The response to my invitation was extremely gratifying. Let me begin with the easiest responses. John Williams writes “I am interested in what you have to say about G.A. Cohen and analytic Marxism more generally.” As it happens, 32 years ago I published a lengthy critique of a book by Jan Elster in which in some considerable detail I came to terms with “analytical Marxism.” If you follow the link at the top of the page (which is, I am afraid, not clickable but has to be copied and pasted – my apologies), you will find a very large repository of my writings, among which is something that is simply identified there as the “Elster paper.” Elsewhere – it will take me a while to find it – I have published a detailed critique of one argument by G. A. Cohen. I hope that will satisfy your curiosity.
A number of you asked for my opinions about things I either
have not read or do not have opinions about and I am afraid I cannot help you
there. For example, although I studied Spinoza 70 years ago with a great
scholar, Harry Austryn Wolfson, I have never written about his works and really
have nothing to say about them. Rather more surprising, perhaps, is the fact
that I have spent almost no time reading or thinking about Wittgenstein, a fact
that is very much to my discredit, I should think. Sorry about that.
The same thing is true about Dick Rorty. I knew him back in the day and found him
quite unimpressive. I was genuinely surprised when he became a really big deal.
I do not think I have actually ever read anything by him so once again chalk
that up to my inadequacy, not his.
My favorite comment was by Achim Kriechel. Back when I was able to take long walks, one
of my favorite early-morning routes in Paris took me along Boulevard Saint
Germain past Café Flore and Deux Magots, opposite Brasserie Lipp. It was always early in the morning when I
walked there and the waiters were just setting the tables and chairs out. I do
not think I ever stopped for coffee but that little spot is burned into my
memory.
Enough for the moment. Tomorrow I will start to address
some of the serious questions which I have something resembling answers.
14 comments:
Although very different in substance and tone from the professor's devastating take on Elster's book, in a review of G. A. Cohen's book Why Not Socialism? Alasdair MacIntyre makes some broadly complementary points about the outstandingly unreflective and narrow, even twisted sort of ahistorical, asocial rationalism presupposed and deployed in (at least some instance of) Analytical Marxism: https://philarchive.org/archive/MACGAC-10
I like Rorty. He's not a titan or a luminary or anything, just someone whose commentary I enjoy.
I don't think I've spent much time with Rorty since grad school, when I was deciding whether or not to pursue a philosophy PhD after completing my MA. I watched some interviews with him on YouTube as well. I liked his demeanor and way of writing, and found it refreshing to hear a professional baldly acknowledge the unappealing features of the philosophical scene, which I had been dimly sensing; I vaguely remember an essay in Consequences of Pragmatism that describes philosophy professors as though they're merely training the next generation of lawyers, or professional crafters of argument. (I liked how Rorty acknowledged that he himself wasn't especially good at argumentation, unlike his student Robert Brandom.)
His contempt for his philosophical opponents (not to mention Republicans) is always amusing, too. It has a kind of exasperated, dismissive quality, but one that opts for curt, deadpan mockery over indignant fury. He might simply toss in a descriptor of the Republican Party as "people who think that 'family values' means hounding gays out of the military."
"The same thing is true about Dick Rorty. I knew him back in the day and found him quite unimpressive. I was genuinely surprised when he became a really big deal. I do not think I have actually ever read anything by him..."
Gratuitous, ad hominem, unkind.
It's not unkind, it's a report of his reaction: he knew Rorty and found him unimpressive. That doesn't mean Rorty *was* unimpressive in some "objective" sense; it's just a report of RPW's subjective reaction.
LFC,
He could have said the same thing about Rorty more diplomatically in scores of different ways. "Speak only good of the dead," especially if the dead are basically your allies in all or almost all major political and social causes. He's not talking about Henry Kissinger or some neocon who he knew in Harvard, after all.
The remark is gratuitiously unkind.
In one of my first philosophy classes (on Descartes) at UC Berkeley in 1983 we students were told explicitly that if we wished to educate ourselves quickly and securely into contemporary philosophical thinking then we should read and study Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. I was grateful for the advice, I suppose, though primarily because it alerted me to the importance of Wilfrid Sellars's 'Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind' as a spruced-up way of arguing for one of Hegel's central claims. A secondary benefit was being introduced to some aspects of Michael Oakeshott's thought. Later I heard Rorty lecture a few times at Berkeley. I and everyone I knew became increasingly exasperated in hearing and re-hearing what one professor referred to as 'Rorty's Stump Speech', which consisted of him cycling among oracular pronouncements about the end of philosophy, lists of the bad foundationalist and the good anti-foundationalist philosophers, and statements of doctrine beginning with the words 'We pragmatists think that'/'Like Dewey I think that'/[or more rarely]'We Nietzscheans think that'. Even later, I and everyone I knew thought that he'd lost his mind with Achieving Our Country. The synthesis given in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature certainly was stimulating and of some historical importance in the corridors of American academic philosophy, but I'm not aware of it having much of a living quality in this century. (I can't recall anyone mentioning Rorty in the past 20 years, except once in a seminar where one of my especially demented students launched an all-out attack that included the claim that I was so stupid that I hadn't even read Rorty.) It seems to me now that he was part of an opening, an opening that quickly shut, where there might be a return to a more humanistic conception in the main lines of American philosophy than what had prevailed since the death of Dewey. Raymond Geuss (him again!) gives what seems to me a fair, personal, and fascinating account of Rorty in a memorial: https://www.bu.edu/arion/files/2010/03/Geuss-on-Rorty.pdf
@ John Rapko
I read a review or two of _Achieving Our Country_. It was presented as an effort to recapture the mantle of patriotism for some version of social democratic or progressive politics. You might think that's silly, but it doesn't amount to someone's having lost his mind. If he'd written a book claiming that Mein Kampf was the greatest philosophical work of the 20th cent, then he'd have lost his mind.
John Rapko,
What's interesting in light about what you say about Rorty's lack of relevance in the U.S. philosophy today is that in Latin America, as far as I can see, Rorty is one of the very few 20th century U.S. philosophers who people read (they also read Rawls) and unlike Rawls, people seem to enjoy Rorty, to talk about him and to quote him in their own philosophical
explorations.
Two different cultures. No one is a prophet in their own land, as they say.
John Rapko: "once in a seminar where one of my especially demented students launched an all-out attack that included the claim that I was so stupid that I hadn't even read Rorty"
What ever became of that student?
A stunt like that in my field would have been career-ending.
Could you give your prospective of the recent stimulus given out due to pandemic. Will someone be able to trace the impact that it had. Monetary policy is so complicated to me, any help is appreciated.
The question of Rorty’s influence is an interesting one. On the one hand, he was an avowed metaphilosopher, someone who wrote historical or sociological commentaries on the business of professional philosophy; and given that much (though not all) of what he had to say in this regard wasn’t exactly complimentary, it’s perhaps unsurprising that the philosophy business has mostly (but not entirely) ignored or dismissed him. This phenomenon was evident during his lifetime, and Rorty would often comment on it.
In the essay Michael references above, Rorty does indeed describe his analytic colleagues as being more akin to lawyers than scientists. That is, they aren’t building knowledge; they’re just exceptionally good at arguing. Every few years, Rorty says, one or two new and exciting papers will circulate among some group of like-minded faculties (in his day, for example, there was what he called a “UCLA-Princeton-Harvard axis”); then everyone in the department goes about devising clever refutations or defenses of these papers; and in a few years everyone moves on to the next new and exciting thing. Rorty admits that it’s not exactly a bad thing that universities are home to people whose specialty is a kind of ruthless argumentation; he only wishes that the history of philosophy were more widely taught. Of course, if one is oneself gainfully employed as a ruthless arguer, why would one listen to Rorty? Or, rather, why wouldn’t one simply acknowledge that he’s right and then go on being happily gainfully employed?
On the other hand, Rorty did have actual philosophical positions. Probably most ‘analytic’ philosophers would credit his arguments for eliminative materialism from the 60s and 70s as his most original work. Dan Dennett, for example, has described Rorty’s philosophy of mind as “just about perfect.” In terms of epistemology and the philosophy of language, Rorty was mostly happy to hold up his student Robert Brandom having extended his insights far beyond what he himself was capable of. In addition, Brandom has said that Huw Price is the philosopher whose views most closely resemble Rorty’s. (BTW the “Bob Brandom” Youtube account features a recent Zoom seminar Brandom gave on pragmatism; there’s lots of discussion of Rorty, including anecdotes.)
As for Professor Wolff’s comment — I too got a “if you don’t have anything nice to say...” vibe from it. And I don’t believe he’s actually never read anything by Rorty. I wonder what they talked about, that professor Wolff found so unimpressive. Politics? Philosophy? Both? Rorty once wrote that as a professed “bourgeois liberal,” he often butted heads with his more radical colleagues. (Really, though, his politics are pretty much exactly in line with Bernie Sanders’s — even down to the impatience with identity politics.) And he certainly wasn’t a dazzling conversationalist the way Bernard Williams reportedly was, nor an exhibitionist like John Searle.
Ed Barreras,
Since I've often clashed with you, I thought I'd take this space to say that I find what you write about Rorty to be especially insightful and perceptive.
I'm familiar with Rorty from articles I've read of his, especially in the London Review of Books and not being a philosopher myself, find reading him more worthwhile than I do reading most academic philosophy.
Wallerstein, thanks. I should’ve mentioned that the essay I referenced is titled “Philosophy in America Today” — meaning the early 80s.
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