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Robert Brandom-Rorty and His Critics -Wiley-Blackwell

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Robert Brandom-Rorty and His Critics -Wiley-Blackwell RORTY AND HIS CRITICS Edited by Robert B. Brandom 12 Freedom, Cruelty, and Truth: Rorty versus Orwell JAMES CONANT Liberal . [Flrom the 1,atin liberalis, pertaining to a free man. Oxford English Dictionary [Lliberals are peoplc who think that cruelty is the worst thing we do . Somewhere we all know that philosophically sophisticated debatc about . objective truth . is pretty harmless stuff. Richard Rortyl There is some hope that the liberal habit of mind, which thinks of truth as something outside yourself, something to be discovered, and not as something you can make up as you go along, will survive . [Tlhe feeling that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world . frightens me much more than bombs. George OrwellZ This paper compares and contrasts Richard Rorty's and George Orwell's respective conceptions of what it means to be a liberal - their respective views of the relation between preservation of freedom, prevention of cruelty, and regard for truth. In his book, Contingency, I~on,yand Solzdarzty, Rorty reads Orwell as espousing the variety of liberalism that Rorty himself seeks to champion. The aim of this paper is to suggest, not only that what is offered there is a misreading of Orwell, but that it is a singularly instructive misreading - one which illuminates the shortcomings of Rorty's preferred method of dissolving philosophical problems. I. The Aims and Method of this Paper There are few contemporary philosophers who have been criticized from as many different quarters as Richard Rorty has. There are also few contemporary philosophers who have been as generous and patient in replying to their critics as he has. In preparation for writing this paper, I read through some of Rorty's many replies to his critics. I was struck by how completely unfazed Rorty remains in the face of most criticisms of his work. (This failure on his part to be impressed by a criticism of his work naturally impresses me most when I am impressed by the criticism.) His reply to FREEDOM, CRUELTY, AND TRUTH:RORTY VERSUS ORWELL 269 every critic is thoughtful and gracious, sometimes repeating things he says elsewhere, but never with any trace of a suggestion that he secretly thinks the critic a moron. Still, many of the replies are pervaded by a common mood and tone. The mood is one of weariness (of having heard it all before) and the tone is one of forbearance (of wishing the topic under discussion were more interesting). And, to some extent, even the content of many of the replies is similar: it is a content which could be most economically expressed simply through a shrug of the shoulders. The common subtext of these extended verbal shrugs of the shoulders might be put as follows: Yes, yes, you want to accuse me of having made a philosophical mistake, or of slighting the importance of a metaphysical insight, or of violating common sense, or of being out of touch with reality, or . .; but don't you see that criticism of this sort is only effective against someone who cares about philosophical correctness, metaphysical insight, common sense, being in touch with reality, or. .; and don't you see that my whole goal is to try to get you to stop caring about the problems to which these ways of talking give rise and to start caring about problems that are worth caring about. My whole point is that we don't need to care about the sorts of problems that philosophers say we have to care about - we only think we have to; and my aim is to demonstrate the utter dispensability of caring about such problems by offering a practical dcmonstration of how well one can get on without caring about them. Though I sympathize with many of Rorty's specific criticisms of the post-Cartesian metaphysical tradition, I also sympathize with many of the critics who find his own putatively non-metaphysical views as philosophically unsound as those he opposes. But the fact remains that criticisms to the effect that his views are philosophically unsound are bound to strike Rorty as point-missing. So what sort of criticism might strike home? What sort of criticism has a hope of eliciting from him something other than a verbal equivalent of a shrug of the shoulders? Rorty himself likes to recommend his epistemological doctrines on therapeutic and on political grounds - that is, on the ground that their adoption will liberate us from disabling metaphysical obsessions, and on the ground that they cohere more comfortably with the sort of politics that we (that is, citizens of our sort of liberal democracy) cannot help wanting. This suggests two possible avenues of criticism which might provoke a more searching response from Rorty: (i) a criticism which could succeed in demonstrating to him that his way of leaving philosophy behind fails to accomplish its purpose, and (ii) a criticism which could succeed in demonstrating to him that his way of rejecting philosophical problems does not enable us to care about the very sorts of goods that he thinks we should care about instead. The most effective way of making out the former criticism would be to show that, his sincere belief to the contrary notwithstanding, his thought remains controlled by the philosophical controversies he wishes to put behind him. The most effective way of making out the latter criticism would be to show that the consequences of his views for the things he thinks we should care about are not only not what he believes and wants them to be, but are in fact roughly the opposite of what he believes and wants them to be." The aim of this paper is to mount a version of each of these criticisms in tandem with the other. The strategy for doing this will be to juxtapose Rorty's reading of Orwell with the texts of Orwell's he purports to read and with passages from Orwell which comment or otherwise bear on those texts. I hope to show that there is a fairly literal sense in which Rorty is unable to read Orwell and that this inability is tied to an 270 CONANT inability to free himself from certain philosophical preoccupations. It will also emerge that many of the things that Orwell himself is most concerned to be able to say - and to preserve as sayable for future generations - turn out to be things that Rorty's strategy for dissolving philosophical problems (namely, one of "vocabulary replace- ment"), if successful, would deprive us of the resources for saying. Rorty tends to see philosophers as obsessed with unprofitable controversies, and prides himself on having liberated himself from those obsessions. But there remains something obsessive about Rorty's own relation to these unprofitable controver~ies.~ Consider the following syndrome: someone does not believe certain doctrines, thinks that much time has been wasted trying to refute them, and that we should no longer occupy ourselves with them; yet this person's thought remains controlled by the worry that he might be falling back into the very doctrines he wishes no longer to occupy himself with. I will refer to a syndrome of this sort when it is directed towards doctrines of an epistemological nature as epi~temologism.~Epistemologism is a species of jxation - an inability to detach one's mind from certain ideas (however much one may claim to be no longer interested in attending to them). The strategy of this paper will be to treat Rorty's writing on Orwell as a field within which the symptoms of his epistemologism manifest themselves. The attempt to mount a criticism of Rorty which Rorty himself might find compelling encounters an additional obstacle in Rorty's views on philosophical method. Rorty frankly admits to no longer being much interested in either offering or responding to philosophical arguments per se. He sometimes seems to claim to find the arguments of a philosopher persuasive only to the extent that they can be shown to be parasitic upon or abbreviations for a claim to the effect that a certain old way of talking leads to intellectual dead-ends, whereas a proposed new way of talking assists in the avoidance of those dead-ends.The method of philosophical persuasion that Rorty himself officially favors in his recent work is that of redescription: On the view of philosophy which I am offering, philosophers should not be asked for arguments against, for example, the correspondence theory of truth or the idea of the "intrinsic nature of reality" . Interesting philosophy is rarely an examination of the pros and cons of a thesis. Usually it is, implicitly or explicitly, a contest betwcen an entrenched vocabulary which has become a nuisance and a half-formed vocabulary which vaguely promises great things . Conforming to my own precepts, I am not going to offer arguments against thc vocabulary I want to replacc. Instead, I am going to try to make the vocabulary I favor look attractive by showing how it may be used to describe a variety of topics.' The method of this paper, accordingly, will be to offer a redescription of Rorty's doctrines. In particular, starting in the section on Rontian Totalitarianism of the paper, the goal is to furnish a description of how Rorty's doctrines appear when viewed from the perspective of Orwell - an author Rorty professes to admire and whose work he views as innocent of the sort of philosophy he deplores. My aim, in offering such a redescription, will be roughly the opposite of Rorty's own: to try to make "the vocabulary" he favors look unattractive by showing how poorly it describes a variety of topics he himself uses it to de~cribe.~The point of the exercise is to suggest that Rorty's own attempt to junk an "entrenched vocabulary" (which has allegedly become a nuisance) in favor of a "half-formed vocabulary" (which vaguely promises great things) deprives us of the very resources we require to address some of "the great things" the pared-down replacement "vocabulary" was supposed to help us address.
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