Pragmatists are concerned with understanding philosophical concepts, traditionally treated very abstractly, through the examination of their place in the concrete human practices of inquiry, contestation, adjudication and judgment. The founder of the tradition, C. S. Peirce, put it this way: in order to grasp a concept, we must connect it to that with which we have “dealings” (CP 5. 4). Otherwise, our concepts are the subject of empty metaphysics, “vagabond thoughts that tramp the public roads without any human habitation” (CP 8. 112). The insight at the heart of pragmatism is that any domain of inquiry and assertion—science, mathematics, ethics, politics—is human inquiry and assertion. In ethics and politics, this means that pragmatists reject the fruitless quest to ground objectivity in high metaphysics, a supernatural God, an all-powerful sovereign, or some other absolute ideal.
Richard Rorty was one of pragmatism’s most well-known proponents, not just within the confines of professional philosophy (which he chafed against), but throughout the humanities and social sciences. On his version of pragmatism, the absence of infallible foundations for knowledge leads directly to the idea that we cannot aim at getting things right, but only at a temporary agreement with our peers, or within a community or form of life. All we have are the sociological facts on the ground about what a community takes to be acceptable. There are no rules or norms or truths that go beyond or above a description of those facts. He notoriously said that nothing prevents a pragmatist from being a Nazi.[1]
But, just like David Hume, Rorty found that he had to leave his philosophical scepticism in his study when he exited it and went into the world. Rorty was committed to political positions and causes. He was committed to what we might call liberal democratic values, such as autonomy, peace, security; the right to not be tortured; and the avoidance of suffering, cruelty, and oppression.[2] How could he believe in such things if their objective value is nothing but what his peers let him get away with saying?
One way Rorty coped with this tension between his philosophy and his life was to see-saw when pressed. He took back his radical ideas about the contingency of our beliefs and then affirmed them, and then took them back again, sometimes in the same volume. A good illustration of this is the Library of Living Philosophers dedicated to him. My own contribution to that volume argued that his position was too focused on the apparent radical plurality or radical particularity of moral contexts. I argued that this brand of pragmatism can only end in a ‘might is right’ view. It leaves us with nothing to say to those who disagree with us, and nothing to say to ourselves, as to why the inclusion of the ‘other’ is better than what one of the promoters of a similar quietist view, the Nazi-sympathizer Carl Schmitt, advocated—aiming at “substantive homogeneity” in our community.[3] In his reply, Rorty took back his more extreme statements and became the sensible kind of pragmatist. He said that those statements about truth being what our peers will let us get away with saying were “incautious and misleading hyberbole” (Rorty 2010: 45). But in his replies to others, he reaffirmed his strong statements, saying that his philosophical position on truth is “neutral between social democracy and fascism” (Rorty 2010b: 102).
There is not much to be said in favour of the see-saw method of resolving a contradiction. But in the late 1980s, Rorty made systematic attempts to rid his position of the tension, making use of a “firm distinction” between public and private. In our private philosophy, we must be “liberal ironists,” aware of the radical contingency of knowledge and free to pursue self-creation in a “spirit of playfulness.” The job of the private philosopher is to create and undermine descriptions of human culture. The aim is not to tell it like it is, but rather to expand the “repertoire of alternative descriptions.”[4] He “defines” an ironist as someone who fulfils three conditions:
(1) She has radical and continuing doubts about the final vocabulary she currently uses, because she has been impressed by other vocabularies, vocabularies taken as final by people or books she has encountered; (2) she realizes that argument phrased in her present vocabulary can neither underwrite nor dissolve these doubts; (3) insofar as she philosophizes about her situation, she does not think that her vocabulary is closer to reality than others, that it is in touch with a power not herself. Ironists who are inclined to philosophize see the choice between vocabularies as made neither within a neutral and universal metavocabulary nor by an attempt to fight one’s way past appearances to the real, but simply by playing the new off against the old. (73)
It is here, in one’s private life or in one’s study, that fascism and liberalism are underdetermined, because every position is underdetermined.
Ironists, however, are “at best useless” and “at worst dangerous” in the public realm.[5] It is only in their private lives that irony—the sharp awareness of the contingency and flimsiness of one’s beliefs—should thrive. Nothing is stopping the ironist from being committed to liberal values in public.
This is not a stellar argument. First, it makes philosophy itself one of those useless vagabond thoughts. If the epistemological theses of pragmatism are inert once you leave your study, that speaks ill of those epistemological theses. Indeed, the very idea that one might leave one’s philosophy behind when one enters the public sphere goes against the very grain of the pragmatist insight, which is to make philosophy relevant and to connect it to action. The pragmatist should want nothing to do with Rorty’s idea that the philosopher should be a detached liberal ironist in private.
But there is a more important, because more general, argument against Rorty. That is, the argument is addressed not only to pragmatists, but across all philosophical traditions. Rorty’s position is simply dangerous. Populist governments right now threaten to tip the world into violence and moral darkness. Legal philosophers, in halls as hallowed as Oxford and Harvard,[6] argue for a strong state ruled by a legally unlimited executive who they hope will revive a reactionary religious basis for public life. Their success can be seen in the outgoing President of the United States—a pathological con artist who has packed the courts with religious judges. Global warming and a pandemic as deadly as the one in 1918-20 threaten lives and livelihoods, yet epidemiologists and climate change scientists are being cast as liars by anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists on the lunatic right. The more mainstream right continues to howl with anti-intellectual resentment, castigating universities as bastions of socialism. The left does its own damage by policing speech. Is the Rortian solution really to say that there is really no truth and falsity at stake here, but that one can, if one likes, make a liberal stand in one’s public life? Or, one can, if one likes, take a fascist stand in public life? We need a philosophy that serves us better than that.
There is a route to a more charitable reading of Rorty. That is to see the whole of his work as being rightly concerned about a tension that lies at the heart of the human condition. On the one hand, we take our beliefs to be true, or objective, or aimed at getting things right. On the other hand, we know that our beliefs, and our philosophical ways of understanding their nature and status, have developed in ways that are contingent on all sorts of historical accidents—the evolution of the human brain and sensory apparatus, the way language-users have posed fundamental questions and answered them, the power relations that structure inquiry and knowledge, the technology made possible by the earth’s raw materials, our ingenuity, our political and economic aims, and so on. How can both of these things hold? How can we aim at getting things right, yet see, as Williams James put it, that “the trail of the human serpent is over everything”?[7]
The charitable reading is that Rorty, with all pragmatists, tried to walk the fine line between saying that anything goes and saying that we aim at getting things right, despite the contingencies of knowledge. His argument that we can have it both ways by recognizing contingency in private and right in public is a failure. But Rorty at least saw the challenge of walking the line, even if he usually teetered and sometimes fell over to the ‘anything goes’ side.
We pragmatists need to do better. We need to give reasons for why fascism, old and new, is unacceptable. We need to be able to assert in our philosophy that we are in an age of disturbing moral regress in which we can no longer take it for granted that politicians need even pay lip service to the rights of refugees; to honesty; or to the need to protect the environment for future generations. We need our philosophy to be able to explain how there has been moral progress in many societies regarding, for instance, the rights of women.
There are resources within the pragmatist tradition for doing all this. John Dewey’s greatest insight was that inquiry of any kind requires the ability to offer and criticize hypotheses, and to be heard. Thus, broadly democratic norms are justified, which for Dewey, include equality of education and opportunity, as well as the norms of freedom of inquiry and expression. Dewey offers us a justification for putting in place mechanisms to protect high quality, freely available, information; to ensure equality of income and opportunity; and to criticize those who fail to take seriously the experience of others.
Clarence Irving Lewis put forward an alternative pragmatist route to seeing our contingent judgments as part of a belief system aimed at truth. He set out an account of how moral experience can introduce a genuine norm, just as perceptual experience can introduce a causal norm. He argued that the whole body of our beliefs form a pyramid, with the most comprehensive, such as those of logic, at the top, and the least general, such as ‘Arthur left his watch on the night table’ at the bottom (Lewis 1923[1970]). Ethical judgments are also under our cognitive scope, “as obdurate and compelling” as “any other kind of knowledge” (Lewis 1971 [1946]): 407). When we have a new experience, we attempt to fit it into our human, preformed, patterns. Persistent failure leads to readjustment in the pyramid, but the higher up a concept stands, the more reluctant we are to disturb it, because the more radical and far-reaching the results will be.
To switch to a better, and more well-known metaphor, we have experience informing the singular beliefs at the periphery of our web of belief, whereas at the core, we find norms that have been stabilized over time by experience. We would find great swathes of our web of belief disturbed if, for example, principles against torturing children and genocide were thrown into doubt. But a belief on the periphery, such as “I should support Oxfam over giving money to my struggling brother,” is something I might easily abandon in the face of counterargument or experience. Indeed, some ethical decisions on the periphery might be mostly, or even entirely up to an individual—more like matters of taste (although even the decision about charitable giving operates within constraints, such as choosing only amongst worthwhile charities, not neo-Nazi groups). Beliefs and principles at the core are also fallible and revisable, but were we to revise them, those changes would reverberate throughout our body of knowledge. For instance, as Jeremy Waldron has shown, if the norm allowing torture after 9/11 were to be established, it would cause much damage to the legal order, quite apart from the morality of permitting torture (Waldron 2005). One can see a picture emerging here on which ethical claims are candidates for truth, and some claims, such as “it is wrong to sexually assault children,” seem very much aimed at the truth (and, indeed, true).
That is, the pragmatist has resources to provide a complex and accurate picture of our familiar moral world and of how we might aim at getting things right in our human inquiries and deliberations. Rorty chose not to employ those resources, but instead to see if the public-private distinction could do the work for him. It is time to abandon his liberal irony and move on to a more serious, less detached, kind of pragmatism.
[1] See Rorty (1990: 636-7), (1999: 15).
[2] Rorty (1993: 111), 1989.
[3] See Misak 2000, 2010; Schmitt (1996).
[4] Rorty (1989: xv; 73; 39).
[5] Rorty (1989: 68).
[6] See Finnis (2009: 440) and Vermeule (2020).
[7] See (James 1919 [1907]: 37) and Misak (forthcoming) for the most recent iteration of the argument, this time in response to Bernard Harcourt, who might well be considered a successor to Rorty.
References
Dewey, John (1938) Logic: The Theory of Inquiry. The Later Works of John Dewey, Volume 12, 1925 – 1953. Ed. Jo Ann Boydston. Southern Illinois University Press.
Finnis, John (2009) ‘Endorsing Discrimination Between Faiths: A Case of Extreme Speech’ in Ivan Hare and James Weinstein, eds., Extreme Speech and Democracy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
James, William. 1919 [1907]. Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking. Reprint: New York: Longmans, Green and Co.
Lewis, Clarence Irving (1923 [1970]) “A Pragmatic Conception of the A Priori”, in Collected Papers of Clarence Irving Lewis. Ed. John D. Goheen and John L. Mothershead, Jr. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1970, 231-240.
Lewis, Clarence Irving (1971 [1946]) An Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation. London: Open Court.
Misak, Cheryl (forthcoming) “Nothing Scoundrelous About Truth” Nomos.
________ (2000) Truth, Politics, Morality: Pragmatism and Deliberation Routledge.
________ (2010) “Richard Rorty’s Place in the Pragmatist Pantheon”. The Philosophy of Richard Rorty, Library of Living Philosophers, Open Court, 27-43.
Peirce, Charles Sanders (1931–58). Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. Ed. C. Hartshorne and P. Weiss (vols. i–vi), A. Burks (vols. vii and viii). Cambridge MA: Belknap Press. Referred to as CP: Volume: paragraph number.
Rorty, Richard (2010a) “Reply to Cheryl Misak”. The Philosophy of Richard Rorty, Library of Living Philosophers, Open Court, 44-45.
________ (2010b) “Reply to Harvey Cormier”. The Philosophy of Richard Rorty, Library of Living Philosophers, Open Court, 102-105.
________ (1999) Philosophy and Social Hope. New York: Penquin.
________ (1993) “Human Rights, Rationality, and Sentimentality” in Stephen Shute and Susan Hurley, eds, On Human Rights: The Oxford Amnesty Lectures 1993.
________ (1990) ‘Truth and Freedom: A Reply to Thomas McCarthy’, Critical Inquiry, 16/3, 633-43.
________ (1989) Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Schmitt, Carl (1996) The Concept of the Political, George Schwab trans. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Waldron, J. (2005) “Torture and Positive Law: Jurisprudence for the White House”, Columbia Law Review 105/6, 1681-1750.
