Feeling Beyond the Text: Reflections on The Rorty Reader

Contemporary Pragmatism Vol. 8, No. 2 (December 2011), 205–212 Editions Rodopi © 2011 Feeling Beyond the Text: Reflections on The Rorty Reader Richard Shusterman Examining key themes presented in the excellent Rorty Reader, this essay also argues that Rorty’s philosophical import extends beyond the propositional content of his texts. After indicating how Rorty’s central philosophical stance of anti-representationalism is expressed in his aestheticist advocacy of a pluralist literary culture and his theory that ethics and moral progress can be properly based only on sentiments rather than rationality, the paper explains why his philosophy should have therefore embraced the role of embodied experience rather than rejecting it. 1. On the centenary of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s birth, William James said, The pathos of death is this, that when the days of one’s life are ended, those days that were so crowded with business and felt so heavy in their passing, what remains of one in memory should usually be so slight a thing. The phantom of an attitude, the echo of a certain mode of thought, a few pages of print, some invention, or some victory we gained in a brief critical hour, are all that can survive the best of us. It is as if the whole of a man’s significance had now shrunk into the phantom of an attitude, into a mere musical note or phrase suggestive of his singularity – happy are those whose singularity gives a note so clear as to be victorious over the inevitable pity of such a diminution and abridgement.1 In composing my remarks on this Rorty Reader2 as we pass the fourth anniversary of his death, I could start by asking whether Richard Rorty is happy by this Jamesian criterion – a paradoxical one that posits happiness as a posthumous affair. I think he surely should be, as this excellent reader makes powerfully clear. It is an abundantly rich reader that goes far beyond “a few pages in print,” running indeed to more than 575 pages. In the wide-ranging texts that Christopher Voparil and Richard Bernstein have judiciously selected 206 RICHARD SHUSTERMAN and astutely arranged, many memorable notes are sounded in Rorty’s elegant prose, whose distinctive style is smooth but not facile, sophisticated but never stuffy, sometimes engagingly colloquial but never crude, often potently critical but rarely cruel. Although Rorty never really wrote about music (his artistic interests appear to be very one-sidedly literary), he certainly was graced with a talent for textual rhythms and verbal melodies that made reading him a pleasure even when one found his ideas maddeningly provocative. Besides his literary skill, another reason why Rorty may be the most widely discussed American philosopher of the last two decades is the diversity of important fields and topics about which he had something interesting to say. Not only did he formulate incisive positions in most of the dominant philosophical subdisciplines (philosophy of mind and language, epistemology and hermeneutics, ethics, metaphysics, aesthetics, and philosophy of science and history), but he also expressed distinctive views on many culturally important issues in fields beyond philosophy, including literature, feminism, law, politics, and religion. By redirecting philosophy’s mission and energies away from mere technical expertise in dealing with narrow academic problems but instead toward the criticism of contemporary culture that would help individuals reorient and enrich their efforts in the conduct of life, Rorty rendered philosophy not merely relevant but even exciting to a wide swath of intellectuals throughout the arts and human sciences. Moreover, by reminding us that this exhilarating way of practicing philosophy as cultural critique and means of edifying self-creation is not simply a trendy new gospel of European thought but the key philosophical message of the pragmatist tradition of William James and John Dewey, Rorty revived pragmatism and gave it a stirringly radical edge, bringing it out of the shadow of analytic philosophy and erasing its then-current image as old-fashioned, provincially homey, and dull. Rorty put the American philosophical tradition onto center stage in the international philosophical scene, bringing its classical pragmatist thinkers into stimulating dialogue with the twentieth-century masters of analytic and continental philosophy and presenting those classic American thinkers as every bit as rewarding and relevant for today’s cultural challenges, and often even more useful for carrying us forward. At a time (after 1989 and before 9/11) when America had established itself as an unrivalled, apparently invincible superpower, Rorty provided a pragmatist philosophy that, while critical of certain ills in American life, remained resolutely patriotic and internationally influential, a philosophy fitting for the leader of the liberal free world. For such reasons, every American pragmatist philosopher today owes a significant debt to Rorty. My debt to him is also more personal and profound. He was the person who first stimulated my interest in American philosophy and converted me to pragmatism. Rorty was one of the three master thinkers who made my career possible, not only by providing inspiring examples of creative new theorizing but also by personal encouragement and supportive guidance. I want to record that debt here in reviewing this collection of his work because, in Reflections on The Rorty Reader 207 the past, I have so often made his views a target of severe criticism.3 I first established my own distinctive views largely through criticism of Rorty’s and those of my other two exemplary mentors, Arthur Danto and Pierre Bourdieu. But Rorty’s influence was the first and indeed facilitated the others. Though my official task here is reviewing a collection of Rortian texts, I want to insist that what we can learn from Rorty goes well beyond the textual. He was a model of philosophical generosity, curiosity, grace, and democratic openness that expressed itself beyond the written word, in robust real-life actions. Rorty regularly reached out to philosophers in the margins. I was a young assistant professor in the Israeli desert when I first met him, and I was surprised that he gave me so much time and attention, inviting me to contribute to a special journal issue he was editing on literary theory and encouraging me to move to America to develop my interest in pragmatism. I later learned that he regularly gave generous support to young philosophers from Eastern Europe and South America who wanted to study with him at the University of Virginia. At conferences, he showed remarkable courtesy, kindness, and patience. I remember one ten-day conference I attended with him in France. Though other principal speakers left after the first few days of keynote talks, Rorty stayed to the end, sitting bravely through even the most tedious and incomprehensible of the French papers, even though he sometimes dozed off during them. When Rorty defends the idea of “ethics without principles” (RR 415– 422) people often presume a dubious moral personality. Rorty’s behavior made clear that by having true generosity of heart and a penetrating sensibility in understanding people, their needs, and situations, one does not need principles to be magnificently ethical. Moral principles are crutches for those who lack that empathetic sensibility, imaginative discernment, and gracious sentiment. I return to these themes later in this review. 2. Rorty produced an overwhelming amount of papers on a dizzying variety of themes. The editors have done an excellent job in selecting texts that represent Rorty’s best and most influential work, while giving a sense of the whole trajectory of his career. The first of the Reader’s six parts begin with two essays that pre-date Rorty’s first masterpiece, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (in which formulates his radical immanent critique of analytic philosophy and his turn to what he calls edifying or conversational philosophy) and also includes some selections from that book and two other seminal essays that explain his turn from analysis to pragmatism and textualism. The second group of essays shows his continuing critical dialogue with analytic philosophy, including his engagement with figures like Davidson and Putnam. The sixth part is devoted to autobiographical essays and interviews, including a brief but potent text on poetry that he wrote knowing he would soon die from untreatable pancreatic cancer. 208 RICHARD SHUSTERMAN The three core parts of the book are dedicated to themes relating to pragmatism and political theory: liberalism, democracy, and cultural politics, human rights, feminism, patriotism, and religion. But they also contain essays that deal centrally with ethics and aesthetics (especially with literature of the novel) and with core issues of objectivity and truth, reason and feeling. If editors Bernstein and Voparil are keen to highlight the political dimension of Rorty’s thought as what has been most influential of visible to the broadest academic public, they also recognize that this dimension is integrally woven into his advocacy of an aesthetic turn or literary culture, where sentiment and imagination supersede reason as the means to moral progress and personal redemption. Though my main interest in Rorty is not his political thought, I find the editors’ selection extremely astute and helpful. This is clearly an excellent book to use for teaching a seminar on Rorty. The only text I wish they had included is an essay “Texts and Lumps,” a gem of an essay in which Rorty’s demonstrates his virtuosity in connecting literary theory with philosophy of language and philosophy of science to provide an ingenious solution to common issues of reference, meaning, and identity. Rorty claims he has “really only one idea: the need to get beyond representationalism” (RR 464). Rorty’s anti-representationalism rejects the notion of “knowledge as the assemblage of accurate representations” of reality and the idea of philosophy as “a general theory of representation” which “divides culture up” and sometimes arbitrates between the different fields that represent reality more or less accurately and in different ways (RR 21). But Rorty in fact offers many more ideas, even if they are not originally his own, just as anti-representationalism is an idea he adopted from Dewey, Wittgenstein, and others. We can note, for example, his idea that philosophical representationalism should be replaced with an aesthetic culture where logical justifications by argument are replaced by convincingly attractive rhetoric; his idea that poetry or literature be substituted for religion and philosophical truth as sources of personal redemption (together with the view that we have already reached this “literary culture”); the division of the public and the private realms and the confinement of redemptive matters to the latter; the idea of ethics as based on sentiment rather truth, and the utopian goal as moral progress toward broader sentiments so that we reach “a global civilization in which love is pretty much the only law” (RR 52). These ideas can, of course, be related to his anti-representationalism. For example, Rorty’s anti-representationalism can explain how, on the one hand, he can utterly repudiate the whole field of aesthetics as “another of Kant’s bad ideas”4 yet also affirm a strong “aesthetic strain” (RR 463) in his own writing. His point seems to be that although there is no fixed reality of art or beauty in themselves for which the distinctive field of aesthetics provides theories that accurately represent such reality, there is a dimension of life and culture that is very important and that is called “aesthetic,” though only for various historical reasons and not because it names an essence whose reality aesthetic theories are Reflections on The Rorty Reader 209 designed to represent. (If Rorty says very little about Dewey’s aesthetics, then this may be because he felt it too close in some ways to a representationalist theory of art as experienced.) It is likewise easy to see how the rejection of representationalism encourages an ethics based more on sentiment, poetry, rhetoric, and results than on strictly logical justification and correspondence to truth. 3. As Voparil notes in his superb, comprehensive introduction, Rorty’s oeuvre engages a wide variety of areas in the human sciences and in literature (saying little about music and visual arts). This breadth befits the pervasive pragmatist pluralism he inherited from James and Dewey. But there are two areas he pointedly rejects, and I will close this essay by using texts from the Rorty reader to question this rejection. In elevating literature over traditional philosophy, science, or religion as the source of personal redemption, in advocating the strong poet as an ideal figure who makes things new and creates himself, Rorty follows Harold Bloom. I find nothing objectionable in this appreciation of literature. The idea that poetry (or more generally art) is becoming a substitute for philosophy and religion is a familiar one that goes back Matthew Arnold and continues into turn of the century aestheticism. Since Rorty allows a plurality of ideals, since there is, for him, no one single “really real” ideal that philosophy must represent so that all individuals must logically embrace it, what could be wrong with advocating literature, especially since part of Rorty’s affirming literary culture as eclipsing religious and scientific culture is that its pluralistic openness of genres means that all genres can be legitimate and “there will be no dominant form” (RR 476)? What I find objectionable is his joining Harold Bloom in rejecting the social sciences as merely “dismal” genres.5 This rejection is inconsistent with Rorty’s pluralism and simply unfair to the wealth of insight (and even some strong poetry) in the work of some social science (think of Weber, Simmel, Mauss, and Bourdieu). Moreover, when Rorty criticizes philosophers who do political theory by seeking “theoretical arguments for political stances,” he argues that “such stances can be justified only by pointing to the results of actual or imagined social experiments” (RR 464). But what, if not social science, could provide such results of actual experiments and other relevant data for determining our positions and strategies toward political progress? The nondiscursive and somatic constitute a second area that Rorty pointedly rejects as unworthy of philosophical consideration but that the logic of his own arguments should compel him to embrace. His insistence on confining attention only to the realm of language is expressed in his rejection of the concept of experience, which constitutes perhaps his principal departure from the pragmatism of James and Dewey who affirmed the importance of embodied 210 RICHARD SHUSTERMAN nondiscursive experience in our thought and action, while also insisting on the centrality of language. In taking the linguistic turn, analytic philosophy sought to focus all its attention on the greater clarity and precision of language and logic and abandon the vagueness of experience. Logic and language were linked with rationality in contrast to the fuzzy subjectivity of emotions. Though Rorty has come to reject the idea that logic and rational justificatory arguments define the limits of philosophical and moral thinking, he continues to hold that language does, insisting on “the linguistic character of rationality” (RR 421) and even that “all awareness is a linguistic affair.”6 Hence the nondiscursive and somatic find no place in his thinking, and he has been sharply critical of my attempt to reintroduce these elements in the pragmatist project of somaesthetics. But if we consider his increasing emphasis on the sentiments as the key to ethical positions and moral progress, then we see how important nondiscursive somatic experience should be for his thought. Rorty argues that our commitment to human rights and other central moral principles cannot be effectively justified by appeals to universal rationality. Instead, they depend on shared sentiments about how people should be treated. Cultures who do not share our moral beliefs are perfectly able to perform all sorts of difficult rational tasks; so, Rorty argues, their immoral treatment of certain populations (such as ethnic minorities, women, or children) is thus not the product of irrationality but rather the result of their not feeling that the creatures they oppress are fully human. What makes us more moral than other animals, Rorty claims, is that “We can feel for each other to a much greater extent than they can,” and we ourselves progress in morality the more we can feel for more kinds of people (RR 348). Moral progress is thus “a progress of sentiments” (RR 352). So rather than focusing on the search for universal rational principles to ground our moral beliefs and convince other, we should, “putting foundationalism behind us,” instead “concentrate our energies on manipulating sentiments, on sentimental education,” so that we can empathize with more kinds of people, imaginatively feel ourselves “in the shoes of the despised and oppressed” (RR 348, 350). “That sort of education sufficiently acquaints people of different kinds with one another so that they are less tempted to think of those different from themselves as only quasi-human. The goal of this manipulation of sentiment is to expand the reference” class of those we treat as humans like ourselves, of “people like us” (RR 348), and moral persuasion is more a matter of “rhetorical manipulation” of feeling than “genuine validity-seeking argument” (RR 432). As all sentiments are fundamentally bodily, so are feelings of prejudice, many of which (I argue) arise from somatic feelings of discomfort aroused by the bodies of culturally different people. The fact that they look, smell, talk, or walk differently than we do makes us less likely to consider them as human as us because our bodies react differently toward them than toward our own people. These negative reactions are often implicit and do their work beneath the level of full consciousness, which is another reason why they resist rational Reflections on The Rorty Reader 211 arguments for tolerance. We can therefore gain greater control of our prejudices and display greater moral inclusiveness by gaining greater awareness and control of our bodily reactions through greater somatic consciousness.7 Feelings can be effectively manipulated through somatic as well as linguistic means. We can bring strangers (and even enemies) to feel more comfortable with each other by having them share the pleasures of eating and drinking together. As William James long ago famously argued, we can also to some extent transform our own moods and feelings by taking on the postures and bodily behaviors of those feelings and moods we wish to feel.8 Moreover, to imagine empathetically what it feels like to be oppressed or despised (or even simply insulted or offended) is an act of somatic consciousness that can be done more powerfully when we have a more developed somatic imagination, when our somatic sensibility is more sensitive and subtle. There is thus a deep connection between cultivating somatic sensibility and cultivating the greater sensibility of sentiment that Rorty seeks as a means to moral progress, but he neglects this productive connection or continuity by ignoring the body. In the posthumously published gem that concludes The Rorty Reader, he offers the following pithy argument for the importance of poetry. “No words, no reasoning. No imagination, no new words. No such words, no moral or intellectual progress” (RR 510). Let me conclude by formulating (though far less elegantly) a similar type of argument for the importance of the body. No moral progress without cultivating our heightened sensibility and feelings for others; no successful, systematic cultivation of our powers of feeling without recognizing and cultivation its bodily base; no moral progress without somatic cultivation and its heightening of imaginative sensibility; more moral progress through greater attention to such cultivation of the body and its perceptive, affective, and imaginative powers. Despite his outspoken resistance to somaesthetics, Rorty’s later advocacy of philosophy as cultural politics suggests that he would not be averse to this sort of argument.9 Rorty, of course, might rightly balk at talk of “the body” as an essentialist, foundational notion, just as he sometimes criticized the notion of language as a foundational essence. But as somaesthetics and the above argument for somatic moral cultivation make clear, we are dealing with different, gendered, culturally-shaped bodies rather than a foundational, fixed, universal body that defines human identity and limits. Indeed, one key element of the somaesthetic project that Rorty might favor is its aim to extend our limits through the meliorative, pluralistic cultivation of our bodies, or what I prefer to call our somas (the term “soma” denoting what Dewey sometimes called “bodymind”). 212 RICHARD SHUSTERMAN NOTES 1. William James, “Address at the Emerson Centenary in Concord,” in Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Infobase Publishing, 2008), p. 32. 2. Christopher Voparil and Richard Bernstein, ed., The Rorty Reader (Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010). References to this work in my review essay are abbreviated with RR. 3. See, for example, Richard Shusterman, Pragmatist Aesthetics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), Practicing Philosophy (London and New York: Routledge, 1997). For a recent treatment of Rorty that articulates the lines of my critique and tries to work toward greater convergence in our views, see my “Pragmatism and Cultural Politics: From Rortian Textualism to Somaesthetics,” New Literary History 41.1 (2010): 69–94. 4. Richard Rorty, “Response to Richard Shusterman,” in Richard Rorty: Critical Dialogues, ed. Matthew Festenstein and Simon Thompson (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2001), p. 156. 5. Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 127. In his last book, Rorty expresses his pluralism by urging philosophy’s greater interaction with many different fields: “The more philosophy interacts with other human activities – not just natural science, but art, literature, religion, and politics as well – the more relevant to cultural politics it becomes, and thus the more useful.” Richard Rorty, Philosophy as Cultural Politics (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. x. Note how he omits the social sciences from this list of enriching disciplines. 6. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope (New York: Penguin, 1999), p. 48. 7. For more detailed argument of these points, see Richard Shusterman, Body Consciousness: A Philosophy of Mindfulness and Somaesthetics (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 8. William James, The Principles of Psychology (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), chap. 4. 9. For an extended argument to this effect, see my “Pragmatism and Cultural Politics.” Richard Shusterman Humanities and Philosophy College of Arts and Letters Florida Atlantic University 777 Glades Road Boca Raton, Florida 33431-0991 United States