The word “bored” above is only slightly rhetorical. Some commentators have said that Richard Rorty was “anti-philosophy” too. His defenders and fans, on the other hand, deny this. Readers can make up their own minds after reading this essay and the quotes within it.
“While Richard Rorty’s later work questioned the traditional role of philosophy, it’s inaccurate to say he grew bored with philosophy itself.”
— See source here.
It’s odd that in the Wikipedia entry on Richard Rorty, the first publication it cites (in its ‘Select Bibliography’) is from 1979. The Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, on the other hand, has a work published from 1952 in its own bibliography. Indeed, it cites many other publications which came before Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.
Rorty edited The Linguistic Turn: Essays in Philosophical Method in 1967 (when he was 36). Not that this is to argue that in 1979 there was an apocalyptic shift. Before that, in 1977, Rorty also had the paper ‘Derrida on Language, Being, and Abnormal Philosophy’ published in the Journal of Philosophy.
Rorty was born in 1931. In 1979, Rorty was 48. So are readers to assume that his book Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature was when the Real Rorty was born?
To be fair to Rorty (or simply to be accurate), in the preface to his Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature Rorty did write that
“[a]lmost as soon as I began to study philosophy, I was impressed by the way in which philosophical problems appeared, disappeared, or changed shape, as a result of new assumptions or vocabularies”.
More specifically, Rorty wrote (in the same preface) that he’d “began thinking out its plot while holding an ACLS Fellowship in 1969–1970, and wrote the bulk of the first draft while holding a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1973–74”…
Okay.
So perhaps Rorty got a little bored in 1973 rather than in 1979. Less psychologically, perhaps he simply got sick of philosophical problems appearing, disappearing, and changing shape.
Oddly enough, although Rorty got bored with philosophy, he was still influenced by such philosophers as John Dewey, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Willard Van Orman Quine and Wilfrid Sellars… at least he was until 1990. (Rorty died in 2007.)
Still, why give this essay the title ‘Did Richard Rorty Grow Bored With Philosophy’? Well, Rorty didn’t often use the precise word “bored”. However, Professor Rorty, a lifelong academic, did speak out against any “boring academic speciality” which went under the name of philosophy. Rorty, of course, was an academic philosopher, so he didn’t have himself in mind here. In any case, one can hardly claim that Rorty was bored with philosophy simply because he used this way of speaking a couple of times. So I don’t. Rorty expressed his boredom in many other ways too.
Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature
A central position of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature is summed up in the following way:
“[T]he author attempts to dissolve modern philosophical problems instead of solving them. Rorty does this by presenting them as pseudo-problems that only exist in the language-game of epistemological projects culminating in analytic philosophy. In a pragmatist gesture, Rorty suggests that philosophy must get past these pseudo-problems if it is to be productive.”
Now for a question which can also be aimed at Wittgenstein:
Is the attempt at dissolving philosophical problems the same as giving up on — or getting bored with — philosophy itself?
What happens after philosophy’s problems are dissolved?
In terms of Wittgenstein again (if not Rorty), this issue has been much debated. (As is everything else related to Wittgenstein’s position on anything and everything.) Wittgenstein’s later works certainly seem like philosophy. However, perhaps they seem like philosophy because Wittgenstein was dissolving philosophy at the time. Thus, many readers will see many philosophical terms and problems and then simply assume that they’re reading a work of philosophy.
To Rorty, “therapy” is the act of dissolving the problems found in philosophy.
Is that itself philosophy?
And what comes after therapy?…
More therapy?
In Rorty’s case, what came after philosophy (if not after therapy) was writing about literature, politics, history, etc. Did he do so in a philosophical way?
Yes.
The writer quoted above believes that philosophy will carry on regardless after the Great Dissolving. To repeat:
“In a pragmatist gesture, Rorty suggests that philosophy must get past these pseudo-problems if it is to be productive.”
The argument here is that philosophy must get past these “pseudo-problems”. But, once past them, it’s still philosophy.
Rorty himself said that philosophy wouldn’t die if his project were to be successful. He wrote:
“Whichever happens, however, there is no danger of philosophy’s ‘coming to an end’.”
Yet that may not be a claim as to the value of philosophy, simply its refusal to die. Rorty continued by saying that “[r]eligion did not come to an end in the Enlightenment”.
So Rorty did desire the death of… professional philosophy. Or at least he criticised the
“neo-Kantian image of philosophy as a profession, then, is involved with the image of the ‘mind’ or ‘language’ as mirroring nature”.
Were Rorty’s project ever to be successful, then there’d still be philosophy — what he called “edifying philosophy”! That is, Rorty’s philosophy, and Rortian philosophy and other examples of edifying philosophy. So who else did Rorty have in mind? Apart from the philosophers mentioned in this essay, he claimed that Marx, Freud and Sartre were edifying philosophers.
To repeat. Did Rorty admit his boredom with philosophy? Perhaps he’d have simply said that philosophy was repeatedly going down blind alleys. So whether he was bored or not may not be the issue. Indeed, readers themselves can decide whether Rorty’s written and spoken words express boredom.
In any case, the philosopher Thomas Nagel took a similar position to the one found in this essay. He claimed that Rorty, along with Putnam, Sellars, and Wittgenstein, were all “sick of the subject and glad to be rid of its problems”. So it’s ironic that one of Nagel’s targets, Hilary Putnam, expressed his own problem with what he too called “deflationary philosophers”. Indeed, he mainly had Rorty in mind when he used that term. In Putnam’s own words:
“There is an excitement in the air. And if I react to Professor Rorty’s book (1979) with a certain sharpness, it is because one more ‘deflationary’ book, one more book telling is that the deep questions aren’t deep and the whole enterprise was a mistake, is just what we don’t need right now.”
Rorty’s Wittgenstein and Rorty’s Heidegger
Rorty expressed his boredom through the positions of other philosophers too.
For example, he told his readers that Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Dewey “set aside” rather than “argue[d] against” epistemology and metaphysics. That is, these philosophers didn’t “devote themselves to discovering false propositions or bad arguments in the works of their predecessors”.
Rorty went into more detail elsewhere. Speaking of Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Dewey again, he claimed that
“[a]ll three make it as difficult as possible to take their thought as expressing views on traditional philosophical problems, or as making constructive proposals for philosophy as a cooperative and progressive discipline”.
Yet Rorty himself sucked out many views from Heidegger and Wittgenstein. So take this de-mystificatory interpretation of Heidegger’s notion of Dasein:
“I take ‘Being’ to be, in Heidegger [ ] merely ‘transcendental German’ for a ‘connection of man with the enveloping world’, which naturalism [ ] does not help us envisage.”
Can readers now “set aside” Rorty’s own work?
If the trick is to ignore philosophy, then can’t readers ignore Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Rorty too?
According to Rorty, this stance of ignoring prior philosophy was “revolutionary”. (Some commentators believe that Wittgenstein prided himself — or broadcasted the fact — that he’d never read philosophy. Sure, it’s hard to ignore philosophy you’ve never read.)
Of course, there can be reasons and arguments as to why we should ignore philosophy. Were these forthcoming in the cases of Rorty, Wittgenstein and Heidegger?
Take the following example.
Rorty made his Wittgensteinian and/or Heideggerian point in the following passage:
“[ ] [T]hat a ‘philosophical problem’ was a product of the unconscious adoption of assumptions built into the vocabulary in which the problem was stated — assumptions which were to be questioned before the problem itself was taken seriously.”
That can be read as stating a profound truth about philosophy (or about philosophising). Alternatively, it’s a statement of the bleeding obvious.
It’s clearly the case that a philosopher (or anyone else) is highly likely to use the “vocabulary” (or the technical terms) inherited from the “philosophical problem” he’s tackling. How could such an enterprise so much as make sense — or even begin — otherwise?
For example, if a reader were to tackle the mind-body problem, then he’s likely to use the terms “mind”, “body”, etc. Moreover, even if he doesn't see it as a problem, then he’d still need to use such words as “substance”, “clear and distinct ideas”, etc. in his criticisms. Now is all this any different to claiming that a physicist, biologist, social scientist or psychologist (unconsciously) adopts the (supposed) assumptions which are built into the vocabulary in which various problems are stated?
Let’s go wider here.
When someone uses the English language (or uses Sanskrit or German) doesn’t he/she adopt certain assumptions simply by virtue of inheriting a natural language? Indeed, wouldn’t that someone be like Wittgenstein’s lion if he/she didn’t inherit a natural language?
In these cases, then, are we trapped in the manner in which Rorty explains above? Of course, every utterance could, or does, contain “assumptions”…
But so what!
More to the point of philosophy, a technical language must be used — at least to some degree.
On a different tack.
What some readers may not understand is why Rorty himself assumed that philosophers didn’t question assumptions. More relevantly, why did he believed that philosophers didn’t realise that such assumptions needed to be “questioned” before “the problem itself was taken seriously”?
Readers would need to read a hell of a lot of historical philosophy, and philosophers, to come to such a general point. Perhaps Rorty himself did so. Yet, as already stated, even when assumptions are questioned, a given language and a given set of technical terms will still be used in order to so much as communicate. If this isn’t done, then the idea of questioning assumptions, and rebelling against the entire history of philosophy, couldn’t even be expressed.
In any case, one can question assumptions and still write philosophy. Indeed, one can question assumptions and tackle the old boring problems...
Philosophy, Therapy and Literature
If Rorty moved away from philosophy due to boredom, then what did he move toward? He moved toward literature, politics, history and sociology.
Because of that, Rorty sneered at the (not his own words) “fetishization of argument” in his book Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. This means that much of his later work owes more to literature than it does to philosophy. (Rorty would have probably have admitted this.)
In the Wittgensteinian manner, Rorty talked about the “therapy [he] offered” his readers. He also wrote that this therapy was “edifying [and] designed to make the reader question his own motives for philosophising”.
Was this therapy actually philosophy?
Rorty’s late work may well still be philosophy. However, Rorty himself believed that Wittgenstein’s and Heidegger’s work isn’t philosophy. In detail:
“To think of Wittgenstein and Heidegger as having views about how things are is not to be wrong about how things are, exactly; it is just poor taste. It puts them in a position which they do not want to be in, and in which they look ridiculous.”
(Was Rorty also referring to himself here?)
Is “not having views about how things are” a philosophical position? It depends. It could be a kind of metaphilosophy in which all philosophers are attacked for having views. However, that would still be philosophy. Alternatively, Rorty might have redefined the word “philosophy” in order for it to accommodate the kind of philosophy which he personally liked and agreed with. (Rorty often talked in terms of “redefinitions” which were needed “to keep the conversation going”.)…
But forget all that!
Wittgenstein and Heidegger did have strong views about many things. Moreover, Rorty’s Wittgenstein and Rorty’s Heidegger had strong views about other philosophers having views…
Yes, of course, Rorty believed Wittgenstein and Heidegger got out of that bind by “avoiding having a view about having views”. So how did Rorty claim that Wittgenstein and Heidegger pulled that trick off? He continued:
“One reason they manage it as well as they do is that they do not think that when we say something we must necessarily be expressing a view about a subject.”
Most (perhaps all) of the fans of Heidegger and Wittgenstein do believe that these philosophers expressed strong views about many subjects. On Rorty’s view, on the other hand, perhaps it was simply poetry, “saying something [without] expressing a view”, playing games, and/or “participating in a conversation”.
Importantly, this isn’t even a case of having a strict, narrow and pedantic view on what philosophy is. It’s really about Rorty playing games because he was bored with philosophy. Perhaps Wittgenstein and Heidegger played games too. Perhaps the playing of games is a good philosophical thing to do.
