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

by Richard Rorty

tout commence en mystique et finit en politique.

kulturgeschichtliche

When I say that the professional philosophers are getting their due, I mean simply that, insofar as they aren’t (insofar, for example, as ideologues waste time that could be saved if they knew more philosophy), this is the result of human finitude—simple laziness and stupidity, on the part of both the professionals and their various audiences. But of course in this sense, no book, no tradition, and no discipline ever gets its due. To announce that professional philosophy should get more attention would be important only if its plight were a special case.

December 9, 2020. Page 420. Stupid people.

Santayana

By the time Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature appeared, I was a colleague of Dick’s, across the way in McCosh Hall at Princeton, seeing him regularly and being shown the later essays that would go into his second book, Consequences of Pragmatism. He was a careful reader, and greatly wished to be read with care—a quality, with him, occasionally hidden under a love of paradox and a dandyish dryness of tone. His conscientiousness was deeper than his pride. I sent him once a chapter of a book which argued that Kant had lapsed into conventional metaphysics in the Critique of Judgment when he connected the possibility of aesthetic judgment with what he called a “supersensible substrate”—a peculiar formulation to come from a theorist who believed the aesthetic could exist only as an idea. “This has got to be wrong,” Dick said when we spoke in his office, and he took the quotation and the chapter downstairs to check against the German; five minutes later, he was back with a discovery. “You’re right. It’s not Kantian, and he shouldn’t say it, but he does.” The acknowledgment was characteristic and matter-of-fact. Over the years, as he changed his mind about some things, he made a fair number of public retractions, and there can have been few scholars of his stature who did it with such an absence of fuss. But the compulsion to notice what a philosopher “should have said” was an argumentative instinct he would never surrender and could not possibly regret. It showed to comical eff...

December 9, 2020. Page 426.

His father, James Rorty, had been a poet of high reputation in the 1920s before he turned to reformist journalism in the 1930s, but I did not know the final phase of this lineage until Dick mentioned an article his father had written about the last hurrah of the fellow-traveling left: the Paul Robeson concert, held on September 4, 1949, just north of Peekskill, New York. The local populace had stopped the concert a week earlier. When it was rescheduled, they again caught wind of the event, and organized, and the concertgoers and performers trying to leave were mobbed by patriots armed with bats and rocks. What, I asked, had James Rorty said about it? “He argued,” said Dick, “that the people of Peekskill had as much right to express their opinions as Paul Robeson had to express his.” I recalled the stories of rocks thrown at windshields and how my aunt and uncle wondered if they would get out alive, while Dick rapidly calculated the difference of view. “You better not read the article,” he said.

December 9, 2020. Page 427.

Nabokov,

Like William James in The Meaning of Truth, having thrown over the academic philosophy of his day, Rorty made it his mature ambition to abolish the value most cherished by philosophers. He called that value “Truth with a capital T.” His more-or-less Nietzschean variations on the theme were a spur to controversies with Hilary Putnam, John Searle, and others who wanted to preserve a sharper line between the natural and the moral sciences. Whether Rorty had the best of these disputes must be decided by judges better qualified than I. But his aim was easily misunderstood; it was not to deny the existence of a determinable “fact of the matter”—the answer, for example, to the question how many atoms are in carbon dioxide, or how many people were killed at Lidice or at My Lai and by whom? His pragmatism (which opponents called relativism) issued rather from an understanding that scientists, like poets, absorb the parts of the world they care for, and shape the result for human use. In Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, he mentions Thomas Kuhn as one of “the heroes of this book” alongside Dewey, Wittgenstein, Donald Davidson, and Wilfrid Sellars; and it was from Kuhn above all that he derived his belief that no world, of nature or of art, is ever seen just as it is. It is always seen under a description.

December 9, 2020. Page 428. Is this not Kantian?

He would remark that what made someone a great philosopher was, finally, not any observable human quality but merely “a neural kink.”

December 9, 2020. Page 429.

Intellectually, he was restless by nature, and showed several of the qualities he praised in his heroes: the ability to change the subject when the talk grew trite and conventional, to circumvent a useless procedure when it barred the way to a discovery, and to redescribe real and ideal objects, but never with a view to stopping the conversation. He made his points characteristically with “Homeric lists,” as he once called them, but the names were not always so miscellaneous as those above. More often, they were drawn from the broad but recognizable family of Hegel, Darwin, Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger, Derrida, Davidson. The quip or the explosive epigram might be his provisional means, but the history of philosophy was the constant shorthand medium for the riffs in which he worked out his larger preoccupations. Rorty’s argument with philosophy was a lover’s quarrel after all, and the pleasure he took in his capability as a lecturer on philosophy and literature—quite the equal of his gift as a writer—was in some part a performer’s pleasure, a little abashed at itself, as befitted the rueful pride of a prodigy who had worked half his life to cure himself of pride. The voice was definite, soft-spoken, with unconscious pauses where it had nothing to add, leaving room for others to come in. As much as his honesty and intelligence, those who learned from him will miss his curiosity, his power of surprise at finding anything new and rare.

December 9, 2020. Page 431.