Rorty’s Anti-Representationalism and Poe’s Poetics

Abstract

The aim of this essay is to discuss Rorty’s sceptical view of knowledge as representation, particularly as expressed in his Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) and in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989) as a framework for a rereading of Poe’s poetics. Despite the differences in their historical context, this comparative approach discloses Rorty’s and Poe’s shared anti-representationalism, which subverts the accepted notions of the relationship between language and reference on the one hand, and between the world as referent and its poetic representation on the other.

Notes

1. Edgar Allan Poe, “The Philosophy of Composition,” in Selected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. David Galloway (Middlessex: Penguin, 1982), 480; hereafter cited in the text.

2. See, for example, Aristotle, Poetics, ed. Stephen Halliwell (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), where he defines the nature of poetry:

Poetry in general seems to have sprung from two causes, each of them lying deep in our nature. First, the instinct of imitation is implanted in man from childhood, one difference between him and other animals being that he is the most imitative of living creatures, and through imitation learns his earliest lessons; and no less universal is the pleasure felt in things imitated. We have evidence of this in the facts of experience. Objects which in themselves we view with pain, we delight to contemplate when reproduced with minute fidelity: such as the forms of the most ignoble animals and of dead bodies. The cause of this again is, that to learn gives the liveliest pleasure, not only to philosophers but to men in general; whose capacity, however, of learning is more limited. … Imitation, then, is one instinct of our nature. (chap. 4)

Aristotle’s concept of the cathartic end of poetry differed from Plato’s, according to which poetry cannot convey knowledge as it is merely a representation of reality, not reality itself. This is so because for Plato knowledge is essentially ethical-philosophical, from which it follows that no truth can be attained by untruthful means: language itself bears the unbridgeable gaps between the meanings it conveys through its signs, the objects it designates, and the Ideal Forms that lie beyond visible reality (Republic, bks. 7, 10).

3. See Horace’s Epistola ad Pisones (Ars Poetica): “Aut prodesse uolunt aut delectare poetae /aut simul et iucunda et idonea dicere uitae,” in Oeuvres d’Horace. Texte latin, ed. F. Pléssis et P. Lejay (Paris: Hachette, 1906), 333–34.

4. Edgar Allan Poe, “The Poetic Principle,” in Selected Writings, 503; hereafter cited in the text.

5. John Keats to Bailey, November 1817: “Oh for a life of Sensations rather than of thoughts. John Keats, The Letters of John Keats, ed. M. Buxton Foman (London: Oxford University Press, 1984).

6. In “The Poetic Principle,” Poe presents the aesthetic end of poetry:

It has been assumed, tacitly and avowedly, directly and indirectly, that the ultimate object of all Poetry is Truth. Every poem, it is said, should inculcate a moral and by this moral is the poetical merit of the work to be adjudged. We Americans especially have patronized this happy idea, and we Bostonians very especially have developed it in full. We have taken it into our heads that to write a poem simply for the poem's sake, and to acknowledge such to have been our design, would be to confess ourselves radically wanting in the true poetic dignity and force:—but the simple fact is that would we but permit ourselves to look into our own souls we should immediately there discover that under the sun there neither exists nor can exist any work more thoroughly dignified, more supremely noble, than this very poem, this poem per se, this poem which is a poem and nothing more, this poem written solely for the poem’s sake. (503–4)

7. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Thirtieth-Anniversary ed. (1979; Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), xiii; Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); hereafter references to both works are cited in the text.

8. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope (Middlesex: Penguin, 2000), 6–8; hereafter cited in the text.

9. Neil Gascoigne, Richard Rorty (London: Polity Press, 2008), 5.

10. What Rorty particularly emphasizes are the links to Locke’s empiricism for the understanding of “mental processes,” in line with Cartesian rationalism, for the notion of “the mind” as a separate entity where “processes” occur, and with Kantian transcendental thought, to which we owe “the notion of philosophy as a tribunal of pure reason” (4).

11. Gascoigne, Richard Rorty, 127.

12. Richard Rorty, Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers III (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 25.

13. Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism: Essays 1970-1890 (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), xix.

14. Gascoigne, Richard Rorty, 128.

15. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001): “We are under the illusion that what is peculiar, profound, essential, in our investigation, resides in its trying to grasp the incomparable essence of language” (§97).

16. Gascoigne, Richard Rorty, 128.

17. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §100.

18. Curiously, a similar explanation was put forward in the 1940s by the Czech structuralist Ian Mukarowsky, who distinguished between the “Artfakt” (the artwork in itself, as a sign) and the aesthetic object, which can only exist in the interaction between the writer’s intentionality and the audience’s appreciation and evaluation. Mukarowsky’s aesthetic insight was further developed in the 1970s by Hans Robert Jauss as the “aesthetics of reception.”

19. In Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature Rorty describes the central divergence between Hegel and Kant as follows:

The “back to Kant” movement of the 1860s in Germany was also a “let’s go down to work” movement—a way of separating the autonomous nonempirical discipline of philosophy from ideology on the one hand and from the rising science of empirical psychology on the other. ... Hegelianism produced an image of philosophy as a discipline which somehow both completed and swallowed up the other disciplines, rather than grounding them. It also made philosophy too popular, too interesting, too important, to be properly professional: it challenged philosophy professors to embody the World-Spirit, rather than simply getting on with their Fach. (134–35)

20. I quote from Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature:

Heidegger’s way of recounting history of philosophy lets us see the beginnings of the Cartesian imagery, in the Greeks and the metamorphoses of this imagery during the last three centuries. He then lets us “distance” ourselves from the tradition. Yet neither Heidegger nor Wittgenstein lets us see the historical phenomenon of mirror-imagery, the story of the domination of the mind of the West by ocular metaphors, within a social perspective. (12–13)

Rorty adds that this social perspective is found in Dewey even though he lacked either “Wittgenstein’s dialectical acuity” or “Heidegger’s historical learning” (13).

21. Rorty dismisses the weight of these charges, seeing them as “mindless” defensive reactions of the philosophical tradition Dewey attacked.

22. Jürgen Habermas, “Richard Rorty’s Pragmatic Turn,” in On the Pragmatics of Communication, ed. Maeve Cooke (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 343–82.

23. In Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Rorty comments on the role of “edifying philosophers” in changing the vocabulary and behavior of social communities:

When such edifying philosophers as Marx, Freud or Sartre offer new explanations of our usual patterns of justifying our actions and assertions, and when these explanations are taken up and integrated in our lives, we have striking examples of the phenomenon of reflection’s changing vocabulary and behavior. But... this phenomenon does not require any new understanding of theory-construction and theory-confirmation. (386)

24. Paul de Man, “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” in Blindness and Insight (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 187–228.

25. There are a number of parallels to this emphasis on effect or Wirkung: Jauss’s aesthetics of reception and the notion of Erwartungshorizont, “horizon of expectations” (“Literaturgeschichte als Provokation,” 1969); Derrida’s ever shifting concept of “origin,” no longer a stable archi-foundation, but a “supplement of origin” (Of Grammatology, 1967); and Michel Foucault’s realization of the arbitrary nature of any beginning (The Order of Discourse, 1971).

26. See Friedrich Nietzsche, Nachlass der 80er Jahre. In Werke in sechs Bänden (München: Hanser, 1980), Band VI.