Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature: Thirtieth-Anniversary Edition (Princeton Classics)

by Richard Rorty

To see this point, it helps to bear in mind that there are plenty of occasions on which we do well simply to ignore the pour-soi of human beings. We do this in the case of particularly dull and conventional people, for example, whose every act and word are so predictable that we “objectivize” them without hesitation. Conversely, when we come up against something nonhuman which wriggles out of the conceptual net presently used, it is natural to start talking about an unknown language—to imagine, for example, the migrating butterflies having a language in which they describe features of the world for which Newtonian mechanics has no name. Or, if we do not go this far, we at least fall naturally into the notion that the Book of Nature has not yet been deciphered—that it no more contains “gravitation,” say, than it contains “natural motion.” The temptation is to anthropomorphize the nonhuman world, or some part of it, just as soon as it becomes clear that, as with the native of an exotic culture, or the genius whose talk is over our heads, we do not “speak the same language.” Nature is whatever is so routine and familiar and manageable that we trust our own language implicitly. Spirit is whatever is so unfamiliar and unmanageable that we begin to wonder whether our “language” is “adequate” to it. Our wonder, stripped of mirror-imagery, is simply about whether somebody or something may not be dealing with the world in terms for which our language contains no ready equivalents. ...

December 7, 2020. Page 353.