TOO LATE TO RETIRE WHEN YOU'VE BEEN DEAD FOR CENTURIES:

After leaving Princeton's philosophy department in 1981, he never held another appointment as a philosopher--by choice. He thought philosophy's days were numbered and spent the second half of his career (and much of the first) explaining why.

But how can philosophy end? Surely the quest for Truth is eternal? Surely the hunger for Wisdom is part of human nature? Surely questions about the Good will never cease to exercise us? Well, yes and no. Certainly Rorty was not proposing that we simply give up on all the big questions. We will always mull over "how things, in the largest sense of that word, hang together, in the largest sense of that word," a phrase he quoted often from one of his favorite philosophers, Wilfrid Sellars. But he thought that philosophy's perennial abstractions, distinctions, and problems--including Truth, human nature, and the Good--though they were once very much alive, had by now led Western thought into a dead end and should be retired.

Truth, for example, has meant many things since Plato: a knowledge of the Forms; a subsistent Essence, in virtue of which all true things are true; a correspondence between sentences and states of affairs. Likewise the Good: fulfillment of one's telos, or natural end; participation in the Divine Essence; the greatest happiness of the greatest number. Each of these definitions has its partisans, but to each of them most other philosophers are quite deaf. Schools wax and wane but, unlike scientific theories, none steadily gains adherents as it achieves generally recognized solutions to common problems, while its competitors fade away. Philosophy makes no progress.

Rorty was hardly the first to make this observation and draw the conclusion that something else was necessary and inevitable. Hume's mordant aphorism gives the gist of much later criticism: "If we take in our hand any volume, of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance, let us ask: Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames, for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion." John Stuart Mill dispensed with most of traditional philosophy, though he was the greatest political and moral philosopher of his day. William James did grapple with many of the traditional problems and gave the new orientation a name ("pragmatism") and some pithy formulations: "The true is the good in the way of belief." "A difference that makes no difference is no difference at all." And perhaps the best-known and most misunderstood: "Grant an idea or belief to be true...what concrete difference will its being true make in anyone's actual life?... What experiences will be different from those which would obtain if the belief were false? What, in short, is the truth's cash-value in experiential terms?" The face of twentieth-century pragmatism and Rorty's main influence was John Dewey, a penetrating and prolific writer who unfortunately never spoke or wrote a memorable sentence.

In the introduction to Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Rorty attributed to Dewey, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger the view that he himself had adopted. It is one of innumerable passages in which Rorty advocated the euthanasia of philosophy:

Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Dewey are in agreement that the notion of knowledge as accurate representation, made possible by special mental processes, and intelligible through a general theory of representation, needs to be abandoned. For all three, the notions of "foundations of knowledge" and of philosophy as revolving around the Cartesian attempt to answer the epistemological skeptic are set aside. Further, they set aside the notion of "the mind" common to Descartes, Locke, and Kant--as a special object of study, located in inner space, containing elements or processes which make knowledge possible. This is not to say that they have alternative "theories of knowledge" or "philosophies of mind." They set aside epistemology and metaphysics as possible disciplines.... [They] glimpse the possibility of a form of intellectual life in which the vocabulary of philosophical reflection inherited from the seventeenth century would seem as pointless as the thirteenth-century philosophical vocabulary had seemed to the Enlightenment.

"Setting aside epistemology and metaphysics" is as good a short definition of pragmatism's purpose as one may hope for.

Tweet   @brothersjudd