Richard Rorty is even more dismissive of the Modern project than most. He argues that the legacy of Descartes was responsible for the failed Kantian attempt to ―render all knowledge-claims commensurable.‖45 For Rorty the problem is epistemology itself, or at least the style of epistemology that dominates the Cartesian quest. He uses Descartes to illustrate the failings of the Modern project and he refers to the Cogito as the ―original sin of philosophy.‖46
43 Colapietro, ―The Pragmatic Turn,‖ 19-30.
44 See Chantal Mouffe, ―Deconstruction, Pragmatism and the Politics of Democracy‖ in Chantal Mouffe ed., Deconstruction and Pragmatism: Simon Critchley, Jacques Derrida, Ernest Laclau, and Richard Rorty (London: Routledge, 1996), 1-12.
45 Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 210.
46 Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 60.
In the introduction to a collection of essays devoted to The Linguistic Turn, Rorty argues against the Modern assumption that philosophy ought to transform itself into a science. New methods such as Descartes‘ ―clear and distinct ideas,‖ Kant‘s
―transcendental method,‖ and Husserl‘s ―bracketing‖ all failed, according to Rorty, because all attempts to find a starting point without presuppositions are doomed because in order to know what method one is going to adopt one must already have presupposed ―some metaphysical and some epistemological conclusion.‖47 The linguistic turn was coined to refer to a type of non-foundationalism that focused on the link between philosophy and language.
Among pragmatist philosophers, however, the ―pragmatic turn‖ more appropriately describes the search for a language that deals with what James refers to as the ―cash value‖ or practical consequences for human conduct.
Rorty rejects Descartes‘ suggestions that one should withdraw from history and tradition, first, because he thinks it is a bad idea, and second, because he argues that it is impossible. Rorty argues that any description of how things are from a
―God‘s eye point of view‖ does not ―free us from the contingency of having been acculturated as we were.‖48 It is this acculturation that determines why some theories about the real world are accepted and some rejected. He emphasises that the historical or hermeneutical dimension of truth is pivotal because truth is based on an inter-subjective agreement or consensus among members of a community.49
47 Richard Rorty, The Linguistic Turn: Recent Essays in Philosophical Method (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1967), 1.
48 Richard Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers, Volume 1 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1991), 13.
49 Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, 21.
He adopts what he refers to as the ―Quine-Sellars‖50 approach to epistemology and argues against the correspondence view of truth primarily because there is no way to get outside existing beliefs and language. This is because nothing would count as justification without reference to what was already being taken for granted.51 For Rorty the Modern anxiety over relativism should be seen as a desire to preserve existing habits of contemporary European life that were ―nurtured by the Enlightenment‖ and justified ―by it in terms of an appeal to reason.‖52
Rorty agrees with Williams that foundationalist assumptions concerning the need for universals and the subsequent desire for impartial detachment should be rejected.53 Following Nietzsche, he describes this desire for objectivity as a
―disguised form of the fear of death‖ and ―an attempt to avoid facing up to contingency, to escape from time and chance.‖54 He accepts Foucault‘s analysis that science and philosophy produce usefulness rather than truth. As new theories and discoveries unfold, ―objectivity‖ is that which serves as a means for grounding further theories and further discovery.55
Rorty aims to replace Enlightenment rationalism with a general turn away from theory toward a more pragmatic, holistic and narrative account of knowledge.56 The pragmatic reality of moral claims, according to Rorty, is that they are not
50 Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 80.
51 Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 178.
52 Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism and Truth, 28.
53 Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism and Truth, 30.
54 Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism and Truth, 28-32.
55 Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 3-9.
56 Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, xvi.
universalisable: thus objectivity is best understood as a consensus of rational discussants because this is the most objectivity we can hope for.57 The consensus referred to here is not universal because the aim is to achieve limited consensus among rational discussants with respect to particular practices. This pragmatic approach to objectivity, based on consensus, is both more practical and realisable than theory-centred objectivity. This type of consensus aims to achieve perspectivally good decisions rather than universally right decisions. A good legal decision, for instance, would be one that conforms to the history and practice of law. A limited teleological consensus develops between rational discussants (lawyers, judges, politicians, legal academics, etc.) over actions, protocols, and behaviour that is consistent with good practice and therefore consistent with the teleological goal of law, namely, justice.
A pragmatic appreciation for truth and justification, with a commitment to rational consensus, is more edifying for Rorty than the attempt to update or modify foundationalist truth-claims every time they fail.58 Rorty prefers James‘
description of truth, a truth which is ―better for us to believe,‖ rather than some representational version of truth.59 He acknowledges that the ―holistic, anti-foundationalist, pragmatist treatments of knowledge and meaning‖ found in his own work and in the work of Dewey, Wittgenstein, Quine, Sellars, and Davidson is offensive to many philosophers because by abandoning the quest for
57 Rorty, ―Pragmatism, Relativism, and Irrationalism,‖ 719-738.
58 Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 373.
59 Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 377-378.
commensuration they become relativists.60 Like Williams, however, Rorty is not inclined to give much credence to the charge that he is a relativist:
In short, my strategy for escaping the self-referential difficulties into which ‗the Relativist‘ keeps getting himself is to move everything over from epistemology and metaphysics into cultural politics, from claims to knowledge and appeals to self-evidence to suggestions about what we should try.61
This charge of relativism has come even from philosophers who are in general agreement with Rorty‘s non-foundationalist stance because they are concerned with how his rejection of foundationalism will cash out in disciplines like ethics and politics. In a collection of essays devoted to Rorty‘s work, Charles Guignon and David Hiley suggest that the consequences of taking a non-foundationalist stance is deeply troubling for moral and social thought. They claim that Rorty‘s non-foundationalist stance results in some form of moral relativism because it would be difficult to discern ―why we have the commitments we have‖ or why
―we should take one path into the future rather than another.‖62 Rorty‘s response is to argue that in the history of Modern philosophy one often finds philosophers who resemble each other in their distrust of the idea that ―man‘s essence is to be a
―knower of essences,‖ and he claims that Goethe, Kierkegaard, Santayana, James, Dewey, the later Wittgenstein, and the later Heidegger are ―figures of this sort‖
who were also accused of relativism or cynicism.63
60 Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 317.
61 Richard Rorty, Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, Volume 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 57.
62 Charles B. Guignon and David R. Hiley, ―Biting the Bullet: Rorty on Private and Public Morality,‖ in Alan Malachowski ed., Reading Rorty (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990): 339-364.
63 Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 367.
The charge of relativism often misses the point that pragmatists such as Rorty make. The pragmatist is cynical of foundational versions of truth but not to truth that is perspectival, a truth that is relative to particular traditions with particular justificatory processes. For Rorty, truth is perspectival because ―We cannot justify our beliefs (in physics, ethics, or any other area) to everybody, but only to those whose beliefs overlap ours to some appropriate extent.‖64 For Rorty one can be an epistemological relativist, because truth does not mirror nature, without being either a scientific or moral relativist. This is because truth is understood as a concept with a history or, in his words, ―a consensus chosen by rational discussants.‖65 Rorty contends that Dewey was an edifying philosopher because Dewey incorporates the concept of philosophy as conversation when he writes about philosophy being a mentoring exercise rather than an exercise in the transmission of knowledge.66 For Dewey, mentoring is a purposeful activity in which people ―strive for the realization of ends‖; when people are asked why they behave as they do, Dewey says the only answer, apart from blind custom, is that
―they strive to attain certain goals because they believe that these ends have an intrinsic value of their own; they are good, satisfactory.‖67 Thus the realisation of ends and attainment of goals is only possible when there is a broad agreement about what those ends or goals are.
64 Richard Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, 31.
65Richard Rorty, ―Pragmatism, Relativism, and Irrationalism,‖ Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 53 (1980): 719-738, and Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 338.
66 Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 379-389.
67 Jo Ann Boydston ed., John Dewey: The Later Works (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990), 181.
The critique of foundationalism has gathered momentum over the last fifty years and many critics use Descartes as a paradigm for what has gone wrong. According to this view, Descartes‘ attempt to ground theological and philosophical truths on self-evident principles failed because no agreement has been forthcoming in philosophy over what these first principles comprise. ―Non-foundationalism‖ has therefore come to refer to various theories that advocate taking a more historicist view of knowledge.