Responses as Indications of a New Philosophy

Take care of Freedom and Truth Will Take Care of Itself: Interviews with Richard Rorty
Edited with an Introduction by Eduardo Mendieta
Stanford University Press
213 pages,

Reviewed by Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala

Published in “Books in Canada . The Canadian Review of Books,” January 2007,
Volume 36, Number 1, p. 26-27

Richard Rorty is without doubt the most important American philosopher since the death of John Dewey in 1952, and will maintain this status for a very long time. This collection of interviews is useful for learning about the work of the author of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979), which argues that scientific philosophy has come to an end, while hermeneutic philosophy is the likely candidate for overcoming the scientific-humanist divide that has characterized philosophical inquiry since Kant. Although this book could be read as a simple collection of answers by Rorty to various matters pertaining to philosophy, politics, and culture, it is better read as a series of responses serving as indications . In other words, Rorty's responses are meant to take readers beyond the simple question-and-answer framework, thereby signaling the shape philosophy can take after the so-called end of foundationalism or metaphysics.

We aren't implying that the interviewers didn't do their job well; on the contrary, their questions elicited important responses. But reading Rorty's responses as far-reaching reflections will make for a better introduction to his thought, which focused on moving “people away from the notion of being in touch with something big and powerful and nonhuman.” The only feature open to criticism in this collection, edited by Eduardo Mendieta, is its incomplete bibliography. However, Rorty is perhaps the most widely studied philosopher in the world, and comprehensive bibliographies of his works can be found in other volumes, including Richard Rumana's Richard Rorty: An Annotated Bibliography of Secondary Literature and Robert Brandom's Rorty and His Critics . Instead of making a summary of each interview, we will try to comment on two central themes that represent the antifoundational thrust of his philosophy: pragmatism and democracy.

The first important indication Rorty provides is a guide to reading his masterpiece, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature . Analytical philosophers were the first to react against it, portraying it as an attack on analytical philosophy. But Rorty had only tried to show that the notion of philosophy as a distinct, autonomous, and powerful sector of culture has become outdated; in other words, philosophy had to be considered as something larger and looser than a self-sufficient and circumscribed discipline. Rorty's aim, as he tells us, was to dismantle the foundational status of philosophy, which, on the one hand, had a religious quality by virtue of its fixation on a non-human realm, and on the other, sought to discover the way the world really is—an objective reality unblemished by human subjectivity. Both of these presupposed that man was linked to something fateful like God, Nature, or Reason, and like a mirror only reflected what was in front of him. This is what Rorty, following Jacques Derrida, referred to as logocentrism—the need to find an ahistorical, transcultural matrix for one's thinking, something into which everything can fit, independently of one's time and place. The name generally given to this matrix is “truth”, and it is the desire to ascertain it that has shaped philosophy since the days of Plato.

Philosophy's emancipation from such logocentrism, explains Rorty, does not occur overnight. It happens gradually, in the same way theology has been supplanted by secularism. If man is no longer just a mirror of nature, and can be viewed instead as a “historical contingent interpreter,” then the common matrix of religion, science, and reason (truth) automatically dismantles itself, leaving space for freedom, liberty, and democracy. Rorty's slogan “take care of freedom and truth will take care of itself,” suggests that we are a community of historically-contingent interpreters, and “a truth” is that which a free, pragmatic community can agree about. Pragmatist “call beliefs true when their adoption makes us able to achieve happiness”; in other words, truth is a bonus, a contingent factor that often comes together with irony defined by Rorty as the “recognition of the contingency of one's ‘final vocabulary'.”

Rorty has often been criticized for strongly emphasizing the significance of politics over philosophy, or democracy over truth, in order to discredit the role of technical clarity in problem solving that philosophy has acquired in common with science. Although he has nothing against scientific methods, he's asserting, as did Hans-Georg Gadamer, that it isn't the only method available to men and women active in human affairs, and it is certainly not the most productive one; technical clarity does not leave any room for uncertainty, contingency, and creativity, which are so often the mainspring of man's greatest discoveries. “If you don't allow people to be unclear, says Rorty, intellectual progress grinds to a halt. It's the vague people who are the pioneers.” This is why Rorty believes that the “inculcation of antilogocentrism in the young will contribute to the strength of democratic societies.” His goal is to see “democratic politics be what sets the goals of philosophy, rather than philosophy setting the goals of politics.” It is only in this way that the two lefts—which Rorty identified in Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America (1998)—can be clearly distinguished: one is the old left concerned mostly with economic issues, while the other is the new left or cultural left, interested particularly in problems of multiculturalism, politics of difference and of recognition. For the former, the desire to safeguard democracy and freedom is the prime impetus for participation in social and political life; for the latter, objectives are determined by philosophy and culture. Unfortunately the new left is overly reliant on academic analysis and seminars on theories of hegemony and new strategies for overcoming it, rather than “recommend[ing], as the old left, the usual social-democratic welfare-state measures that worked in the rich democracies.”

Although Rorty generally avoids “turning away from economics to culture,” he sees neither the global triumph of neoliberal economical systems nor the antiglobalization movements as positive alternatives to the current reality of global economics, the principal effect of which has been to give still more power to the “corporations which function as conspiracies of the rich against the poor.” Of all of Rorty's indications , it is the significant role he ascribes to the concept of “conversation” which we consider to be the most essential, since this is what allows mankind to continue the discourse with intellectual predecessors, and is the sole means of avoiding the errors of the past.