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The task of philosophy
Histo,lv
Pergamon
of European
Ideas,
Vol. 20. Nos l-3, pp. 559-566. 1995 Copyright 0 1995 Elsevier Science Ltd Printed in Great Britain. All rights reserved 0191-6599/95 $9.50 + 00
THE TASK OF PHILOSOPHY ANDRZEJ SZAHAJ *
Since the time of Parmenides and Plato the task of philosophy has been the pursuit of Truth and the attempt to provide certain knowledge (episteme), thus distinguishing itself as a specific kind of human activity in opposition to the rule of prejudice and mere opinion (doxa). While subject matter of philosophy has varied, its nature has remained the same. Science also has been faithful to this philosophical view. Both philosophy and science became a basis of the modernist vision of the human world, both attempting to conceptualise essential regularities occurring in ‘objective’ reality, or at least attempting to approximate them. The reality in question is understood as unique, unchangeable, and independent of the individual or community of knowing subjects who recognise it. The language of cognition, although changeable, ‘suits reality’ because its proper terms accurately refer to it. In this way, philosophy and science ensure cognitive and technological progress in the shared belief that general progress is the best way to human self-improvement. The philosopher and the scientist, as special individuals independent of an influence of the outside world, look into the essence of reality by means of the perspicacity of their reason. In this sense, they play the role of secular priests. Faithful only to the reality in question, they do not follow any other prejudgements. For modernistic philosophers and scientists, the universally accepted principles of philosophical and scientific method are not prejudgments but principles/elements of reason itself. According to the Modernist model of philosophy and science, the truth discovered by it exerts an influence on the possibility of an improvement of social life and contributes to the human mastering of nature. Disinterested philosophical and scientific research presents a concerted pattern of unselfishness and truthfulness. Increasingly, however, philosophy and science have found themselves in a critical situation. The old strategies of defending the traditional task of philosophy have failed one by one. In this crisis situation, post-modernist philosophy arose and drew different conclusions about the nature of philosophy and science. Richard Rorty’s post-Modem philosophy is one of the more moderate and, I think, more reasonable varieties of this new philosophy. Thus, it warrants a careful examination in these times of crisis. If it can be said that there is something in Rorty’s philosophy that characterises it most precisely, it is its radical anti-foundationalism. Rorty vigorously opposes the model of philosophy in which reaching the essence of Reality, discovering the Truth, identifying the Good, and grasping the nature of the Self are the most important issues. According to Rorty, who refers in this respect to the tradition of pragmatism, (especially James’ and Dewey’s pragmatism), philosophy has *Institute of Philosophy, Nicolaus Copernicus University, 87-100 Torun, Ul. Fosa Staromiejska 3, Poland. 559
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Andrzej Szahaj
nothing to do with such foundational concerns. For pragmatists, the Platonic tradition is played-out and, in this sense, so is traditional phUosophy. As it has so far been understood, the 'mind' is the first and principal subject of Rorty's attack. Rorty holds that the traditional conception of the mind is the basic element of a certain vision of philosophising, dominant in Europe since the seventeenth century, in which the mind is perceived as a great mirror containingvarious representations--some accurate, some not and capable of being studied by pure, non-empiricalmethods. Without the notion of the mind as mirror, the notion of knowledgeas accuracy of representation would have not suggesteditself. Without this letter notion the strategycommonto Descartesand Kant--getting more accurate representation by inspecting, repairing and polishing the mirror, so to speak--would have not made sense. Without this strategy in mind, recent claims that philosophy could consist of 'conceptual analysis' or 'explication of meatiings' or examination of'the logicof our language' or of'the structure of the constituting activity of consciousness' would not have made s e n s e . In Rorty's opinion, wrestling with the 'mind' is wrestling with a fragment of a greater whole, i.e. the metaphor which has organised philosophical reflection since at least the seventeenth century, ff not since Plato himself. In accordance with this metaphor, human beings are equipped with a mind which helps them to transcend the darkness hiding Reality so that the one and only truth of Reality could be impressed on the mirror which is the mind. This truth ought to find its reflection in language whose meanings somehow 'catch on' Reality. This makes possible correspondences between linguistic judgments and certain states of Reality. According to Rorty, however, there is no escape from language: statements (judgements) are compared with other statements (judgements), descriptions with descriptions, and not with some non-linguistic 'reality'. Thus, truth is the result of a debate which is characteristic of human community. In this sense, truth, being dependent on time, place and the historical interests of those who strive for it, is created rather than discovered. The pursuit of the phantom of Truth which would reveal the essence of Reality is futile. As Rorty says, 'the nature of truth' is an unprofitable topic, resembling in this respect 'the nature of man' and 'the nature of God'. 2 There are only two resorts we can have while wrestling with the problem of truth--acceptance and coherence. What then does the author of Philosophy and theMirror of Nature think about 'reality'? Clearly under the influence of Hilary Putnam, he has an anti-realistic view. Putnam maintains that there are two principal epistemological orientations: externalist and internalist. The former assumes that 'the world is a certain definite whole composed of objects independent of our minds. There is exactly one truth and a complete description of'the way the world exists'. The truth entails a certain kind of correspondence between words or thoughts-signs and external things and types of things'? In the internalist perspective, on the other hand, questions about objects from the world are sensible only when asked within some theory or some conceptual framework which helps us 'cut out objects from the world'. Truth in the internalist approach, says Putnam, is a certain kind of(idealised) rational acceptability, a certain kind of ideal coherence
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of our beliefs themselves as well as our beliefs and our experiences as represented within our system o f beliefs. Truth is not a correspondence with 'states of affairs' which are independent of the mind or of discourse. There is no point of view of God's Eye which we can get to know or imagine. There are only different points of view of real people which reflect different interests and goals which their descriptions and theories serve. 4 Although we have to allow for the existence of experimental 'entrances' to knowledge, still, on the other hand, we should be aware that these 'entrances' are from the very beginning shaped by our concepts, dictionaries, and theories--all of which instantly catch them up in a net of interpretative associations. Hence, as Putnam says, 'the idea of a point at which subjectivity ends and the capital-letter Objectivity begins turns out to be a chimera'? Rorty declares himself an advocate of Putnam's internal realism. 6 Our cognition does not comply with the modes in which nature is represented in our minds and which it imposes upon us. Nature does not suggest or hint anything. Our judgments about nature are better or worse only respective to the effectiveness of their application. There is no sense in saying that our cognition comes close to discovering the truth about nature (about reality). Even if it were so, we would never learn about it since we are not able to break away from the sphere of what is human to decide what the relationship between our cognition and its object is. We already know that, according to Rorty, it is no longer worth searching for Truth, the essence of Reality, Good, or Rationality. What, then, is worth doing for the philosopher? The author of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature answers: ... neither the priests nor the physicists nor the poets nor the Party were thought of as more 'rational', or more 'scientific' or 'deeper' than one another. No particular portion of culture would be signalled out as exemplifying (or signally failing to exemplify) the condition to which the rest aspired .... Afortiori, such a culture would contain nobody called 'the Philosopher' who could explain why and how certain areas of culture enjoyed a special relation to reality. Such a culture would, doubtless, contain specialists in seeing how things hang together. But these would be people who had no special 'problems' to solve, nor any special 'method' to apply, abided by no particular disciplinary standards, had no collective self-image as a 'profession'.... They would be all-purpose intellectuals who were ready to offer a view on pretty much anything, in the hope of making it hang together with everything else.7 In the world according to Rorty, the hope of reaching the final Truth, the end of uncertainty, and establishing evidence of our bond with the superhuman would be definitely frustrated. Only solidarity with those who suffer 'pain and humiliation' would remain for the beings isolated and doomed to transitoriness, s In that world, the 'ironist' would be the main hero. The ironist, according to Rorty, is someone who does not believe in the exclusiveness of the 'dictionary' which he is using. He is constantly tormented by doubts since he knows and appreciates the merits of other competing 'dictionaries'. Moreover, he knows that an argument contained in his 'dictionary' cannot eliminate his doubts just because of the fact that it is based on a certain way of viewing the world, a way
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which may be called into question. While philosophising about his own situation, he realises that he is in no way authorised to expect that his 'dictionary' is somehow closer to reality than all the others he knows. He knows, furthermore, that the choice between dictionaries is never made from the neutral perspective of a 'metadictionary'. Being a historicist and nominalist, the ironist does not believe in the inner nature of things, their hidden essence, just as he does not believe in the existence o f ' h u m a n nature'. He realises that contentions posed in any dispute are eventually of a rhetorical nature and that the metaphysician's efforts to base his assertions upon indisputable assumptions are more or less persuasive as others. Rorty claims that the dividing lines between various spheres of culture are artificial. What is common and constitutive for them is the necessity to ceaselessly produce 'texts', i.e. meaningful symbolic messages. Rorty refers to the views of Derrida in what he says about the omnipresence of texts and the ceaseless process of producing them. He particularly delights in the fact that, For Derrida writing always leads to more writing, and more, and still more--just as history does not lead to Absolute Knowledge or the Final Struggle, but to more history, and more, and still more .... Texts comment on other texts, and we should stop trying to test texts for accuracy of representation? In this way we have got closer again to the key-question in Rorty's reflection. Here is the crux of the issue: 'The textualist starts out from the claim that all problems, topics, and distinctions are language-relativewthe results from our having chosen to use a certain vocabulary, to play a certain language-game'. 1° Rorty, in one form or another, repeatedly expresses this view at different points in his books. It seems to play the key-role in his philosophy and in this way relates it to the whole postmodernist tradition, a la the French version of it (Derrida, Deleuze, Lyotard). Rorty's main idea is roughly as follows. Humans are beings who of necessity use language. Moreover, as Wittgenstein pointed out, our existence in society is inevitably connected with our participation in manifold language games, that is, in specific combinations of activities involving both language and practical life. Each language game is a self-contained whole. Now if we substitute 'a dictionary' for 'a language game', we will get more or less what Rorty has in mind. We have to do with a variety of 'dictionaries', that is, of historically and culturally determined forms of viewing the world, which we use to cope with our natural and social environment. These dictionaries provide us with a certain concepts that determine the way in which we perceive ourselves as well as other people and nature. But we cannot determine which of them are better or worse in any disinterested sense, i.e. which are 'objective' in the sense of reflecting the essence of Reality, Morality or Good. They are rather only the expressions of our subjective and interested visions of what we think is true, real, and good. There is no criterion that would help us to decide independently of our situations and interests since we cannot break away from embeddedness in language, culture, and time in order to view, as it were, from the outside their many oppositions. As Rorty puts it, 'the world does not provide us with any criterion of choice between alternative metaphors . . . . we can only compare languages or metaphors with one
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another, not with something beyond language called 'fact'.H That is also why there is no method to compare language--or different forms of culture for that mattermwith something outside language. Rorty says, 'One can use language to criticise and enlarge itself.., but one cannot see langnage-as-a-whole in relation to something else to which it applies'. 12 Or, 'we have no prelinguistic consciousness to which language needs to be adequate, no deep sense of how things are'. ~3The dictionaries we use are useful or useless, good or bad, helpful or deceptive, sensitive or vulgar. We must not say, however, that some of them are more 'objective', because the notion of objectivity implies the possibility of our comparing language to reality by means of some non-linguistic apparatus. As I mentioned before, all artistic, scientific, and philosophical activity is reduced by Rorty to a common denominator--to the process of writing texts and their constant interpretation. What is left on the battle field is 'literature' because everything is 'literature'. Why, then, should this fragment known as 'literature' be dealt with by philosophers? Rorty's answers is that interpreting other people and their statements (literature) widens and deepens our sense of community. This is another reason for not seeking any metaphysical foundations of science, art or philosophy. The only thing that matters is that they facilitate communication, which for the author of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature is a primary value in the ethical sense. Willingness to talk, to listen to other people, to weigh the consequences of our actions upon other people--are simply moral virtues. They cannot be inculcated nor fortified by theoretical research into essence.... We are not conversingbecause we have a goal, but because Socratic conversation is an activity which is its own end) 4 While communicating, we confront different dictionaries and cultures. With such interpretative confrontations, Rorty believes we produce new and better ways of speaking and acting. A certain current of existentialism runs through this. For an individual devoid of any metaphysical protection is desperately in need of talking to others in order not to lose his or her personal integrity, in order to be able to act at all in the face of increasing doubts. Rorty deeply believes that a person to whom metaphysical axioms are alien is nevertheless able to adhere consistently to their chosen worldview and ethical values, even though they know that they are fortuitous, relative, and historically and culturally determined. I must confess that my attitude towards Rorty's views mentioned above, as well as to the whole post-Modernist thought, is ambivalent. On the one hand, these views are close to my way of seeing the world and philosophy. I appreciate all the convalescent power of the destruction they carry. And I like the radicalism of this philosophy. I also agree in large part with its diagnoses, especially as they are expressed in Rorty's philosophy. This is very close to memthe problem of reality, language, truth and the cultural conditions of cognition and action. Thanks to the destructive work of post-Modernists, some elements of the traditional world-views may become de-objectified, and, in this way, the process
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of disenchantment of the world may gain momentum as human beings gain intellectual and, perhaps, private-life independence. But it is precisely here that the previously signalled feeling of ambivalence towards the whole process sneaks in. The point is that the gradual process of the decline of the metaphysical prejudgments, so typical of the development of Western culture, deprives this very culture of its necessary integrating and regulating power. As Jerzy Kmita says, the farther away modern culture gets from its magic source, the more of its socioregulatingpower it loses,graduallyapproaching a certain point in whichit willhave to undergo a definite change if human praxis which reproduces social existence were farther to require due super-individual regulation? 5 It seems that Rorty's philosophy, among others, is exactly a sign of the European culture having reached that 'critical point'--the point characterised by the extreme individualisation of world-views, the excess of ideas and senses present in the world-view 'market', and the lack of criteria for choosing the 'right', 'pertinent' or 'true' ones. In short, it has gradually become apparent that neither God nor Nature of the Enlightenment thought nor progress-bound history guaranteed the existence (outside-mind) of superior, non-practical world-view values and of the valuesoriented symbolisationrelation. If so, they can be founded only by an individualact of decision making which arbitrarily chooses some of the values or relationships.l~ Thus, having emancipated himself from God, and Historical Necessity, man is left alone with himself (which Nietzsche and Weber said would happen). Let us observe, however, that if society is to reproduce itself at all, culture has to preserve its superindividual, integrating-regulating power. This necessity is given convincing expression in Jiirgen Habermas' theory of communicative actions.17 It points out additionally the problems which occur when the reproduction in question becomes disturbed with the collapse of world-view communication integrating human society. I find the analyses of the necessities connected with the reproduction of the 'Lebenswelt' in Theorie des Kommunikativen Handelns extremely convincing. What arouses my anxiety is the possibility of an effective solution of that reproduction problem should the post-Modernist culture become the predominant response to the challenge posed by some new (though arising in our full view, I should think) form of post-industrial social order in which the whole hitherto existing model of production, exchange, and consumption would undergo some fundamental transformation. In such an eventuality, I agree with Habermas, that perhaps it would become necessary to face such phenomena as the loss of the belief that there is some sense in life, a break in the continuity of tradition, unsettling of individual and group identity, the loss of validity of public institutions, anomie, the loss of motivation, the crisis of ethical and world-view orientations used in education and socialisation of individuals, isolation, and, finally, different individual psychical pathologies. ~8Certainly an objection may be raised that such an approach is characteristic of the typically Modernist attitude. And this is well right. But the problem lies in the fact that, seemingly,
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not all the questions raised here could be easily overcome by a post-Modernist culture. The accusation of cherishing the Modernist prejudices would be, in this situation, a dodge rather than actually facing the difficulties. On the other hand, the very fact of their existence requires an analysis which makes a constant challenge to late-twentieth-century social thought. The difficulties concerning ethical evaluation resulting from the relativity of ethical norms should be considered separately. Is any normative ethical system or set of world-view beliefs that is both related to the socio-cultural context and without metaphysical foundations really able to motivate effectively the actions of individual subjects? Where does Rorty's faith in people's solidarity in suffering and in their ability to communicate come from? Is it not, after all, based on some implicit premises concerning, for instance, human nature? If so, doesn't the same metaphysics that was thrown out re-enter through the back door? As is perfectly well known, Rorty declares his entire approval of Habermas' conception that the social order should be based on the principles of 'communication free from distortion'. He does not agree, however, with its metaphysical fundamentalism--the author of Theorie des Kommunikativen Handelns strives to give his conception of a strictly theoretical status.19 In this manner, however, he overlooks the fact of fundamental importance it has for understanding Habermas' approach. The conception of undisturbed communication is an integral part of a much greater whole, without which it actually loses its sense. Likewise, the notion 'communication' itself loses its sense when only the behaviourist model of conduct is admitted, which is precisely what Rorty does. To conclude these considerations, it is worth asking once more the fundamental question: why is this type of post-Modern reflection (of which Rorty is a good example) so popular? What has happened within European culture that prompts us, after 20 centuries, to revitalise philosophical conceptions and world views, representing the perplexities of the ancient Sophists and Sceptics in updated forms? There is not enough place here to put forward some more developed hypotheses. Suffice it to say that it seems that post-Modernist philosophy describes the process of world-view changes which accompany the final transition stage of traditional Western societies becoming post-traditional ones. The most important virtue of this process is a huge pluralisation and privatisation of beliefs. But now is time to ask whether philosophy should try to deepen this process with its instruments of deconstruction or should it rather fight against chaos and the generalised diffusion of sense? In my opinion, philosophy can still be a kind of intellectual activity, which, armed with a critical attitude and irony, must try to save remnants of sense and solidarity. Avoiding any fundamentalism and trying to be open to different voices and arguments, it ought still seek to glue together pieces of the broken mirror of Sense. This sense can be, and must be, a local and fragile one. But the most important thing is that it can be found at all. As Odo Marquard said, 'The sense amounts to the lack of sense that is still avoided'. 2° Only in this way can philosophy remain faithful to its traditional mission. Andrzej Szahaj
Nicolaus Copernicus University, Torun
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Andrzej Szahaj
566 NOTES
1. R. Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), p. 12. 2. R. Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 8. 3. H. Putnam, Reason, Truth and History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981, p. 49. 4. ibidem, op. cit., p. 50. 5. H. Putnam, The Many Faces of Realism, La SaNe: Open Court Publishing Company 1987, p. 28. 6. R. Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, op. cit., p. 298. 7. R. Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1982, XXXVIII-XXXIX. 8. R. Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, op. cir. XVI. 9. R. Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, op. cit., p. 94-95. 10. ibidem, op. cit., p. 140. 11. R. Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, op. cit., p. 20. 12. R. Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, op. cit., p. XIX. 13. R. Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, op. cit., p. 21. 14. R. Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, op. cit., p. 172. 15. J. Kmita, Cena emancypacji, "Odra" 1986, no. 4, p. 17. 16. J. Kmita, Magiczne zrodlo kultury, "Odra: 1984", no. 2, p. 28. 17. J. Habermas, Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns, 2 vols., Frankfurt a/M: Suhrkamp 1981. 18. ibidem, op. tit., vol. 2, pp. 214-217. 19. R. Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, op. cit., p. 67. 20. O. Marquard, W sprawie dietetyki oczekiwania na sens, Acta Universitatis Lodziensis, Folia Philosophica 1988, vol. 6, 10.
History of European Ideas
Pergamon
of European
Ideas,
Vol. 20. Nos l-3, pp. 559-566. 1995 Copyright 0 1995 Elsevier Science Ltd Printed in Great Britain. All rights reserved 0191-6599/95 $9.50 + 00
THE TASK OF PHILOSOPHY ANDRZEJ SZAHAJ *
Since the time of Parmenides and Plato the task of philosophy has been the pursuit of Truth and the attempt to provide certain knowledge (episteme), thus distinguishing itself as a specific kind of human activity in opposition to the rule of prejudice and mere opinion (doxa). While subject matter of philosophy has varied, its nature has remained the same. Science also has been faithful to this philosophical view. Both philosophy and science became a basis of the modernist vision of the human world, both attempting to conceptualise essential regularities occurring in ‘objective’ reality, or at least attempting to approximate them. The reality in question is understood as unique, unchangeable, and independent of the individual or community of knowing subjects who recognise it. The language of cognition, although changeable, ‘suits reality’ because its proper terms accurately refer to it. In this way, philosophy and science ensure cognitive and technological progress in the shared belief that general progress is the best way to human self-improvement. The philosopher and the scientist, as special individuals independent of an influence of the outside world, look into the essence of reality by means of the perspicacity of their reason. In this sense, they play the role of secular priests. Faithful only to the reality in question, they do not follow any other prejudgements. For modernistic philosophers and scientists, the universally accepted principles of philosophical and scientific method are not prejudgments but principles/elements of reason itself. According to the Modernist model of philosophy and science, the truth discovered by it exerts an influence on the possibility of an improvement of social life and contributes to the human mastering of nature. Disinterested philosophical and scientific research presents a concerted pattern of unselfishness and truthfulness. Increasingly, however, philosophy and science have found themselves in a critical situation. The old strategies of defending the traditional task of philosophy have failed one by one. In this crisis situation, post-modernist philosophy arose and drew different conclusions about the nature of philosophy and science. Richard Rorty’s post-Modem philosophy is one of the more moderate and, I think, more reasonable varieties of this new philosophy. Thus, it warrants a careful examination in these times of crisis. If it can be said that there is something in Rorty’s philosophy that characterises it most precisely, it is its radical anti-foundationalism. Rorty vigorously opposes the model of philosophy in which reaching the essence of Reality, discovering the Truth, identifying the Good, and grasping the nature of the Self are the most important issues. According to Rorty, who refers in this respect to the tradition of pragmatism, (especially James’ and Dewey’s pragmatism), philosophy has *Institute of Philosophy, Nicolaus Copernicus University, 87-100 Torun, Ul. Fosa Staromiejska 3, Poland. 559
560
Andrzej Szahaj
nothing to do with such foundational concerns. For pragmatists, the Platonic tradition is played-out and, in this sense, so is traditional phUosophy. As it has so far been understood, the 'mind' is the first and principal subject of Rorty's attack. Rorty holds that the traditional conception of the mind is the basic element of a certain vision of philosophising, dominant in Europe since the seventeenth century, in which the mind is perceived as a great mirror containingvarious representations--some accurate, some not and capable of being studied by pure, non-empiricalmethods. Without the notion of the mind as mirror, the notion of knowledgeas accuracy of representation would have not suggesteditself. Without this letter notion the strategycommonto Descartesand Kant--getting more accurate representation by inspecting, repairing and polishing the mirror, so to speak--would have not made sense. Without this strategy in mind, recent claims that philosophy could consist of 'conceptual analysis' or 'explication of meatiings' or examination of'the logicof our language' or of'the structure of the constituting activity of consciousness' would not have made s e n s e . In Rorty's opinion, wrestling with the 'mind' is wrestling with a fragment of a greater whole, i.e. the metaphor which has organised philosophical reflection since at least the seventeenth century, ff not since Plato himself. In accordance with this metaphor, human beings are equipped with a mind which helps them to transcend the darkness hiding Reality so that the one and only truth of Reality could be impressed on the mirror which is the mind. This truth ought to find its reflection in language whose meanings somehow 'catch on' Reality. This makes possible correspondences between linguistic judgments and certain states of Reality. According to Rorty, however, there is no escape from language: statements (judgements) are compared with other statements (judgements), descriptions with descriptions, and not with some non-linguistic 'reality'. Thus, truth is the result of a debate which is characteristic of human community. In this sense, truth, being dependent on time, place and the historical interests of those who strive for it, is created rather than discovered. The pursuit of the phantom of Truth which would reveal the essence of Reality is futile. As Rorty says, 'the nature of truth' is an unprofitable topic, resembling in this respect 'the nature of man' and 'the nature of God'. 2 There are only two resorts we can have while wrestling with the problem of truth--acceptance and coherence. What then does the author of Philosophy and theMirror of Nature think about 'reality'? Clearly under the influence of Hilary Putnam, he has an anti-realistic view. Putnam maintains that there are two principal epistemological orientations: externalist and internalist. The former assumes that 'the world is a certain definite whole composed of objects independent of our minds. There is exactly one truth and a complete description of'the way the world exists'. The truth entails a certain kind of correspondence between words or thoughts-signs and external things and types of things'? In the internalist perspective, on the other hand, questions about objects from the world are sensible only when asked within some theory or some conceptual framework which helps us 'cut out objects from the world'. Truth in the internalist approach, says Putnam, is a certain kind of(idealised) rational acceptability, a certain kind of ideal coherence
History of European Ideas
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561
of our beliefs themselves as well as our beliefs and our experiences as represented within our system o f beliefs. Truth is not a correspondence with 'states of affairs' which are independent of the mind or of discourse. There is no point of view of God's Eye which we can get to know or imagine. There are only different points of view of real people which reflect different interests and goals which their descriptions and theories serve. 4 Although we have to allow for the existence of experimental 'entrances' to knowledge, still, on the other hand, we should be aware that these 'entrances' are from the very beginning shaped by our concepts, dictionaries, and theories--all of which instantly catch them up in a net of interpretative associations. Hence, as Putnam says, 'the idea of a point at which subjectivity ends and the capital-letter Objectivity begins turns out to be a chimera'? Rorty declares himself an advocate of Putnam's internal realism. 6 Our cognition does not comply with the modes in which nature is represented in our minds and which it imposes upon us. Nature does not suggest or hint anything. Our judgments about nature are better or worse only respective to the effectiveness of their application. There is no sense in saying that our cognition comes close to discovering the truth about nature (about reality). Even if it were so, we would never learn about it since we are not able to break away from the sphere of what is human to decide what the relationship between our cognition and its object is. We already know that, according to Rorty, it is no longer worth searching for Truth, the essence of Reality, Good, or Rationality. What, then, is worth doing for the philosopher? The author of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature answers: ... neither the priests nor the physicists nor the poets nor the Party were thought of as more 'rational', or more 'scientific' or 'deeper' than one another. No particular portion of culture would be signalled out as exemplifying (or signally failing to exemplify) the condition to which the rest aspired .... Afortiori, such a culture would contain nobody called 'the Philosopher' who could explain why and how certain areas of culture enjoyed a special relation to reality. Such a culture would, doubtless, contain specialists in seeing how things hang together. But these would be people who had no special 'problems' to solve, nor any special 'method' to apply, abided by no particular disciplinary standards, had no collective self-image as a 'profession'.... They would be all-purpose intellectuals who were ready to offer a view on pretty much anything, in the hope of making it hang together with everything else.7 In the world according to Rorty, the hope of reaching the final Truth, the end of uncertainty, and establishing evidence of our bond with the superhuman would be definitely frustrated. Only solidarity with those who suffer 'pain and humiliation' would remain for the beings isolated and doomed to transitoriness, s In that world, the 'ironist' would be the main hero. The ironist, according to Rorty, is someone who does not believe in the exclusiveness of the 'dictionary' which he is using. He is constantly tormented by doubts since he knows and appreciates the merits of other competing 'dictionaries'. Moreover, he knows that an argument contained in his 'dictionary' cannot eliminate his doubts just because of the fact that it is based on a certain way of viewing the world, a way
Volume 20, Nos 1-3, January 1995
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which may be called into question. While philosophising about his own situation, he realises that he is in no way authorised to expect that his 'dictionary' is somehow closer to reality than all the others he knows. He knows, furthermore, that the choice between dictionaries is never made from the neutral perspective of a 'metadictionary'. Being a historicist and nominalist, the ironist does not believe in the inner nature of things, their hidden essence, just as he does not believe in the existence o f ' h u m a n nature'. He realises that contentions posed in any dispute are eventually of a rhetorical nature and that the metaphysician's efforts to base his assertions upon indisputable assumptions are more or less persuasive as others. Rorty claims that the dividing lines between various spheres of culture are artificial. What is common and constitutive for them is the necessity to ceaselessly produce 'texts', i.e. meaningful symbolic messages. Rorty refers to the views of Derrida in what he says about the omnipresence of texts and the ceaseless process of producing them. He particularly delights in the fact that, For Derrida writing always leads to more writing, and more, and still more--just as history does not lead to Absolute Knowledge or the Final Struggle, but to more history, and more, and still more .... Texts comment on other texts, and we should stop trying to test texts for accuracy of representation? In this way we have got closer again to the key-question in Rorty's reflection. Here is the crux of the issue: 'The textualist starts out from the claim that all problems, topics, and distinctions are language-relativewthe results from our having chosen to use a certain vocabulary, to play a certain language-game'. 1° Rorty, in one form or another, repeatedly expresses this view at different points in his books. It seems to play the key-role in his philosophy and in this way relates it to the whole postmodernist tradition, a la the French version of it (Derrida, Deleuze, Lyotard). Rorty's main idea is roughly as follows. Humans are beings who of necessity use language. Moreover, as Wittgenstein pointed out, our existence in society is inevitably connected with our participation in manifold language games, that is, in specific combinations of activities involving both language and practical life. Each language game is a self-contained whole. Now if we substitute 'a dictionary' for 'a language game', we will get more or less what Rorty has in mind. We have to do with a variety of 'dictionaries', that is, of historically and culturally determined forms of viewing the world, which we use to cope with our natural and social environment. These dictionaries provide us with a certain concepts that determine the way in which we perceive ourselves as well as other people and nature. But we cannot determine which of them are better or worse in any disinterested sense, i.e. which are 'objective' in the sense of reflecting the essence of Reality, Morality or Good. They are rather only the expressions of our subjective and interested visions of what we think is true, real, and good. There is no criterion that would help us to decide independently of our situations and interests since we cannot break away from embeddedness in language, culture, and time in order to view, as it were, from the outside their many oppositions. As Rorty puts it, 'the world does not provide us with any criterion of choice between alternative metaphors . . . . we can only compare languages or metaphors with one
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another, not with something beyond language called 'fact'.H That is also why there is no method to compare language--or different forms of culture for that mattermwith something outside language. Rorty says, 'One can use language to criticise and enlarge itself.., but one cannot see langnage-as-a-whole in relation to something else to which it applies'. 12 Or, 'we have no prelinguistic consciousness to which language needs to be adequate, no deep sense of how things are'. ~3The dictionaries we use are useful or useless, good or bad, helpful or deceptive, sensitive or vulgar. We must not say, however, that some of them are more 'objective', because the notion of objectivity implies the possibility of our comparing language to reality by means of some non-linguistic apparatus. As I mentioned before, all artistic, scientific, and philosophical activity is reduced by Rorty to a common denominator--to the process of writing texts and their constant interpretation. What is left on the battle field is 'literature' because everything is 'literature'. Why, then, should this fragment known as 'literature' be dealt with by philosophers? Rorty's answers is that interpreting other people and their statements (literature) widens and deepens our sense of community. This is another reason for not seeking any metaphysical foundations of science, art or philosophy. The only thing that matters is that they facilitate communication, which for the author of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature is a primary value in the ethical sense. Willingness to talk, to listen to other people, to weigh the consequences of our actions upon other people--are simply moral virtues. They cannot be inculcated nor fortified by theoretical research into essence.... We are not conversingbecause we have a goal, but because Socratic conversation is an activity which is its own end) 4 While communicating, we confront different dictionaries and cultures. With such interpretative confrontations, Rorty believes we produce new and better ways of speaking and acting. A certain current of existentialism runs through this. For an individual devoid of any metaphysical protection is desperately in need of talking to others in order not to lose his or her personal integrity, in order to be able to act at all in the face of increasing doubts. Rorty deeply believes that a person to whom metaphysical axioms are alien is nevertheless able to adhere consistently to their chosen worldview and ethical values, even though they know that they are fortuitous, relative, and historically and culturally determined. I must confess that my attitude towards Rorty's views mentioned above, as well as to the whole post-Modernist thought, is ambivalent. On the one hand, these views are close to my way of seeing the world and philosophy. I appreciate all the convalescent power of the destruction they carry. And I like the radicalism of this philosophy. I also agree in large part with its diagnoses, especially as they are expressed in Rorty's philosophy. This is very close to memthe problem of reality, language, truth and the cultural conditions of cognition and action. Thanks to the destructive work of post-Modernists, some elements of the traditional world-views may become de-objectified, and, in this way, the process
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of disenchantment of the world may gain momentum as human beings gain intellectual and, perhaps, private-life independence. But it is precisely here that the previously signalled feeling of ambivalence towards the whole process sneaks in. The point is that the gradual process of the decline of the metaphysical prejudgments, so typical of the development of Western culture, deprives this very culture of its necessary integrating and regulating power. As Jerzy Kmita says, the farther away modern culture gets from its magic source, the more of its socioregulatingpower it loses,graduallyapproaching a certain point in whichit willhave to undergo a definite change if human praxis which reproduces social existence were farther to require due super-individual regulation? 5 It seems that Rorty's philosophy, among others, is exactly a sign of the European culture having reached that 'critical point'--the point characterised by the extreme individualisation of world-views, the excess of ideas and senses present in the world-view 'market', and the lack of criteria for choosing the 'right', 'pertinent' or 'true' ones. In short, it has gradually become apparent that neither God nor Nature of the Enlightenment thought nor progress-bound history guaranteed the existence (outside-mind) of superior, non-practical world-view values and of the valuesoriented symbolisationrelation. If so, they can be founded only by an individualact of decision making which arbitrarily chooses some of the values or relationships.l~ Thus, having emancipated himself from God, and Historical Necessity, man is left alone with himself (which Nietzsche and Weber said would happen). Let us observe, however, that if society is to reproduce itself at all, culture has to preserve its superindividual, integrating-regulating power. This necessity is given convincing expression in Jiirgen Habermas' theory of communicative actions.17 It points out additionally the problems which occur when the reproduction in question becomes disturbed with the collapse of world-view communication integrating human society. I find the analyses of the necessities connected with the reproduction of the 'Lebenswelt' in Theorie des Kommunikativen Handelns extremely convincing. What arouses my anxiety is the possibility of an effective solution of that reproduction problem should the post-Modernist culture become the predominant response to the challenge posed by some new (though arising in our full view, I should think) form of post-industrial social order in which the whole hitherto existing model of production, exchange, and consumption would undergo some fundamental transformation. In such an eventuality, I agree with Habermas, that perhaps it would become necessary to face such phenomena as the loss of the belief that there is some sense in life, a break in the continuity of tradition, unsettling of individual and group identity, the loss of validity of public institutions, anomie, the loss of motivation, the crisis of ethical and world-view orientations used in education and socialisation of individuals, isolation, and, finally, different individual psychical pathologies. ~8Certainly an objection may be raised that such an approach is characteristic of the typically Modernist attitude. And this is well right. But the problem lies in the fact that, seemingly,
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not all the questions raised here could be easily overcome by a post-Modernist culture. The accusation of cherishing the Modernist prejudices would be, in this situation, a dodge rather than actually facing the difficulties. On the other hand, the very fact of their existence requires an analysis which makes a constant challenge to late-twentieth-century social thought. The difficulties concerning ethical evaluation resulting from the relativity of ethical norms should be considered separately. Is any normative ethical system or set of world-view beliefs that is both related to the socio-cultural context and without metaphysical foundations really able to motivate effectively the actions of individual subjects? Where does Rorty's faith in people's solidarity in suffering and in their ability to communicate come from? Is it not, after all, based on some implicit premises concerning, for instance, human nature? If so, doesn't the same metaphysics that was thrown out re-enter through the back door? As is perfectly well known, Rorty declares his entire approval of Habermas' conception that the social order should be based on the principles of 'communication free from distortion'. He does not agree, however, with its metaphysical fundamentalism--the author of Theorie des Kommunikativen Handelns strives to give his conception of a strictly theoretical status.19 In this manner, however, he overlooks the fact of fundamental importance it has for understanding Habermas' approach. The conception of undisturbed communication is an integral part of a much greater whole, without which it actually loses its sense. Likewise, the notion 'communication' itself loses its sense when only the behaviourist model of conduct is admitted, which is precisely what Rorty does. To conclude these considerations, it is worth asking once more the fundamental question: why is this type of post-Modern reflection (of which Rorty is a good example) so popular? What has happened within European culture that prompts us, after 20 centuries, to revitalise philosophical conceptions and world views, representing the perplexities of the ancient Sophists and Sceptics in updated forms? There is not enough place here to put forward some more developed hypotheses. Suffice it to say that it seems that post-Modernist philosophy describes the process of world-view changes which accompany the final transition stage of traditional Western societies becoming post-traditional ones. The most important virtue of this process is a huge pluralisation and privatisation of beliefs. But now is time to ask whether philosophy should try to deepen this process with its instruments of deconstruction or should it rather fight against chaos and the generalised diffusion of sense? In my opinion, philosophy can still be a kind of intellectual activity, which, armed with a critical attitude and irony, must try to save remnants of sense and solidarity. Avoiding any fundamentalism and trying to be open to different voices and arguments, it ought still seek to glue together pieces of the broken mirror of Sense. This sense can be, and must be, a local and fragile one. But the most important thing is that it can be found at all. As Odo Marquard said, 'The sense amounts to the lack of sense that is still avoided'. 2° Only in this way can philosophy remain faithful to its traditional mission. Andrzej Szahaj
Nicolaus Copernicus University, Torun
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1. R. Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), p. 12. 2. R. Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 8. 3. H. Putnam, Reason, Truth and History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981, p. 49. 4. ibidem, op. cit., p. 50. 5. H. Putnam, The Many Faces of Realism, La SaNe: Open Court Publishing Company 1987, p. 28. 6. R. Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, op. cit., p. 298. 7. R. Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1982, XXXVIII-XXXIX. 8. R. Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, op. cir. XVI. 9. R. Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, op. cit., p. 94-95. 10. ibidem, op. cit., p. 140. 11. R. Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, op. cit., p. 20. 12. R. Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, op. cit., p. XIX. 13. R. Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, op. cit., p. 21. 14. R. Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, op. cit., p. 172. 15. J. Kmita, Cena emancypacji, "Odra" 1986, no. 4, p. 17. 16. J. Kmita, Magiczne zrodlo kultury, "Odra: 1984", no. 2, p. 28. 17. J. Habermas, Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns, 2 vols., Frankfurt a/M: Suhrkamp 1981. 18. ibidem, op. tit., vol. 2, pp. 214-217. 19. R. Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, op. cit., p. 67. 20. O. Marquard, W sprawie dietetyki oczekiwania na sens, Acta Universitatis Lodziensis, Folia Philosophica 1988, vol. 6, 10.
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