A Post-Philosophical Politics? An Interview with Richard Rorty

Philosophy & Social Criticism http://psc.sagepub.com/ a post-philosophical politics? an interview by danny postel richard rorty Philosophy Social Criticism 1989 15: 199 DOI: 10.1177/019145378901500206 The online version of this article can be found at: http://psc.sagepub.com/content/15/2/199.citation Published by: http://www.sagepublications.com Additional services and information for Philosophy & Social Criticism can be found at: Email Alerts: http://psc.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts Subscriptions: http://psc.sagepub.com/subscriptions Reprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav Permissions: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav >> Version of Record - Apr 1, 1989 What is This? Downloaded from psc.sagepub.com at University of Denver on November 6, 2014 richard a rorty post-philosophical politics? an interview by danny postel Q: Professor Rorty, what do you when you say that and cancelled&dquo; itself? mean analytic philosophy has &dquo;transcended A: WhatI mean is that it worked itself out of a job: it started with notions of logic, language, analytic truth, conceptual analysiswhich it then criticized. So the effect of its analyses was to analyze away its own tools. Q: How, as you contribute to this? see it, did Wittgenstein, Quine and Sellars A: What’s common to them,I think, is holism-that is, the notion that you can’t dissect words or sentences and their relation to the world in isolation, that you have to understand words and sentences in the context of an entire linguistic practice. Once you see this, the empiricist image which lay behind logical positivist polemics can’t be sustained. Q: Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind has caused quite a sensation both in the intellectual community and in the public culture generally. To what is this to be attributed? A:I still don’t understand the book’s popularity. It was half a polemic against the mores of contemporary student life in Downloaded from psc.sagepub.com at University of Denver on November 6, 2014 richard rorty America and half a polemic against the philosophical convictions of most contemporary American intellectuals. My criticisms’ were largely of the latter, whileI think the book’s wider audience was interested mainly in the former. Q: His book did give you occasion to express some of your own views on the politics of higher education.2You wrote that higher education &dquo;should be a matter of inciting doubt and stimulating imagination, thereby challenging the prevailing social consensus.&dquo; A: What I had in mind is that the American colleges and universities have been centers of leftist political thought in our century. And this seems to me their most important social role. They’ve served to help the country realize that it was committing an injustice, that it was in danger of becoming too greedy, too selfish. Q: And do you support this function of theirs? A: Sure. It’s this kind of contribution to universities principally exist. society for which Q: Do you think students should be critical of the ties that link universities to the military-industrial complex? Many students are now taking action-calling fortheir institutions to end research for the military, to divest from corporations damaging the environment, to ban the C.I.A. from recruiting on campus, etc. Do you support this movement? A:I don’t think it can do any harm, but doubt it has any great effect. Like getting the R.O.T.C. units off campus during the sixties, it at least expresses concern. It didn’t change the army to get the R.O.T.C. units off-and you probably can’t change the companies-but it can’t hurt. Q: You’ve asked in your writings what a &dquo;post-Philosophical&dquo; culture would look like, suggesting that we are moving toward being one. What would it mean to be living in such a culture? A: WhatI mean by a post-Philosophical culture is one that doesn’t have any surrogate for God. Think of a Philosophical (secularist) culture as a successor to a religious culture, as the Enlightenment thought of itself. That Philosophical culture still had notions like Nature, Reason, Human Nature, and so on, which were points of reference outside of history by reference to which history was to be judged. 200 Q: In Contingency, Irony and Solidarity you Downloaded from psc.sagepub.com at University of Denver on November 6, 2014 draw not only post- philosophical politics? from the work of such analytic thinkers as Wittgenstein, Quine, and Sellars, but also from the writings of Continental figures like Derrida, Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Freud. You argue that thinkers such as these allow us to see ourselves as historical contingencies. Can you talk about that? A: Seeing yourself as an historical contingency is the opposite seeing yourself as linked to something fateful like Reason, Nature, God, or History. Thinking of yourself as a contingency means thinking of what matters most to you as mattering most for no deep reason, but simply due to the kind of parents you happened to have, the kind of society you grew up in, and so on. of Q: How have Freud, Nietzsche, and Derrida this respect? helped us along in A: Freud,I think, is very good as making us see how our sense of importance is relative to the accidents of upbringing. Nietzsche and Derrida are very good at criticizing the theological or metaphysical notion of a reference point outside of language or outside of history. Q: Interestingly, while you draw from the criticisms Foucault has offered of these Enlightenment notions, you seem not to share his rejection of the social arrangements and political institutions that derive from and rest upon Enlightenment ways of thinking about the world. Why is that? A: I don’t see what Foucault had against bourgeois liberalism, except that in the France of the fifties and sixties it just wasn’t respectable to be a bourgeois liberal. I don’t think he has any arguments against itoranything betterto suggest. So, I’m inclined to thinkthat his opposition to liberalism and reformism was merely a contingent French fashion. Q: What about other arguments against bourgeois liberalismDewey’s for example? Didn’t Dewey see the need forfar-reaching structural change in the basic institutional arrangements of American society? Yes, Dewey was what in Europe would have been called a social democrat. He was the inspiration for a good deal of what we think of as the left-wing of the Democratic party. A: Q: Given the enormous problems we’re seeing-the spectre of crisis rooted in an economic system that produces ecological obscene social inequalities, threats to the planet and its inhabitants caused by uncontrolled economic growth and an international system that’s choking the Third world-wouldn’t a an 201 Downloaded from psc.sagepub.com at University of Denver on November 6, 2014 richard rorty Deweyan things? be calling for some serious changes in the order of A: I’m all for social changes, but I would prefer them to be reformist rather than revolutionary. I don’t see that it’s liberalism that’s to blame for America’s willingness to let the ghettos crumble and let the black kids grow up without hope. You can blame the American voters for not being liberals, butI don’t think you can blame liberalism. Q: I’m suspicious of the old distinction you invoke in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity between the public and private realms of life. Given your praise for what you see as Dewey’s having overcome this kind of Western distinction (fact/ value, subject/object, theory/practice, etc.), why reassert the dichotomy of the public and private spheres? A: I guess I don’t see this as the kind of distinction Dewey sought to overcome. Maybe I just haven’t read the right things in Dewey, butI can’t see what he’d have against it. Q: Hasn’t feminism awakened us to the danger of separating the public and private realms? A: I guess I don’t see the relevance of feminism here. The kind of private/public distinction the feminists mostly talk about is the distinction between who stays home and does the dirty work with the cooking and kids, and who gets out of the house into the great world outside. That has nothing to do with the distinction I’m trying to draw between individual self-creation and public responsibility. Q: You don’t see politics as something that permeates all realms of human life? A: With luck, politics doesn’t permeate all realms of human life. It does in countries like China. But in countries that are better off, it often doesn’t, and I don’t see why anybody would want it to. I think of the aim of liberal politics as leaving as much space for privacy as possible. Q: Can you talk about the political theme of the book: solidarity? You argue that solidarity should be our social goal. As I’m using the term, it’s a sense of other people and ourselves being ‘5rve’=we feel that what affects them affects us because we, to some extent, identify with them. I was trying to describe social progress in a way borrowed from Wilfred Sellars: the expansion of &dquo;we&dquo; consciousness, that is, the ability to take in more and more people of the sort fashionably called &dquo;marginal&dquo; A: 202 Downloaded from psc.sagepub.com at University of Denver on November 6, 2014 post- philosophical politics? and think of them as one of us, included in us. The argumentI make is that this is mainly done by going into concrete details about marginal lives rather than by having theories about what all human beings have in common. Q: Would you say that it’s a practical rather than matter? A:I think of it as a a philosophical matter for novelists rather than theorists. Q: Why don’t you think theoreticians should attempt to, say, speculate about the human condition or reflect critically on the problems of the times-or even suggest how solidarity might become a more vital part of human interaction? A:I think there’s a long record of them trying to give theoretical arguments for greater human solidarity, andI don’t think anything much came of it. It’s not thatI have a high a prioriargument against theory-it’s just looking at the track record of the novelists and the track record of the theorists. Q: What about the work of Jurgen Habermas? You often seem drawing from his thinking, and yet his project has been that of finding a philosophical grounding for a commitment to social to be solidarity. A: Absolutely, and he andI are always arguing about this. He thinks of me as some kind of relativist, andI think of him as some kind of transcendentalist. Q: He has been active in the current debates over Martin Heidegger’s Nazism, arguing that a deep connection exists between Heidegger’s fascism and his philosophy. Others, such as Derrida, have downplayed the connection. Where do you stand on that question? A:I think Heidegger’s philosophy and his politics can be explained on the basis of some of the same biographical facts. But I don’t think the politics contaminate the philosophy. You can explain Sartre’s Stalinism by reference to the same biographical facts that gave rise to Being and Nothing ness, but I don’t think that book is contaminated by the Stalinism. 203 Q: Sidney Hook’s death marks the end of a chapter in the history of American pragmatism. Hook took himself to be Dewey’s philosophical and political heir, while he championed the cause of the Cold War and failed to criticize the United States for its atrocities from Vietnam to Central America. Once a leading Marxist revolutionary, he became a supporter of Ronald Reagan Downloaded from psc.sagepub.com at University of Denver on November 6, 2014 richard rorty and an apologist for American power. Do you Dewey’s political project through faithfully? think he carried A: Yes, though I disagreed with him about Vietnam and voted Democratic while he voted Republican. Our disagreements were on political tactics rather than on overall strategies. ENDNOTES 1. See "That Old Time 2. See "Education Without Philosophy," The New Republic, April 4,1988. Dogma," Dissent, Spring, 204 Downloaded from psc.sagepub.com at University of Denver on November 6, 2014 1989.