Round Table on Richard Rorty’s “The Decline of Redemptive Truth and the Rise of a Literary Culture, the Way the Western Intellectuals Went”
Liviu Cotrău: Ladies and gentlemen, to quote Professor Marga’s recent quote of Harold Bloom’s observation that “Richard Rorty is the most interesting philosopher in the world today,” I think, by way of introduction, it is my duty to tell you why he is so interesting. I will try to respond to this issue by addressing the implicit question to whom does Rorty seem to be so interesting. He is surely interesting to people like Harold Bloom or like most of us here, literary people. However, for quite a large number of philosophers of mainly realist persuasions, he is not so interesting as extremely controversial. Simply stated, how could Rorty, the professional philosopher who places Charles Dickens and Milan Kundera above Hegel and Kant, be other than controversial? The truth is that Rorty has done recently probably more than any other philosopher of modern times to undermine the privileged status of philosophy. So how can Rorty expect the gratitude of professional philosophers, who, like the ancient priests of Egypt or the Celtic druids claim to be the sole proprietors of knowledge?
Nietzsche said that God is dead. Since that fateful pronouncement we have had all kinds of deaths (that of tragedy, among others). Rorty tells us that philosophy is dead, or dying. A question arises: what is living then? Well, in Rorty’s view, what is very much alive and kicking is, lo and behold, literary criticism!, precisely what we have been busy doing for more or less practical reasons. That’s surely enough reason for us to love Rorty regardless of what he is saying about the rest. Thanks to Rorty and to people of the same bent, literary criticism is no longer a Cinderella among the other disciplines, but a profession that seems to be probably best positioned to cope with the postmodern situation. Philosophy, history and all the ‘soft’ fields of inquiry, as Rorty calls them, turn out to be so many fictive or rhetorical constructs. But literary criticism, by its proximity to and perhaps contamination by, or even better, as a result of its consanguine relation to the practice of fiction, provides the least deluded means of addressing the postmodern condition. In short, literary criticism frankly acknowledges its institutional role as a social and cultural practice, free of essentialist presuppositions and truth-claims. A frivolous activity? All the better, Rorty would reply, for it is through ‘theory-talk’ rather than high-handed ‘theory’, through the freeplay of meanings, that we can build Oscar Wilde’s utopia or the Good Global Society.
Rorty may be less interesting and rather controversial for some literary critics as well. “One philosophical method which will do no good at all,” Rorty says, “is ‘analysis of meanings’. The problem is that one thinks there are too many meanings around and the other side too few” (quote from Philosophy and the Mirrror of Nature, 88). Such observations are likely to affect, in a significant way, pace Fish, the way we interpret literary texts. The notion that ‘meaning’ is out there in the text and that the business of a literary critic is to re-cover it (cover it again?) is deeply embedded in our literary practice. If American students of literature have long been exposed to New Criticism, with its insistence on the autonomy and self-sufficiency of texts, with its notion of the text as being a ‘verbal icon’, a structure of in-wrought irony or paradox, we, on the Continent, have been practising a kind of ‘explication du texte’ or close philological reading (in our Saxon schools they will study Goethe’s Faustus for a year or two in the (vain?) hope of eliciting all the possible textual meanings by interpreting that most famous poem line by line). In other words, we have been entertaining the notion that we ought to be guided by such high standards as ‘truth’ and ‘objectivity’ in what we are doing with the text, by some high ground of principle or by some fixed standards of judgment (think of the way we have been doing ‘aesthetics’, by focusing on various essentialist concepts such as ‘the beautiful’, ‘the sublime’, etc.). We have adopted the Enlightenment ethos of theory, reason and truth; we have committed ourselves to what goes by the name of ‘scientific realism’. The very notion of ‘metaphor’ – meta – phoros – that is, beyond light – suggests that there may be something interesting, something new, perhaps essential to our being, behind that light. This, of course, doesn’t mean that we never listened to what Nietzsche said about truth as being ‘a moving army of metaphors, metonymies and anthropomorphisms’, or to Wittgenstein’s descriptions of ‘language games’ and ‘cultural forms of life’. However, the sense that we somehow manage to stand ‘above’ the text, inspecting it from a privileged position, has been stronger than our suspicion that the ‘ultimate’ reality of the text is in fact our own idiosyncratic fabrication. The worst scenario, some of us will say, is that there is no original meaning in the text, that the text is, to use Eco’s words, like a picnic where the author brings the words, and the reader brings the meanings.
To do justice to Rorty’s philosophical practice would mean to recapitulate all the key moments, and why not? the details of the history of scientific, philosophical and literary practices. I can only say that such a synopsis is to be found in his wonderful and most influential work, which I have quoted previously, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1980), a book which has been translated into 15 languages. Other major philosophical contributions of Rorty’s are, in chronological order: The Linguistic Turn, 1967, updated in 1992; Consequences of Pragmatism, 1982; Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, 1988, translated into 21 languages, Romanian included; Objectivity, Relativism and Truth: Philosophical papers I., 1991; Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical papers II., 1991; Hoffnung statt Erkentnnis: Einleitung in die pragmatische Philosophie, 1994; Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth Century America, 1998; Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers III, 1998; Philosophy and Social Hope, a collection of non-technical esasays, which is forthcoming.
After having served for almost two decades as Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University, and for sixteen years as Professor of the Humanities at the University of Virginia, Professor Rorty is currently Professor of Comparative Literature at Stanford University. Since last week, last Friday, to be precise, Professor Rorty has been a Doctor Honoris Causa member of the Babes-Bolyai academic community.
In what follows I would like to ask Rector Marga to make a few comments on Professor Rorty’s essay, which all the respondents have had the pleasure to read. Professor Marga, you have the word…
Andrei Marga: Dear colleagues, Professor Rorty offered us for this discussion a text which has to be included in the general framework of his work, and this is the first step for understanding his text. I don’t want to repeat the content of this text, but to say some words about its place within Rorty’s work and within contemporary philosophy. To start this discussion, I will also raise some questions addressed to Professor Rorty based on his text.
In the beginning I will say that “The Decline of Redemptive Truth and the Rise of a Literary Culture” is an excellent text in many respects. First of all, it is a summary of Rorty’s philosophy, with regard to some crucial concepts: truth, philosophy, intellectual history, the difference between literature, literary culture, and philosophical culture and religious culture. The text is also an excellent challenge with regard to our conceptual framework for approaching the raised problems: the modern, the advanced modern societies. I find it is an excellent approach and an attempt to offer intellectual tools for defining, for promoting human liberty, human solidarity. This text raises problems first of all with regard to other texts of Rorty. In this sense, I will show that this text, in my own interpretation, is a continuation of “Philosophy and Pragmatism”, which was published as an introduction to the second volume published by Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, and in this introduction Rorty describes the idea of a post-philosophical culture. Now he has completed this idea by saying that this post-philosophical culture is, or could be, a literary culture. In so far as the connections with other previous works of Rorty’s are concerned, I would also mention that Rorty does not touch for the first time the problem of the relationship between religion and philosophy. In at least two previous texts, for instance in “Is there a problem about fictional discourse?” from ’79 and in “Deconstruction”, another text, he approaches this problem. In both texts he takes distance from Derrida by not accepting the idea that all is a text, all is a general text, all is a kind of protuberance of a general text. Richard Rorty underlines the idea that literature and philosophy and science and so on are different kinds of texts. They must not be confused in the same text. As regards the place of this conceptualisation in the history of philosophy, I wonder about the proximity of Rorty’s approach, or rather the comparability of his approach to other famous approaches. In this sense, I would ask Professor Rorty about his relationship with, for instance, Auguste Comte. Comte describes the evolution of the modern mind as a passage from the religious mind to the philosophic mind and then to the scientific mind. Rorty is using a scheme based on three concepts, but he differentiates the third one, saying that the last stage is not the scientific one, but rather the literary one. In this sense, I would like to ask him to compare his approach to the famous approach of Auguste Comte, which is familiar, which is notorious in our country, in our context. Furthermore, I was impressed by the links between Rorty and Emerson: the perspective in which he has interpreted the intellectual history of the last five centuries is maybe the perspective of self-reliance. We are familiar with the concept of ‘self-reliance’ based on Emerson’s approach; in fact, Professor Stanciu, who is present here, has translated Emerson, precisely the text I am referring to.
As far as philosophy is concerned, of course, Professor Rorty must be situated, in a sense, in the continuum of philosophical culture. It isn’t very clear to me, Professor Rorty, whether you consider, in your criticism addressed to the philosophical culture, Philosophy, with a capital P, or mainly “many philosophies”. Because in your introduction to Consequences of Pragmatism you mention mostly Philosophy with a capital P. Now, you have avoided this kind of speech and you have addressed strong criticism to philosophies without any distinction. Of course, we have different possibilities to choose from with regard to the relations between philosophy and literature. In my opinion, it is very difficult to separate literature, the literary culture, from philosophy. At least in our context, the European context, we are accustomed to the idea that philosophy is a kind of unavoidable structure or assumption.
As I said yesterday, we are also very eager, very curious to have your reaction to the current interpretations of your relativism. Mostly in your text entitled “Philosophy and Solidarity” you mention the three meanings of relativism and you say that you are defending the third ethnocentric one, which means that you consider that the standards of truth, the criteria of rationality are placed within the interactions, within the various relationships in a society. As I mentioned yesterday, there is a danger in not separating rational structure, rational attitudes from non-rational ones. I am curious to see your position, your defense against the danger of not being sufficiently distant from the irrational or purely contextual approaches; and in this sense I have a personal curiosity to see your reaction to what Habermas said about your relativism. Habermas was most careful to distinguish your relativism in comparison to the long history of his own approach. Habermas said, I quote: “Rorty führt die Objektivität über Erkenntnis auf die Inter-Subjektivität einer Übereinstimmung zurück”. I repeat, I want to see your reaction to this interpretation, which, I could say, is very popular among European philosophers, and not only among the Romanian ones.
And, finally, my last remark. Of course, we can discuss about the relationship between philosophy and literature under different aspects. Is philosophy a kind of literature? Can we place philosophy with literature? Is there a succession between literature and philosophy, or could they cohabitate? According to my understanding, you don’t consider philosophy as a kind of literature. This disposition, which has been shared by Derrida, for instance, is avoided in your text. But I would like to see in more details your reactions to such questions. Thank you.
Liviu Cotrău: Thank you. I wonder if Professor Rorty would like to answer straight away, or maybe he would like to take other questions.
Richard Rorty: I’d be glad to answer straight away, at least to some of Rector Marga’s questions. On the relation to Comte: it seems to me that what Comte called ‘a positive stage of development’ is just a form of what he called ‘the metaphysical stage’, the form which metaphysics takes when it becomes completely materialist and says that natural science gives us the Truth. It seems to me that the idea that natural science gives us the Truth is the result of the idea, the Platonic – Socratic idea that the Truth, in the sense of “that which all human beings most badly need to know”, is “what all human beings can agree upon”. Well, it turned out in the nineteenth century that the only thing that human beings could really agree on were the results of natural science. So people said OK, that must mean that natural science is what we’we always wanted to know. But, of course, it isn’t. All natural science tells you is how things work. It’s very nice to know how things work if you’re interested in technology. But knowing how things work is of no use whatever in figuring out what to do with your life. So, natural science is not a source of the sort of truth that religion and philosophy try to get. Materialist metaphysics, physics, natural science as the answer to the old philosophical questions is a failure, because it doesn’t speak to the old philosophical questions. The only thing you can say for it is that it is true: that is, everybody agrees on physical scientific theories. But truth is not the same as universal utility and all that science is good for is prediction and control of the environment.
I don’t have anything special to say about the relation to Emerson except that the Emersonian idea of self-reliance seems to me to have been taken over by Nietzsche, who read Emerson intensively, and who made more of the notion of self-reliance than Emerson managed to make, by transmuting it into the idea of self-creation.
On the relation between literature and philosophy, I don’t think of literature as taking the place of philosophy. I think of us as reading theological and philosophical texts in a literary way, that is not as attempts to get at the truth, but as imaginative suggestions about ways in which we might develop our self-image. So it isn’t that one discipline will end and another discipline will take its place. The discipline of philosophy we will have with us forever. There will always be commentary on Plato, on Kant, on Hegel, on Nietzsche and so on, and you might as well call that philosophy, but this commentary will not be seen as a quasi-scientific discipline which will come up with results. It will merely be like literary criticism, an attempt to lay out the alternatives.
On relativism I don’t see that a purely contextualist approach is irrationalist. Here Habermas and I simply disagree. I think that every attribution of meaning, every attempt at appreciation or interpretation is a matter of putting something in a context. That’s all we ever do. Contexts are used to putting things, texts, people, institutions, nations in context, which is useful for various purposes. To put something in a given context is never irrational; the only thing that’s irrational is to insist that that is the only relevant context to put it in. If you have a diversity of contexts to put the same thing in, you don’t have to be afraid of irrationalism. Habermas thinks there has to be a single universal context to overcome irrationalism, and I don’t.
One last question I’d like to take up. Rector Marga asked: is philosophy unavoidable? Well, the history of philosophy is for us, Europeans and Americans, unavoidable because it’s part of what made us the people we are. To understand ourselves requires some sense of what we call the history of philosophy, that is the canonical texts from Plato to Nietzsche. If we don’t study those texts, we lose a great deal, but that is not to say that there will always be a quasi-scientific discipline called ‘philosophy’. There may or may not be and whether there is or not, I think, doesn’t greatly matter.
Liviu Cotrău: Should we understand, Professor Rorty, that philosophers and literary critics, theorists and anti-theorists, professionals and anti-professionals are all in the same boat, and while some are out there to steer the boat by some fixed coordinates, some are just rocking the boat to show that there are no such coordinates, and shall we then say that both procedures, both positions are valid on their own terms?
Richard Rorty: Well, again, the difference between Habermas and myself is that he uses the notion of validity, and I would prefer the notion of utility and say that various academic disciplines, political institutions, facts and so on have utility for one or another purpose, that if you want to ask: “is there a purpose”, ”are they valid”, all you can be asking is “is this a purpose that it is worth bothering about?” Purposes become obsolete, so it may be that certain academic disciplines, certain texts, certain political institutions and so on, certain cultures, will become obsolete. To say that ‘there is no fixed coordinate to steer the boat by’ is just to say that as cultural politics becomes more and more democratic, more people will give up the idea of universal validity and will only consider: Has the decision about what purposes to serve been freely arrived at? It seems to me that if you can answer that question affirmatively, then you don’t really need to worry about the political.
Liviu Cotrău: As you may have noticed, most of the respondents here belong to the literary camp, so I wonder if there are any questions regarding the relationship between pragmatism and literature, that is, if there are any consequences of that sort of philosophy for literary practice, because at least one follower of Richard Rorty’s, Stanley Fish, is an exemplary case of a literary critic who will strongly reject the implications and consequences of theory, claiming that theory has no consequences whatsoever for literary practice, it does not change one’s beliefs. So I think this is a very common consequence of what we think we are doing in the field of literary studies.
Richard Rorty: I think that Stanley Fish overstates his point. I think what he is entitled to say is that reading a theory book doesn’t help you find what to say about a text, a novel, a poem, a play, in any way different than reading another novel or poem or play helps you figure out what to say about the first novel, poem or play. That is, works of theory, works of philosophy are just texts to be collated with other texts, compared to other texts, have similarities and differences pointed out. They don’t stand on a different level than literary texts telling you what to do with literary texts. I think nothing can tell you what to do with a literary text. What you do with it is a fiction of the other books you’ve read, the other interests you have, the other people you know, the other concerns you have. If you are lucky, your particular constellation of interests, concerns, acquaintances and so on will produce a work of criticism which itself becomes a text worthy of studying. Great critics, Dr. Johnson, Hazlitt, Harold Bloom, Goethe, the canonical thinkers of national traditions of literary criticism write texts which we read in the same way that we read novels, plays, poems and so on. I think the notion that there can be such a thing as the professional study of literature is unfortunate. That young people should be given an oportunity in universities to write literary criticism is, I think, a very good idea. The idea that there can be a method of doing so I think is a very bad idea. The young students of literature should not be encouraged to practice a method, they should not be encouraged to think that now they understand how to find out the meanings of texts. It is enough for them to think: “perhaps some day I could do something like what Dr. Johnson did with Milton, perhaps some day I could do something like what Bloom did with Blake, perhaps some day I could do something like what Heidegger did with Socrates, perhaps some day I can say something interesting about one of my favorite books. This is a perfectly reasonable intellectual ambition, and universities are a good place in which to encourage this ambition. But the unfortunate idea that there is a quasi-scientific discipline called “literary interpretation” is, I think, something that we could give up without worrying.
Liviu Cotrău: We are going to lose our jobs, Professor Rorty.
Richard Rorty: For years I was told by audiences of philosophy students and professors that I was going to make them lose their jobs.
Liviu Cotrău: Indeed, the philosophers would lose their jobs first.
Richard Rorty: The philosopher’s job is to read books that other people don’t read and to talk about those books. I mean, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is a very hard book. And somebody has to figure out what it says, and relate it to the concerns of a new generation. Sooner or later somebody has to re-read the literary canon and relate those texts to the concerns of a new generation. This job will always be open, whether there is a quasi-scientific discipline or not doesn’t matter. It might be done outside the university, it might be done inside the university, but, again, that’s a matter of allocation of resources.
Liviu Cotrău: I would say the literati will be very pleased with your account of philosophy, but probably the linguists won’t be that happy about it, for they think they are following, let’s say, a ‘more’ scientific, ‘more’ scholarly, ‘more’ rational procedure. There are a few distinguished linguists around, so I wonder if Chomsky might be of any help in this discussion.
Mircea Borcilă: Professor Rorty, I must start with the idea that I am not a Chomskyan myself. I would rather play the devil’s advocate by reminding you about that confrontation Chomsky started in the 1980s with your philosophy, and pointing to one aspect that he thought was crucial, namely the fact that he denies the very principle of accessibility of a reflexive mind, of the basic structures of language and thought as such. In one word, he denies Vico’s point of departure for building the humanities, and he tells us that the only way out is to go back to the Galilean method in the science of nature to find, not necessarily any truth, but to find a way, an access to, a contact with what he means to be the basic roots of our human nature. Now, I’m not aware of your reply to this criticism, and I must say I don’t agree with Chomsky’s position. Fundamentally I’m on your side, but I would be very much interested in your present-day reply to Chomsky.
Richard Rorty: There has been a controversy between Chomsky and philosophers of language like Donald Davidson and incidentally myself on the question whether the notion of the structures of language is one that names a fruitful topic of research. Chomsky recently wrote an article saying that there is this huge scientific enterprise going on in linguistics, and Davidson is suggesting that it can’t possibly take place, but it does take place, we are doing this; and I think that all one can say is that we just have to wait and see whether something interesting comes out of what is called ‘MIT linguistics’ or ‘MIT cognitive science’, the kind of enterprise which grew up around Chomsky and others. It may be that there are interesting linguistic universals of the sort that Chomsky is looking for, but we don’t know that a priori. Davidson, I think, can show that there are no such universals, we can just say there is no particular reason to look for them. I think that all one can do is say to Chomsky: “O.K., well, keep doing the research, so far you haven’t really shown us anything that is very exciting, but who knows, maybe you will.”
Mircea Borcilă: What about the second generation of cognitive science, Lakoff’s and Johnson’s opposition to Chomsky as an alternative?
Richard Rorty: I confess, I don’t understand the work of Lakoff and Chomsky very well. They say it’s important to figure out, you know, which words are metaphors and what their metaphorical meaning is. I can’t see what the importance is. As Nietzsche said, as you put it, every word started out probably as some sort of metaphor, but I can’t really care what sort. I don’t see why I should care what metaphor each word can be traced back to, I don`t see what we would do with this knowledge if we had it. So, I don’t see what Lakoff and Chomsky think there lies in the future, but I may simply not have read enough of their work to really grasp their program.
Liviu Cotrău: Professor Stanciu has got something to say…
Virgil Stanciu: Professor Rorty, if I may, I must confess I have a problem with the way you treat natural sciences and the materialist metaphysicians. Are we to understand that philosophy should be removed from the scientific field totally, along with the literary and artistic fields? And, if that is the case, what do we make of the fine philosophical works that are not really science, Stephen Hawking’s, for instance?
Richard Rorty: I can’t see what further increase of knowledge about the Big Bang or about related matters would give us that would be more than, so to speak, ‘greater elegance’. The completion of the project of a unifying science, finding out eveything one wants to know, finding out everything that every scientist wants to know would give us an enormously beautiful, intellectual, imaginative construction. But I think that it would leave us in very much the same spiritual position that we were in in the days of Democritus, you know. We now know a great deal of details that Democritus didn’t know, but it’s still atoms and void; and atoms and void aren’t really very interesting. To qualify that a bit: it’s sometimes said we now know that it isn`t atoms and void because of quantum indeterminacy, because of one or another special scientific result, but I seem to have a blind spot for appreciating the importance of these scientific results. The intellectual and imaginative power of the new scientific theories seems to me, you know, admirable, but I can’t think of anything to do with these results. So even after we find out how the brain works, you know, how, molecule by molecule, information is processed, conceptual thought occurs, imagination happens and so on, I don’t think we will have any better idea of what to do with our brain.
Liviu Cotrău: Richard Rorty has been labeled a postmodern philosopher. I suppose Professor Matei Călinescu, who has done some interesting research work on the issue of postmodernism, would perhaps like to situate Rorty’s philosophy in the tradition of postmodern thinking.
Matei Călinescu: Well, I will limit myself to asking you an unphilosophical question, or perhaps two. The first question has to do with what is happening in today’s world in the West, in the United States primarily, with the discussion about literature. For instance, literature is under a double challenge at this point. From the academia come voices in English departments, in humanities departments, that say simply there is no such thing as literature, that this is an elitist invention, there are texts, there are advertisements, there are texts, there are literary works, there are simply texts, why don’t we create departments of textual studies? There have been proposals to call English departments ‘Departments of Textual Studies’. For there is a very strong challenge here. The idea of literature appears as elitist, class-based, politically and culturally incorrect. The canon is also under challenge. It has been totally politically incorrect. On the other hand, there is the challenge coming from popular culture, from the world of entertainment, the amusement industry and the Frankfurt School of philosophers. Sociologically, one may even know that there are people, young people in the US who pride themselves on not having ever read a book. Not to speak of novels or of more complex literary texts. So how do we go about recommending a literary model of organizing knowledge and deciding about purposes and the crisis of the idea of literature? That’s one thing and then one marginal question you recommend, and I agree with you intellectually, the abandonment of any method, which brings me to the idea of Feyerabend’s Against Method. On the other hand, students of literature and of other disciplines are looking for the purpose for studying this, finding finally a job in the area, there are intellectual fashions, there are people, for instance young people in the US, who undertake studies with psychoanalysis, or literary students who undertake studies in psychoanalysis, or Lacan or whatever, because the market is there. If you are a Lacanian, you find a job, if you are an old-fashioned stuffy liberal, you don’t find a job. So what would be your response to these questions?
Richard Rorty: On the first topic. It seems to me it’s perfectly true that literature, in the sense of the canon, the stuff that has been usually been studied in literature departments, is an elitist invention. But it’s the elite that invented it, and it has been a very useful elite. The intellectuals of the West who are bound together across the generations by studying those canonical texts have been a force for social good. They have organized themselves around those canonical texts in the way that religious people organize themselves around the sacred scriptures. In the paper that I distributed for this round table I called it ‘Shelley’s defense of poetry’. Shelley is saying we could have gotten along without the philosophers and the scientists, but think what human life in Europe would be like if we had not preserved Greek art, Greek literature, if we had not preserved Dante, if we had not preserved Shakespeare and so on! And I think he’s absolutely right. These texts were vehicles for social progress, they were inspirations for the creation of human liberty. So it would not be a light thing to give up the study of that canon. There is nothing particularly wrong with elitism. The only question is: is it a good elite or a bad elite? And the elite that has organized around what we call ‘literature’ as a whole has been a good elite.
On the question of how you get jobs if you live in a culture which is professionalized to the degree that university instruction is professionalized I think you just have to be cynical about it. If you have to look like a Lacanian, look like a Lacanian. Eventually you will get tenure, eventually they won’t be able to fire you any more, and then you can look like what you want to look. I and many other people started our careers as philosophy professors by imitating the dominant fashions in philosophy and doing what we were expected to do, and then we got tenure, and then we did what we wanted to do. This seems to me a perfectly reasonable compromise.
Marius Jucan: In support of what you were saying of the literary culture, what would be the Marxist critical tradition of the imagination, because in one of your most famous essays on Heidegger, “Dickens and Kundera”, you actually oppose the novelist to the philosopher, and if I understood well, there is a kind of play versus the philosopher and the novelist, and under the guidance of the philosopher we recognize reason or rationalization, and under the guidance of the novelist we may recognize the freeplay of imagination. Now, the focus of my question would be on just how free is this play of imagination, in your conception?
Richard Rorty: I’m not sure I understand. I mean how free is it compared with… with what?
Marius Jucan: How free is it compared to the discourse of rationality?
Richard Rorty: Oh, I guess I think there is no such thing as ‘the discourse of rationality’, that there are simply conversations within expert cultures conducted according to whatever norms are prevalent within that expert culture at a certain time. I mean, to be a good philosopher in Germany in 1820, you conformed to a certain set of rules, you know, you had to fit within a certain expert culture, to be a good philosopher in the US at the present time you fit within another expert culture. Both expert cultures are rational discourses, one is just as rational as the other. I think that the nice thing about being a poet or being a novelist is there is. n’t a relevant expert culture. If you’re good enough, you may break through the conventions and do something so novel that it will take the literary critics a long time to figure out what it is that you did. And that’s called ‘literary greatness’. So, you know, one reason that literary bohemia has always seemed so different from the university is that within the university there are acknowledged experts and in the bohemia there are no acknowledged experts. You need both institutions, but it isn’t because universities are rational and bohemia is irrational, it`s just that you need the conversability that comes from the participation in an expert culture, and you also need people who don’t want to converse; they just want to create.
Corin Braga: Professor Rorty, you give in your paper a convincing argument on the evolution of the idea of “redemptive truth”. You make the distinction between three historical acceptations of what you consider to be the goal of human knowledge: God in the religious culture, Truth in the philosophical culture, and self-realization in the literary culture. Now, I would like to focus on some of the historical joints of this evolution.
Firstly, you state that the shift from a philosophical truth to a literary vision first took shape in the works of some writers such as Cervantes and Shakespeare. These writers dropped the Platonic idea of some single and final essence of humanity, and they started searching for the actual polymorphous variety of humankind. Now, could this metamorphosis be the result of a conflict of visions that affected the ontological certainty of the Baroque thinkers? Let me explain this point. By the end of the sixteenth century, the Neo-platonic and magical philosophy of the Renaissance was bluntly contested by Christian theology. Reformation, and especially the Counter-Reformation, tried to reinstall the orthodox dogma, and this resulted in a brutal confrontation between two visions of the world, between two explanations of the world: the Christian and the Neo-platonic one. Could this conflict be the cause that led to a collapse of the certitude of a final truth (be it religious or philosophical) and reoriented the ‘intellectuals’ towards the literary exploration of the variety of human nature?
Secondly, you state that the idea of a philosophical truth ended with Nietzsche, but was perpetrated in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by the idea of a scientific truth. So, in the nineteenth century the philosophical culture was, on the one hand, challenged and replaced by the literary culture, and, on the other hand, continued by positivism and natural sciences. Now, this picture could be restated in a different arrangement. We could say that the culture that in the nineteenth century challenged and disrupted metaphysics was positivistic, atheistic and materialistic natural science, and the culture that preserved the religious and philosophical idea of the sacred and the absolute, the shift from ethics to aesthetics, was literature. What do you think about such a restatement of the positions?
Thirdly, you argue that contemporary intellectuals feel progressively disenchanted with the idea of a scientific final truth. This means that the scientific explanation, which is a prolongation of the metaphysical explanation, is also about to vanish. Could we place this phenomenon of vanishing under the name of postmodernism? I wouldn’t ask this question if I didn’t know that you consider postmodernism to be an inappropriate and misleading concept.
And, finally, what do you think of the idea of relating postmodernism (which is currently connected to the postindustrial societies) to postcommunism? In the utopian model of ‘literary’ culture, the leading principle would be the respect for difference and the tolerance towards each individual truth. Just on the contrary, the communist totalitarian societies were built on the idea of a single absolute truth, elaborated by the Marxist ideology and put into practice by the communist party. Could communist societies be seen as one of the last social applications of the concept of a unique ‘redemptive truth’? Thank you.
Richard Rorty: On the first point, I’m not sure why you picked neo-Platonist philosophy versus Christianity as one of the causes of the ferment that produced, among other things, Cervantes and Shakespeare. I don’t have any particular views about why these people occurred at that time except my hunch would be that the Reformation must have had something to do with it. The fact that you had the clergy at war with one another for a century, that the unanimity of religious belief had broken up perhaps had something to do with the rise of modern literature. I suppose I would, this may be just because philosophers always do this, but I would tend to put the crucial conflict of the period not in the sixteenth century, but in the seventeenth century, in the conflict between the new science and the church, but I don’t have any firm views about this. I don’t think I’m a good enough intellectual historian to answer the question very well.
About the sacred, it seems to me that the notion of ‘the sacred’ probably can’t survive in a literary culture, because the sacred has to be special, it has to be reserved from the rest of life, it has to be set apart. It seems to me that the rise of literary culture replaces the notion of the sacred with that of the private, you know, that which you don’t have to justify to the community, that which you can take full responsibility for yourself and which other people don’t have the right to question you about. The private/public opposition seems to me a more useful opposition than the opposition between the sacred and the profane. I think that the idea of a single truth, redemptive truth, either in its religious or philosophical or materialist metaphysics form suggests that there is something sacred which all human beings have the same duty to acknowledge and once you get rid of something which all human beings have the duty to acknowledge other than their social responsibility of their human beings, then you don’t have the idea of the sacred anymore. You just have the idea of the sphere of the individual as separate from the sphere of social responsibility.
Professor Călinescu has written a lot about various ways in which the term ‘postmodernism’ is used, and one of the things he said that seemed to me most important is that there is a confusion between the idea of modernity and the idea of the literary and artistic avantgarde. I think modernity is, as Habermas says, an unfinished project that we still have with us. I don’t think anything has changed since the Enlightenment in our social goals, our idea of what society ought to be like, so in that sense there is no such thing as social postmodernity. There are, of course, succesive avantgardes, the literary-artistic avantgarde of the first part of the twentieth century got called ‘modernism’, when it was time for a new avantgarde, they had to call themselves something different, so people began calling them ‘postmodern’, but that’s a meaningless expression, it just means whatever avantgarde came after that avantgarde. And soon there would be another avantgarde, which will be post-postmodernism. You can keep this up forever if you want to.
I don’t think there is any such thing as post-industrial society. You know, the industrial society is going strong in the Third World, the people that make the clothing, make the sneakers, produce most of the stuff that the rest of the world uses, so I don’t see much hope in industry going away. I mean, I can’t quite imagine what a postindustrial society would look like. I think Daniel Bell’s story about postindustrial society has some relevance to the economic situation of the United States, but not much to the world as a whole.
I don’t see much of a connection between communism and the idea of redemptive truth. Any gang of thugs that seizes control of the government, the Nazis, the Communists, the righ-wing Republicans in the United States, will say we stand for the one true something or other. That’s what the Catholic Church said, it`s what the Communist Party said, that’s what any gang that wants power will inevitably say. One reason not to believe that there is such a thing as redemptive truth is that we might be able to create a culture in which the very idea of claiming that our government has the truth just sounds ridiculous. We managed to create a situation in Europe in which the idea of a government saying ‘we are on God’s side’ began to sound ridiculous because everybody said so, you know. Nobody took it seriously. I think we may be moving into a period when saying ‘We stand for the truth’ will sound equally important.
Berszán István: I have just one question. I have concluded from your paper that I could get pragmatist to a certain extent. I can accept how a philosophical question of what the truth is is transformed into the open question “what to do with ourselves”. It seems to me that this question in your paper is opened only within a process of reflection, within a process of using signifiers or within a literary culture. The term ‘literary’ in its sense referring to the signifying activity or practice functions as a synecdoque here. It stands for any alternative practice, which means that reading and writing exercises or practices are happening exclusively on the scene of signifiers. Why do we not put again the open question ‘What to do with ourselves when we read or write?’ It seems to me that this practice is reduced to the scene of signifiers in a literary culture. When we read or when we write it means that we use signifiers, and it seems to me there must be an answer to this open question, and if there is an answer, it is not an open question anymore.
Richard Rorty: I guess I don’t see what alternative to what you are calling ‘the scene of signifiers’ we have. We talk to one another and, you know, if you want to call it so, that’s, you think, signifiers, we can’t stop talking to each other, we shouldn’t stop talking to each other, so, I mean, what’s so bad about the scene of signifiers?
Berszán István: Because it’s… the problem for me is that it’s an exclusive scene!
Richard Rorty: What’s the alternative then?
Berszán István: I think it’s quite hard to make a conference now on this topic because I began to serve these alternatives under the name of ritual reading and writing exercises, and, of course, when I’m speaking, when I’m formulating sentences, I am using signifiers. But the starting point for me was that when I read, there happen gestures which aren’t inside the scene of signifiers, or they make another rhythm, not the rhythm of using signifiers, maybe another time. For me time is a temporization, making time, and it depends on the gestures which make the rhythm of this time.
Richard Rorty: I read your paper on the subject and I can’t really get the hang of your use of the notion of ‘ritual’. I mean, I vaguely see what you’re suggesting, but it rather reminds me of Bergson, you know… Bergson’s attempt to escape from concepts into a realm of pure durée, of pure unspatialized temporality… it seems to me, you know, it was a nice idea, but nobody knew how to do it. I mean, it sounded good, but Bergson didn’t explain how to do the tricks, and I sort of have the same questions about your notion of ritual. You know, how would I know whether I escaped the scene of signifiers? Just as in Bergson one wonders, you know: what would it be like not to have any concepts? Would I still be there? I have the feeling, if I left the scene of signifiers, I wouldn’t recognize myself anymore.
Berszán István: OK. Thanks!
Liviu Cotrău: What is really bothering me is the spin-off of these pragmatic and neo-pragmatic assumptions, the collapse of binary oppositions, the collapse of antinomies: ‘subjective’ versus ‘objective’, ‘synthetic’ versus ‘analytical’, ‘true’ versus ‘false’ and so on, with great names behind such distinctions. Take, for example, Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels’ Against Theory. They say that an example of the tendency to generate theoretical problems is splitting apart terms which actually should be taken together; so, in their view, the mistake is to imagine the possibility or desirability of moving from one term to another. Now, in the field of literary studies we constantly operate with such distinctions and oppositions, for instance ‘authorial intention’ versus ‘textual intention’, what Eco has called intentio auctoris and intentio operis. This can hardly be taken as a futile distinction – witness the productivity of various kinds of inquiries – formalism, structuralism, New Criticism, etc. – into the nature of the text’s intention and meaning. So my question, Professor Rorty, is to what extent would you endorse such radical denunciations as Knapp and Michaels’ of the practice of literary criticism operating with structural and functional dichotomies?
Richard Rorty: I guess I have the same doubts about the fruitfulness of structuralism and New Criticism and so on as I do about Chomsky and MIT cognitive science. It’s produced some good books, just as MIT has produced some good books. But I have a feeling those books would have been written anyway, even without this, you know, huge theoretical structure. Chomsky has made some interesting observations about what may turn out to be a universal grammar, but he didn’t have to surround these observations with this huge theory of innate structures. There were some good New Critics, but they didn’t have to construct this big theory of the verbal icon in order to do what they did. I think what was alive in New Criticism was the example of Eliot’s critical essays and some people were able to write essays almost as good as poems. Some people were able to produce essays almost as intriguing as Emerson’s. But I don’t see that literary criticism has been, you know, has had its level raised by this sort of huge professional movements that have been taking place. They’ve been movements in the direction of professionalization, and you can’t have a profession without such claims about method, structure and so on. I just don’t think that one should take them that seriously: you can use them to get a job, but after you use them to get a job, you shouldn’t really pay too much attention to them.
Mircea Borcilă: Professor Rorty, but does it go back to the question of how it works? I mean poetics or the theory of literature in this perspective asks itself a different question than literary criticism. My question is: is that question legitimate within a literary culture as you envision?
Richard Rorty: Again, all I can say is I don’t think that asking it has shown much fruit so far. That is, I think that asking the question ‘how do literary texts work?’ either means having a general theory about how texts work, which seems to me nobody has convincingly done, or it’s just saying: ‘this poem works this way, that novel works that way’, don’t bother me with the question of whether this is typical of the way poems or novels work. I prefer the lighter kind of criticism, and I just haven’t seen the fruits of claims that this is the way that things in general would work.
Liviu Cotrău: I am sure, ladies and gentlemen, that you would like to take part in our discussion, so would you like to address any question to Professor Rorty? Yes, please.
Question: I am not a philosopher. I am a communicator, but I find this session particularly interesting. I think what I feel is we need to break out of the ‘box’. In America they will say there are a lot of things inside the box, there they stand inside the box. Theory or philosophical theory, whatever kind of theory you want to talk about becomes obsolete. I don’t agree that science is a truth, science has also become obsolete through the years, over and over again, It proved something wrong and we believed it was the truth. I found it out years ago. I was very young and objected to doing things just so inside the box, and I kind of equated that with theory, basing everything on theory. It was useful. I made a mistake. I wish I had acquired more skill. I think that theory is just simply that. The problem is, and I would agree with you, sir, that the problem is why we take that too seriously, why we take it as a truth, why we take it as a belief, or we use it as an exercise to find a reason, to experiment. I remember I sat with a group of Florentine artists once and I spent a month copying each other. That did not make me in the end an artist by that. It simply gave me some practice in learning to use some of those skills, and I think that’s what theory can help us with. I frankly admit I only trust my own theories. I develop them. Thank you.
Richard Rorty: I guess my only comment is to tell you a story about my most successful teaching. I once taught in a summer school for professors who came from different places to learn about literary theory, and I had one professor from South Africa who was writing a book on black women novelists in South Africa, and she didn’t say anything at the seminar, but after six weeks she came up to me and said: ‘I have finished my book and I have figured that it needed a methodological and theoretical preface, so I came to America for the summer to find out how to write a methodological and theoretical preface. And then I took your seminar and I realized I didn’t have to write a methodological preface. Thank you.’
Liviu Cotrău: Any other question? Yes, please…
Question: From a pragmatical point of view, you are right. But how is one to decide what is true?
Richard Rorty: I think that the word “true”, like the word “good” is the word we use when we think that a view is justified when we recommend it and so on and so, of course, I think my view is true. It isn’t true because it corresponds to the nature of things, it’s just better than anybody else’s view. What more can you say?
Question: Why is that?
Richard Rorty: That’s a long story. I think, you know, all one can do is say: Here is an alternative which has the following disadvantages, here is another alternative which has the following disadvantages and so on, and you try to go through as many alternatives as possible, but what people would really like is, you know, a single, great big massive knock-down argument in favor of pragmatism, or, you know, whatever, and, of course, you’ll never get that. All you can possibly mean by ‘my view is true’ is ‘I have thought about the alternatives and on the whole this one seems the best.’
Andrei Marga: You have a more detailed answer in your introduction to Consequences of Pragmatism, where you answer this question.
Richard Rorty: Maybe I could enlarge on it by saying I think the test of a philosophical view is, you know, how well does it contribute to the formation of a freer and more democratic culture and society than we presently have, and Dewey and the other American pragmatists thought that if you want to have a philosophical view of truth that will contribute to the greatness of such a society, we recommend the pragmatist view of truth, in that, you know, it is recommended on the basis of social utility.
Liviu Cotrău: If there are no further questions, let me conclude this wonderful occasion on the melancholic tone of Bernard Shaw’s observation that whilst the subject-matter is not exhausted, we may be exhausted. I would like to thank Professor Rorty for his willingness to take part in our panel discussion. Indeed pragmatism does have consequences. Thank you very much.
(a consemnat Mihaela Ursa)