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Sixteen

RICHARD RORTY’S INTERPRETATION OF SELFHOOD

Alexander Kremer

1. Introduction

“Can Rorty be regarded as a pragmatist philosopher at all?” Clearly, an affirmative response to this question is offered by many philosophers and , both in the US and around the world. This answer is possible, however, only if we take “” in the traditional sense. The main differences between traditional pragmatism and neo-pragmatism are that the is not really considered important by the neo-pragmatists, and that the neo-pragmatists focus on language instead of experience. Nevertheless, there are also common features, for example that theory is handled as practice in itself and that we have to struggle for more and more useful of our world to make it as good as possible. Everybody knows that Rorty, a promising analytic philosopher, changed his in the early ‘70s and became a neo-pragmatist thinker who understands well not only the American but also the European philosophical tradition. But let’s raise the question again: “Can Rorty be considered a pragmatist philosopher?” Does it really matter? It can be an interesting question of classification, but it really does not matter if we would like to describe or evaluate Rorty as a philosopher. All that matters in this case is his . Philosophy can help us with and interpreting human in connection with our practical life. This is what philosophy is for! Despite thousands of different definitions I am persuaded that the formal structure of philosophical thinking remains the same, and “only” the content is different. This formal structure of philosophy might be regarded as the theoretical and historical self-reflection of a human being that is the permanent condition of existential inquiry. If philosophy is a permanent, theoretical self- and world-understanding and interpretation, then – based on this – Rorty is doing pretty well. The better the narrative we can get from a philosopher, the better the philosophy he has created! In this essay, I would like to indicate a novel feature of Rorty’s philosophy. He claims that the human being is a finite and historical being, and everything in our world is a temporal, historical process. These processes always have a continuous and a discontinuous dimension, and only their balance is different.I am persuaded that Rorty knows quite well what makes continuity; he emphasizes, however, the 192 Alexander Kremer discontinuous. Regarding the self, this means, inter alia, that he emphasizes the contingency of selfhood.

2. Rorty’s Philosophy

As is well known, was an analytic thinker who only later, in the 1970s, became a neo-pragmatist philosopher. In contrast to the traditional foundational philosophers, Rorty hailed firstD ewey, Wittgenstein, Heidegger and later Derrida as the most important philosophers of the twentieth century. Disregarding here a thorough analysis of his philosophy, I would like only to emphasize that Rorty walked radically his own way and drew the consequences from his views. From these consequences, I will emphasize here the three most important ones from the point of view of my topic. First, pragmatism, according to Rorty, is an anti- essentialist, historicist constructivism. Since we create both language and about the world, we should be constantly interested in reconstructing language to make it more useful and rewarding, and to make our experienced world more satisfying to our needs and desires. Second, as every pragmatist knows, Rorty is also a pan-relationist. He maintains in his article, “A World without Substances or Essences” (1994), that the gap between the so-called ‘analytic’ and ‘continental’ shows few signs of being bridged, although the best works being done in these two traditions overlap to an important extent. The quickest way of expressing this commonality is to say that philosophers as diverse as and , Donald Davidson and , and Bruno Latour, and Michael Foucault – and Richard Rorty, of course – are all anti-dualists. They are trying to replace the world pictures constructed with the aid of metaphysical dualisms inherited from the Greeks (essence and accident; substance and property; appearance and reality, etc.) with a picture of a flux of continually changing relations. Third, Rorty appropriates this standpoint and explains as his own that “everything is a social construction” and “all awareness is a linguistic affair.”1 Once we have said that all our awareness is under a , and that descriptions are functions of social needs, then ‘’ and ‘reality’ can only be names of something unknowable – something like Kant’s ‘Thing-in-Itself.’ From all of this, however, Rorty draws not only the conclusion that it is hopeless to try to get behind appearance to the intrinsic nature of reality, but also that there is no such thing as the absolute intrinsic nature at all. Anti-essentialists, like Rorty, cannot believe even that human would be a special faculty for penetrating through appearances to reality. As he wrote: “We anti-essentialists, of course, do not believe that there is such a faculty. Since nothing has an intrinsic nature, neither do human beings.”2