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  • On Rorty's Evangelical Metaphilosophy
  • David Rondel

I have spent 40 years looking for a coherent and convincing way of formulating my worries about what, if anything, philosophy is good for.

—Richard Rorty, "Trotsky and Wild Orchids"

Richard Rorty had an unusually avid interest in metaphilosophy. Again and again he would return to questions about the practical uses (if any) to which philosophy might be put, about philosophy's role in intellectual culture, about what philosophy is or might become. His answers to these questions were famously negative: philosophy's practical uses are few, its cultural role marginal. Philosophy is or will be whatever we make of it.

Yet it is one thing to have given up on the idea of Philosophy as a Fach with a naturally occurring canon of problems, or in terms of the closely related conception of Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft, and another thing to write books and essays aimed at persuading one's peers to see things the same way.1 The difference here is akin to that between the atheist who, lacking belief in a God, simply goes about her daily business and the "evangelical atheist," who wishes to convince everyone around that her lack of religious faith represents the right way to see things. Rorty certainly hoped to persuade his readers and interlocutors that his lack of faith in Philosophy was the right way to see things—though, tellingly for what I argue in this [End Page 150] paper, "right" must be taken to mean something like "more convenient or promising" rather than "fits more faithfully with philosophy's real, actual prospects." Rorty did not merely have private, idiosyncratic worries about the value of philosophy. Much more energetically, he spent decades searching for "coherent and convincing ways" of formulating them. Rorty's skepticism about philosophy's grand ambitions was not merely the sort of conclusion one reached, privately, when one realized that the youthful expectations one had first brought to the study of philosophy had been naive.2 It was much more than the private hunch that "the whole idea of holding reality and justice in a single vision had been a mistake" (1999, 12). On the contrary, Rorty labored diligently to convince others of the futility of such synoptic, Platonic pursuits. There was an important therapeutic lesson to be gleaned from the disappointment of Rorty's Bildung, a lesson from whose learning the enterprise of philosophy—and perhaps intellectual culture as a whole—would stand to benefit.

I want to argue in what follows that Rorty's ambivalent relationship to the old Greek dualism between persuasion, or rhetoric, on the one hand, and logical demonstration or argumentation on the other, sheds light on the character and purpose of his "evangelical metaphilosophy." I argue, further, that the significance of the rhetoric/logic dualism in Rorty's work can be accounted for by his sometimes neurotic attentiveness to the so-called problem of self-reference and that this conclusion can be brought into sharper relief by examining a certain tension in Rorty's thought between his repudiation of "philosophical finality" (a phrase I make precise shortly) and the language in which his urges to "drop" a whole host of dualisms, distinctions, and controversies is sometimes expressed. I do not advance this argument in the spirit of a definitive interpretation of Rorty's metaphilosophical ambitions. My aim is not to put forward a candidate answer to the question "What is really at the heart of Rorty?" It is rather to single out for examination some philosophically interesting aspects of Rorty's rhetorical practice, and to ask what, if anything, Rorty's unique way of arguing might suggest about his broader philosophical program. My argument neither undermines nor minimizes the centrality of Rorty's elegant critiques of, among other things, foundationalism, essentialism, and (capital 'P') Philosophy. On the contrary, I am happy to concede that those critiques, along with the deeply historicist and therapeutic perspective in which they are couched, are at the center of Rorty's enterprise, that they, more than anything else, hold the key to what is most noteworthy about Rorty's thought. Yet it does not violate that concession to suggest that...

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