Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Master's Theses Graduate School 2008 Richard Rorty's map of political misreading Shaun Kenan King Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_theses Part of the Political Science Commons Recommended Citation King, Shaun Kenan, "Richard Rorty's map of political misreading" (2008). LSU Master's Theses. 523. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_theses/523 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Master's Theses by an authorized graduate school editor of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. RICHARD RORTY’S MAP OF POLITICAL MISREADING A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in The Department of Political Science by Shaun King B.A., Campbell University, 2005 August, 2008 FOR DANIELLE ii Acknowledgements This master’s thesis would not have been possible without the trust, support, and direction that Dr. Cecil Eubanks has given me for over a year. His thoughtful criticisms and provocations have helped me connect ideas and transition between them better than I could ever have done without him. Dr. James Stoner and Dr. William Clark were kind enough to provide commentary and questions that I hope to pursue further as I extend this project. Dr. Neil Gross and Dr. Stanley Fish corresponded with me briefly, but their contributions confirmed my intuitions. As an editor, Ms. Susanna Dixon combed through the fibers of my thesis with a meticulousness I cherish. iii Table of Contents DEDICATION .…………………………………………………………………………………...ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ……………………………………………………………………...iii ABSTRACT .……………………………………………………………………………...………v CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION ………………………………………………………………..1 CHAPTER 2. RORTY’S PECULIAR PRAGMATISM …………………………………….…17 CHAPTER 3. RORTY AND ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY ...………..………………………...33 CHAPTER 4. THE PRIORITY OF HAROLD BLOOM ……………………………………....61 CHAPTER 5. RORTY’S WEDGE BETWEEN LIBERALISM AND COMMUNITARIANISM ……….………………………………………….....………………..89 CHAPTER 6. CONCLUSION ………………………………………………………………..107 BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………………………………………113 VITA.………………………………………………………………...…………………………120 iv Abstract For more than a quarter century, Richard Rorty was one of the most controversial writers. Critics of Rorty have often clustered their remarks around distinct themes within Rorty’s body of literature. Is Rorty’s criticism of the correspondence theory of truth valid and what standard of validity could confirm that? Does Rorty’s treatment of pragmatists such as William James and John Dewey accurately reflect their writings? Is Rorty’s brand of liberalism defensible when it assumes no non-circular form of justification can be proffered? These are the questions most often addressed by Rorty’s critics. He responded to their objections for two decades. By taking a synoptic view of Rorty’s literary corpus, my goal is to change a few of the questions being asked and offer criticism of Rorty’s texts predicated on the validity of a new cluster of questions. I offer a reading of Rorty’s political theories that places Rorty’s debt to the literary critic Harold Bloom’s concepts higher than his avowed affiliation with pragmatism. I argue that in order to understand the nature of Rorty’s affiliation with pragmatism it is best to understand how Rorty was profoundly influenced by a cluster of Bloom’s concepts. These concepts include, “belatedness,” “anxiety,” “influence,” “strong poet,” “precursor,” and “misreading.” I propose a reading of Rorty’s text which, when taken together, make Bloom’s influence on Rorty central. I describe five features that make Rorty’s pragmatism peculiar. Next, I move to a discussion of Rorty’s exchanges with Donald Davidson revealing Rorty’s adaptations, contradictions, and peculiar allegiance to pragmatism. Next, I explain that allegiance by placing Bloom as the central figure in the late development of Rorty’s writings on the division of the private realm of self-creation and the public realm of solidarity. Finally, I discuss how Bloom’s concepts help explain how Rorty has wedged himself in a peculiar way between Rawlsian v liberalism and communitarianism. Although Bloom is central, his centrality does not make Rorty’s writings more coherent. Placing Bloom at the center explains some of Rorty’s peculiarities while it raises other problems. vi Chapter 1: Introduction If Frederick Nietzsche wanted to be considered philosophy’s Hamlet, then we may want to consider Richard Rorty as philosophy’s Shakespeare. Just as Nehamas argues, “Nietzsche created a character out of himself,”1 so too does Rorty. At the height of his career, Rorty embraced a kind of poetic playfulness which opened itself up to both inconsistency and multiplicity. Marjorie Garber writes, “Every age creates its own Shakespeare.”2 Every age does this by finding in Shakespeare something right for that age. What makes Shakespeare endlessly present is his multiplicity. Shakespeare’s only coherence is the world of possibilities he unleashes.3 In Nietzsche’s words, “the more affects we allow to speak about one thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we can use to observe one thing, the more complete will our ‘concept’ of this thing, our ‘objectivity’ be.”4 Richard Rorty presents himself as the stage writer for the philosopher-as-actor. They all audition for philosophy’s Shakespeare. Rorty’s writings are meta-philosophical, in that, they concern themselves with the conditions under which philosophy is either possible or relevant. Unsatisfied with metaphilosophical criticism, Rorty wrote substantively and controversially about democratic discourse. By the end of his career, Rorty knowingly embraced inconsistency. He may have believed that inconsistency was akin to multiplicity and that multiplicity would keep his writings relevant in the future’s uncertainty. 1 Nehamas, Alexander. Nietzsche: Life As Literature. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 233. 2 Garber, Marjorie. Shakespeare After All. (New York: Anchor Books, 2004), 28. 3 For a more an approach that tries to balance philosophical realism with something closer to Harold Bloom’s theory that Shakespeare is the strongest of ‘strong poets’ see, McGinn, Colin. Shakespeare’s Philosophy: Discovering the Meaning Behind the Plays. (New York: Harper Perennial, 2006). Note especially his reflections on Harold Bloom’s interpretation of Shakespeare (202-04). 4 Nietzsche, Frederick. On the Genealogy of Morals reprinted in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, trans. and ed. Walter Kauffman. (New York: The Modern Library, 1992), 555. 1 Nehamas has been reading Rorty and writing about him since Rorty wrote Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. At some time, around the publication of Rorty’s Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Nehamas lost track of Rorty. In reviewing the latter publication, Nehamas notes that Rorty has “A touch of the poet,” and is “writing with vision.”5 However, Nehamas makes two errors in reviewing Rorty that I want to expose as part of my argument about recasting Rorty in the proper light. First, Nehamas quotes Rorty who writes, “Since truth is a property of sentences, since sentences are dependent for their existence upon vocabularies, and since vocabularies are made by human beings, so are truths.” 6 However, Nehamas criticizes it without considering the context within which it is presented. Nehamas says in response to Rorty, “reasons don’t seem to be created in the same way words are,” but this is exactly what Rorty leaves open for us when he writes, “Truth cannot be out there – cannot exist independently of the human mind – because sentences cannot so exist, or be out there. The world is out there, but descriptions of the world are not. Only descriptions of the world can be true or false.”7 Giving descriptions that can either be true or false is another way of saying that reasons can be true or false, but Rorty’s explanation of descriptions are that they can be true or false and their truth or falsity is appraised as such, not by checking them against the world or reality or the forms or nature or God, but rather by the way they fit within our vocabulary. Our vocabulary as a whole is more or less useful in coping with the world. This is something that Nehamas agrees with, yet seen in this context, Nehamas is objecting to Rorty’s phrasing of the syllogism in question. Why – the question needs to be asked – does Rorty phrase it that way? Nehamas’ criticism capitalizes on the pithiness of Rorty’s syllogism: “since truth is a property of sentences, since sentences are dependent for their existence upon vocabularies, and 5 Nehamas, Alexander. “A touch of the poet.” Raritan 10, no. 1 (1990):104-25. 6 Ibid., 110.; Rorty, Richard. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 9. 7 Ibid., 110.; Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 5. 2 since vocabularies are made by human beings, so are truths.” Eight years earlier, before Rorty aligned with the poets against philosophers (something I will explain in chapter four), Nehamas was calling Rorty’s writings, “understated eloquence, argumentative depth and moral seriousness, with vision as well as with style.”8 Yet eight years later, Nehamas still refers to Rorty as someone who has a “vision,” but now Nehamas has reversed much of what he said earlier. Instead of “depth and moral seriousness,” the Rorty of Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity “tends to take too many things at face value;” Rorty gives us a “hermeneutics of credulity.”9 More than any philosopher of the twentieth century, Rorty has been reviled. He recounts much of his criticisms in an autobiographical reflection: If there is anything to the idea that the best intellectual position is one which is attacked with equal vigor from the political right and the political left, then I am in good shape.