Engaging the Present: The Necessity of Reading Rorty

Engaging the Present: The Use of Reading Rorty (Not final version) Dr. Clayton Chin Queen Mary, University of London [email protected] Despite being almost universally rejected at one point, Richard Rorty was nonetheless at the centre of debates in political thought. He managed, on a rare scale, to draw in thinkers from almost every tradition into a common discussion on the role and capacity of philosophy in our social and political lives. However, he now no longer occupies that central space in contemporary political thought, where he is now ignored. This article confronts this critical situation, drawing on recent literature in pragmatist debates, in order to argue that Rorty is a necessary participant in the current conversation of political philosophy. Unlike most others, Rorty singularly situated his thought within the present social context. In fact, through a critique of foundationalism and metaphysics, Rorty restricts political thinking to that framework. The result is a reformulation of the philosophical project to articulating and justifying the present political universe. Due to this, Rorty’s thought comes to summarize many of the assumptions underlying contemporary liberal democratic thought. He thus offers us a unique site for the critical confrontation and reconstruction of that present. Keywords: Pragmatism, Rorty, Criticism, Reconstruction, Liberalism 1. Introduction: Richard Rorty’s place in contemporary political theory is contentious. He has and continues to be a figure that inspires strong reactions. However, the reasons for this have not remained constant. While Rorty in the past has been understood both as a dangerous philosophical radical, undermining the grounds of Western thought and politics, and as a myopic apologist for the status quo, the disagreement around reading him today surrounds his relevance. Rorty was once incendiary and dangerous. Presently however, he seems commonplace and uncontroversial. While many would still strongly agree or disagree with his ideas, they would not feel the need to engage with him in any detail. Consequently, outside pragmatism, Rorty has generally fallen out of the wider conversation of social and political thought. While he is often mentioned, he is rarely seriously engaged on any issue. He is a common object of casual dismissal but an infrequent subject for productive engagement. However, when approached in a certain way, engagement with Rorty can yield fundamental critical and reconstructive resources for thinking politics in the present. This article confronts this critical situation by arguing for the necessity of reading Rorty into contemporary political theory. However, the point is not simply to read Rorty but to read him in a certain manner, in relation to a certain question. Against typical readings of him as an end-of-philosophy anti-theorist, we must examine Rorty exactly in terms of the sphere that he considered most important for philosophy: metaphilosophy—that is, the reflection on the activity of philosophy and its role and capacities in human life (Bernstein 2010, 11; West 1989, 199). Rorty uniquely confronted the crisis in philosophical foundations and the resulting question of the role and capacities of a philosophy without grounds in wider political and cultural life. His work was thus consistently oriented to this widest of all philosophical issues. Such a project increases his significance not only because of his ability to engage such intractable issues but for his skill at speaking across traditional boundaries in the constellation of Western Political thought (and beyond as well) while doing so. Rorty engaged Analytic thinkers, Pragmatists, Critical theorists and Continental philosophers (amongst others) in an inclusive philosophical dialogue that managed, simultaneously, to speak to all these groups. It is in this sense that he was accurately described as ‘the most influential contemporary American philosopher’(Klepp 1990). However, Rorty’s importance goes beyond addressing wide issues and many groups. Both of these reasons speak to his relevance only if those issues and groups are still important to political thought.1 Rorty does offer a path away from the crisis in foundations which confronts that problem without ignoring it or slipping back into some appeal to a neutral perspective. Further, he does do this by engaging and drawing on many perspectives and attempting to speak to all the aforementioned groups. However, how he achieves both these aims is the important point, especially for his relevance to contemporary thought. Rorty re-orients thought to the present. It is both the subject and object of his philosophy; that which it speaks to and about. His perspective attempts to subsist without grounds by directly engaging the present social and political world, its assumptions and limitations. Further, unlike genealogical approaches, which also claim such an orientation, Rorty’s does so without an explicitly critical orientation to the present. Rather, as will be demonstrated below, Rorty’s thought summarizes the present. It theorizes it and renders explicit its own self-justification. Due to this unique relation, whereby he draws out and reveals the philosophical content underlying much of contemporary liberal democratic politics, Rorty’s work offers a distinctive critical and reconstructive site for political and social theory. By approaching him through the question of his positive role of philosophy, his work becomes an attempt to “flush out” and engage our present framework, its assumptions, and limitations. In this manner, Rorty is a place to begin; a place to work out from. He is starting point for a situated philosophical analysis of our social and political lives. Successful or not, he is a necessary participant in the current conversation. 2. Rorty’s Trajectory Rorty’s work was not always on the margins of contemporary political thought. After the publication of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature(PMN), when he entered prominence within the wider world of academic philosophy, until the end of his active publishing career, Rorty was often discussed. Neil Gross, his unofficial academic biographer, claims that, ‘one could not be taken seriously as an intellectual in the 1990s without forming some kind of opinion as to Rorty’s views’(Gross 2008, 336). Nonetheless, he has always had few supporters. In fact, of the over 1200 entries in a comprehensive bibliography of secondary literature on his work compiled in 2002, only a handful are classed as “friendly to Rorty”(Rumana 2002, ix). Rorty himself was distinctly aware of this. In an autobiographical essay, he describes how he was rejected by both Left and Right for being an apologist of the status quo and a dangerous radical respectively(Rorty 1999a, 5). The negative character of this reception went beyond this political dichotomy. As one commentator notes, at one point Rorty was the necessary object of dismissal within Western political thought (Horton 2001, 15). In this, he was both written about and rejected by (nearly) all his contemporaries in the last decades of the twentieth century. A cursory glance at the critical volumes published on Rorty in the 1990s and early 2000s reveals not only pragmatists but: critical theorists, liberal political theorists, philosophers of education, intellectual historians, analytic philosophers, continental thinkers, post-marxists, and communitarians amongst others(Brandom 2000a; Guignon and Hiley 2003; Peters and Ghiraldelli 2001; Pettegrew 2000; A. R. Malachowski 1990; Festenstein and Thompson 2001; Mouffe 1996; A. Malachowski 2002). The diversity of these volumes illustrates the wide range of interest Rorty’s work generated at this point. In contrast, the recent critical focus on his work comes almost entirely from pragmatists; from those attempting to solidify his legacy and argue for his importance within the pragmatist tradition (Gascoigne 2013; Castro and Ghiraldelli 2011; Gröschner, Koopman, and Sandbothe 2013a).2 In recent years, principally since his death in 2007 but also in the last years before it, the critical constellation around Rorty shifted. Rather than controversial and rejected, Rorty is now more often casually dismissed and, outside pragmatist circles, ignored. Alan Malachowski notes that there is often the perception now that Rorty was “insufficiently provocative”. Here, his supposed destruction of philosophy ‘lays down nothing more dangerous than some damp intellectual squibs’(A. Malachowski 2011, 87). Brian Leiter illustrates this trend in arguing that because Rorty tends to describe philosophy with ‘shameless fabrications… most philosophers have stopped reading him’(Leiter 2004, 18). The significance of Rorty’s work has generally been called into question. However, it is important to note that, despite Leiter’s claim, this is not the product of any developed argument. While I thus agree with Malachowski that such dismissals are the product of superficial readings, the fact remains that he is no longer part of the dominant discussions within contemporary political thought. As noted above, the exception to this is pragmatism. Rorty’s work has always been contentious amongst pragmatists. Whether regarding his interpretation of Dewey or his suitability for the pragmatist label, some of his most vitriolic criticisms have come from this group that he himself claimed membership in.3 However, pragmatism seems in recent years to be experiencing a re-revival and consequently its critical matrix around Rorty has shifted. For this “third-wave”, Rorty is still a very central subject. There are several dynamics present here; however, I will only focus on two. First, a sizable group of theorists, working broadly within pragmatist themes, still reject Rorty. While acknowledging his importance for the neo-pragmatist revival of the 1980s, this “new pragmatism” opposes his actual formulation of pragmatism and his rejection of truth and objective forms of enquiry (Misak, 2007: pp. 1–2; see also, 2010).4 Second, there is a recent group of Rorty-scholars attempting to shore up his legacy and continue his reformulation of philosophy. They undertake this with the advantage of hindsight upon his whole career, and in light of his final set of published essays, Philosophy as Cultural Politics(Rorty 2007a). While they vary, this group broadly argues that Rorty’s work offers a unique reformulation of philosophy as a form of situated cultural criticism. (Koopman 2013a; Voparil 2011a, 115; Hiley 2011, 47; Koopman 2009, chap. 1; Bacon 2006; A. Malachowski 2011, 86; Voparil 2013, 110–1; Castro and Ghiraldelli 2011). They attempt to rescue Rorty from the dominant perception that his work is merely a negative, end-of-philosophy anti-theory by teasing out his positive conception of a post-metaphysical philosophical practice. Most readings of Rorty still ignore this positive, constructive side of his thought and identify him solely with a negative approach/project (e.g. White, 2009: pp. 102–4).5 While remaining critical, this group of pragmatists encourage us to read Rorty from within his project. Here, he is a philosopher of culture(Koopman 2006, 112) and an edifier engaging in the creation of “Bildungsroman” in order to provoke us out of our philosophical complacency(Voparil 2005, 118). One member deserves special attention. In recent years, Colin Koopman has done the most amongst this group to illustrate Rorty’s positive conception of philosophy-as-cultural-criticism, tracking its development throughout his works. For him, what Rorty offers is, ‘an internal critical challenge to philosophy, meant as a provocation toward a transformation of philosophy itself’(Koopman 2013a, 75)This transformation reorients philosophical thought away from supposedly perennial questions, away from the construction of philosophical methods or frameworks, to an embedded form of criticism oriented to the present moment. This approach attempts to “hold its time in thought,”6 that is, to gain ‘a synthetic vision of our cultural present’ (Koopman 2013a, 94). What Rorty offers, Koopman, argues, is the orientation to engage our present social and political universe, identify its problems, and meliorate them toward a better future. This is criticism of our culture; an on-going conversation about who we are (i.e. a synthetic vision of the present) and who we might become (i.e. a reconstruction of that present). Lurking beneath Koopman’s analysis is a subterranean argument regarding Rorty’s relevance. Outside of the question of the use of Rorty’s method for engaging in philosophical cultural criticism, this claim (further) reveals his significance for current social and political thought. Rorty encourages us to understand and engage our present; to create a synthetic vision of that social and political universe to serve as a reconstructive object for thought. However, for Koopman, in this, his philosophy also comes to illustrate the assumptions, beliefs and practices, underlying much of our contemporary liberal democratic culture. ‘Rorty’s thought is generally worthy of explication and critique because it offers a clear and honest summary of many of the beliefs at the heart of contemporary liberal culture.’(Koopman, 2007: p. 47. See also: Bernstein, 2010: pp. 2–3; Gröschner et al., 2013a: p. x; Jenkins, 1995: p. 4). However, in spite of his insight into Rorty’s work, Koopman’s fails to support this claim. He does not answer how Rorty’s philosophy summarizes the present. This failing is also true of the aforementioned group of scholars identifying this philosophy of cultural criticism in Rorty’s work. None sufficiently address how (i.e. with what philosophical resources) one can gain such a synoptic vision. If the claim in this quotation is true, it would surely make Rorty’s thought all the more important; for it could serve as a critical and reconstructive site for summarizing, engaging and improving our present. However, this point remains unexplained within both Koopman’s work and the wider critical literature. In spite of Rorty’s sympathetic readers he has disappeared from the wider conversations of political theory. In contrast, here I will demonstrate his relevance. For the sake of brevity I am not arguing that Rorty’s concerns are particularly relevant to the contemporary matrix of political theory (though I do think they are). Rather, taking up Koopman’s unexplained claim, in the following sections I will illustrate how Rorty’s thought illustrates many of the beliefs underlying present social and political thought. Thus, moving beyond a claim that Rorty reformulated philosophy as cultural criticism (a claim I am not disputing here), I am arguing that in this, he himself comes to summarize some of the assumptions underlying contemporary liberal democratic culture. Through an analysis of his philosophical project and political conclusions, I will illustrate how Rorty’s philosophy re-orients thought to the present social and political universe. In this, he comes to task philosophy with summarizing and articulating the existing social-political conversation. The purpose of this is reconstructive. For Rorty, in the absence of philosophical certainty, philosophy can only engage its socio-political present and articulate it in a manner to propel its politics in a certain direction. For him, this cultural-critical task is inherently one of self-justification. Drawing on our own set of traditions and meanings, we can justify the best parts of the present in order to emphasize them. However, by enacting this, Rorty’s thought also comes to offer just such an object. By following his own method, Rorty himself summarizes (at least one dynamic within) his present and renders obvious its implicit self-justification. Of course, Rorty, finite and contingent as he was, could only do so partially. Nonetheless, he exposes one dynamic within contemporary cultural politics for critical and reconstructive reflection. In this argument, I am implicitly claiming that the assumptions of our current social-political universe are relevant. A truly critical form of thinking must engage that matrix of thought, that present. Koopman understands this well when he urges us to take Rorty seriously, ‘lest we persist in parading down paths that Rorty has shown to be severely out of touch with current cultural requirements’(Koopman 2013a, 76). What follows will establish this relationship to the present throughout Rorty’s work, beginning in his initial project and extending it to his politics and wider reformulation of the project of philosophy. It will track this dynamic within the various aspects of his thought, rather than chronologically, in order to illustrate Rorty’s relevance to contemporary thought. Finally, it will compare this Rorty with genealogical approaches to politics. Such “histories of present” provide important clarification of the resources and failings of Rorty’s reformulation of philosophy as cultural criticism. 3. From Epistemological Behaviourism to the Priority of the Social The orientation towards the present social and political world enters early in Rorty’s philosophy and shapes his perspective and relation to thought. It is important to note, being generally ignored by the aforementioned critical literature, that this orientation is rooted in an ontological and epistemological argument. From its beginning Rorty was concerned with the status of philosophical claims in relation to those from other vocabularies within society. In PMN,7 he argued that Western epistemology in general—and Analytic philosophy specifically—was plagued by metaphors of the mind as a representational mirror of reality. These metaphors sustained the belief that a relationship of correspondence between that mind and the world was possible and was the project of philosophy. Here, the implicit goal was certainty; certain knowledge through a neutral framework for enquiry, one that allowed thought to penetrate appearance down to reality. There is a fundamental undercurrent of anti-authoritarianism in Rorty’s critique. For him, this demand for a theory of knowledge aimed at certainty is simply the desire to be constrained by a non-human (i.e. certain) authority(Rorty 2009a, 315). Already here there is evidence of Rorty’s focus. The problem with epistemology, with certainty and correspondence, is not philosophical but social. It reveals the cultural desire for epistemic authority, for a nonhuman force which compels us to belief. Rorty rejected such an external authority and, instead, offered a sociological account of epistemic authority. Rorty opposed this quest for certainty through his alternative understanding of language and justification. His “epistemological behaviourism” ignores the entire question of foundations and certainty (and the appearance-reality divide). It holds that whether correspondence exists or not, the authority of knowledge-claims (their justification) is only socio-linguistic; ‘justification is not a matter of a special relation between ideas (or words) and objects, but of conversation, of social practice’(Rorty 2009a, 170). This is not a claim about the accuracy of behavioural explanations of knowledge-claims. Rather, it is only a claim about where the authority of our practices originates; one that claims it as solely social and behavioural. Authority, for Rorty, is determined by our present social reality. That is the context we must engage rather than some external contact with the Real that would assure our representations. In this manner, Rorty limits the discussion without an overt epistemological claim. He establishes the primacy of the social in order to address the foundationalist epidemic within Modern philosophy that stems from the desire for non-social authority and compulsion (Rorty 2009a, 157–8). In this manner, Rorty sociologically circumvents the epistemological question and removes the need for non-human sources of epistemic authority. Rather than arguing against correspondence he reverts to a sociological level of explanation to explain how communities actually justify (attach authority to) statements. He thus sidesteps the philosophical question in favour of the social. It is important to note that this sociological emphasis, while not stressed in the critical literature generally, has been observed (Voparil 2011b, 135; Koopman 2013a, 84) and is present throughout Rorty’s thought. What has been ignored is how this emphasis is rooted in an ontological and epistemological argument about authority. For Rorty, such authority is never a product of epistemic or ontological criteria but only of social ones. The consequences of the epistemic framing to Rorty’s emphasis upon the present social reality and its categories can be illustrated through a brief look at his understanding of language.8 Once again, the motivating basis is an epistemic claim. In opposition to the Analytic conception of language as a medium between mind and world, for Rorty, language is a social practice; a form of behaviour that allows us to pragmatically cope with our environment. In this, it is contingent; language has no unique connection to physical reality or Being. However, as the source of all forms of authority, of justification between language-using entities, it does have priority over reality and the ontological in the social “conversation” of a given community. What Rorty opposes is the attempt to judge language by the physical world through the addition of some neutral framework which would guarantee that our language accurately represents reality(Rorty 1989, 10; Rorty 1991a, 150). This is the same attempt to subject language (i.e. our social life) to an external non-human authority. Such a project confuses cause with justification. For him, there is a strict separation between the world causing us to hold a belief, which is a physical relation he in no way denies, and that belief being justified, which is a normative relation of authority. All justificatory considerations are internal to a language using social group. The relations between that group and the world of things can only be understood in causal (non-normative) terms. The world does constrain us, but only causally, never normatively. Thus, Rorty wants to drop the concept of truth for justification and theorize the latter as internal to every vocabulary/language. A belief, for him, can only be overridden by another belief, never by reference to something outside of the vocabulary in question (Brandom 2000b, 159–61; Rorty 1989, 5–8). In this manner, Rorty limits epistemic and ontological authority to the social reality of a particular group. This limitation is key to how this relation to the present manifests politically. As argued below, by framing the relation to the present in this epistemic limitation, Rorty compromises the critical faculties of problematization in his philosophy-as-cultural-criticism. While he reorients philosophy’s focus to present social forms, he prevents it from interrogating that very matrix and identifying what aspects need to be changed. However, before addressing this fully, it is important to understand its development within Rorty’s work. The mature development of Rorty’s emphasis on the present social matrix is found in his concept of “cultural politics”.9 Mainly examined in Philosophy as Cultural Politics, cultural politics denotes the fullest form of Rorty’s reformulation of philosophy-as-cultural-criticism. Further, it relies upon a self-conscious and obvious prioritization of the social, which he summarizes as “the ontological priority of the social.” For Rorty, much of philosophy assumes that, ‘ontology precedes cultural politics’(Rorty 2007b, 5). Essentially, that reality trumps social consensus as a standard of justification in determining what language a community uses and what objects they discuss through this vocabulary. However, as illustrated above, Rorty argued that there is no non-linguistic (and hence non-cultural) access to such a neutral sphere, no matter the candidate (e.g. experience, existence, knowledge, the Real, Being, etc.). “Cultural politics,” in opposition, relies upon no non-human claim to authority. Rather, it refers solely to discourses within a society about what vocabularies, terms, and topics it is useful to employ. It is only through social discourse and the consensus of some community that the notion of authority has any operative value. Cultural politics is the socio-political process of justification where we decide which languages to use, categories to employ, and objects to speak about. ‘Interventions in cultural politics have sometimes taken the form of proposals for new roles men and women might play… Sometimes they have been sketches of an ideal community… Sometimes they have been suggestions about how to reconcile seemingly incompatible outlooks’(Rorty 2007c, ix–x). Broadly speaking, they are attempts to offer new practices and ways of speaking calculated to shift our understanding of who we are and where we are going. Rejecting the assumption that some external standard should or does govern social and political life, Rorty instead argues ‘that cultural politics should replace ontology, and that whether it should or should not is itself a matter of cultural politics’(Rorty 2007b, 5). Bluntly put, this amounts to the claim that there is no way to get out of cultural politics. It is the frame (and limit) of human thought and practice. In this, Rorty moves from suggesting a form of political practice to identifying a necessary prioritization of the social that subsumes all other purported behaviour. All claims to authority, whether cultural-political suggestions for new practices or ontological claims about reality, are already cultural politics. They are just suggestions for a set of terms and practices for a particular way of life. ‘That is, there is no getting outside of this cultural-political realm to some non-social space’(Voparil 2011b, 138). In this manner, Rorty develops his sociological manoeuvre. When one accepts this primacy, all cultural discussions, as cultural politics, become about the use of one vocabulary over another. Even discussions that appeal to ontologies and epistemologies are moves within the game of cultural politics. Thus, through the priority of the social Rorty circumvents the philosophical level of discussion and limits us to the sociological. The motivating base of Rorty’s focus on the present is an epistemic claim. As one commentator has succinctly summarized, ‘the core of Rorty’s pragmatism is a rejection of any authority over and above that of human agreement’ (Bacon, 2006: p. 865). From this flows the consequent circumscription of philosophy to that present, social context. Without external authority, without reference to some non-human standard, philosophical discussion must be refocused to the current, cultural matrix. All too often, Rorty’s critics missed this, choosing to confront him over one of his specific arguments about truth, objectivity, language or reality. In this, they ignored the larger world-historical perspective in his thought and the fundamental challenge this represents: how he seeks to reorient the discourse of philosophy to the wider present historical and social context. Further, this approach misses how Rorty attempted to democratize that discourse. His critique of epistemology, understanding of social justification, description of language and concept of cultural politics all attempt in the same manner to democratize philosophy and politics by removing supposedly neutral standards from the conversation(Voparil 2011b, 133,138). Importantly though, as I am arguing, the epistemic basis of this claim also limits what type of activities can take place within cultural politics. As the subsequent sections will note, it comes to affect critiques of our current cultural-political sphere. As such, it is appropriate to shift to Rorty’s discussion of politics, for while his social perspective has been illustrated, several questions necessarily arise: what are the political consequences of this elevation of social categories and epistemic limitation? How does this affect how Rorty actually constructs politics? Finally, how does Rorty’s thought summarize many of the assumptions underlying contemporary liberal democratic culture as a result? 4. The Priority of the Democratic Community: Justifying the Present This philosophical priority of the social context shapes Rorty’s understanding of and approach to politics. Specifically, he comes to claim that liberalism, specifically Rawls’ form, is justified through the priority it gives to the present social context. It is a way of organizing politics only as cultural politics; a way of refocusing political thought and behaviour to the social present. Rorty here dissociates philosophy from politics. However, in this context, philosophy is not cultural politics but the foundationalist philosophies that make political form flow from philosophical justification. The latter is Rorty’s concern in his discussion of politics. His focus is on reforming our understanding of the status of liberalism and its justification rather than on articulating a novel form of that tradition. However, the two, justification and articulation, are not radically separate. For Rorty, any process of justification is already a process of articulating the traditions of a community. To justify, philosophy cannot ground but it can reveal and summarize the implicit self-justification already operative within our practices and traditions. Through a reading of Rawls, Rorty attempts to illustrate the scope and limits of human thought in relation to politics. Philosophy as cultural politics must dwell exactly in this socio-political sphere of articulation as justification. It must give a strategic summarization of the present in order to push it in certain directions. This approach and its implicit limitations culminate in Rorty’s later turn to a politics of social hope and its attempt to redefine America itself. In this manner, he argues for an understanding of politics and liberalism and their relation to philosophy which undergirds the understanding of cultural politics addressed above. The “ontological priority of the social” becomes the corresponding “priority of democracy to philosophy.” Rorty was deeply concerned about the gap between contemporary political theory and the practices and beliefs in which it is socially situated. His whole project of reformulating philosophy, of turning it toward the present social situation, is meant to remedy the abstraction and professionalization he believed separated philosophy from “the problems of men.” To close this gap, Rorty attempted to shift the metaphilosophical justification and understanding of contemporary politics. Thus, he recast the very relation between philosophy and politics in a manner which he summarized as the priority of democracy to philosophy. His account here depends upon a Deweyean reading of the work of John Rawls that self-consciously emphasizes his later historicism over his earlier Kantianism. Rorty argues that this Rawls uniquely reveals how political justification can occur without philosophical foundations. Liberalism thus needs no philosophical “back-up”.10 In this sense, philosophy is not necessary to public life, to our cultural-political conversation. In the absence of philosophical certainty, foundationalist philosophy, like religion and all other “comprehensive doctrines,” should be bracketed from politics. For Rorty, this bracketting is exactly what makes Rawls’ theory political rather than philosophical. What Rawls provides, rather than principles which ground contemporary liberalism, is the best philosophical articulation of liberalism in the present. As Rawls himself notes, the political conception of justice is rooted only within the ideas already embedded within liberal democratic culture, the ‘basic intuitive ideas that are embedded in the political institutions of a democratic society and the public traditions of their interpretation. Justice as fairness is a political conception in part because it starts from within a certain political tradition’(Rawls, 1985: pp. 225–6; see also, 2005: pp. 11–15). Rorty argues that, rooted in the social context in this manner, Rawls’ analysis is “thoroughly historicist and antiuniversalist.” It avoids philosophical issues and only refers to background assumptions, the types of “common-sense” understandings offered by history and sociology. These entail the shared understandings of a community; the meanings and associations generally assumed by their public discourse. For Rorty, the strength of Rawls’s articulation of liberalism and justice is that it discourages the desire to go beyond the sphere of cultural politics. It shifts politics from metaphysical to political thinking. When justice, rather than an antecedent order, is central we stop appealing to non-human (non-social) authority. Rather, the imperative becomes successful accommodation amongst individuals in a community with shared traditions(Rorty 1991b, 184). This is what Rorty called “freedom as the recognition of contingency”; freedom as social and historical autonomy (i.e. a community free from self-imposed and external forms of authority). This is freedom as the recognition that we are finite, linguistic, historical communities with no ultimate basis for our social practices and vocabularies. It is freedom as the recognition that only we create and justify those languages and habits. Rawls’ emphasis on justice as accommodation amongst individuals in a community institutionalizes this freedom. It grounds public discussion, not within an antecedent order, but within the history and traditions embedded within public life. It is non-ideological in its method of seeking reflective equilibrium in an existing linguistic, social, and historical community. There are two related claims within Rorty’s admittedly idiosyncratic interpretation and use of Rawls.11 Rawls, for him, is both offering a certain way of thinking politics, from within the traditions of a community, and enacting that approach within a particular context. He is both saying we can only define politics by the traditions of a community and providing a theoretical formalization of a set of traditions, the cultural-political present of Western (specifically, American) Liberalism. Rorty comments that when we understand Rawls’ work on his interpretation, that emphasises the anti-foundationalist (social) contextualist elements, it is just a ‘historico-sociological description of the way we live now’(Rorty 1991b, 185). Rawls is only invoking what we already do. Giving priority to democracy over philosophy is already an “American habit”. Rawls’ work is simply the best articulation of liberalism. Rooted only within the present community and its public traditions, his theory of justice was ‘trying to systematize the principles and intuitions typical of American liberals’(Rorty 1991b, 189). This should recall Rorty’s claim, discussed above, that all claims to authority are already just cultural politics. In this, Rorty reconceives justification as articulation. In any project of justifying (i.e. giving authority) we are already in a process of articulating the traditions of our community. Similarly, whenever we articulate our community, we render available resources for its justification and improvement. We are summarizing that cultural present for a particular cultural-political purpose. It is for this reason that the language and method of “redescription” become so central to Rorty’s pragmatic liberalism. For him, all justifications are redescriptive articulations of the present(Thompson 2001, 34; Rorty 1989, 45). However, there is a further issue floating beneath the surface of Rorty’s thought. Such articulations are never simple descriptions. In any process of articulation and systematization, there is imposition. Stephen Mulhall and Adam Swift identify this aspect in Rawls when they comment that his justice is, ‘a systematic articulation, the “working up” into a coherent pattern, of the intuitive ideas that, because they are embedded in our society’s main institutions and the public traditions of their interpretation, can be regarded as implicitly shared’ (Mulhall, Swift, 1996: p. 173; see also, Bacon, 2011: p. 206). By “working up” into a coherent pattern an implicitly shared set of ideas, Rawls imposes a particular understanding of the cultural present. He may draw on its resources but he also arranges them in a particular way. In a sense, he only gives us one possible reading of that context, one that must emphasize certain dynamics while necessarily ignoring others. In this manner, such articulations, for Rorty, can be cultural-political. They can be one understanding of the best aspects of the present designed for a purpose. He is implicitly aware of this when he defines philosophy’s cultural task as ‘finding a description of all the things characteristic of your time of which you most approve, with which you unflinchingly identify, a description which will serve as a description of the end toward which the historical developments which led up to your time were means’ (Rorty 1989, 55). Such descriptions are always partisan; they are always a selection of elements of the present for a purpose. Rorty also attempts to enact this approach of redescriptive articulation. In his discussion of Rawls, he situates his argument within a narrative, a social and historical set of meanings relevant to his context. He consciously roots that argument within the American tradition and the legacy of Thomas Jefferson and religious toleration (Rorty 1991b, 175–6, 194). Further, his own choice to use Rawls further reflects this approach. As Rorty notes, he reads Rawls along Deweyean lines. However, instead of simply employing Dewey, he uses Rawls in order to engage the current matrix of political thought which is in many ways Rawlsian. Further, he attempts to redescribe (justify and summarize) liberalism for the present. His “Postmodern Bourgeois Liberalism” illustrates a politics defined by its simultaneous rejection of philosophical foundations and immersion in a community. It is a contingent justification of a set of institutions and practices rooted only in the community it emerges from. Further, it is self-consciously partial and contextual in orientation; that is, for Rorty, this is the present justification of liberalism, the one suited to its current needs. Rorty emphasizes this by highlighting two aspects. He calls it “bourgeois” to acknowledge it is a set of institutions and practices only ‘possible and justifiable in certain historical, and especially economic, conditions’(Rorty 1991c, 198). Further, he calls it “postmodern,” recalling the work of Jean François Lyotard, to indicate that it rejects “metanarratives” which describe abstract transhistorical entities (e.g. Absolute Spirit, the Proletariat, etc) outside of a particular social context. Instead, this politics is only rooted within the contingent, historical narratives of a community relevant to its present; for Rorty, the broad tradition of American progressivism. Present throughout his work, this approach is most self-conscious and obvious in Rorty’s later turn toward a politics of social hope(Voparil 2006, 156–8). There, Rorty enacted his above imperative to situate one’s politics within the social and cultural nexus of a community (i.e. its set of meanings and hopes) and engage in a project of articulation as justification. Specifically, he roots his politics within the democratic and social imaginary of the American traditions of transcendentalism and pragmatism. His language becomes steeped in R.W. Emerson’s individualism and Walt Whitman’s democratic vistas(West 1989, 203–4). Further, his work here becomes about the justification and summarization of America itself. It is an understanding of it in order to propel it in a certain direction. He exhorts us “to take America seriously,” because, ‘Pragmatism and America are expressions of a hopeful, melioristic, experimental frame of mind… both the country and its most distinguished philosopher [Dewey] suggest that we can, in politics, substitute hope for the sort of knowledge which philosophers have usually tried to attain. America has always been a future-oriented country, a country which delights in the fact that it invented itself in the relatively recent past’(Rorty 1999b, 24). Here, Rorty attempts to explain America to itself; he attempts to offer an (necessarily partial) interpretation of that community, drawn from its own traditions, which will propel its politics in a specific direction that is presently needful. For him, such cultural-political interventions, such summaries of what America can mean, are the most philosophy can achieve in politics. Thus, in his much maligned Achieving our Country, he critically confronts his community, the contemporary American academic Left, in order to shift its politics back onto a trajectory Rorty understands as within that community but currently lost. He attempts to explain the Left to itself, to summarize one aspect of it, specifically its reformist meliorism, in order to emphasize this as worthy of identification with. In fact, he argues here that the failure of that Left is precisely to engage its social and political universe. In rejecting America entirely, it fails to take the opportunity to define it and thereby shift its politics(Rorty 1998, 13–18). It fails to summarize, articulate and so justify its best aspects. Effectively, it fails to engage the cultural-political question of what in fact the best aspect of America is. Rorty was attempting to reactivate American culture and politics.12 He was trying to resurrect an intellectual project, central to American culture, which had been lost: the cultural-political reconstruction of the present. To do this, and in light of his reorientation of philosophy, Rorty attempted to articulate the present in his philosophy. This involved ‘putting politics first and tailoring a philosophy to suit’(Rorty 1991b, 178); that is, situating thought within the social and cultural context and offering a strategic philosophical summary of that moment. Thus, in spite of his rejection of foundationalism, Rorty does not argue that philosophy is socially useless. Philosophy can hold our time in thought. It can be a partisan meta-level articulation of our implicit cultural and historical vocabulary, its best dynamics, in the attempt to push its practices in a certain direction. Consequently, we can now qualify Koopman’s unexplained claim that Rorty summarizes many of the assumptions underlying contemporary liberal democratic culture. Rorty does articulate many of these assumptions but he only does so within a wider project of justifying one set of those beliefs and practices. It is thus a necessarily partial and partisan summarization for the purpose of a particular reconstruction. Rorty consciously attempts to situate his philosophy within contemporary American, liberal politics and theoretically summarize at least one dynamic therein. It may be only one aspect, one thread of that conversation, but it is a real summarization of the present and an indication of at least one of its horizons of possibility. 5. Problematizing the Present: Articulation vs. Genealogy Till now, this article has only hinted at the limitations of Rorty’s reorientation of philosophy to the present and his consequent imperative for thought to re-descriptively articulate that present within cultural-politics. While in any project, especially one with such a dramatic metaphilosophical shift, there are multiple issues, for the sake of brevity only one concern will be highlighted here. In order to illustrate some of the consequences of Rorty’s particular way of relating to the present, I will briefly contrast him with some of the broad features of genealogical approaches. As discussed above, Koopman and those attempting to re-situate Rorty’s thought as an effort in philosophy-as-cultural-criticism do not fully examine the consequences of his reorientation of thought to the present. As I have argued, this fundamentally occurs within an epistemological and ontological argument around the primacy of our present social reality in determining knowledge (the ontological priority of the social) and our cultural-political lives (the priority of democracy to philosophy). Within Rorty’s work there is a sociological reduction that determines that we are always already engaged in cultural politics. Further, this limitation is fundamentally tied to his imperative for a form of embedded cultural-political criticism that attempts to articulate our context’s best self-justification(Allen 1998, 31). That is, epistemologically situated and limited by the present, all we can do is articulate it in a way that develops its best features. In this, Rorty develops pragmatist resources for cultural-political reconstruction. He better enables us to meliorate our problematic practices toward better ones in the future. However, as Koopman notes, in cultural politics political philosophy must engage in, ‘articulating, problematizing and reconstructing the plural publics and cultures in which we find ourselves’(Koopman 2009, 28). These three elements (articulation, problematization and reconstruction) are essential. Rorty clearly undertakes the task of articulating our present. Further, he clearly encourages us to reconstruct our problematic practices in that present. However, due to the relation to the present he creates, whereby he epistemologically limits us to the task of justifying some dynamic within the present, he ignores the task of actually problematizing that present. He fails to delineate how we identify what needs to be reconstructed within an articulation of the present.13 Genealogical approaches (especially those deriving from Michel Foucault) contrast this well. Genealogy also questions the elements of our practices justified by non-human sources. Further, it also seeks to undermine traditional progressive narratives and open our practices to the future. However, it does this, broadly, within a very different relation to the present socio-political universe; one that develops the possibility of philosophically undermining and problematizing that present. That is, genealogy does not aim at articulating one set of descriptions and practices within the present, those deemed to be more worthy of extension and reconstruction, rather, it attempts to make us view that present differently than from within its own lens(Brown 2001, 96). To achieve this, it enacts what Foucault famously called an ‘ontology of the present.’ This ontology of our present reality enquires into the conditions of the present and its historical formation in order to understand the limits of that present. The explicit purpose here is critical. The constitutive conditions of the present are exposed in genealogy in order to provide a space for rupture (Foucault 1988a, 36; Foucault 1988b, 87,95). The significance of this difference is further clarified by the use of history in Foucaultian genealogy. In spite of his critique of the progressive histories of the Enlightenment and his emphasis on contingency, Rorty still employs progressive histories to the present, narratives which, as quoted above, ‘serve as a description of the end toward which the historical developments which led up to your time were means’ (Rorty 1989, 55). Though only one set of dynamics is emphasized in cultural politics, the present is the locus and source of this material. It is the endpoint our narratives must work up to. In contrast, genealogical histories undermine all such progressive accounts by exposing the inevitable remainder of any progression. Foucault notes, ‘History becomes "effective" to the degree that it introduces discontinuity into our very being---as it divides our emotions, dramatizes our instincts, multiplies our body and sets it against itself. "Effective" history deprives the self of the reassuring stability of life and nature, and it will not permit itself to be transported by a voiceless obstinacy toward a millennial ending’ (Foucault 1977, 154). Such an emphasis changes the role of philosophy in politics. Rather than serving as an under-labourer for cultural politics, philosophy for Foucault must be exterior to politics. It must take up a position external to our present (insofar as that is possible) in order to maintain a critical relation for the problematization of the present (Foucault 2010, 351). While I do not have the space here to examine whether Foucault successfully achieves this in his genealogies, it is clear that he attempts such problematization. In contrast, Rorty’s philosophy-as-cultural-criticism does not expose the conditions of possibility of the present. While his thought is also focused on the present social universe and also employs historical narratives to understand it, it relates to that present and employs those narratives differently. Rorty’s thought is situated in the present. By embedding philosophical discussion within the present and its terms, Rorty does not want to undermine those narratives, he wants to employ them. They are explicitly intended to flow into and justify some aspect of the present. Here, Rorty fails to problematize. By assuming present narratives, he accepts what the present has already determined to be a problem. In this, he offers no means to decide which aspects of the present to justify or reject. In fact, he consistently emphasized that there was no need to expose political problems. For him, freedom only relies upon the simple non-theoretical distinction between force and persuasion. The difference is the empirical presence of certain institutions (e.g. a free press, neutral judiciary, etc.)or their absence(Rorty 1989, 84). As a result of this assumption, Rorty emphasises reconstruction over problematization. He focuses more on the resources within philosophy for recreating our languages and practices, for meliorating them, than for identifying what needs to be reconstructed. However, both sides of such a project are necessary(Koopman 2011, 6; Connolly 1995, 16–20). We need both diagnostic strategies for problematization and reconstructive ones for melioration. Rorty is quite right that to engage our present, we must articulate it. However, he is comparatively silent on the critical resources for problematization. 6. Conclusion: Reading Rorty as a Critical and Reconstructive Site for Thought Despite his unique project, Rorty’s work has fallen out of the dominant discussions of contemporary thought. However, his thinking presents a unique opportunity; one that has yet to be fully realized. The philosophical and political priority of the present social context is the central component of Rorty’s perspective. From this premise flows a project that aims to engage and articulate that present. However, we must reform Koopman's above claim. Rorty does not necessarily summarize the assumptions underlying contemporary liberal, democratic thought. This is only partially achievable. Rorty articulates one cultural-political interpretation of the present. He emphasizes one set of dynamics therein and offers them up as a reconstructive site for politics. Nonetheless, while he could never totalize that field of thought, in this project he uniquely offers, ‘the embodiment of the contemporary, a barometer, perhaps, of intellectual pressures across so many disciplines’(Jenkins 1995, 4). Thus, problematic though they are, Rorty's substantive political theories around the priority of democracy, liberalism as postmodern and bourgeois, and the necessity of a Left situated within the myth of American democracy (amongst others) should be read as attempted summarizations of his socio-political present. A theoretical justification of one real and persistent set of dynamics, one trajectory of thought, in American social and political life. In this sense, Rorty offers us a site, a “public terrain” for contemporary political discussion. His thought can serve as something to be problematized, something to approached genealogically and critically. Criticism of Rorty can thus serve as criticism of (one aspect of) the present. Here, I have only been attempting to justify why we must and explain how we can, read Rorty. As such, much more must be done to bring him, and this reading of him, into dialogue with contemporary political theory. I have only made the case for why such a project is important; why reading Rorty in relation to the present is important for contemporary thought. Acknowledgements I would like to thank Michael Bacon, Lasse Thomassen, Ana Estefania Carballo, and Simon Kaye for reading earlier drafts of this paper. Notes 1 I would argue both that the question of the role of philosophy in political thought is of special relevance today and that, broadly speaking, those groups listed remain relevant to it. However, neither point is the focus here. 2 The notable exception to this trend is (Auxier and Hahn 2010) which does include several pieces from non-pragmatists like Gianni Vattimo and Albrecht Wellmer. However, both of these entries, amongst others, are repetitions of now notable intellectual dialogues between Rorty and the respective figure. They mainly repeat these established debates. For an analysis of Rorty’s critics, see: (Bernstein 2010; Voparil 2005). 3 See for example: (Haack 1995; Rescher 2000, 52,80). Traditionally, even Rorty’s more sympathetic pragmatist critics (such as Richard J. Berstein and Robert Brandom) have been quite critical of him. 4 Misak’s edited volume previously cited serves as an ideal introduction to this group. In her introduction there, she explicitly frames them around a rejection of Rorty. For a defence of Rorty from her (and other’s) criticisms, see: (Bacon 2012). For Bacon, despite new pragmatist claims, there is little substantive difference between their views on truth, objectivity, and enquiry and Rorty’s. 5 Earlier examples include: (McCarthy 1991, 5; Fraser 1990, 314–15) 6 This quotation from Hegel’s Philosophy of Right(Hegel 1991, 21) occurs throughout Rorty’s publications, in most cases broadly serving as an indication that philosophy should orient itself to its present social, cultural and political matrix. 7 His concern here actually predates this work. See: (Rorty 2009b) – this is an early essay of Rorty’s only recently published. 8 While I am asserting that this emphasis pervades Rorty’s work, there is not the space here to prove this exhaustively. Instead, having examined the origin of this trend in his PMN, I will illustrate how it develops in his understanding of language and within his mature construction of politics. 9 As a positive concept in Rorty’s thought, this term is mainly examined in (Rorty 2007a). However, in earlier periods he does use the term pejoratively to denote a form of identity politics. For example, (Rorty 1997, 35) 10 This claim occurs within Rorty’s larger criticism of much of the world of political philosophy as still under the presupposition that politics requires philosophical foundations. For example, in “Trotsky and the Wild Orchids”, Rorty argues that most of his critics assume in some manner that foundations are the source of political authority(Rorty 1999a). 11 While generally ignored in the critical literature on both Rorty and Rawls, the former’s reading of the latter is unique. For sympathetic and critical accounts respectively, see: (Bacon 2011; Mulhall and Swift 1996, chap. 8). 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