for a paradigm shift in philosophy. We should give up on arguing about how things really are, and instead should, humbly accepting our ultimate finitude, get on with searching for new, more powerful, accounts of the world we live in and of our lives in it. The only aim of endeavouring to increase our knowledge and understanding, he argues, should be to increase our ability to do things in the world and to live richer and fuller human lives. Because humans are inescapably caught in webs of language and culture that are utterly contingent in origin, they can never reach the perspective-free standpoint that would be required to access the really Real. Only God could do that.

Competing explanations and “truths”, says Rorty should be compared purely on how much they help us do new things and live richer lives. And this is why he describes himself as a pragmatist in the tradition of Dewey, James etc. All explanations should be judged against pragmatic criteria, which amounts to asking how useful they are. None of this should change the content of things that count as knowledge and small t truths (eg scientific knowledge). It just offers (to Rorty) a more honest account of what we mean when we claim something is “true”. Ultimately, “hard facts” are things that people sharing a social practice all agree upon, things which if denied might lead to ascriptions of insanity or deviance.

Lecture 1

Lecture 1 outlines his general thesis and critiques what he terms the Appearance-Reality distinction, which he argues has been the centrepiece of much post-Platonic philosophy. Here he claims that all human progress really amounts to is the process of replacing our old descriptions of the world with new, more useful ones. However, because we are unable to describe the world directly as it really is we have no right to say that our new, better, explanations get us any closer to any ultimate Truth.

The old set of questions, he says, ask how humans might get in touch with something from which they have been estranged, where as the new set of questions ask how people might create new narratives that overcome the limitations of the old ones and enable us to create better futures.

Lecture 2

Lecture 2 maps his argument onto arguments within contemporary philosophy, both between analytic and “continental” philosophers, and, within analytic philosophy, between philosophers who follow Wittgenstein and those who are more sympathetic to cognitive science approaches to mind and language. Needless to say, Rorty sides with the continental philosophers and the Wittgensteinians

Lecture 3

In Lecture 3 he discusses his debts to the traditions of romanticism and pragmatism. Romanticism because it takes seriously the idea of radically re-describing reality and pragmatism because it offers public criteria against which to judge whether such redescriptions are better than the descriptions they endeavour to replace.

Read the lectures here.