9
Pragmatism, Historicism, Aestheticism

Rorty's Neopragmatism

As the assault on metaphysics and modernity gathered force in the 1970s and 1980s, a new strand emerged with Richard Rorty's departure from Anglo-American analytical philosophy. Although the American pragmatist tradition was fundamental to him, Rorty refurbished that tradition and developed a particular understanding of the postmetaphysical possibilities, partly in confrontation with Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, and Derrida. And though he owed no debt to Croce, his intellectual framework had some striking similarities with Croce's, and for a while, at least, he found a significant kinship with Gadamerian hermeneutics. Rorty was navigating precisely the space at issue for us, and his distinctive way of sorting out its possibilities made him the most influential American contributor to the wider humanistic discussion by the late 1980s.

Rorty's contribution proved so valuable because he was able to bridge the gap between Anglo-American and Continental approaches; he moved comfortably, for example, from Quine and Davidson to Heidegger and Derrida. Partly because of his unique range, Rorty became as trenchant a critic of the metaphysical and modern as we have had, deepening the characterization of the overall cultural displacement. And in Rorty's thinking, one measure of that displacement was precisely a reduction to history. He characterized as "historicism" the harvest of Dewey, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein. Moreover, taking for granted the contingency and historicity of things, he himself proposed an orientation to the postmetaphysical world that was explicitly historicist.^[1]

[1] Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 9–10.

That orientation was explicitly moderate as well, so it paralleled Croce's and Gadamer's up to a point. For Rorty, too, removing the metaphysical props does not warrant the giddy or debilitating cultural consequences that some were drawing.^[2] He, too, sought to show that we need not become preoccupied with skepticism and relativism as we recognize that, lacking any suprahistorical vantage point, we are doomed to become outdated. But coming later than Croce and Gadamer and from a different tradition, he was able to add considerably to what they had offered.

Rorty sought especially to reconnect with the American pragmatism of John Dewey, who had distanced himself from Croce in a celebrated dispute over aesthetics during the late 1940s and early 1950s. Croce recognized a general kinship with Dewey, however, and the cultural reorientation he proposed included many of the themes that Rorty found valuable in Dewey's legacy. Most basically, Croce, too, had deflated philosophy in favor of engagement with the ordinary world.^[3] Indeed, Rorty's line of argument was arguably more congruent with Croce's way of doing so than with Dewey's.

Starting from a radical empiricism, pragmatism in Dewey's hands came to warrant a still-deeper cultural privilege for science. The question was how science comes up with what it does and how we can adapt scientific procedures to other forms of activity. As Rorty himself put it, Dewey held that things would be better "if only we could adopt the attitude and the habits of the natural scientist."^[4] Indeed, a scientific approach to value choice and conflict resolution could lead us to the millennium. At the same time, the American pragmatists paid little attention to the problems surrounding history and historical knowledge.^[5] During

[2] Ibid., 281–288, 294–295, 309–310, 316–317.

[3] For a good summary of the dispute between Dewey and Croce over aesthetics, see George H. Douglas, "A Reconsideration of the Dewey-Croce Exchange," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 28, no. 4 (Summer 1970): 497–504. While stressing his kinship with Dewey, Rorty recognized an important ambivalence in Dewey's career: Dewey wanted to be a conventional system builder even as he offered a new therapeutic conception of philosophy. See especially Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism (Essays: 1972–1980) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 35, 73, 82–83, 85. We have seen that Croce, too, seemed to place a premium on philosophical system early in his career, but he made it ever clearer that what had initially seemed systematic categories were merely ad hoc clarifications. Though Rorty admitted the complexity of Dewey's legacy, some students of Dewey have plausibly accused Rorty of overemphasizing those aspects of Dewey's thought that anticipate his own. See especially Robert B. Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 539–542.

[4] Richard Rorty, Essays on Heidegger and Others (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 129. See also p. 137.

[5] Cushing Strout, The Pragmatic Revolt in American History: Carl Becker and Charles Beard (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958), 14. See also Brook Thomas, The New Historicism and Other Old-Fashioned Topics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 97. In his relatively late Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (New York: Henry Holt, 1938), 220–244, esp. pp. 234–239, Dewey considered aspects of historical knowledge, but his argument echoed Croce's of a quarter-century before—as Croce noted with some exasperation. And even as he addressed questions about historical knowing, Dewey did not develop an overarching historicist framework like Croce's—or like Rorty's of a half-century later.

the 1920s and 1930s, as Deweyan pragmatists were seeking to take over social science departments in the United States, Croce was attacking social science and proposing, from his historicist perspective, cultural priorities that were closer than many of Dewey's to those Rorty would later emphasize.

Like Croce and Gadamer, Rorty took it for granted that we can no longer take our cultural cue from the natural sciences—that we must look to the other, "humanistic" culture instead. Moreover, Rorty seemed to echo Croce and Vico in focusing on the winding of history around creative language. And his way of conceiving language was central to the moderation of his position. Still, Rorty's pragmatism led him to focus not on truth but on the consequences, or "cash value," of saying this as opposed to that; we use language in different ways simply to get what we want under different circumstances. As we have seen, both Croce and Gadamer explicitly opposed any such pragmatist dissolution of truth. So despite the areas of convergence, a crucial difference between Rorty's neopragmatism and historicist hermeneutics is apparent from the outset.

During the 1980s, Rorty's effort to establish a postmetaphysical middle ground attracted many who, while valuing the deconstructionist assault on metaphysics, found the cultural prescriptions of deconstruction excessive or extravagant. Christopher Butler, for example, embraced Rorty's pragmatist categories as he sought to show how to sidestep the apparent dualism of reality and deforming language that he felt had led Derrida to excess. For Butler, the distinction between literal and figurative uses of language is a pragmatic one; theoretical adjudication is neither possible nor necessary. Rorty similarly criticized Derrida for failing to assume a relaxed, pragmatic, naturalistic view of language.^[6]

We noted that Derrida seemed to take the philosophical tradition too seriously and thus his overreaction as it apparently dissolved. From Rorty's down-to-earth, American perspective, that tradition had not been all that important in the first place. Intellectuals have had their particular hang-ups, and some even managed to get worked up about the problems of metaphysics. But those problems were of no general import. In seeking a postmetaphysical alternative to Heidegger, Rorty even dared confess that he himself "forgets about Being and thinks that beings are all there are."^[7] But he denied that in doing so he had fallen into Heidegger's darkening and night.

Still, for all its moderate valences, Rorty's neopragmatism diverged from the reconstructive neohistoricism it sometimes seemed to entail. Although not denying history as one kind of writing, Rorty gravitated toward the wider aestheticism,

[6] Christopher Butler, Interpretation, Deconstruction and Ideology: An Introduction to Some Current Issues in Literary Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 23–25; Rorty, Essays on Heidegger , 3.

[7] Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 113n.

which seemed to have no room for history as an autonomous cultural strand.^[8] His departure from historicism proves symptomatic and illuminating.

From Foundations to History

Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature , published in 1979, was fundamental to the overall assault on foundational philosophy. Although there his immediate target was epistemology, his subsequent writings made it clear that he was criticizing metaphysics and any notion of stable essences.^[9] And Rorty showed that an array of innovative recent philosophers had all been pulling in the same antimetaphysical direction. Thus, for example, Wittgenstein, Quine, Dewey, Davidson, and Derrida had all come to the antiessentialist, radically holistic conclusion that things have no intrinsic properties "in themselves," only relational properties. Saussure's notion that language is a play of differences was for Rorty the same as Wittgenstein's notion "that the meaning of a word is its use in the language." Thus we grasp the futility of our long-standing quest for the conditions of possibility of "language," or for some big metavocabulary specifying the least common denominator of all the possible uses of language.^[10]

More generally, we give up the "ancient hope" that Rorty found lurking in the whole philosophical tradition: "the hope for a language which can receive no gloss, requires no interpretation, cannot be distanced, cannot be sneered at by later generations. It is the hope for a vocabulary which is intrinsically and self-evidently final, not merely the most comprehensive and fruitful vocabulary we have come up with so far. Such a vocabulary would have to be adequate to 'place' all of history and all of contemporary culture."^[11] To give up that hope for completeness and closure is to recognize that the world is ever provisional and that we are caught up in endless history.

At first, the end of foundational philosophy might seem to portend some

[8] In ibid., 119n, Rorty considers the notion of aestheticism that Allan Megill developed in his Prophets of Extremity to account for the common thread in the thinking of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, and Derrida. Here, and throughout this book, Rorty seeks to distinguish the private quest for aestheticist edification from the neoliberal politics he advocates, but I will argue that even in Rorty's universe public and private are not so easily separated.

[9] See, for example, Rorty, Contingency , 74–75, 96. Though less explicit, Rorty's antimetaphysical posture had been clear in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature ; see, for example, 269, 272–273. See also Richard Rorty, "Habermas and Lyotard on Post-Modernity," in Habermas and Modernity , ed. Richard J. Bernstein (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985), 170, 173.

[10] Rorty, Essays on Heidegger , 127, 130. This is not to suggest that Rorty was equally comfortable with all the more innovative Anglo-American philosophers of his time. In Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature , 259–262, he found greater kinship with Davidson and Nelson Goodman than with Quine, Hilary Putnam, Wilfrid Sellars, and Saul Kripke. The former were more "radical" and potentially historicist.

[11] Rorty, Essays on Heidegger , 89.

sort of crisis or abyss. But Rorty reacted against the extreme, apocalyptic tendencies of Continental thinkers from Nietzsche and Heidegger to Derrida, all of whom assumed that something deeply significant was ending. The end of essentialism and logocentrism, even the death of God, was not a world-historical pivot, requiring some radically new self-understanding.^[12]

For Rorty, it was not philosophy but the history of concrete social engineering that made North Atlantic civilization what it is—with all its glories and dangers. The canonical sequence of philosophers from Descartes to Nietzsche was a mere distraction. Our philosophical tradition remains back there, of course, but it need not traumatize us; we can simply circumvent it, recognizing it for what it was—and is.^[13]

Conversely, even when such foundations dissolve, we have what we need, so no apocalyptic response is necessary. Rather than assume that the insights of Derrida, for example, demand an altogether different cultural orientation, we can simply proceed without taking the inevitable binary oppositions very seriously—as most of the culture has been doing for a long time. We are increasingly conscious, said Rorty, of resting on nothing more solid than a fountain of puns and metaphors. Because we are constantly reading several texts at once, we do not need, for example, the new kind of writing that Derrida offered in Glas . Although it required real brilliance for Derrida actually to do it on paper, Glas was not the novel catachresis that Derrida intended but a realistic rendering of what goes on in our heads. As we go about our business, we can find room for Derrida, too, of course, but we should take him simply as the great comic writer he is.^[14]

Rorty recognized, however, that Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida had been instrumental in the assault on metaphysics. And despite their apocalyptic tendencies, they had managed some of the generally pragmatist insights that Rorty valued. Although giving it a very different political spin, Nietzsche had done most to convince European intellectuals of the doctrines purveyed to Americans first by James and Dewey, then by "the later, linguistified pragmatists" Quine, Hilary Putnam, and Davidson, who, Rorty maintained, could as easily be grafted onto Nietzsche as onto Dewey. Although their accents sometimes differed, "pragmatists" from Nietzsche and Heidegger to Derrida, Putnam, and Nelson Goodman have taught us to focus on human uses and to accept the relativity of our descriptions, rather than worry about correct representation and suprahistorical essences.^[15]

Although Rorty sometimes portrayed the new, more pluralistic culture he envisioned as "postphilosophical," it was clear that it had room for philosophy as one kind of discourse or conversation. In Philosophy and the Mirror of

[12] Ibid., 132; his targets here are Heidegger, Derrida, and de Man.

[13] Rorty, "Habermas and Lyotard," 172–173.

[14] Rorty, Essays on Heidegger , 100–105.

[15] Ibid., 2–6, 126.

Nature , he suggested that Dewey, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein pointed the way for philosophy to become appropriately therapeutic, as opposed to foundational or systematic.^[16] At the same time, however, Rorty implied that philosophy had always performed something like this therapeutic function, even as it claimed to offer something more grandiose. Much like Croce, he denied that the important philosophers have all been doing the same thing, as if there was a set of enduring philosophical problems to be addressed. Rather than give new answers to the same enduring enigmas, the notable philosophers have endlessly formulated new questions.^[17] Even what have seemed the "deep" philosophical questions are historically specific and provisional.

As therapy, philosophy's aim is simply to continue the conversation. Croce argued in a similar way that philosophy's role was to provide ad hoc clarification—to enable the growth of the world to continue. For both Rorty and Croce, the point of repairing to the philosophical level is not to claim the last word and stop the discussion, or even to stop and rest. The point, rather, is to clear up a cluster of historically specific confusions to enable us to move back down, to get back to work, so that the discussion—and the growth—may continue. Rorty followed Wittgenstein in arguing that philosophical clarification can work—can be "true" or adequate for the particular historical moment or language game.^[18] And he valued Gadamerian hermeneutics because it was not simply another attempt to fill the old epistemological space, to specify a method for attaining truth; rather, it was an attempt to show what happens and how we proceed once the epistemological effort at commensuration, or finding decision procedures, is abandoned.^[19]

Even as he offered his reassuring, easygoing pragmatism, Rorty translated the eclipse of metaphysics into precisely the reduction to history at issue for us. The dissolution of metaphysical foundations leaves us with contingency, with historicity, with things in their individuality.^[20] Much like Croce and Gadamer, Rorty accented the novelty that endlessly results from the creative ways that human beings use language. Thus, for example, "our repertoire of sentences grows as history goes along, and . . . this growth is largely a matter of the literalization of novel metaphors." We are forever responding to new and perplexing cases "by reweaving our web of linguistic usage." More generally, "the realm of possibility expands whenever somebody thinks up a new

[16] Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature , 5, 393–394.

[17] Ibid., 63, 263–264; Rorty, Essays on Heidegger , 123n; Rorty, Consequences , xxxi.

[18] Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature , 393–394; Rorty, Consequences , 104.

[19] Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature , chap. 7, "From Epistemology to Hermeneutics," esp. pp. 315–322. See also pp. 357–358. For a penetrating critique of Rorty's use of Gadamer, see Georgia Warnke, "Hermeneutics and the Social Sciences: A Gadamerian Critique of Rorty," Inquiry 28, no. 3 (September 1985): 339–357. See also Georgia Warnke, Gadamer: Hermeneutics, Tradition and Reason (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987), chap. 5.

[20] See, for example, Rorty, Consequences , 158; Rorty, Contingency , 74; and Rorty, Essays on Heidegger , 108.

vocabulary, and thereby discloses (or invents—the difference is beside any relevant point) a new set of possible worlds."^[21]

In some of his formulations, Rorty was concerned to show especially the historicity of the philosophical tradition. At any one time, philosophy centers on one topic rather than another, not because of some dialectical necessity, but because of the mundane accidents of who happened to encounter what idea when, or because of the contingent intervention of a brilliant new question or idea.^[22] But contingent interaction with innovations elsewhere in the culture—the French Revolution, for example, or the new science, or the advent of the modern novel—also shaped philosophy, so in the final analysis it is not just philosophy that is merely historical but the whole of our world, encompassing everything from selfhood to language.^[23]

On every level, "what we are today" is nothing but the contingent resultant of earlier contingent interaction, when the very measure of what we now "are" was not yet "there." That measure is "always already" in the process of being hammered out—as, of course, it is at this moment as well. In one striking instance of this argument, Rorty invoked both Foucault and Kuhn as he considered the significance of Galileo's triumph over Robert Bellarmine for what subsequently counted as rationality. Even the sort of evidence that would count for this or that was the contingent outcome of the competition of interpretations at that point in the past.

The "grid" which emerged in the latter seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was not there to be appealed to in the early seventeenth century, at the time that Galileo was on trial. No conceivable epistemology, no study of the nature of human knowledge, could have "discovered" it before it was hammered out. The notion of what it was to be "scientific" was in the process of being formed. . . . We are the heirs of three hundred years of rhetoric about the importance of distinguishing sharply between science and religion, science and politics, science and art, science and philosophy, and so on. This rhetoric . . . has made us what we are today.^[24]

Along the same lines, Rorty insisted that the quest for a theory of meaning change, in response, especially, to Paul Feyerabend's radically open-ended conception of scientific innovation, was doomed. Indeed, the division of labor between the historian and the philosopher no longer made sense, because what comes to seem the rationality of change always depends on new discoveries. Thus, for Rorty, the philosopher has nothing to add to what the historian shows.^[25]

[21] Rorty, Essays on Heidegger , 3, 109, 127; see also p. 103.

[22] Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature , 264; see also pp. 389–392, as well as Rorty, Consequences , 62; and Rorty, Essays on Heidegger , 88n–89n, 98.

[23] See especially Rorty, Contingency , chap. 1; see also pp. 50–51.

[24] Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature , 327–331. The quotation is from pp. 330–331.

[25] Ibid., 272.

So Rorty's conception of what there is, what is happening, as the roles of both philosophy and science contract, seemed first to suggest a deeper premium on historical inquiry. Indeed, for Rorty, even more than for Croce or Gadamer, philosophy plays its therapeutic role by becoming a radical kind of historical inquiry. He insisted explicitly that we can only refer to history for self-understanding, and he himself resorted frequently to historical interpretation—some of the most effective we have had.

Rorty's immediate target was the philosophical tradition. To get rid of the vexing but unnecessary mind-body problem, for example, we must relive its history.^[26] But of course it is ultimately the whole of our history, not simply an isolable history of philosophy, that opens for such questioning. Rorty noted that we find ourselves asking why we have philosophy in our culture in the first place—and this is a broader historical question.^[27]

Our cultural situation invites big, encompassing histories that, Rorty suggested, stem from contemporary concerns and can significantly affect contemporary practice. Considering, for example, the enduring desire for some suprahistorical grasp of the conditions of free discussion, he observed that he would like "to replace both religious and philosophical accounts of a suprahistorical ground or an end-of-history convergence with a historical narrative about the rise of liberal institutions and customs." That history would have immense practical import—as the only way to get our bearings in a postmetaphysical world: "Such a narrative would clarify the conditions in which the idea of truth as correspondence to reality might gradually be replaced by the idea of truth as what comes to be believed in the course of free and open encounters."^[28]

Rorty's sense of what historical inquiry might accomplish enabled him to bring out the reconstructive potential in Foucault's approach, though he also offered some illuminating criticism of Foucault's tensions and ambiguities. Envisioning a fully postmetaphysical culture, in which we no longer believe we need "a theory of communicative competence as backup," Rorty suggested that we would simply turn our attention "to some concrete examples of what was presently distorting our communication." Approaching them historically opens the way to the sort of salutary

"shock" we get when, reading Foucault, we realize that the jargon we liberal intellectuals developed has played into the hands of the bureaucrats. Detailed historical narratives of the sort Foucault offers us would take the place of philosophical metanarratives. Such narratives would not unmask something created by power called "ideology" in the name of something not created by power called

[26] Ibid., 33–34, 123–126, 136. See also pp. 10, 389–392; as well as Rorty, Consequences , 186.

[27] Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature , 229. See also Rorty, Consequences , 60–71.

[28] Rorty, Contingency , 68.

"validity" or "emancipation." They would just explain who was currently getting and using power for what purposes, and then (unlike Foucault) suggest how some other people might get it and use it for other purposes.^[29]

So whereas Foucault left uncertainty about the practical import of historical questioning, Rorty explicitly connected history as thought with history-making action. Indeed, his way of conceiving the mechanisms whereby the world grows as we respond and question, act and interact, is almost precisely Croce's of over fifty years before. In interacting, we all hope our modicum of novelty, our creative response in language, will be carried into the future, becoming part of the stock of what are taken to be literal truths.^[30] But for Rorty, again as for Croce, pluralism and humility follow from historicism; we understand ourselves as collaborators in the process through which the world is endlessly remade.

These accents led Rorty, like Croce, to insist that the overall intellectual reorientation was neoliberal in its political implications. Rorty opposed his historicist neoliberalism to the effort of those like Habermas "to ground moral obligation, and thus social institutions, on something universally human."^[31] Exactly like Croce during the 1920s, Rorty held that we cannot specify in advance what counts as undistorted, or ideological, or true, or good; all we can do is set up free, pluralistic, democratic institutions and trust in the ever-provisional outcome of the resulting interaction.^[32] In interacting, we seek to persuade, but we also seek an ever-renewed yet always provisional consensus within a tolerant, broadly liberal framework.

Whatever Rorty's own characterizations, critics like Jonathan Culler and Christopher Norris found his thinking politically conservative in implication, especially when compared with the radicalism of deconstruction. Rorty claimed in response to be striking a balance.^[33] He found a place for Foucault's radical historical questioning, yet he embedded Foucault's approach within a quasi-Gadamerian framework. Thus his concern for "reinforcing our sense of identification with our community," though always in a postmetaphysical mode,

[29] Rorty, "Habermas and Lyotard," 173.

[30] Rorty, Contingency , 42; see also p. 61. For a few of Croce's many statements along these lines, see Cultura e vita morale: Intermezzi polemici (Bari: Laterza, 1955), 206–209 (1916), 210–211 (1917); and Filosofia e storiografia: Saggi (Bari: Laterza, 1969), 64–65 (1945).

[31] Rorty, Essays on Heidegger , 197. Although Rorty here refers to Habermas as "my fellow liberal," the crucial difference is explicit; Rorty was determined to do without the suprahistorical element that Habermas still seemed to find necessary.

[32] Ibid., 132–133; Rorty, Contingency , 84, 176–177. Up to a point, Rorty's pluralism was congruent with Foucault's emphasis on local knowledge and the wider postmodern reaction against "metanarrative," or the pretense of global solution.

[33] In Essays on Heidegger , 119–120, 120n, 132–136, Rorty opposed his tolerant, democratic pluralism to the American cultural Left, with its tendency, derived partly from Foucault and de Man, to view contemporary democratic states as "disciplinary" and reformist politics as complicit with the discourses of power.

without "a theory of communicative competence as backup."^[34] Conversely, this Gadamerian dimension was not prejudicially conservative because it was balanced with Foucault's invitation to ongoing critical questioning. The community Rorty envisioned was liberal as opposed to conservative precisely in inviting this endless self-examination through deconstructive historical inquiry.

In general, then, Rorty's cultural prescriptions seemed to point to the synthesis of deconstructive questioning and Gadamerian gathering, or community, that seems necessary for postmetaphysical moderation. But rather than focus on the scope for a new culture of history, he reached out to the literary culture and prescribed a variety of aestheticism. Even as he found kinship with Gadamer, Rorty's accents diverged from Gadamer's own, for Rorty was concerned with edification while Gadamerian hermeneutics, though departing from epistemology, was still concerned with the happening of truth. In the same way, Rorty posited a relationship between individual experience and the world as historical that compromised the accents on history-making that were prominent in much of his writing. From within his aestheticized neopragmatist framework, history seemed unlikely to play the cultural role Rorty himself sometimes seemed to suggest for it.

From Philosophy to Textualism

Rorty's assessment of contemporary cultural possibilities rested on his historical account of the process whereby the claims of both philosophy and science began to diminish. In "Nineteenth-Century Idealism and Twentieth-Century Textualism" (1980), he offered an arresting historical sketch of the cultural falling out that resulted from the breakdown of modern philosophy.^[35] Though brilliant in many respects, the essay moves quickly over the crucial changes, and it is illuminating to pinpoint its accents and omissions.

Much, plausibly, turns on Hegel's departure from the Kantian notion that the task of philosophy was to provide a stable cultural framework by accounting for the success of science. By subordinating any such framework to the overall historical process, Hegel not only occasioned a break into historicism but opened the way to a recasting of the intellectual hierarchy. With the scientific study of nature forced down a notch or two, a new kind of literary culture, from Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Ralph Waldo Emerson on up to those like the American literary intellectual Harold Bloom in our own time, began to assume the role of cultural arbiter that philosophy had previously played.^[36]

[34] Rorty, "Habermas and Lyotard," 173.

[35] Reprinted in Rorty, Consequences , 139–159. See esp. pp. 146–153 for the points at issue for us.

[36] Ibid., 149. More specifically, this meant, with romanticism, the hope "that what the philosophers had been seeking, the inmost secrets of the spirit, were to be discovered by the new literary genres which were emerging" (p. 150).

Thus, initially, the claims of romanticism, but with Nietzsche and William James late in the nineteenth century, romanticism gave way to pragmatism; we understand the new vocabularies we devise not as bringing secrets to light but simply as tools for getting what we want. At about the same time, the new modernist literature depicted life without hope of metaphysical comfort. Then a more general culture of textualism emerged in the twentieth century, attempting to think through the pragmatist break, the "thorough-going abandonment of the notion of discovering the truth which is common to theology and science."^[37]

Rorty contended that one variant of that textualism did not fully make the break. Even in our own time there are "weak textualists" who believe that with everything reduced to linguistic structures or some such, we can at last get it right, by means of the correct method, whether structuralist or poststructuralist. Rorty identified instead with the "strong textualist," who embraces the twin legacies of pragmatism and literary modernism and who seeks autonomy and novelty, rather than truthfulness to experience or the discovery of preexisting significance.^[38] With his premium on strong textualism, Rorty was following Bloom, whose concern with "the anxiety of influence" proved central to Rorty's way of conceiving the cultural challenge and whose corresponding emphasis on "strong misreadings" influenced Rorty's sense of current priorities.^[39]

Rorty's way of dividing things up recalls the long-standing bifurcation into "the two cultures" made famous by C. P. Snow but also to be found in important subsequent assessments of cultural proportions.^[40] The alternative to the scientific culture, more or less buttressed by philosophy, more or less dominant for the past couple hundred years, is a literary culture that offers certain kinds of things instead. In embracing that literary culture, Rorty placed a relatively conventional emphasis on the value of poetry, the novel, the literary mode in general, but it was his way of embracing Bloom's categories that gave particular bite to his cultural prescriptions.

In one sense, Rorty's way of associating the decline of science with the fallout from Hegel was idiosyncratic. The breakdown of the Hegelian synthesis is widely viewed as the charter for the great age of science that followed, with

[37] Ibid., 150–151; emphasis in original.

[38] Ibid., 151–153.

[39] In addition to ibid., 151–154, 157–158; see Rorty, Contingency , 24, 24n–25n, 29–30, 40–41, 41n–42n, 53, 61, for his debt to Bloom and his way of embracing these two categories. For Bloom's elaboration of those categories, see The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973) and A Map of Misreading (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975).

[40] C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures: And a Second Look (New York: New American Library, Mentor, 1964). Rorty invokes Snow approvingly in introducing Consequences ; see pp. xli and xlvii, n. 50. See also W. T. Jones, The Sciences and the Humanities: Conflict and Reconciliation (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1967). Although he probes more deeply, Jones ends up, like Snow, positing a cultural dichotomy between science and literature that leaves history suspended ambiguously.

each branch of inquiry detaching itself from what had been the philosophical center to become, or seek to become, an autonomous science. But Rorty's underlying point is convincing. Although the cultural apogee of science came in the late nineteenth century, Hegel was central to historicizing ways of conceiving the philosophical foundations, and ultimately scientific inquiry itself, which ultimately helped to undermine the hegemony of science. The question is what was left, or what alternatives emerged, as both systematic philosophy and science were historicized.

Rorty jumped quickly from nineteenth-century Hegelianism to twentieth-century textualism rather than pull back to encompass the whole broadly humanistic culture that emerged in tension with science and foundational philosophy during the nineteenth century. The several strands of that culture included those Rorty featured, culminating in pragmatism and modernism, but also a historicist strand that had also come through Hegel, that was not limited to Dilthey, and that had in Gadamer one major contemporary exemplar. In conflating historicism with Hegel, and in featuring romanticism as what emerges as the space of science proves circumscribed, Rorty neglected that historicist strand, its relationship with the pragmatist and modernist strands, and its prospects for development.^[41] Thus he tended toward a limiting bifurcation as he characterized the cultural possibilities that have resulted from our recent intellectual history.

To be sure, Rorty embraced Gadamer as an ally in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature , but problematically and, ultimately, unconvincingly. Because Gadamer was reacting against epistemology, Rorty assumed that he, too, was interested in edification and a kind of aestheticism, that he, too, was showing that in a postphilosophical world we simply try to get what we want. The alternative to the metaphysical pretense of a final vocabulary was a quest for autonomy on the private level. But this was to gloss over Gadamer's concern with truth and the endless gathering, or coming back together, of the public world, the continuing tradition to which we belong. Rorty's use of Gadamer reflected his tendency to characterize postmetaphysical alternatives in a narrowly dualistic way.

Irony, Redescription, Autonomy

Rorty, then, was quick to find common cause with the literary culture, but what, more specifically, did he find most important for us, now that we seem at last to be coming to terms with the break from idealism to textualism? His initial suggestion was that we follow the lead of edifying thinkers like Dewey, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein, who seek not to mirror reality but simply to keep the conversation going—in the face of our ongoing attempt to close it through

[41] Rorty, Consequences , 76, 82, 85.

appeal to objective truth. Although they know their work is historically specific and thus loses its point when their historical period has ended, such edifying thinkers are a source of new descriptions, of ongoing novelty.^[42] For example, the greatness of Dewey's work

lies in the sheer provocativeness of its suggestions about how to slough off our intellectual past, and about how to treat that past as material for playful experimentation rather than as imposing tasks and responsibilities upon us. Dewey's work helps us put aside that spirit of seriousness which artists traditionally lack and philosophers are traditionally supposed to maintain. For the spirit of seriousness can only exist in an intellectual world in which human life is an attempt to attain an end beyond life, an escape from freedom into the atemporal. The conception of such a world is still built into our education and our common speech, not to mention the attitudes of philosophers toward their work.^[43]

Whatever the scope for edification, this characterization indicates Rorty's tendency to limit us to two alternatives, one traditional, bound up with the conventional function of philosophy, and the other generally artistic. In the traditional philosophical mode, our past imposes "tasks and responsibilities upon us," and we find ourselves seeking escape into the atemporal; in the artistic mode, we treat our intellectual past "as material for playful experimentation."

In Rorty's later works, the edifying philosopher took more general form as the ironist, his major postmodern protagonist. The ironist seeks autonomy.

He is trying to get out from under inherited contingencies and make his own contingencies, get out from under an old final vocabulary and fashion one which will be all his own. The generic trait of ironists is that they do not hope to have their doubts about their final vocabularies settled by something larger than themselves. This means that their criterion for resolving doubts, their criterion of private perfection, is autonomy rather than affiliation to a power other than themselves. All any ironist can measure success against is the past—not by living up to it, but by redescribing it in his terms, thereby becoming able to say, "Thus I willed it.". . . He wants to be able to sum up his life in his own terms.^[44]

In emphasizing ever-provisional self-making, Rorty was explicitly seeking to turn from the "modern" premium on self-expression, with its still-metaphysical assumption of a given essence.^[45] But the Nietzschean notion of "thus I willed it" prompts another line of questioning. Does the autonomy resulting from successful redescription have some wider public purpose, or is it simply an end in itself?

In some of his moods, Rorty seemed to want to box out not just the philosophical

[42] Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature , 368–369, 377–378.

[43] Rorty, Consequences , 87–88; emphasis in original.

[44] Rorty, Contingency , 97.

[45] Ibid., chap. 2; see esp. pp. 42–43.

tradition but the concerns of intellectuals more generally, as idiosyncratic and of marginal importance.^[46] The intellectual, from this perspective, is a special type, preoccupied with self-creation and novelty, needing to use words that are not part of anybody else's language game. Intellectuals are not serving a social purpose when they fulfill this idiosyncratic personal need—and thus they are prone to feelings of alienation and guilt.

Generally, however, Rorty had in mind a wider cultural function, responding to reality-as-history, even as he accented novelty, originality, and self-description. Intellectuals may be more original than others, but the question of creativity and change is at issue for the culture as a whole.^[47] In one sense, the intellectual ironist serves as a cultural spearhead or pioneer; in another, all actors are "intellectuals" to the extent that their responses rest on some understanding of a given situation. Ultimately, the imperative of irony applies to all of us. But how does that imperative, and how does the function of the ironist, relate to the neohistoricist conception Rorty seemed on his way to positing? Distinguishable questions about both thought and action are at issue.

Among other things, the ironist is looking for a redescription of the philosophical tradition that will cause it to lose its hold over him. In both his prescriptions and his practice, Rorty sometimes suggested that a historical account, revealing the contingency of the tradition, is precisely what is needed to achieve the desired autonomy. But is such a historical account simply a creative, ironic redescription, or is it in some sense true and, on that basis, distinguishable from other kinds of redescription?

Moreover, Rorty apparently sought, in publishing his own historical accounts, to influence the subsequent culture—as indeed he has. He recognized, let us recall, that we hope that our modicum of novelty, or metaphor, will carry into the future, becoming part of the future's stock of what are taken to be literal truths. Moreover, he noted explicitly that some influence others in the process of social interaction; new metaphors connect with earlier ones, influencing the future. Thus there is "a web which stretches backward and forward through past and future time."^[48] The world is an ongoing conversation, as opposed to a series of unconnected assertions or descriptions. And a particular history results from the provisional triumph of some particular set of

[46] See, for example, Rorty, "Habermas and Lyotard," 174–175; and Rorty, Essays on Heidegger , 136–137.

[47] Nancy Fraser has astutely analyzed the tensions between the "pragmatic" and "romantic," or "public" and "private," themes in Rorty's thinking. See especially her "Solidarity or Singularity? Richard Rorty between Romanticism and Technocracy," in Consequences of Theory , ed. Jonathan Arac and Barbara Johnson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 39–62. On pp. 44–46, Fraser nicely characterizes the tack Rorty takes when claiming that strong poets serve a wider sociopolitical function, but she finds him unpersuasive. See also Nancy Fraser, "From Irony to Prophecy to Politics: A Response to Richard Rorty," Michigan Quarterly Review 30, no. 2 (Spring 1991): 259–266.

[48] Rorty, Contingency , 41–42. See also pp. 29, 61.

contingent metaphors. So creative redescription could be conceived as history-making, reshaping the culture as an aspect of the ongoing particularizing and growth. How, then, do irony and redescription relate to the connectedness, the web of influence, that Rorty could not avoid positing?

Rorty went out of his way to link irony and redescription to discontinuity, as opposed to the reconnection of history-making action. What I seek, in coming up with new metaphors, is a redescription that will prove useful for my own purposes of self-creation, not for reconstructing the public world. Indeed, creativity is bound up with wriggling free of history. Suggesting that contingency precludes continuity, Rorty implied that creation requires discontinuity and even conflated "the continuity-seeking historian" with the discredited philosopher.^[49]

Rorty's tendency to jump from philosophy to literature, bypassing or precluding history, is especially clear in the striking passage below, in which he first implies that a form of postmetaphysical history is what we most need but then finds literature to be the only alternative to metaphysically grounded theory. From a consideration of Proust, contrasted favorably with Nietzsche in this context, Rorty concluded

that novels are a safer medium than theory for expressing one's recognition of the relativity and contingency of authority figures. For novels are usually about people—things which are . . . quite evidently time-bound, embedded in a web of contingencies. . . . By contrast, books which are about ideas, even when written by historicists like Hegel and Nietzsche, look like descriptions of eternal relations between eternal objects, rather than genealogical accounts of the filiation of final vocabularies, showing how these vocabularies were engendered by haphazard matings, by who happened to bump into whom.^[50]

Rorty's implication is that such genealogy is what we most need in this contingent world, and it is not afforded by the novel, insofar as novels deal with people as opposed to ideas. There is a particular cultural place for something "between" more or less metaphysical theory, on the one hand, and literature, on the other. The genealogies we need look at first glance like histories. Yet Rorty leaves us with a cultural premium on "novels," implying that anything not focused on contingencies of people will seem like something more than the desired genealogy, will be taken as claiming metaphysical sanction or suprahistorical status. Although not focusing explicitly on history in this passage, Rorty implied that history necessarily claims too much, looks like something more. And thus he assigned to literature a role that initially seemed to fall to history in a postmetaphysical culture.

[49] Ibid., 28, 107. See also p. 25 n. 2, for Rorty's way of understanding continuity: "Metaphysicians look for continuities—overarching conditions of possibility—which provide the space within which discontinuity occurs."

[50] Ibid., 107–108.

As one especially effective thrust in his assault on the philosophical tradition, Rorty showed that we are misled by the assumption of a prelinguistic consciousness, or intuition of the way things are, that we should be able to get at in language, with philosophy showing us how. In fact, however, "what is described as such a consciousness is simply a disposition to use the language of our ancestors, to worship the corpses of their metaphors."^[51] Our philosophical tradition, in other words, leads us to take the contingent metaphors of our language to be more than they are. This tendency seems to be built in: "each generation's irony is likely to become the next generation's metaphysics. Metaphysics is, so to speak, irony gone public and flat—liquefaction congealed, providing a new ground on which to inscribe new figures."^[52]

For Rorty, the ironist, or forger of "new ways of speaking," responds to precisely this tendency to congeal. We might assume that the ongoing process of freeing up our creativity would include recognizing that the constituents of our present language are dead metaphors, that our world is wound around contingent dead metaphors—the sort of thing deconstruction might help us do. But, in this instance as well, Rorty turned away from any premium on historical inquiry and played up the role for literature. Although literature cannot have the political import that some leftists envision, "literary study helps one realize that today's literal and objective truth is just the corpse of yesterday's metaphor."^[53] No doubt it can, in a loose, general sort of way, but historical inquiry encompassing the insights of Derridean deconstruction might do so with considerably more bite.

Whether accenting edification or irony, redescription or strong misreading, Rorty continually bypassed history and plugged into the wider aestheticism. His accents in doing so stemmed from his way of framing the relationship between individual experience and the historical world. Anxiety about autonomy in the postmetaphysical situation, in which we find ourselves trapped within an ever-congealing history, gave a particular spin to his assessment of the possibilities.

Suffocation, Weightlessness, and the Prophets of Extremity

I noted that when seeking to deflate the apocalyptic tendencies of deconstruction, Rorty insisted that we increasingly understand ourselves as resting on a fountain of puns and metaphors. But I also noted that there seems to be an ongoing tendency, in Rorty's universe, for once-molten metaphors to "objectify" or congeal and for human beings, in their metaphysical necrophilia, to

[51] Ibid., 21.

[52] Rorty, Essays on Heidegger , 128n.

[53] Ibid., 134.

worship the corpses. So we need to keep showing up and undermining that still-metaphysical tendency. But do the particular metaphors that have in fact resulted—become ours, us—have to be the objects of such misplaced worship? What if we were to experience them as nothing more than what they are, as nothing but history? We would no longer worship them, certainly, but we have seen that new preoccupations intrude as metaphysics fades, as we escape even its shadow.

Fundamental to Rorty's response was the suffocating experience, explored first by Nietzsche, of being always already caught up in a particular history—determined by a past not chosen and confined to a present that is nothing but the haphazard resultant of the whole of that past. With the reduction to history, the anxiety of influence that Bloom explored with respect to poetry becomes general, because everything is wound around metaphor coming to us from a past that threatens our autonomy.^[54]

Thus Rorty, still following Bloom, advocated the actively "strong misreadings" that yield new metaphors; the alternative, merely to "read," is to be confined to the particular line of the actual, with the present seemingly encompassing the embryo of any future. More specifically, to seek "truth" as opposed to a disruptive irony is to remain subservient to metaphors now congealed. Our tendency to worship corpses is the other side of the tendency of particularizing history to ensnare us, limiting what we can say, do, even be, in ways we have not chosen. So the premium is on irony, even quirkiness, as opposed to truth or reconnection.

Although Rorty, as noted, posited a web of influence, we experience the inevitability of connection not as an opportunity to help shape the future but as a limitation to be eluded as much as possible. Thus the act of strong misreading is not experienced as history-making but as liberating from the confining world of nothing but history. And the effort of wriggling free is endless because the future as well as the past occasions the experience of suffocation; the anxiety of influence works in both directions.

Again Rorty invoked Bloom, who "reminds us that just as even the strongest poet is parasitic on her precursors, just as even she can give birth only to a small part of herself, so she is dependent on the kindness of all those strangers out there in the future."^[55] Even insofar as each of us manages to redescribe the whole past into "thus I willed it," we will continually be redescribed in contingent ways we have not chosen by those who come after us. It is happening to Rorty precisely now, as it will be happening to me "now." In a sense, in fact, history is precisely that ongoing process of redescribing. Recognition of that fact leads not only to anxiety over what will become of what I do but also to resentment of history itself, for arbitrarily making of what I do, even what I

[54] Rorty, Contingency , 40–41.

[55] Ibid., 41.

am, something I cannot choose or foresee. Although Rorty did not engage in Derridean preemptive moves to one-up history and undercut the subsequent redescription, he, too, placed a premium on endlessly wriggling free of the particularizing coils.

But such anxiety toward the future may give way to its opposite, to a giddy sense of weightlessness or lightness. Not only is it impossible to foresee how things will connect but, in light of the radical contingency of things, there seems no good reason why they end up connecting as they do. Since what will happen to what I do is almost literally up in the air, it does not matter what I do, so I come to feel that reality as mere history lacks sufficient weight to hold together, to come back together. The anxiety of suffocating submergence within the particular history gives way to a feeling of lightness warranting a premium on edification or irony without any concern for shaping the future.

So though Rorty's neopragmatism seemed at first a way of boxing out poststructuralist excess, his response paralleled certain aspects of the poststructuralist reaction and left him, too, in the broadly aestheticist camp as he accented edification, quirkiness, and play at the expense of disciplined criticism to serve history-making change. His way of conceiving the cultural possibilities was broadly pluralistic in one sense, but it proved dualistic in a deeper sense as he afforded privilege to the generally literary alternative to foundation-seeking philosophy. The scope for a postmetaphysical culture of history, operating "between" the old philosophy and the new literary culture, got lost.

In both deconstruction and neopragmatism, the aestheticist tendency stemmed from both the "modern" preoccupation with metaphysical authority and the twin "postmodern" preoccupations with claustrophobia and weightlessness. But because Rorty was less subject to philosophical traumas and more comfortably within the postmodern space, his thinking manifested more clearly the postmodern preoccupations.

In his effort to sort out cultural possibilities, Rorty confronted Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, and Derrida directly. His analyses were unusually helpful because they sought to pinpoint the tensions that resulted from the disparate components in the thinking of each. More specifically, Rorty featured the extreme impulses in each, probing their sources and questioning their relationship with his own cultural strategy.^[56] In the final analysis, however, his characterizations fed his tendency to present an aestheticized pragmatism as the only alternative to still-metaphysical positions.

Although he initially dismissed Heidegger as simply another Platonist with a newer jargon, Rorty's later work did greater justice to the postmetaphysical dimension in Heidegger's confrontation with the tradition. More specifically,

[56] I focus especially on Heidegger and Derrida in what follows. For Rorty's assessment of Foucault, see especially his 1988 essay, "Moral Identity and Private Autonomy: The Case of Foucault," in Essays on Heidegger, 193–198. See also Contingency , 61–69, where he considers Foucault in tandem with Habermas.

he played up Heidegger's preoccupation with the world as historical. In a particularly telling passage, Rorty found Heidegger, like Hegel and Nietzsche, to have been caught up in a "quest for the historical sublime."

Whereas Plato and Kant had prudently taken this sublimity outside of time altogether, Nietzsche and Heidegger cannot use this dodge. They have to stay in time, but to view themselves as separated from all the rest of time by a decisive event.

This quest for the historical sublime—for proximity to some event such as the closing of the gap between subject and object or the advent of the superman or the end of metaphysics—leads Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger to fancy themselves in the role of the "last philosopher." The attempt to be in this position is the attempt to write something which will make it impossible for one to be redescribed except in one's own terms—make it impossible to become an element in anybody else's beautiful pattern, one more little thing.^[57]

Rorty recognized, then, that for both Nietzsche and Heidegger, the priority was no longer a suprahistorical metaphysics but a certain relationship with our particular history. But each was concerned to keep from becoming merely a piece of the history like everything else. There seemed something suffocating about confinement to the particular contingent history, knowing that what I do will become part of it in a way I cannot determine. Autonomy thus required not simply redescribing the past but also bringing some part of the history itself to an end, so that I will not be subject to the capriciousness of the merely historical future.

In one sense, Rorty concluded, Heidegger achieved "the sublimity he attempted," eluding the snares of the tradition and creating himself.^[58] By reformulating philosophical language, he made the elemental words of our tradition poetic, so that the sounds, not the uses, are what matter; the words are no longer tools, means to ends, or counters in a game others can play. They become opaque, so we are not drawn to recontextualize them, thereby redescribing Heidegger himself. Heidegger, then, forced us to see him as a thinker of a different kind, not as just another metaphysician, just another footnote to Plato.

For Rorty, Heidegger's quasi-ironic disengagement could serve subsequent efforts on the part of those who have been formed by our philosophical tradition, who have worried about the esoteric problems of metaphysics, and who now stand in ironic relation to those problems: "Despite himself, what Heidegger did to the history of philosophy was not to deconstruct it but to further encapsulate and isolate it, thus enabling us to circumvent it." Those few, including Rorty himself, found encounter with Heidegger essential as they made their

[57] Rorty, Contingency , 105–106.

[58] Ibid., 118–119. Rorty offers this assessment, however, in contrasting Heidegger with Proust, who, Rorty holds, succeeded in a way that Heidegger did not. See pp. 108–120 for the overall contrast.

own comparable efforts at redescription. But Heidegger had not solved some general problem of the age, as he thought he was doing. Indeed, Rorty insisted, Heidegger's enterprise was "entirely useless to people who do not share his associations."^[59]

On one level, the conception of cultural possibilities implicit in Rorty's assessment of Heidegger was radically pluralistic. Some, like Heidegger and Rorty themselves, had to engage philosophy, but that particular sphere and that particular confrontation were not privileged. Other kinds of people develop their own edifying relationship to what, thanks to history, they have become. Rorty also featured the uses of novels, as we have seen, but the list might be expanded to include, for example, the carnivalesque, or cross-dressing, or certain forms of popular music.

In a deeper sense, however, Rorty had room for only two alternatives—the old monolithic, philosophically grounded culture, and the ironic, edifying redescription that he valued. Heidegger was suspended in the middle. He was sufficiently ironic that he could not be redescribed, but he still assumed there was a privileged list of books and words to be confronted; he still thought the most important thing for us was to spruce up Greek terms. What kept Heidegger bound to the philosophical tradition was his refusal or inability to embrace the more relaxed aestheticism that Rorty found the only genuinely postmetaphysical response. Heidegger, said Rorty, "wanted to find a way of being neither metaphysical nor aestheticist," but for Rorty, there was no such space.^[60]

Rorty found Derrida, too, guilty of overvaluing the philosophical tradition, especially in his earlier phase, before the mid-1970s. At that point Derrida was still operating as a traditional philosopher, seeking "to go transcendental" and deduce the noncausal conditions of possibility—in this case, for the im possibility of closure. Though Derrida claimed to show how to avoid the traps of philosophy, his terms like "trace" and "différance" were attempts to devise a new metavocabulary claiming superior status, even closure. But for Rorty, it was simply inconsistent to contend that the possibilities for recontextualization are boundless, that there can be no closure, while also offering transcendental arguments, based on a claim to grasp the condition of possibility of all possible contexts. The categories Derrida derived through his form of transcendental deduction were unnecessary, dispensable.^[61]

But Rorty recognized that after the mid-1970s Derrida had become more consistently preoccupied with sidestepping the limiting philosophical tradition. Derrida had been especially concerned to avoid the mistake of Heidegger, who

[59] Rorty, Essays on Heidegger , 105 (emphasis in original); Rorty, Contingency , 118–119. See also Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature , 12.

[60] Rorty, Contingency , 112. See also Rorty, Essays on Heidegger , 104.

[61] Rorty, Essays on Heidegger , 2, 93–94, 110n, 112–113, 118, 124n, 121–128. Rorty argues especially against Rodolphe Gasché's The Tain of the Mirror , which accents, and values, the philosophical rigor of Derrida's work.

had sought mightily to be a postphilosophical thinker, yet who, Derrida felt, had ended up mired within the tradition nevertheless. Derrida sought to be more radical by trying out brutal, disruptive ways of changing terrain, or by interlacing the horns of the dilemma by embracing several languages or texts at once.^[62]

Up to a point, Rorty valued that enterprise: "What Derrida has done, despite himself, is to show us how to take Heidegger with Nietzschean gaiety, how to see his handling of the metaphysical tradition as a brilliantly original narrative rather than as an epochal transformation."^[63] But when Derrida turned from philosophy, his writings seemed to lack focus and point. It appeared that in Derrida's hands, at least, writing utterly emptied of philosophical content would lack subject, context—would be so open as to be merely babble.^[64] So Derrida kept returning to philosophy to tell the story over and over, showing how philosophy invariably eludes itself. But even this, for Rorty, remained too close to what philosophers had always done, giving transcendental arguments, establishing general propositions—in this case about the impossibility of a completed vocabulary.

By the latter 1980s, Derrida seemed to have abandoned definitively any attempt to establish categories, so Rorty proposed that Derrida's earlier, apparently more traditional phase had simply been a false start that need not compromise the value of later works like The Post Card . No longer was Derrida concerned to say how things are on some level by finding the correct words; no longer was he just another philosopher, concerned to give rigorous arguments for a position that would settle things on some level. Now Derrida was "content to have fun rather than feel haunted." And Rorty heartily approved: "I think he was on the right track when he suggested that the only strategy of evasion that is going to work will be to write in a way that makes the discourse of philosophy look enigmatic rather than ubiquitous. At his best, Derrida realizes that one good way to make something look enigmatic is to treat it as a joke."^[65] Thus Rorty's praise for the later Derrida as a "a great comic writer" whose way of treating the tradition was "splendidly original." For Rorty, then, Derrida had become one of those valuable edifying thinkers who serve the culture by loosening, opening things up, in the face of the ongoing tendency to congeal.^[66]

Rorty's characterizations of Heidegger and Derrida remain invaluable, but his way of opposing aestheticism to metaphysics limited what he was prepared to draw from them. From his perspective, the two thinkers were postmetaphysical

[62] Rorty, Essays on Heidegger , 95–98. Here Rorty relies especially on the key passage in Derrida's Margins of Philosophy , trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 135.

[63] Rorty, Essays on Heidegger , 105.

[64] Ibid., 93–94.

[65] Ibid., 117–118.

[66] Ibid., 113, 113n, 128, 128n.

only insofar as they treated the ensnaring tradition as a joke and embraced an edifying irony, with a premium on creativity, novelty, and quirkiness. The central postmetaphysical impulse is a quest for autonomy in opposition to a tradition that grows to encompass whatever we say or do.

Rorty's accents, stemming from his dualistic framework, kept him from doing justice to certain of the postmetaphysical extremes. Although he found an element of religious ritual in the recent vogue of deconstruction, Rorty was not attuned to the possibility that new forms of religiosity might open up, in opposition to the workaday world he generally featured. Thus he did not do justice to Heidegger, who came to recognize precisely what Rorty charged against him, that "we need to create our own elementary words, not spruce up Greek ones."^[67] That, however, was not so easy. We may think we are on our own, but we will not be, until we experience the sense in which we are nothing but this particular destining—and then find a way of distancing from the whole of it. Only by thus preparing ourselves might we serve the creating/receiving/disclosing of those new elementary words. Heidegger envisioned an alternative to Rorty's easygoing pragmatism and to the sort of personal edification Rorty assumed he must have been seeking.

Even as he pinpointed the quasi-religious element in Paul de Man's version of deconstruction, Rorty did not do justice to the point of telling our story over and over, in a ritualistic way. And his lack of sympathy for any such aim affected his treatment of Derrida as well. Even in Derrida's hands, telling it over and over is new and different, not simply a variation on transcendental argument.^[68] It is an extreme response to history, not just another philosophy, precisely because Derrida was fully self-conscious and reflexive. Moreover, even if such ritualistic retelling is done in a semicomic mode, it may stem from preoccupations and aspirations quite different from the personal concern for autonomy.

Reconnection and Truth

Rorty's treatment of the extremists fed his tendency to sidestep the reconstructive alternative to both metaphysics and postmetaphysical extremity that he initially seemed to invite. In approaching Derrida's earlier, more conventional works, he was quick to assume that Derrida was doing old-fashioned philosophy rather than the historically informed "theory" that may be necessary even as we leave the old philosophy behind.^[69] Derrida's categories may be understood as attempts at ad hoc clarification, specifying, for now, some of the conditions of our postmetaphysical situation so that we might respond to

[67] Ibid., 104.

[68] Note the telling ambiguity in ibid., 93–94.

[69] Ibid., 101–102.

historically specific problems. In positing différance as "older," for example, Derrida was seeking a way to say what seemed essential at his moment of rupture—that slippage is built in, is "always already," so that we cease appealing to a ground or origin.^[70] Any such enterprise yields nothing more than "new metaphors," in Rorty's terms, and even those that prove most persuasive need not pretend to transcend history. From within his dualistic framework, Rorty could not do justice to the sense in which Derrida could "argue," even offer some new categories, without claiming the last word.

Rorty charged that in their different ways both Heidegger and Derrida suggested they had finally gotten language right, as it actually is. Rather than "take a relaxed, naturalistic, Darwinian view of language," each tended to let "'Language' become the latest substitute for 'God' or 'Mind'—something mysterious, incapable of being described in the same terms in which we describe tables, trees, and atoms."^[71] Although for Heidegger, to be sure, new insight into language might open the way to the quasi-religious "mystery" Rorty was determined to do without, it may not be enough, in light of contemporary confusions, simply to relax and put language to work. Even insofar as we aim to return to the workaday world as soon as we can, we may need to ask big questions about how we have come to conceive language as we have; we may need to say something new and relatively theoretical about how it relates to us and the world. But we need not claim that now, at last, we have said everything that will ever need to be said. We simply seek to do better at saying what language has been so far.

We noted that Rorty, in accenting autonomy and redescription, was taking over some of Nietzsche's imperatives, partly as mediated by Bloom. With his accent on "thus I willed it," Nietzsche appeared to warrant a concentration on the private or personal level, apart from the public world of history. But, as emphasized in chapter 4, he experienced the freakish present world not simply as a blurry backdrop, or as raw material for his own edifying self-creation. Though only the contingent outcome of a chain of accidents, it was the fatality, and Nietzsche sought an affirmative relationship with it to overcome both resentment and fear of judgment, including historical judgment. So the mode of life that Nietzsche posited cannot be understood as private as opposed to public; it entailed a certain relationship with the whole, newly experienced as nothing but the particular history.

If we eschew the Nietzschean extreme, we must devise an alternative understanding of the relationship between individual and postmetaphysical totality. With his neoliberal accents, Rorty was no Nietzschean extremist, but he tended to settle for a private-public bifurcation, partly because of the loosely Nietzschean

[70] Derrida, Margins of Philosophy , 22. Derrida's denial that he was offering another set of philosophical categories left Rorty puzzled. See Jacques Derrida, Positions , trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 52; and Rorty, Essays on Heidegger , 102.

[71] Rorty, Essays on Heidegger , 3–4. See also p. 5.

emphasis on self-creation at work in the culture. His emphasis on the private produced prejudicial characterizations, mixed uneasily with his liberal and historicist accents, and led him simply to neglect certain possibilities.^[72]

So quick was Rorty to place a premium on personal redescription that he did not fully consider the scope for a mode of belonging to the historical totality that does not preclude creativity but invites it. In their different ways, Croce and Gadamer each specified an affirmative relationship that entails such ongoing criticism and reconstruction. We identify with the actual world sufficiently to care for it, to feel responsibility for it, and to respond to it, seeking not autonomy but reconnection with the world even as we help to change it.

In associating Dewey with playful experimentation as opposed to seriousness, Rorty reacted plausibly against philosophical pretense, but he also neglected the scope for a kind of weak seriousness as the middle term. Croce, in contrast, suggested that precisely because there can be no "escape from freedom into the atemporal," as Rorty put it, our ongoing making of history is of ultimate seriousness and that we are ultimately responsible—though only to history, that apparently capricious judge.^[73]

Although Rorty denied to literature the grandiose political role that the American literary Left seemed to envision, he suggested that certain forms of writing—from novels to newspaper stories to Foucault's histories—can make a difference. There was scope for effective criticism and constructive change, underpinned by some measure of positive identification with the actual.^[74] Even redescription that starts on the personal level might have public or broadly political effects, reconnecting with the actual and helping to shape the future. But Rorty's emphasis on individual self-creation stood in tension with that mode of identification—and with the way of experiencing ourselves as public actors that follows from it. The edification Rorty valued tended toward quirky brilliance, originality for its own sake. Indeed, his conflation of "seriousness" with metaphysics tended to undermine any emphasis on reconnection and the enduring, history-making weight of what we do.

An effort to reconnect, to influence, to participate in the process and shape the future leads to a premium on knowing the world as history. Conversely, the more we play down the history-making weight of what we do, the less we need worry about the autonomy of historical inquiry, the sense in which historical inquiry can yield truth in a way that literary modes do not.

We noted that Rorty called for historical narrative as the way to clarify the

[72] See, for example, ibid., 127, where Rorty discusses the different purposes that language, as a set of tools, may perform. Like Alexander Nehamas, on whose interpretation of Nietzsche he draws, Rorty did not do justice to Nietzsche's confrontation with the totality that results from the reduction to history. See Contingency , 27n, for Rorty's acknowledgment of his debt to Nehamas.

[73] Rorty offered the quoted phrase in discussing, approvingly, Dewey's retreat from seriousness. See Rorty, Consequences , 87–88. See also above, p. 238.

[74] See Rorty, Essays on Heidegger , 119–120, 120n, 134–136; and Rorty, "Habermas and Lyotard," 173, for indications of the scope for that positive identification.

conditions in which a new conception "of truth as what comes to be believed in the course of free and open encounters" could emerge to replace our long-standing "idea of truth as correspondence to reality."^[75] This would be to redescribe our past to make certain consequences possible. But no matter how brilliant and original the narrative, it could have the consequences Rorty envisioned only if it was specifically historical, seeking truth. The point of such a redescription is to reconnect, and brilliance and originality are not sufficient. The truth to be sought would not claim to be definitive, and it would be congruent with precisely the notion of truth to which Rorty refers here and elsewhere.

There is obviously more to be said about how specifically historical truth happens, about what distinguishes it from its contraries, and about the difference its autonomy makes to the culture. Croce and Gadamer offered some indications. With Rorty's inflation of the literary sphere, however, a historical account becomes just another form of irony, metaphor, or strong misreading. Again and again, Rorty's aestheticist accents blurred the sense in which historical truth still stands opposed to literary fiction even in a postmetaphysical world where no one claims some finished and complete account. Despite Gadamer's concern to recast truth, Rorty invoked Gadamer in insisting that from the "educational" point of view that replaces epistemology, "the way things are said is more important than the possession of truths."^[76] Because he was so eager to embrace an aestheticized pragmatism as the alternative to the conventional belief in definitive "truths," Rorty took no account of Gadamer's effort to offer a postmetaphysical understanding of truth.

In the same way, Rorty's strong misreader "is in it for what he can get out of it, not for the satisfaction of getting something right."^[77] Fair enough, but this formulation invites overreaction unless we recognize, with Croce, that what such misreaders need and seek, even if they have no illusions about "getting something right," is a true account, precisely insofar as such knowing is to serve action. The fact that it will simply be a finite and provisional true account, not complete or definitive, does not dissolve it into literature or generic redescription. Insofar as that difference is blurred, any assessment of cultural proportions will preclude prejudicially the scope for an autonomous historical strand, and the postmetaphysical culture will be unnecessarily irrationalist and capricious.

Rorty admitted that we all hope our metaphors will connect. At the same time, he noted the possibility that the quest for originality can lead to pointless babble. In criticizing Foucault, he seemed to place a premium on the community, belonging, and endless reconnection that Foucault seemed determined to

[75] Rorty, Contingency , 68. See above, p. 233.

[76] Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature , 359.

[77] Rorty, Consequences , 152.

disrupt.^[78] To avoid babble, what Derrida or anyone else needs is precisely to reconnect. Because he was a philosopher, Derrida needed to reconnect with the philosophical tradition—as he did, even as he radically deconstructed it. But there is scope for such deconstruction-reconnection in all reaches of the culture. Try it with the bases of our sociopolitical thinking, or with the discourse of business and ethics or of gender and sexual harassment. But Rorty's concern with autonomy and edifying personal redescription kept him from developing this point, even led him to turn in the opposite direction and emphasize autonomy and shaking loose as opposed to any such reconnection.

As I have emphasized, plausible new preoccupations result as we contemplate being recontextualized in an endlessly slipping world of contingent particularizing. Thus, in part, the tendencies toward extremity I have noted. Insofar as Rorty responded to such preoccupations, his assessment of our cultural possibilities became one-sided. Yet that response coexisted with his historicist and reconstructive impulses. Although he sought to sidestep the issue by bifurcating private and public, or the idiosyncratic concerns of intellectuals and the concerns of everyone else, he was simply ambivalent in responding to the reduction to history. I have accented the plausibility of an array of responses, including various extremes, even while seeking to specify the terms of a moderate alternative. The components will jostle, and Rorty's ambivalence is itself plausible. But what is most therapeutic at this point is to sort out the components—in a way that reconnects.

[78] As discussed in the preceding chapter. See Rorty, "Habermas and Lyotard," 172.