Richard Rorty's Philosophy and Social Hope

The utility of systems lies not merely in their making us think about something in an ordered way according to a particular scheme but in their making us think about it at all; the latter utility is incontestably greater than the former. Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

I have recently compiled an anthology of fantastic literature. While I admit that such a work is among the few a second Noah should rescue from a second deluge, I must confess my guilty omission of the unsuspected major masters of the genre: Parmenides, Plato, John Scotus Erigena, Albertus Magnus, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, Francis Bradley. What, in fact, are the wonders of Wells or Edgar Allan Poe–a flower that visits us from the future, a dead man under hypnosis–in comparison to the invention of God, the labored theory of a being who in same way is three and who endures alone outside of time? What is the bezoar stone to pre-established harmony, what is the unicorn to the Trinity, who is Lucius Apuleius to the multipliers of Buddhas of the Greater Vehicle, what are all the nights of Scheherazade next to an argument by Berkeley? Jorge Luis Borges

I

One benefit among many I have found from reading philosophy is that it can expose the unquestioned intellectual assumptions I hold and subjects them to scrutiny. By being scrutinised in this way, I am forced to re-evaluate my views, and through this either change them or develop a more explicit, if doubtless flawed, defence of them. Richard Rorty can claim to have provided such a service to me through his Philosophy and Social Hope which collects a number of his essays for popular rather than purely academic audiences. Though one might say he less scrutinises common-sense assumptions and thinking, and more drives his car over them, spits on their mangled corpse, then runs them over again for good measure.

Across the essays in Philosophy and Social Hope he articulates his variant of the philosophical tradition of pragmatism. Pragmatism is a broad tradition, and one account of how to define it is simply as a series of disputes on truth and meaning¹. Another account is that it is centred on an idea of knowledge as inseparable from agency². Both of these characterisations are rather vague, so it is perhaps then more useful to speak of specific pragmatisms. C.S. Peirce originated the tradition with his pragmatic maxim which states³:

Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object.

Peirce’s maxim is an account of meaning, intended to motivate what statements are clear (because their consequences are well-defined) and what statements are not meaningfully different from one another (because they produce no testable consequences distinct from one another). Because it is a theory of meaningful versus not meaningful statements, a number of fruitful comparisons to the verification principle of the logical empiricists have been made. The maxim was grounded in his experience as a scientist, and even today I have found it helpful as a method for achieving clarity in a concept I am trying to work through, even if not as a theory of meaning.

William James offered and popularised an alternative interpretation of pragmatism as a theory of truth, wherein true ideas are those which are practically useful⁴. ‘Practically useful’ here includes individual psychological benefit, meaning that where Peirce’s early pragmatism as expressed in the maxim ruled out metaphysical beliefs (because not practically consequential, though he was later to refine his view), James’ pragmatism allowed them to be justified on an individual-to-individual basis. James’ account of pragmatism treats knowledge as a means of navigating life, but is also therefore arguably fairly subjective in its account of knowledge.

Dewey for his part took pragmatism on a very different tack again. He saw pragmatism as building on a reading of Darwin as having the world to posses nothing fixed or immutable. Like James, Dewey saw philosophy as being overly technical and divorced from real-world problems. He took this position much further than James however, developing an account of pragmatism as a post-Darwinian philosophy which treats inquiry as a means of grappling with human problems, and as a project for restructuring society to better meet human needs. He was, amongst other things, a champion of (American) democracy as a consequence.

II

Among these early figures, Rorty’s pragmatism is most derived from John Dewey, to an extent from William James, and not at all from C.S. Peirce. He often defines his pragmatism in negative terms, like Dewey in opposition to ‘Platonist’ dualisms such as appearance-reality, matter-mind, made-found, objective-subjective, and sensible-intellectual. More generally, he defines it in opposition to epistemological foundationalism. Like Dewey Rorty motivates his pragmatism by taking Darwin as a starting point, wherein human language and thought are not means of representing reality but instead are tools which serve human purposes. In his account, if I say to you ‘I am hungry’, I am not making accessible information previously inaccessible to you, but rather enabling you to predict my future behaviour.

While most of these dualisms feel essential to me as an outsider to the discipline and to Rorty’s work⁵, the most challenging to grapple with is Rorty’s rejection of the appearance-reality distinction. Part of the problem, I think, is that the distinction between appearance and reality takes on much more specific meaning within the Western philosophical tradition than it does in colloquial usage. The distinction goes back to the ancient Greek philosophers (at the very least), but reaches its fullest expression in Western philosophy in Kant’s distinction between the thing-in-itself or noumenon, and phenomenon.

Now, I have to stress here to the reader that Kant remains a to-read for me, and that I have only encountered secondary summaries, but I will do my best to expand on this. In Kant’s formulation of the appearance-reality distinction, phenomena constitute the appearances of objects accessible to humans, while noumena constitute the things-in-themselves, or their actual reality independent of our experience. As humans we impose a priori intuitions (such as time and space) and concepts of understanding (such as causation or unity) inherent to humans on the objects of experience to make sense of them. The thing-in-itself is thus inaccessible to us, and appearance is where our knowledge ultimately lives.

So when Rorty speaks about the appearance-reality distinction, it is this philosophical tradition that one must bear in mind, rather than the colloquial usage of ‘appearance’ or ‘reality’. The dominant account of truth in Western philosophy is the correspondence theory of truth, which holds that our beliefs are true insofar as they correspond to external reality⁶. Now, I suspect that few philosophers or scientists would deny that our knowledge is fallible, but would instead suggest that our knowledge of, say, physics has progressed over time through increasing approximation to the physical laws that govern reality. They might say, contra Kant, we have been able to learn something of noumena from phenomena.

Rorty rejects this view of human knowledge. There is no increasing approximation to external reality over time, but rather the replacement by old beliefs by new on the ground that they are more useful and help us to navigate reality. Our beliefs do not represent reality, but instead enable us to interact with our environment like any other tool. He rejects the appearance-reality distinction and does not use the language of noumenon or phenomenon because his interpretation of pragmatism means that the question of whether we can discover the reality behind appearances is a man-made problem, rather than a discovered problem.

Our ancestors developed the philosophical distinction of appearance and reality (among other dualisms) as useful for their problems and purposes, but vide Dewey it is no longer useful for our purposes today. He admits in this a degree of philosophical affinity with ‘post-Nietzschean’ philosophers in the European continental tradition (among whom he names Heidegger, Sartre, Gadamer, Derrida, and Foucault) who insist that we as humans live inside language, and can never break out of it. But he claims to be more radical, in that he does not consider philosophy to be distinct from other spheres of human activity such as science or politics. The only distinction that can be made is in the kind of problems philosophy deals with. In this Rorty claims consistency: he argues that dissolving the language on which the activity of philosophy has hitherto depended should also dissolve previous ideas of its distinctiveness from other spheres of culture.

III

I admit I struggle to accept Rorty’s epistemology. I do not reject the view that we as humans live inside thought and language, that there is no observation unencumbered by belief. But to extrapolate from this that the appearance-reality distinction ought to be abandoned, that we cannot say that human knowledge might have a relationship to reality external to ourselves seems incorrect to me. Now I am conscious I am in danger here, in that I am at risk of making a sort of conservative appeal to common sense about appearance and reality. Rorty argues that it is the role of philosophers to shake the rest of us out of our common-sense assumptions, and here he has certainly rattled one of mine. In one of the essays on Kuhn, he responds to – and demolishes – Steven Weinberg’s (a nobel laureate in physics) defence of physics as corresponding to external reality by pointing to a long history of difficulty with the notion of correspondence by philosophers, which Weinberg had not engaged with. I too have not read as much philosophy as Rorty, so in one perspective I should defer to Rorty’s view.

But deference of this kind would be a strange perspective to take, and one not in line with Rorty’s anti-authoritarianism and rejection of appeal to authority. In a 2020 survey of philosophers by PhilPapers⁷ – so admittedly post-dating Rorty’s writing, and indeed Rorty himself – a majority (51.37%) of respondents accepted or leaned towards the correspondence theory of truth, with the deflationary theory of truth taking second place (24.53%). Epistemic theories of truth, of which pragmatism is one (or, rather, to which the various pragmatisms belong) and the verification principle another, took third place (10.16%). Rorty’s view, in other words, is a minority view even among like-minded philosophers. He was not afraid of going against philosophical consensus, and would not I imagine want his readers to blindly follow either consensus or his own views.

Although Rorty rightly criticises Weinberg for failing to engage with the relevant literature before asserting his view, his point was confined only to the need to engage with the extant literature and thought before opining. He wanted – and I do not understand what the point of writing essays for a general audience would be if he did not want this – to make people think, to question the assumptions they took for granted. And he hoped to provide some tools for progressives to pursue social change. So although I have not – and not being a professional philosopher will not – read as much philosophy as Rorty, I do hope to have read enough to articulate a perspective, drawing on neither common sense nor deference, but instead on a level – however superficial – of engagement with some of the relevant thought.

In Alan Chalmers’ What Is This Thing Called Science?, an introductory text to the philosophy of science which covers substantial ground, Chalmers takes on what he describes as global anti-realist views of the kind articulated by Rorty. We can accept the view that there is no theory-free observation. Chalmers provides some good examples. Imagine a botanist and a lay person were to take notes on some plants: it is doubtless the case that the notes of the former would be much richer in detail and content, precisely because of their greater pre-existing experiences. More telling however is the fact that bacteria and other germs would have been seen through microscopes for a long time but not noticed, precisely because what we observe is conditioned by existing experience and knowledge.

But Chalmers argues, and I agree, that none of this leads us to needing to accept the kind of global anti-realism that Rorty argues for, where we can never get outside of language and so the appearance-reality distinction is dissolved. Once we have a theory, we can test it against our observations, or we can even manipulate the world through experiments. If observation and experiment do not match our beliefs, then our beliefs as they currently stand have not matched reality. In the sense that we can replicate scientific observations and interventions, we can speak about objective evidence, and we can get, to some extent, beyond language and thought and poke at the world around us. Even if our theoretical frameworks change, our experimental results do not. The question remains whether we can go further still and recover a notion of correspondence.

When Rorty writes of philosophy of science in these essays, one could be forgiven for thinking it stopped with Kuhn and Feyerabend. But the kind of view I have just articulated, which is derived from the new experimentalists such as Ian Hacking, Deborah Mayo, and Nancy Cartwright, came later than Kuhn and Feyerabend, but recovers both a notion of something distinctive about science, and a notion of scientific realism, of successful scientific theories corresponding to external reality. Hacking’s famous argument is that we would not be able to spray atoms if they were not real, and it is difficult to disagree. Likewise useful is Mayo’s notion of severe testing, where we can regard a theory as reasonably confirmed if it has passed a large number of tests which would likely have falsified it where it indeed false.

While Rorty claims that the correspondence theory of truth has no pragmatic implications, I am not sure that I agree. If I think like a pragmatist, and consider the practical implications of non-correspondence, I don’t know how a successful physics could succeed in developing things like rockets if the theories they used to develop them did not approximate external reality. If I did not think that engineer’s beliefs corresponded to reality, would I really want to get in a car they had designed? On what basis could I trust in their engineering? Our knowledge is fallible, and Newton’s account of physics proved to be so. But it approximated many parts of reality well, and, more to the point, Einstein’s physics, which approximates reality better, reduces to Newton’s under certain conditions. Although proven fallible, Newton’s physics still proves to be a good enough approximation for many tasks.

I am aware that what I am arguing for here is a version of the no miracles argument, which says that only scientific realism avoids treating scientific success as a miracle. Rorty might say that successful prediction is enough to say a theory is useful without needing criteria such as correspondence. But like other arguments against the no miracles argument⁸, I find this unconvincing, because it simply begs the question of why some theories are successful at making predictions and others are not. I need not claim here that all currently useful scientific beliefs are strongly confirmed – only that enough of them have been for approximate correspondence to be a satisfactory account of why successful prediction works.

In the same essay on Kuhn, Rorty notes that maths and physics achieve a much higher degree of consensus than does philosophy or literature, with disciplines such as political science sitting somewhere between (but closer to literature, in Rorty’s account). Again, I think we need a notion of why it has been possible to achieve consensus in some disciplines but not all. In maths, this is through coherence within systems of axiomatic reasoning. In physics, it is through appeal to external evidence as demonstrated through experiment and interaction with the world. For me, it is the absence of such clear external criteria that make consensus impossible in ethics or philosophy.

Rorty himself makes in the introduction a brief, but for me crucial, concession towards the validity of a causal interpretation of the appearance-reality distinction, in that the objects of our experience possess a causal existence independent of us. Our knowledge of reality will surely be more useful to us if it can represent that causal existence, because it enables the kind of prediction and control our scientific beliefs are supposed to enable in Rorty’s account. To say our beliefs are useful or successful at prediction begs the question of what makes a belief useful or successful at prediction, and one of the things that can make a belief useful or successful at prediction is correspondence.

IV

However, I can begin to make more sense of Rorty’s views if I begin to explore the idea that correspondence is only one way in which beliefs can be useful for human purposes. There are many domains where the notion of correspondence to external reality is a nonsense. Consider ethics: what external reality is there to correspond to, in the sense of interaction and experiment defined above? Here and in political thought I find Rorty’s pragmatism and writing fruitful. Rorty argues that we should cease to search for truth, and instead simply search for acceptable justification and (ideally) eventual agreement. We should replace the question of whether our knowledge is adequate to reality, and instead seek to assess whether the ways we describe and relate to things serves our needs as humans.

Philosophers such as Kołakowski saw in the lack of external truth to appeal to a route to relativism⁹. As he expresses in an interview with Noëlle McAfee¹⁰, Rorty however prefers to draw on Dewey, who sought to move away from abstract principles and towards social practice. We can in this account build a justification for democracy on empirical and consequentialist grounds, in that historical experience has shown it to be the best system yet devised for maximising human flourishing. Rorty acknowledges in the interview that there is nothing we can say to a fascist to change their mind: their values are fundamentally different from ours. But we can justify our opposition to fascism as something cruel and inhuman through appeal to experience. This is rather different from an “anything goes” relativism, while conceding the point that our beliefs are contingent.

So, for me, some of the best material in Philosophy and Social Hope are the later essays in the book, where he applies his pragmatism to a range of social and political problems. I do not think, like Rorty’s critics whom he addresses in the opening essay, that he holds the views he holds just to get a gasp. He has obviously derived his stance by taking the pragmatic tradition as inherited from James and Dewey and in combination with other philosophers such as Kuhn to what he sees as its logical conclusion. But this is not to say he does not have a delightful sense of mischief.

For instance, in Failed Prophecies, Glorious Hopes, he compares the social impacts of the New Testament and the Communist Manifesto. Both books were intended by their authors as predictions of the future, and both were wrong. Both books have at times led to immense cruelty and human suffering. However, he treats both books as expressions of the hope that

some day we shall be willing and able to treat the needs of all human beings with the respect and consideration with which we treat the needs of those closest to us, those whom we love.

Seen in this light, the value of both texts is in being the founding document of movements which have done much for human freedom and equality (note the emphasis on practical consequence rather than the nature of the beliefs involved). However, he considers the Manifesto to be the better of the two documents, on the consequentialist grounds that it served as inspiration for the trade union movement. For Rorty

the moral stature of the unions towers above that of the churches and the corporations, the governments and the universities.

This is because of the enormous and selfless risks taken on by the early trade unionists to defeat the degrading working conditions and starvation wages they faced as workers. Rorty is usually concerned with the American case, but there is no country in the West today in which those of us who work for a living do not owe thanks to those unionists who took – often illegal at the time – action against these conditions and ensured that the rest of us could share in the prosperity brought about by industrialisation. What is mischievous is the favourable comparison against the New Testament, given the religiosity of the society in which Rorty exists and addresses. But provocative though it may be, the comparison holds true for me, and demonstrates the value of his consequentialist orientation.

V

Similarly crucial is Rorty’s recognition that one of the greatest social challenges of our time is global inequality. In Failed Prophecies, Glorious Hopes, he expresses the view that

Our children need to learn, early on, to see the inequalities between their own fortunes and those of other children as neither the Will of God nor the necessary price for economic efficiency, but as an evitable tragedy.

It is a theme he returns to in the essays Love And Money and Globalization, the Politics of Identity and Social Hope. The former of these is, as far as Rorty’s writing goes, strangely pessimistic in character. He expresses the view that, as of yet, there exists no solution for the problem of poverty in the global South. He recalls in particular the view of an Indian philosopher and MP that despite his efforts to use Western thought and technology to address India’s problems, especially its high birth rate, it remained rational for parents in Indian villages to have eight children, as two would die in childhood, three would be girls and so require dowries, one of the boys would run away, and the two remaining would have to work so pay their sister’s dowries and take care of their parents. Speak to a few migrants living in the West today originally from other parts of the world, and you will quickly learn that the obligation and pressure of caring for one’s parents in their retirement remains as present as it did in 1992 when Rorty wrote the essay.

Yet Love and Money remains a distinctively Rortyean essay, in that he expresses the view that the solution to the political and economic dilemmas of ameliorating this poverty not depend on some revolution in values, but rather through some unimagined bureaucratic-technological initiative. Technology – including social technologies such as bureaucracy – aren’t only the best we’ve got for addressing human problems, but are all we’ve got. Here one once again sees the difference between Rorty and his interpretation of the pragmatic tradition and what he has called the post-Nietzschean tradition within European continental philosophy.

Globalization, the Politics of Identity and Social Hope is also a pessimistic essay, albeit one addressing the growing intellectual tendency towards despair on the left rather than being entirely rooted in a sense of pessimism on Rorty’s part. He argues that we have witnessed in the past few decades a growing inability to imagine that we shall achieve a classless global society in which there exist no differences in opportunity for children of one nation as opposed to another. I admit I feel no such hope, and that recent years, particular vis a vis Trump’s presidency, his foreign policy, and the broader rise of the radical right and authoritarian populism have made me fearful, rather than hopeful for the future of the world within my lifetime.

Rorty highlights that two versions of this hope have historically existed. One is the the more familiar (in today’s thought) Marxist utopia built by proletarian revolution and predicated on the abolition of private property (Rorty interestingly says entrepreneurship rather than property). The second was that of Western intellectuals in the immediate aftermath of World War 2, who thought that peace and technological progress would make possible previous undreamed-of economic prosperity within the free market. This prosperity would lead to a series of political reforms, culminating in democracy similar to that of the Scandinavian welfare states being instituted in every part of the planet (I think that Rorty meant that this dream was most achieved in Scandinavia, rather than that these countries were the model at the time). This utopian scenario was the one Western statesmen had in mind when signing the charter of the United Nations.

Today, the Marxist experiment of abolishing markets pursued in the USSR and elsewhere is broadly seen as a failure, while few today would claim that economic prosperity necessarily leads to greater equality. For Rorty this pessimism serves as the background for intellectual pessimism about globalisation. Political thought draws on its surrounding conditions, and this was as true for Marx as it was for Dewey and Rawls. And so the turn towards philosophy on the left represents a loss a plausible narrative of progress. Philosophy in this sense can serve as a means of re-articulating social phenomena to work towards a particular political goal, but not to form it in the first place.

The central problem of globalisation is the relative loss of power of nation states over their economic situation, due to the globalisation of capital. For Rorty, however unlikely it is, the most socially useful thing intellectuals can do in light of this is to draw the attention of educated publics towards the need for a global polity as a countervailing power to the super-rich in the age of globalisation. He argues – and here we return to Rorty’s characteristic sense of social hope – that philosophers should seek to persuade people to set aside a sense of themselves in terms of religious or ethnic identity, and instead to see themselves as part of a single, great, human adventure. I think I prefer Amin Maalouf’s variant of this view, which is that our goal should be to achieve a globalisation based on recognising the universality of human dignity, yet which rejects the homogenisation of human culture. But Rorty like Maalouf nonetheless stands here as a thinker dedicated to a utopian future, in opposition to a pessimism grounded in our present.

VI

It is Rorty’s sense of social hope that I think is, ultimately, a valuable tool for those of us confronting the political problems of our age. In Religion as a Conversation stopper he claims to think with Habermas that intellectuals like himself are still plugging away at the basic tasks of the Enlightenment, and that there is no such thing as postmodernity. For Rorty the secularisation of public life was the great achievement of the Enlightenment, and the job of philosophers like himself is to make the rest of us rely less on tradition. Hence his argument in this essay that though religion might motivate one’s views on public policy, it is simply a matter for one’s private life. Hence his view that philosophers should try and point us once again to utopian visions of progress, albeit ones more grounded in historical experience, and in reform rather than revolution.

Unlike those he characterises as post-Nietzschean thinkers whom argue variously against humanism, liberal individualism, technologism, etc (one might add scientism, despite Rorty’s own interpretation of Kuhn), Rorty sees no problem in these ‘-isms’. The Enlightenment for him is the least common denominator of thinkers as diverse as Mill, Marx, Trotsky, Whitman, William James, and Václav Havel. I might add to this list Hume, Kant, Voltaire, H.G. Wells, and George Orwell, though some of them may ill fit with Rorty’s pragmatism. I think the best critique of the political tradition of liberal democracy and its Enlightenment roots was perhaps made by James C. Scott in his Seeing Like a State – which I should make the time to read – in which he problematises the way in which states use administrative and bureaucratic technologies to make legible that which they govern, at the cost of abstracting away from and simplifying pre-existing and diverse social arrangements¹¹.

In this light, it is easy enough to see why the post-Nietzscheans turned against science and technology and indeed against the notion of progress. But as Scott accepted, this kind of abstraction is necessary for large-scale liberal democracy¹². And it will be necessary again if we are to actually make the world a better place. As Rorty argues in Love and Money, technology – and here I include social technology – is all we’ve got. We can think with both Rorty and John Gray that the achievements of the Enlightenment are contingent, that liberalism is largely a product of the West. But we should think with Rorty and against Gray – who argues that we should stop trying to apply liberalism where it doesn’t fit – that we ought to defend it anyway, and to realise its hopes for the rest of the world, but hopefully with greater awareness of past failures and hypocrisies.

I did not enjoy all of the essays in Philosophy and Social Hope. I admit that I did not much care for the two essays on law, and Pragmatism and Law: A Response to David Luban was particularly esoteric to me, rooted as it is in philosophical controversies of which I have no awareness. The essay on Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum in particular was a particularly poor reading of that book for me, in that while Rorty attempts to shoehorn it into a pragmatist reading in which there are no hidden essences to be uncovered, a crucial plot point of the book is precisely that a piece of evidence used in the various conspiracy theories really is just a shopping list.

But I think he will stay with me as a thinker for a long time. His emphasis on justification and consequence is bracing, as is his support for what I would describe as a social democratic politics. Although sometimes frustrating and single-minded, he is nonetheless an excellent provoker when it comes to our pre-existing assumptions and indeed the very language we use to describe things. He has forced me to better develop my own conception of human knowledge and thought. And contrary to the charges of relativism against him, I think the notion of justification grounded in historical experience provides a way for us to motivate our ethics and our politics without needing to appeal to external realities. In this light, he achieves what we wanted to: a philosophy which contributes to anti-authoritarian and liberal politics appropriate to our needs and challenges.

Footnotes