How pragmatic should we be in philosophy? According to pragmatists, from Charles Peirce and William James to John Dewey and Richard Rorty, what matters most in knowledge is its utility, especially the difference a statement makes to social practices.
Rorty was especially incisive in his elaborations on pragmatism. Taking lessons from Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Dewey, Donald Davidson, Jacques Derrida, and others, Rorty discounted Western philosophy’s preoccupation with theories of truth and the distinctions between reality and appearance, conceptual scheme and content, objectivity and subjectivity, and fact and value.
Rorty’s pragmatism
As Rorty illustrated over and over in his middle and later writings, the pragmatist’s way of handling such theoretical distinctions is to deflate them, to redescribe them in practical terms. As he says about John McDowell’s empiricism (in the seventh chapter of Rorty’s third volume of philosophical papers), ‘Crackerbarrel pragmatists like me always ask, as William James did, “What difference to practice is that funny little difference in theory supposed to make?”’
Often, Rorty would deflate technical philosophical vocabulary by psychoanalyzing the philosopher. For instance, in “Heidegger, Kundera, and Dickens,” Rorty diagnoses Heidegger’s philosophy rather than taking it at face value. By attempting to “out-Nietzsche Nietzsche,” he says, Heidegger ‘hoped thereby to free himself of the resentment which, despite himself, Nietzsche displayed so conspicuously. Heidegger thought that if he could free himself from this resentment, and from the urge to dominate, he could free himself from the West and so, as he said, quoting Holderlin, “sing a new song.”’
And again:
Heidegger himself was just one more of the people whom Nietzsche called “ascetic priests.” His attempt to encapsulate the West, to sum it up and distance himself from it, was one more power play…On my reading, Heidegger is still doing the same sort of thing which Plato tried to do when he created a supersensible world from which to look down on Athens, or Augustine when he imagined a City of God from which to look down on the Dark Ages. He is opting out of the struggles of his fellow humans by making his mind its own place, his own story the only story that counts, making himself the redeemer of his time precisely by his abstention from action.
I recall the excitement of reading Rorty when I was an undergraduate student. To a young student, Rorty is as exciting as Nietzsche because both of those philosophers get personal. It’s no accident that the ad hominem fallacy is so commonly committed, of course, because as social mammals, we love conflict, or “drama” as it’s called in slang. Rorty makes philosophy personal in spelling out the practical implications of ideas because he thinks those are the only things that count in pragmatic terms.
Thus, Rorty is infamous for denying that truth connects symbols to facts. For Rorty, knowledge is just playing around in a language game. Instead of being objective, we’re intersubjective in showing what he called “solidarity” with those who agree with us. As he says in the Introduction to Truth and Progress,
We [philosophers who think like Rorty] think that there are many ways to talk about what is going on, and that none of them gets closer to the way things are in themselves than any other. We have no idea what “in itself” is supposed to mean in the phrase “reality as it is in itself.” So we suggest that the appearance-reality distinction be dropped in favor of a distinction between less useful and more useful ways of talking.
As Rorty says, his critics accused him of denying the existence of truth. He replied that “truth” is indefinable, given Davidson’s analysis of the matter, and anyway, truth isn’t the goal of inquiry. This is because
the only criterion we have for applying the word “true” is justification, and justification is always relative to an audience. So it is also relative to that audience’s lights — the purposes that such an audience wants served and the situation in which it finds itself. This means that the question “Do our practices of justification lead to truth?” is as unanswerable as it is unpragmatic. It is unanswerable because there is no way to privilege our current purposes and interests. It is unpragmatic because the answer to it would make no difference whatever to our practices.
Science, too, for Rorty, is a language game that’s justified by its impact on our practices. Thus, he says, “The causal independence of quarks from human discourse is not a mark of reality as opposed to appearance; it is simply an unquestioned part of our talk about quarks…We can say, with Foucault, that both human rights and homosexuality are recent social constructions, but only if we say, with Bruno Latour, that quarks are too.”
Indeed, says Rorty, ‘One of the benefits of getting rid of the notion of the intrinsic nature of reality is that you get rid of the notion that quarks and human rights differ in “ontological status.”’ What matters to pragmatists like Rorty isn’t metaphysics, but social progress. There are no absolute moral facts, of course, just as there aren’t empirical ones, according to him. Moral progress
should not be conceived of as the convergence of human opinion to Moral Truth or as the onset of greater rationality, but rather as an increase in our ability to see more and more differences among people as morally irrelevant. This ability — to see the difference between people’s religions, nations, genders, races, economic status, and so on as irrelevant to the possibility of cooperating with them for mutual benefit and as irrelevant to the need to alleviate their suffering — has increased considerably since the Enlightenment. It has created communities that are more inclusive than had previously been thought possible. Our Western liberal picture of a global democratic utopia is that of a planet on which all members of the species are concerned about the fates of all the other members.
Pragmatism and positivism
One way to critique Rorty’s pragmatism is to compare it with existentialism. Both philosophies emphasize the practical applications of a theory. As I explain elsewhere, existentialism is roughly the emphasis on our need to choose how to respond to our fundamental situation in life.
But Rorty would say there’s no way to know what that situation is since any attempt to spell it out is just another move in a language game that doesn’t come into special contact with an external, non-game-like reality. All we have, for Rorty, are our social practices, including the sciences, which means we have languages, theories, games, and other cultural activities and their results.
How the world looks or feels is likewise always subject to interpretation and the pragmatist’s utilitarian test of meaningfulness. If the scientific picture of perception, for example, is useful in helping us achieve our goals, then we’ll adopt that picture. But for the pragmatist, the strictly philosophical or religious account of why the scientific theories work is often useless by comparison with the applicable scientific model.
Pragmatism is thus comparable to positivism. The positivist said all knowledge is scientific in that a meaningful statement must be verifiable or empirically grounded, and knowledge claims that fail that test are worthless and empty. The Rortian pragmatist, too, means to purify philosophy, but he or she does so in less elitist terms. The pragmatist says all useless knowledge claims are worthless, and “usefulness” is determined not by scientists but by society at large.
This suggests a contrast between pragmatism and existentialism: pragmatists speak for dominant cultures, whereas existentialists speak for the subcultures of social outsiders.
Rorty would follow Wittgenstein in saying there’s no such thing as a private language. Society sets the rules of a way of talking or thinking, even if Rorty allows that geniuses revolutionize the discourse by “glimpsing a possibility that had not previously been grasped.”
This is why Rorty mocks Heidegger’s “ascetic-priestly” ambitions. Existentialists, metaphysicians, realists, mystics, and monotheists all hold out the possibility of standing outside language games, of speaking reality’s inhuman language, which Rorty says is impossible. In that seventh chapter, Rorty calls these would-be absolute realists “cultural imperialists, people with monotheistic delusions of grandeur.”
Yet the existentialist’s point is that the encounter with reality that defines our existential condition is absurd, so we shouldn’t expect that encounter to be so easily framed in language. After all, language develops mainly to communicate conventional information, not epiphanies.
Yet the lone existentialist who stands apart from social conventions to glimpse what is indeed useless (counterproductive) from society’s perspective, namely the futility of all our projects from the cosmic vantage point, needn’t even put that experience into words. What matters, says the existentialist, is the feeling of alienation, dread, angst, horror, or awe, the eerie sense that life is a tragic anomaly in a mostly lifeless universe.
In any case, existentialists in the broadest sense needn’t stand alone with any private attempt at language since they’ve evidently formed countercultures. No abstract philosophy is needed to point to the historical fact that there have always been social outsiders. From prehistoric shamans in clans of nomadic animists to high priests, sacred kings, and mystical gurus, and from divinely mad philosophers such as Heraclitus, Pythagoras, Socrates, and the Cynics, to prophets, monks, bohemian artists, satirists, cultists, and melancholy drifters, there have always been maladjusted, dysfunctional, perhaps mentally disordered minorities that have been alienated from mainstream society and its language games.
That alienation was often provoked by the outsider’s encounter with the uncanny, the weird fact that there’s something rather than nothing, and the sense that life is absurd. Specifically, what’s absurd is that the inhuman trumps the human, yet human life exists just the same. Nature went to great trouble to evolve us, yet nature will swallow up our species, sending all histories and language games into oblivion.
The compatibility of pragmatism and existentialism
Now, are such existential speculations idle from a pragmatic perspective? Not really, since, as I said, no obscure philosophizing is needed for the existential encounter or even to give the gist of it with language.
Indeed, in “Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and the Reification of Language,” and in talking about Heidegger’s way of distinguishing between objectivity and subjectivity, between the present-at-hand and the ready-at-hand, Rorty says that both Heidegger and Wittgenstein saw that the only way in which the former kind of objectivity could explain the latter, socially-conditioned, practical kind of subjectivity “was in the familiar unphilosophical way in which evolutionary biology, sociology, and history combine to give a causal explanation of the actuality of one particular social practice rather than another.”
But this opens the door for a cosmic perspective that simply presents the upshot of such causal, scientific explanations. That summary could be artistic, religious, or philosophical. The point would be that natural causality is plainly inhuman, not just on the cosmic scale but in the impersonality of such probabilities. Plato, Augustine, and Heidegger describe absolute otherness differently, of course, and just as some artistic style might leave you cold, one philosophy or another may mean little to you.
That difference in taste, though, leaves untouched the profundity of the encounter with such otherness. Precisely because natural causality is so alien to our social norms in which minds make choices based on beliefs, goals, and values, we could expect that the attempts to summarize that otherness would be varied and halting.
So, in allowing for scientific explanations to override our mundane social expectations, insofar as the former can account for how the latter have historically and causally come into being, Rorty concedes the basis of the kind of philosophical extrapolations he nevertheless rejects.
Also, as I said, social outsiders, including “ascetic priests,” needn’t stand alone. Subcultures have their social practices, too. Those who oppose mainstream society may nevertheless have their subversive or otherwise disturbing practices, such as asceticism or the withdrawal from popular pastimes. That makes existentialism potentially viable in pragmatic terms.
At this point, it’s worth quoting more of Rorty’s denunciation of “ascetic priests”:
Those who embody this character type are always trying to wash the language of their respective tribes off their tongues…His ambition is to get above, or past, or out of, what can be said in language. His goal is always the ineffable. In so far as he is forced to use language, he wants a language which either gives a purer sense to the words of the tribe or, better yet, a language entirely disengaged from the business of the tribe, irrelevant to the mere pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain. Only such a person can share Nietzsche’s and Heidegger’s contempt for the people whom Nietzsche called “the last men”…Ascetic priests have no patience with people who think that mere happiness or mere decrease of suffering might compensate for [what Heidegger loathes as] Seinsvergessenheit, forgetfulness of Being.
So Rorty has uncovered the perennial clash between encultured normies and social outsiders. If it’s all just language games, though, Rorty has no grounds for dismissing the outsider’s existential discourse. He even concedes that this discourse has been immensely useful since
the result of trying to find a language different from the tribe’s is to enrich the language of later generations of that tribe. The more ascetic priests a society can afford to support, the more surplus value is available to provide these priests with the leisure to fantasize, the richer and more diverse the language and projects of that society are likely to become. The spin-offs from private projects of purification turn out to have enormous social utility. Ascetic priests are often not much fun to be around, and usually are useless if what you are interested in is happiness, but they have been the traditional vehicles of linguistic novelty, the means by which a culture is able to have a future interestingly different from its past. They have enabled cultures to change themselves, to break out of a tradition into a previously unimagined future.
Pragmatism as American propaganda
Why, then, does Rorty mock the intellectual outsider? Because that outsider is typically illiberal or at least politically incorrect. This illiberal purist, Rorty says, “is likely to have the same attitude toward sexual as to economic commerce: he finds it messy. So he is inclined both to keep women in their traditional subordinate place, out of sight and mind, and to favor a caste system which ranks the manly warriors, who bathe frequently, above the smelly traders in the bazaar.”
Thus, even though existentialism, for example, is consistent with Rorty’s pragmatism, in that the former can be construed as a countercultural, paradoxical language game that expresses nature’s impersonality and amorality, or the foreignness of natural causality to our social preoccupations, Rorty would hold existentialism at bay not for being useless but for being un-American.
And indeed, pragmatism has mostly been an American philosophy. The reverence for utility came out of the Protestant work ethic, the point being that we shouldn’t overthink life since that would offend God, and above all, we should get back to work. Pragmatism is at home with American workaholism.
In so far as pragmatism and existentialism clash, then, it’s because the pragmatist would speak for the dominant, American-centered culture of Western liberalism, whereas the existentialist promotes the outsider’s counterculture, the one that would disturb most people’s happiness, perhaps going as far as to question certain lines of work for being “inauthentic” responses to our existential condition. Questioning work would be anathema to pragmatists insofar as the latter are guardians of mainstream capitalist cultures.
Moreover, Richard Rorty died in 2007, before he had a chance to suffer the humiliation of American liberals at the hands of Donald Trump’s “presidency.” Just as Nazi populism did beforehand, Trumpism represents the curdling of liberalism, the way vulgar, poisonous demagoguery can rise to the top of open, free societies.
In speaking for American liberals and progressives, Rorty is at his most naïve when he’s effectively dismissing the counterculture. He rejects the absolutist speculations of Plato, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, but those were philosophical encapsulations of countercultural visions.
Intellectualism itself is a neo-shamanic counterculture, a minority view of life for nerds and elites that’s often at odds with popular culture. As philosophical as Rorty’s defense of pragmatism may be, especially in his enlisting of sophisticated “Continental” thinkers like Derrida, Rorty meant to subdue intellectualism on behalf of the hoi palloi.
In that respect, Rorty was an American apologist for how consumerism ends up being illiberal as it infantilizes the masses to restore feudal, aristocratic hierarchies in high-tech, plutocratic guises. And while existentialism can be reframed in pragmatic terms, existentialists are free to see beyond crass Americanism.