Theory & Event

In his two recent books, Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, Volume 3 and Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America, Richard Rorty catalogs the numerous things he wants to leave behind: theories of truth, the influence of Marxism on the American Left, the dominance of what he calls “cultural politics” in the academy, and the idea that America is irrevocably tainted by its legacy of genocide and slavery. He wants to have done with them not because they are insignificant, or because they can be proven wrong, but because he believes they interfere with the efficacy of future projects: a future philosophy entirely cleansed of any metaphysical remainders, or a country with enough “national pride” to muster the “moral courage” necessary to embark on campaigns for social justice. There is much that is provocative, even infuriating in these two books, the first of which collects his essays on philosophical and moral topics from the 1990’s (with two earlier essays), while the second is adapted from the Massey Lectures Rorty gave at Harvard in 1997. Indeed, there are enough dismissive characterizations of both political and philosophical positions to exasperate almost anyone. But Rorty’s very bluntness has the virtue of calling on both those who agree and those who disagree with him to clarify what kind of polity or philosophical culture they envision, and to examine the means used to achieve that vision.

In Part I of Truth and Progress, entitled “Truth and some Philosophers”, Rorty pits his particular brand of anti-representationalism against competing versions from philosophers with whom (with the exception, perhaps, of John Searle) he shares much common ground. Rorty is no longer trying to refute hard-core realists or skeptics. He now believes that the divide between his position and theirs is not going to be bridged by further arguments, but only by a change of heart on one side or the other, and all he will claim is that he has provided a coherent context in which the worries of realists and skeptics no longer make sense. Instead Rorty turns his attention to closer rivals, such as Charles Taylor and Daniel Dennett, who are in agreement with him on the need to abandon the legacy of epistemology and the subject/object dichotomy, but who, in his view, have still not shed the last vestiges of realism. Rorty’s litmus test for a potential rival is whether he or she still believes that “truth” can be used in a philosophically interesting manner. For Rorty, truth is no more than a term of approbation; it is, following William James, “what proves itself to be good in the way of belief.” And while he acknowledges that anyone who calls something “true” means true for all time (“true for now” only makes sense for sentences with dates), it does not follow that any sentence is “made true” by “mind-independent reality”, although he does not deny that “most things in the universe are causally independent of us” (TP: 86). The primary difference between the truths of baseball and the truths of particle physics is that we have more confidence in the persistence of the latter. Setting up a categorical divide between the two is tantamount to believing that the physical world is made up of “a multiplicity of objects, differentiated by intrinsic, non-descriptive-relative features, waiting for somebody to come along and develop a language that cut it at the joints by assigning a word to each object” (TP: 90). And though no one Rorty engages would affirm such a stark version of realism, he argues quite effectively that even nuanced versions — such as Hilary Putnam’s attempt to grasp the “fact of the matter”, or Charles Taylor’s concern to come to “grips with a world of independent things” — end up resembling this caricature more than their advocates would care to admit. He does so by insisting that his pragmatist position, which holds that all human activities can be understood in...