The Professor of
Complacence
by Simon Blackburn

Issue Date: 08.20.01
Post Date:
08.14.01

Rorty and His Critics
edited by Robert B. Brandom
(Blackwell, 410 pp.,
$29.95)

I.

If you visit a mighty good school, you might find some big words
written over the gate: words such as Truth, Reason, Knowledge,
Understanding, or even Wisdom. If the school is old enough and in another
country, you might even find a mention of God, though this word may now be
an embarrassment, or regarded as purely decorative, or if the word was
once there, perhaps it has been erased and something secular substituted.
But nobody would want to erase Truth, Reason, and the rest, would they?

Richard Rorty would. Like Nietzsche more than a century ago, he
believes that these words have inherited the same illusory magic that once
hovered around the idea of a deity. They are supposed to represent
something Big. They stand for an ideal: the accurate representation of
reality. This reality functions in our minds as a sort of non-human
authority, to which we have to answer, and compared with which we are
always in danger of falling short. Yet mankind must now realize that there
is no such authority. Previously, even when the deity was swept away by
the Enlightenment, Truth remained in its place, the last absolute-but now
it, too, has to bow out, as the world-historical moment turns, and
humanity continues its long journey to emancipation.

That journey, Rorty continues, was once regarded as taking us from
ignorance to knowledge, or from darkness to light. But we should no longer
hold such a view of our development, for "no area of culture, and no
period of history, gets Reality more right than any other." The best that
the journey can accomplish is to cement the freedom to speak our minds,
and to usher in ever-renewable vocabularies expressing new adventures in
self-understanding. For words are tools, and the point of our utterances
is not to answer to the Forms or to represent the intrinsic nature of
reality, it is to meet our needs. Words are Darwinian adaptations, not for
copying but for coping.

Once this is thoroughly understood, even the words on the school gate
can be given a kind of use, although it is a poor shadow of what those who
inscribed them there intended. Demythologized, those grand terms serve
only as what Rorty has called "wistful, top-level protestations of good
will." Polemically, however, they are available as weapons of reaction,
when those who defend old vocabularies and old ways of life invoke them to
repel any new kids on the block. (Rorty is well aware that this is how
outraged defenders of what they take to be the real standards of Truth and
Reason will fulminate against him, and he enjoys the fulmination.) But the
principal use of these words is as badges of social solidarity. We
describe things as true when we agree with them, and we describe people as
reasonable when their minds move in the same ways as our minds. When the
words on the gate are read properly, therefore, we should not talk about
the love of the truth but about the love of solidarity. The highest human
good is conversation, and truth is what audiences let you get away with.

he collection of essays that Robert Brandom has assembled is but one of
many books prompted by Rorty's startling, brilliant, and extensive
writings on these themes. Its contributors are as heavy a bunch of
philosophical hitters as could well be gathered, and Rorty's responses to
his critics display his extraordinary gift for ducking and weaving and
laying smoke: he may have arrived at Paris, but he got there by way of
Princeton, and it shows. The volume is also an indicator of Rorty's
significance, in the academy and in the culture at large. For his
"anti-foundational" voice is not a lone voice. It is not even a minority
voice. One hears it across large tracts of the humanities. Rorty is just
the militant tendency of contemporary pragmatism, the Hezbollah of our
disenchanted culture.

Rorty likes to project the image of himself as leading a movement ("we
pragmatists"), and he has generously hailed many of the philosophers here,
such as Donald Davidson and Hilary Putnam, as standing alongside him,
demolishing the school gates. So it is nicely ironic to see them making
their excuses, like nervous guests fearing that a revel has gotten out of
hand. Rorty, a gentlemanly host, is wonderfully polite and patient with
these excuses, while not concealing his conviction that they are basically
worthless. In his own mind, philosophers who argue against him are
typically trapped in ways of thinking (what he would call a vocabulary)
that, he believes, should simply be abandoned.

For this reason, Rorty seldom really argues back. He has arranged
things for himself so that he does not have to do so. For he denies that
philosophical progress comes about through argument. As he rightly reminds
us, argument requires premises and conclusions that belong to the same
conceptual family. Argument, it follows, is for conservatives. And real
progress, by contrast, means "offering us sparkling new ideas or utopian
visions of glorious new institutions," disabusing us of our old routes of
inference and feeling, enabling us to forget where we once were. It does
not mean anything so flat as mere argument.

This is a pretty formidable defensive tackle. When anyone produces a
good reason for rejecting Rorty's views, he seems poised to say that his
whole project is to transcend the logocentrism that endorses any such use
of reason. A number of contributors to the present volume recognize this
trap, and instead tackle pragmatism on its own ground, asking whether we
could expect any good to come of some kind of après-truth culture.
Jacques Bouveresse talks movingly of the plight of decent people in an
intellectually rudderless Paris, where "we have some experience of what
happens when rhetoric, the power of words, and the cult of personality
prevails over reason, logic, and the rules of argumentation." Akeel
Bilgrami follows Daniel C. Dennett in warning against the comfort that
Rorty gives to the irresponsible and the subversive, to the bullshitters
"prepared to speak or write in the requisite jargon, without any goal of
getting things right nor even (like the liar) concealing the right things
which he thinks he has got."

Rorty's retort is that he, too, can distinguish between the frivolous
and the serious:

That is a serious and important distinction. It is well
exemplified in the contrast between the silliest, least literate,
members of academic departments of literature and honest, hardworking,
intellectually curious, laboratory scientists-just as the distinction
between self-righteous priggery and tolerant conversability is well
exemplified by the contrast between the sulkiest, least literate,
members of analytic philosophy departments and honest, hard-working,
intellectually curious, literary critics.

The point that these virtues and vices are spread across all sections
of the academy is surely right. But the point is also a dodge, because the
real question is whether, in the après-truth culture, they are
still virtues and vices.

Rorty denies that love of truth is a special virtue by taunting his
opponents that they have no way of telling who loves truth and who does
not:

What behavioural evidence is relevant? I doubt that
there is more hope of accumulating relevant behavioural evidence here
than there is when attempting to answer the question "Is he saved?" or
"Does he love the Lord his God with all his heart and soul and mind?"
The question "Do you value truth?" seems to me as about as pointless as
these latter questions.

Again, he has a point. We are apt to describe anybody as loving truth
when they agree with us, both as to our certainties and as to our doubts.
But Rorty does not pause to consider whether, in the salons of pragmatism,
into which truth is denied entry, the question "Is he honest and curious?"
must go the same way as the question "Does he love truth?" And he does not
pause to consider whether, while the question "Does he love truth?" may
indeed be intractable in general, it is highly tractable when the truth in
question becomes concrete. If you have not committed a crime, you would
prefer to fall into the hands of a police department that loves the truth
about who commits crimes, and loves it more than it loves just coping by
cozying up to the judges and juries who can give it a successful
prosecution record.

II.

Anyone wanting to protect the school gates should study the general
rhythm of the interchanges here, for Rorty is a formidable opponent, and
few of his critics do much damage. Typically, they start by saluting
Rorty's intellectual ancestors, especially a great trio who ushered in our
age of philosophical doubts about meaning, observation, and theory:
Willard Quine, Wilfrid Sellars, and Thomas Kuhn. They congratulate Rorty
for a number of negative things that they all share: mostly a dislike of
old distinctions, such as that between defining a vocabulary and using it,
or between observation and theory, or between essence and accident, or
thought and language, or fact and value. But then they draw back. Let us
not go overboard, they say. There is still such a thing as getting it
right and getting it wrong. You can say that Oswald acted alone when he
did, or you can say it when he didn't. You may want to know whether
genetically modified crops are dangerous, and it requires biology and
laboratory trials and experimental protocols to discover the answer, not
crystal balls or current linguistic usages. We are not merely trying to
get a consensus when we are trying to find what is true. We are trying to
arrive at the facts.

Rorty replies that we should not belittle efforts to establish
consensus. So where the critic sees two possible goals (getting everyone
to agree and getting at the facts), Rorty sees only one. There is no
significant difference between convincing your peers and getting at the
truth: "The guise of convincing your peers is the very face of truth
itself." But then what is left of facing the facts? Well, facing the facts
is literally nonsense: we can face the Eiffel Tower, but facts are not
things with a place. (If they were, as Wittgenstein remarked, we could
move them; but while you could move the Eiffel Tower to Berlin, you cannot
move the fact that the Eiffel Tower is in Paris anywhere at all.) Facing
the facts can mean only making judgments, and this is a social activity,
enabled only by the rules that govern the language that you speak with
your peers. By forgetting this, Rorty's critics forget the philosophical
heritage that they believe themselves to share with him. They remain
slaves to one version of what Sellars called the myth of the given, which
is the idea of the transparent, incorrigible presence of individual fact
in individual mind.

Rorty has made this counter many times, and he makes it again and again
here. It is exactly parallel to the reply that Stanley Fish, a similar
thinker, makes in his ongoing spats with Ronald Dworkin. Dworkin believes
himself to be offering a specific conception of the right method for
finding the legal truth, steering carefully between the arid desert of
positivism (the myth of the given, in this instance the view that legal
facts are transparently there in black-letter texts) and the licentious,
anything-goes method of pragmatism or legal realism, which counsels judges
to make law up according to the exigencies of the moment. Fish replies
that each of these poles is a mirage, and therefore so is Dworkin's advice
on how to steer between them. The first is a mirage because any text needs
understanding, or taking up to apply to the problem in hand, and this
understanding will be the work of the judge's mind, not of the text all by
itself. The second is a mirage because any "judge" who pays no attention
to statute or precedent has stopped judging, and has started to do
something else, such as parodying the whole institution. So Dworkin's
advice is about as valuable as the advice not to carry a baseball bat
while playing tennis: law as integrity is no more a distinctive recipe for
law than absence of baseball bats is a distinctive approach to tennis.
Judges can only play according to the legal rules, which means attempting
to gain the consensus of fellow members of the interpretive community by
applying statute and precedent to the case at hand. Hence too there is no
open space between "trying to find the right verdict" and "trying to
convince fellow judges." There is no difference that makes a difference.

This is a nice reply. It is so nice, in fact, that it raises the
suspicion that a rather important concession has been made. When Rorty
first substitutes the goal of consensus for the goal of truth, we shudder
at the outrageous image of someone valuing après-truth chit-chat in
the coffeehouse above serious work in the library or the laboratory. It is
this that is so shocking. But now it turns out that there is a
qualification for membership in the coffeehouse. The talkers in the
coffeehouse are to be masters of the library or the laboratory, just as
the legal interpretive community includes only masters of the Constitution
and of precedent.

It also turns out that we cannot achieve the consummation of consensus
with them simply by mutual narcissism, each fixing his gaze on another and
chiming in with his sayings. For in order to achieve consensus both our
gaze and that of our peers must be fixed on the point at hand. If the
issue is whether Oswald acted alone, the conversation must take place amid
archives and news footage. If it is whether genetically modified foods are
dangerous, it must take place in the biology lab. This is what is involved
in being honest and curious-indeed, it is what is involved in
understanding the issue in the first place. But, having gotten this far,
why not also describe ourselves as people who want to know what
happened-or as people who want to find the truth, and a good thing too?
Why demolish the school gate?

f Rorty feels entitled to say as much as he does, why can he not say
more? Consider the virtues that he does regard as verifiable, such as
curiosity and seriousness. We can imagine a community that can winnow out
those who are not really curious about, say, whether Oswald acted alone,
or not really serious in their inquiry into whether genetically modified
crops are dangerous. Perhaps these dilettantes get their opinions from the
newspapers, or reveal alarming tendencies toward emotionally distorted or
wishful thinking. Rorty describes such people as being "unconversable"-but
they are only unconversable, of course, if the conversation is of a
particular type. Bullshitters are typically voluble, and to some audiences
readable. The "theorists" whom Alan Sokal exhibited as having no
understanding whatsoever of the science that they loved to invoke in their
writings had big enough audiences. The failure that they supposedly
illustrated is much better located by words such as "incompetent" or
"incurious." But "incurious" just means not curious about the point at
hand, that is, whether Oswald acted alone or whether GM food is dangerous.

Rorty sometimes tries to deflect this, suggesting that incuriosity
denotes only a lack of receptivity to new vocabularies, as if, say,
enjoying Finnegans Wake would be a recipe for a better history of
the Kennedy assassination or a better understanding of GM food. But this
is smoke, since it is a focused curiosity that matters. Similarly,
"incompetent" means being unable to execute procedures for finding out
whether Oswald acted alone or whether GM crops are dangerous. And if we
can detect those people in this state, then the question stares us in the
face: why can't we say more? Why can't we describe these people as having
no concern, or an insufficient concern, for the truth, or an insufficient
ability to find the truth? In other words, with proper attention to the
notion of an inquiry, and to the notion of a community of inquirers, any
remaining air escapes from the pragmatist balloon, and the circus leaves
town.

This, indeed, is how Fish sees it: he believes that once we get this
far, theory becomes irrelevant to practice, which goes on exactly as
before. Rorty does not want to efface himself so quickly. He likes to
imply that pragmatism really makes some practical difference, as we learn
to oppose metaphysical prigs who suppose that reality has one true
intrinsic nature, which only one final language, such as the language of
theoretical physics, will represent. These prigs believe that there is a
single Book of Nature, which true method will eventually read. When the
philosophical going gets rough, Rorty frequently resorts to mocking this
ideal.

But his mockery is only a way of making things easy for himself,
because you do not need to subscribe to any such monolithic idea of truth
in order to honor everyday truth and the love of particular truths. This
is because there is every difference between the language that you choose
to use and the truth or the falsity of what you say with it. Consider the
enterprise of mapping a tract of land. A tract of land does not demand to
be mapped in any way at all. There is no Book of the Landscape, for the
landscape has no voice. It is utterly silent about whether your map should
show contours or geology or houses or temperatures or anything else. What
you choose to put on your map depends purely on the use to which you will
put the map. Up to this point, pragmatism and Darwinism rule unchallenged.
But this is only half the picture. For once you have made a choice, there
are things to get right or wrong. Once you have chosen what to do, it is
as if the landscape indeed acquires a voice, and it certainly has
authority, since your map-making must attempt to make your map answer to
it. If you purport to show cliffs but show none where there is one, then
you have gotten the landscape wrong.

Rorty would prefer to say that the problem with your map is not one of
how it represents the landscape or corresponds to the landscape, for those
are metaphysically priggish terms. The problem, he wants to say, is just
that users of your map are unlikely to cope very well. He fails to see
that we do not have to choose between these things: we can have both.
Users of the map without the cliff will not cope well when they come to
the cliff, and we can explain why. It is because the map, with respect to
the cliff, misrepresents the landscape.

Rorty is unlikely to accept the cartographic analogy. Perhaps we can
compare maps with landscapes, but we cannot compare our own best theories
with the truth, since we have no access to the truth except in the terms
provided by our own best theories. We cannot "stand outside our own
skins," as Berkeley saw in the seventeenth century when he said that an
idea can resemble only another idea. Faced with this objection, it is
natural to protest that sometimes we check our words not with more words,
but with observation and prediction. But Rorty and his critics typically
share a mistrust of those notions. They suppose that relying on them is
too much like the positivist view of law, according to which black letters
steer us independently of our own capacities to give them meanings.

This is the myth of the given, again. Rorty belongs to a generation of
American philosophers who learned from Sellars that observation is itself
a creature of language: your map determines how you see the landscape. So,
they conclude, there is nothing but maps, maps all the way down, and there
is no independent access to anything mapped. The philosophy in this book,
and much of it is of a very high quality, testifies to the difficulty of
remembering that sometimes it is not maps but cliffs. It is ironic,
therefore, that one of Rorty's central pieces of iconoclasm is the death
of epistemology, of the theory of knowledge, since it is precisely in that
theory that these issues are fought. This is what epistemology is all
about.

III.

Justifying something to your peers is not the same thing as getting it
right. It is a political achievement to make sure that wherever it
matters, in science, history, law, politics, or ethics, the people to whom
you need to justify yourself have their gaze pointed in the right
direction, and so will accept something only when it is likely to be true.
Like any political achievement, it needs careful protection. This explains
why the words went onto the school gate in the first place.

Sometimes Rorty seems to recognize this, though it seems to clash with
his ambition to demolish. At any rate, he remains fond of saying that if
we look after freedom, truth will look after itself. In a free world, he
seems to think, only the people with the library tickets and the
microscopes eventually get into the coffeehouse. This might sound like
Mill's belief in the invincibility of truth--but Mill is much more the
kind of stalwart who wrote the words on the school gate in the first
place. Without those words, it seems romantically optimistic to expect the
achievement to sustain itself. Rorty has this optimism. He has a soft spot
for Deweyan visions of the psalm of the people, as muscular workers stride
shoulder-to-shoulder down limitless vistas into ever more glorious
sunrises, which they greet with ever more creative vocabularies.

Lost in this Whitmanesque glow, it is easy to forget that there is no
reason whatever to believe that by itself freedom makes for truth, any
more than there is to suppose that work makes one free. Freedom includes
the freedom to blur history and fiction, or the freedom to spiral into a
climate of myth, carelessness, incompetence, or active corruption. It
includes the freedom to sentimentalize the past, or to demonize others, or
to bury the bodies and manipulate the record. It is not only totalitarian
societies that find truth slipping away from them: the emotionalists of
contemporary populism, or the moguls of the media and the entertainment
industries, can make it happen just as effectively. That is why Plato felt
that he had to forge the vocabulary of reason and truth in opposition to
democratic politics; and that is why it remains vandalism to rub the words
off the school gates. Orwell thought this, and anybody worried about such
things as the ideology of those who own the press, or the Disneyfication
of history, should think it too.

orty does hold political views, and he holds that there is a definite
if subtle relation between his pragmatism and his political views. He is
celebrated for recommending "liberal irony" as the proper standpoint on
life, the liberalism being the doctrine that "cruelty is the worst thing
we do," and the irony arising from the knowledge that our vocabularies are
transitory and contingent and always on the verge of obsolescence. Critics
have been infuriated by the aestheticism or the weightlessness that
Rortyan irony seems to suggest; but the more important point is that irony
seems philosophically out of place in the philosophical situation that
Rorty recommends.

Irony, in Rorty's teaching, is supposed to follow on the realization
that your vocabulary is always provisional, that better ways of saying
things might come along one day-but it is hard to see why this ought to
beget irony. Unless you are the victim of an après-truth cartographer, you
do very well to take the map seriously when it says there are cliffs, even
if you foresee future maps that do not bother about them. The hill-walker
who finds this thought destabilizing, and takes an ironic detachment
toward his map, is likely to do worse. It is hard to imagine, of course,
how any future maps that do not indicate cliffs could be useful to
walkers, but then it is hard to see how a successor vocabulary--say, one
that does not talk in terms of suffering, or equality, or freedom or power
or justice--could be of much use in politics. So I think that we can
safely set the irony aside.

And irony aside, it is a little difficult to know what to make of such
liberalism. A political philosophy that simply reminds us that cruelty is
the worst thing that we do has not really gotten very far; and there is
nothing especially liberal about it (are conservatives for cruelty?). In
fact, it is doubtful whether Rorty really believes it in any case. In this
volume he enthusiastically endorses a very different view advocated by
Robert Brandom. This holds that "mere mammalian pain"--a phrase, I should
have thought, that trips off the tongues only of people largely
unacquainted with what it describes--does not matter in itself. Brandom
holds that "pain, and like it various sorts of social and economic
deprivation," have only a "second-hand" moral and political significance.
They are important only because they distract people from the activity
that really matters: the pragmatist activity variously described as
"vocabulary-mongering," or "contributing to the Conversation," or
indulging in "sprightly repartee and the production of fruitful novel
utterances." Pain matters because it incapacitates us for sprightly
repartee! It turns out that cruelty is not the worst thing that we
perpetrate. The worst thing is distraction.

here are very few really original ideas in moral philosophy, but this
must surely be one of them. Its excuse, I suppose, is the fear of a Brave
New World in which comfortable zombies live their satisfied porcine lives.
And similar ideas do have a philosophical pedigree, right back to Plato
and to the last book of the Nicomachean Ethics, in which Aristotle
extols the virtues of the life of intellectual contemplation, which to
most contemporary philosophers simply means conversation with the cork in.
But even in his paean to contemplation Aristotle does not hold that
beautifully beguiling the leisure of the theory class is the only measure
of value, and distracting us from it the only measure of evil.

To get the full measure of that doctrine, imagine on the one hand
spending your time as a victim of pain: think of a "mere" mammalian pain,
or if that is too hard to imagine from the comfort of the armchair, get up
and put your hand on a hot stove. Imagine similarly a life of prolonged
disease, starvation, humiliation, fear, and loss. And then imagine, for
contrast, spending life doing quiet things that you might enjoy, such as
gardening or golf. Now get yourself to believe that there is nothing to
choose between them, since in each case there is the same distraction from
vocabulary mongering and sprightly repartee. What a wonderful state of
mind it must be--how stoic, how lofty, how intellectual--whereby a visit
from the secret police, or a cancer, or the loss of a child, is on all
fours with more time as a couch potato. This is a world in which a walk
around the concentration camp is no more disturbing than a walk around the
course at Augusta.

I do not suppose that Brandom and Rorty really believe this inhumane
doctrine. It is just that the abstractions take over, so that at a
particular point in the Conversation it sounds like a sprightly thing to
say. One cannot help feeling that this is only because we are in a
political coffeehouse with no very exacting standards of entry. It is not
the sort of thing you could get away with in a well-ordered cartography
school, or even a department of history, or politics, or literature, if
literature includes Harriet Beecher Stowe and Dickens and Orwell and Primo
Levi. It is not even something you should get away with in a philosophy
department, provided that we can hold onto our gateposts.

SIMON BLACKBURN is professor of philosophy at the
University of Cambridge. His recent books include Think (Oxford
University Press) and Being Good (Oxford University Press).

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