Rorty, ‘Historicism’ and the practice of history: A polemic

Abstract

Rorty's extravagant postures on hermeneutics and incommensurability seem ultimately irreconcilable with the practical exigencies of historical interpretation. This essay highlights Rorty's views on historical reconstruction to demonstrate his ironic relation to historical practice. To make the case fully, it situates Rorty's views on historical method within his larger campaign against the distinctiveness of the ‘interpretive’ approach to human studies. In particular, the essay contests his claim for support from Gadamerian hermeneutics. The object is to expose the sort of ‘conversation’ he envisions as falling far short of the authentic dialogue with the past he professes to recognize as essential for contemporary culture.

Keywords:

• Rorty
• Historicism
• Gadamer
• Historical reconstruction
• History of philosophy
• Hermeneutics

Notes

[1] ‘If Rorty's reform of his own discipline were to be actually carried out, the voice of philosophy would beg.in to sound rather like the voice of intellectual history’ (Hollinger 1985, p. 169).

[2] Rorty certainly professes to be a historicist, but that is a notoriously slippery term. On the ambiguity of ‘historicism’, see: Iggers (1995); Rée (1990, 1991); and Makkreel (1990).

[3] Anthony Cascardi links Rorty with Lyotard: their approaches, ‘although historicist insofar as they assert the contingency of all discourse, constitute further refusals of the attempt by history to mediate and thereby recuperate the differences among divergent accounts of human nature or the world’ (Cascardi 1989, pp. 219–220).

[4] For a very insightful discussion of Rorty's ‘historicism’, see Hall (1994, pp. 14–64, esp. 54ff), where Hall explores the question whether Rorty ‘may have stretched the word “historicism” beyond usable limits’. Hall concludes that Rorty ‘ought to reconsider his claim to be a historicist’ since ‘Rorty's historicism is a poeticized one’ and Hall finds it ‘better…to take full responsibility for one's literary pretensions than to mask them by claims to historicist practice’ (p. 63).

[5] The prospectus for the series, as presented facing the title page of Philosophy in History, reads: ‘The books in this series will discuss the emergence of intellectual traditions and of related new disciplines. The procedures, aims and vocabularies that were generated will be set in the context of the alternatives available within the contemporary framework of ideas and institutions. Through detailed studies of the evolution of such traditions, and their modification by different audiences, it is hoped that a new picture will form of the development of ideas in their concrete contexts. By this means, artificial distinctions between the history of philosophy, of the various sciences, of society and politics, and of literature, may be seen to dissolve’ (my italics).

[6] See Skinner (1966, 1969, 1970, 1971, 1972a, 1972b, 1975); and Tully (1988).

[7] Should any doubts remain about the authorship of the introduction based on stylistic and argumentative evidence alone, let me point out that I have spoken individually with Quentin Skinner and with J. B. Schneewind, and both of them freely acknowledge that Rorty took charge of the writing of that text.

[8] Alasdair MacIntyre has polarized these positions into a deliberately drastic dilemma: ‘Either we read the philosophers of the past so as to make them relevant to our contemporary problems and enterprises, transmuting them as far as possible into what they would have been if they were part of present-day philosophy, and minimizing or ignoring or even on occasion misrepresenting that which refuses such transmutation because it is inextricably bound up with that in the past which makes it radically different from present-day philosophy; or instead we take great care to read them in their own terms, carefully preserving their idiosyncratic and specific character, so that they cannot emerge into the present except as a set of museum pieces’ (MacIntyre 1984, p. 31). From this it is only too clear how the debate has often descended to reciprocal charges of ‘anachronism’ and ‘antiquarianism’. For recent runs of the debate, see Rée (1988); Bennett (1988); and Wilson (1992).

[9] The question of the separability and the priority of these two conventional approaches will be a recurrent element in the dispute with Rorty taken up in this essay, but the most fundamental concern will be with Rorty's query of the methodological legitimacy of historical reconstruction.

[10] In his own essay, Rorty observes: ‘Intellectual history can ignore certain problems which must be settled in order to write the history of a discipline—questions about which people count as scientists, which as poets, which as philosophers, etc.’ (Rorty 1984, p. 68).

[11] ‘[I]ntellectual history works to keep Geistesgeschichte honest, just as historical reconstruction operates to keep rational reconstruction honest. Honesty here consists in keeping in mind the possibility that our self-justifying conversation is with creatures of our own phantasy rather than with historical personages, even ideally re-educated historical personages’ (Rorty 1984, p. 71).

[12] Thus ‘[Geistesgeschichte] aims at self-justification in the same way as does rational reconstruction, but on a different scale’ (Rorty 1984, pp. 56–57). It ‘works at the level of problematics rather than of solutions to problems…[considering] the philosopher in terms of his entire work rather than in terms of his most celebrated arguments’ (Rorty 1984, p. 57).

[13] Norris (1985, pp. 145ff) makes this point quite well.

[14] Among other philosophers who bluntly query what history can possibly have to offer, see: Graham (1982); Cohen (1986); Powers (1986); Winfield (1987); Mash (1987).

[15] On the question of narrative and its validity, see: Mink (1978); Roth (1988, 1989); Anchor (1987); and Carroll (1990).

[16] Rorty derives his phrase ‘conversation of mankind’ from Michael Oakeshott. See Oakeshott (1991). Whether Rorty's borrowing is in the spirit of its originator is a question he disregards systematically, and there will be no point in raising it here.

[17] ‘We cannot give up this idea without giving up the notion that the intellectuals of the previous epochs of European history form a community, a community of which it is good to be a member. If we are to persist in this image of ourselves, then we have to have both imaginary conversations with the dead and the conviction that we have seen further than they. That means we need Geistesgeschichte’ (Rorty 1984, p. 73). This is merely ‘a fulfillment of the natural desire to talk to people some of whose ideas are quite like our own, in the hope of getting them to admit that we have gotten those ideas clearer, or in the hope of getting them clearer still in the course of the conversation’ (Rorty 1984, p. 52).

[18] ‘We take the pardonable ignorance of great dead scientists for granted. We should be equally willing to say that Aristotle was unfortunately ignorant…We hesitate merely because we have colleagues who are themselves ignorant…and whom we courteously describe not as “ignorant”, but as “holding different philosophical views”’ (Rorty 1984, p. 49). Therefore we need to add to the Aristotle who walked the streets of Athens another—‘an ideally reasonable and educable Aristotle…who can be brought to describe himself as having mistaken the preparatory taxonomic stages of biological research for the essence of all scientific inquiry’ (Rorty 1984, p. 51). Rorty concedes that the historical Aristotle could have ‘meant’ few of the things rational reconstructions ascribe to him anachronistically. He implies that Aristotle would be of little interest to a present-day philosopher absent this reconstruction.

[19] MacIntyre (1987a); see also MacIntyre (1977, 1982, 1987b).

[20] See Hollinger's second thoughts about Rorty in this light (Hollinger 1993).

[21] On the problems with Rorty's ethnocentrism, see his exchange with Clifford Geertz (Geertz 1986; Rorty 1986a).

[22] Donald Livingston, for one, is suspicious of this penchant in Rorty's approach to conversation, which Livingston believes deafens him to the conversational possibilities with remote but powerful minds. For Livingston, the art of the historian is to listen to the great dead philosophers' ‘voices and the peculiar idiom in which they speak’. Livingston takes his idea of conversation, like Rorty, from Michael Oakeshott, but he insists it is ‘quite different from Rorty's conception’ (Livingston 1993, p. 112n). He seems to harbor the suspicion that Rorty's idea of ‘conversation’ might, in the apt phrase of Clifford Geertz, entail ‘making the world safe for condescension’ (Geertz 1986, p. 111).

[23] That is, the past—the other, generally—has something we can learn. This is the view advocated by Skinner, Taylor, MacIntyre and others in Philosophy in History. It is what gives intellectual history and history of philosophy the authenticity to teach—to form and to change minds.

[24] In his disquieted comments on the volume, John Yolton observes that the Introduction ‘is often in conflict with [Quentin] Skinner's views’. It is beyond the scope of this essay to establish why Skinner allowed this to happen; what is at issue is what Rorty intrudes upon the question of contextual and general intellectual history in relation to philosophy. Yolton makes it quite clear that he finds the position Rorty develops incompatible with historical reconstruction (Yolton 1985, p. 573).

[25] Skinner (1969, p. 28). This maxim is, of course, neither self-evident nor uncontroversial. What is at issue here is merely Rorty's specific stance toward Skinner.

[26] This approach can be related to the idea of ‘reception theory’. On ‘reception theory’ in this context, see esp. Jauss (1982) and Thompson (1993).

[27] See Hirsh (1967).

[28] Rorty targets Michael Ayers specifically in this argument (Rorty 1984, p. 55n). Ayers had taken a salient stance in this dispute in sharp attacks on Jonathan Bennett and his work. See Ayers (1970), a critique of Bennett (1965), as well as Ayers (1978). Ayers launched one of the most lively and noteworthy debates on the relative merits of historical versus rational reconstruction in history of philosophy. Ayers and Daniel Garber have continued to claim that ‘“we must certainly understand past philosophers before we can legitimately or helpfully use them”’ (Wilson 1992, p. 199, citing from the Prospectus Garber and Ayers issued for their Cambridge History of Seventeenth Century Philosophy). For another major exponent of historical reconstruction, see Rée (1978, 1985).

[29] ‘[T]he more competing Geistesgeschichten we have at hand—the more likely we are to reconstruct, first rationally and then historically, interesting thinkers’ (Rorty 1984, p. 74). Why first rationally and then historically? That question leads us to the radicalism of Rorty's agenda.

[30] There is something not altogether consistent going on in his usage. A. Rosenberg gets that point just right: ‘Rorty's argument trades on an equivocation about meaning. Sometimes “meaning” is used as a semantic notion, in which it has intentional content, but sometimes “meaning” has a thoroughly different significance, one which has nothing to do with “interpretation”’ (Rosenberg 1989, p. 494).

[31] Rorty is citing the back cover of Bennett (1966). Bennett baldly upholds his narrowness of approach: ‘How if at all is literary structure relevant to interpretation? I'm sorry, but I have no opinions about that’. So much for the entire question of rhetoric posed by poststructuralism. ‘The relevance of societies and institutions to interpretation in philosophy is not a topic that I have thought about, and I have nothing to say about it.’ So much for contextualism. Now for historical reconstruction: ‘I take issue with Garber about the idea of understanding a past author's text in his own terms…To understand someone's thought you must get it into your own terms’ (Bennett 1988, pp. 64, 67).

[32] In his book on Spinoza, Bennett makes the same point: ‘I need to consider what Spinoza has in mind, for readings of the text which are faithful to his intentions are likely to teach me more than ones which are not—or so I believe, as I think him to be a great philosopher. And one can be helped to discover his intentions by knowing what he had been reading, whose problems he had been challenged by, and so on’ (Bennett 1984, pp. 15–16).

[33] For Hollinger, Rorty ‘does manifest real respect for intellectual history…Yet Rorty offers no assessment of intellectual history as actually practiced’ (Hollinger 1985, p. 175). Because a careful reading of Rorty's work shows the second sentence is in fact false, the first becomes a matter of ironic interpretation.

[34] Rorty would have us believe that historians would be surprised to learn that truth claims are always contingent upon the situatedness of the interpreter. He charges that history labors under ‘romantic’ illusions: ‘The idea of “the truth about the past, uncontaminated by present perspectives or concerns” is…a romantic ideal of purity which has no relation to any actual inquiry which human beings have undertaken or could undertake’ (Rorty et al. 1984a, p. 7). Yet historians were not absent among those who articulated the conundrum of the ‘hermeneutic circle’. The classic statement of the hermeneutical circle as a methodological problem is Wilhelm Dilthey's fragmentary ‘critique of historical reason’ (Dilthey 1989). See Makkreel (1975) and Ermarth (1981). This issue was broadened into a philosophical problem by Martin Heidegger. See e.g. Bambach (1995). This philosophical aspect was brought further to bear on the problem of historical interpretation above all in Gadamer (1976, 1992). For further development of this consideration, see: Palmer (1969); Hoy (1978); Ricoeur (1981); Weinsheimer (1985); and Warnke (1987).

[35] A major formulation of ‘strong misreading’ with decisive relevance to Rorty's theory and practice is Bloom (1973). Hall terms this ‘a crucial work for Rorty's entire historiographical project’ (Hall 1994, p. 15). In what seems a particularly relevant passage for Rorty's approach to historiography, Bloom writes: ‘I mean something…drastic and (presumably) absurd, which is the triumph of having so stationed the precursor, in one's own work, that particular passages in his work seem to be not presages of one's own advent, but rather to be indebted to one's own achievement, and even (necessarily) to be lessened by one's greater splendor. The mighty dead return, but they return in our colors, and speaking in our voices, at least in part, at least in moments, moments that testify to our persistence, and not their own. If they return wholly in their own strength, then the triumph is theirs’ (Bloom 1973, p. 141).

[36] For deconstruction's disputation of hermeneutic possibilities, see above all Silverman and Ihde (1985) and Michelfelder and Palmer (1989).

[37] This campaign achieved its contour in Rorty (1979), and in a series of essays that appeared in that context, notably his exchange with Charles Taylor and Herbert Dreyfus in Review of Metaphysics (Rorty 1980), and in his essay ‘Method, social science, and social hope’, reprinted in Rorty (1982). See also Rorty (1989, 1991).

[38] See Rabinow and Sullivan (1979, 1987); Hahn et al. (1983); and Hiley et al. (1991). Rorty argues that this school has a serious misconception of its methodological uniqueness and privilege.

[39] This is a variant of the ‘web of belief’ approach developed by Willard Quine. See Quine and Ullian (1978).

[40] Rorty does acknowledge that Hirsch has discerned a unique aspect of texts as against lumps in authorial intention. The upshot of his reflection, though, suggests that it is a trivial uniqueness (Rorty 1991, pp. 87–89). For a later insistence on the meaninglessness of the sorts of distinctions involved with Skinner and Hirsch—this time disputing distinctions proffered by Umberto Eco, see Rorty (1992, esp. pp. 93ff.).

[41] For the highly controversial question of the natural sciences and their distinctive claim, perhaps the most cogent objections have been entered by Williams (1983). Even such an admirer as Hollinger finds Rorty's posture on natural science unpersuasive (see Hollinger 1985, p. 168). Rorty's insistence that the distinctiveness of the human sciences has no ontological foundation has drawn the support of some, and the opposition of many. For support see Okrent (1984); for opposition see, of course, Taylor and Dreyfus themselves, notably Taylor (1981) and Dreyfus (1986).

[42] It is noteworthy that this interpretation is affirmed by Habermas but rejected by Rorty (Rorty 1991, p. 97n). Warnke 1985 defends Taylor and the notion of a double hermeneutic.

[43] For Davidson's resistance, see Davidson (1986, p. 310). But see Davidson (1990, p. 134), where he writes: ‘Rorty urges two things: that my view of truth amounts to a rejection of both coherence and correspondence theories and should properly be classed as belonging to the pragmatic tradition…I pretty much concur with him on both points’.

[44] In the introduction Rorty acknowledges, ‘I have been writing more and more about Davidson…The four chapters which make up Part II of this volume are a mixture of exposition of Davidson and commentary on him’ (Rorty 1991, p. 1).

[45] He is not maintaining that individual subjects cannot be found to be in error. Error is what the idea of ‘belief ’ permits, but only against the backdrop of a ‘social theory of interpretation’. In that context, ‘belief is built to take up the slack between sentences held true by individuals and sentences held true (or false) by public standards. What is private about belief is not that it is accessible to only one person, but that it may be idiosyncratic’. Thus ‘to interpret a particular utterance it is necessary to construct a comprehensive theory for the interpretation of a potential infinity of utterances. The evidence for the interpretation of a particular utterance will therefore have to be evidence for the interpretation of all utterances of a speaker or community’ (Davidson 1984, p. 148).

[46] For more of Foucault's theories, see Foucault (1972, 1973, 1988).

[47] According to Rorty what Kuhn is claiming is: ‘there is no commensurability between groups of scientists who have different paradigms of a successful explanation, or who do not share the same disciplinary matrix’ (Rorty 1979, p. 323). His goal in making this argument was to persuade historians of science that a shift in interpretation meant a shift in observation, that all facts were ‘theory-laden’. Rorty agrees that ‘we…need to give up the notion of “data and interpretation” with its suggestion that if we could get to the real data, unpolluted by our choice of language, we should be ‘grounding’ rational choice’ (Rorty 1979, p. 325). But even if there were a neutral observation language it would, Rorty avers, be ‘of no help whatever in bringing decision between theories under an algorithm’ (Rorty 1979, p. 324).

[48] See: Zammito (2004); Kuhn (1970, 1977); Lakatos and Musgrave (1970); Lakatos (1970); Feyerabend (1975); Laudan (1976).

[49] This is the language which inspired Hollinger's appraisal of Rorty.

[50] Though here, too, the presence of Bloom is not to be underestimated: ‘Discontinuity is freedom’ (Bloom 1973, p. 39). Bloom, too, despises ‘normal discourse’—‘most so-called “accurate” interpretations of poetry are worse than mistakes; perhaps there are only more or less creative or interesting misreadings, for is not every reading necessarily a clinamen [deviation]?’ (Bloom 1973, p. 43).

[51] For Rorty's criticism of Habermas, see Rorty (1985, 1989, pp. 65–69).

[52] As Bloom puts it, ‘The strong imagination comes to its painful birth through savagery and misrepresentation’ (Bloom 1973, p. 86).

[53] Yet once we become Bekannte, we can talk about and formulate the matters which constitute our newly established community, our common ground: Gemeinschaft. And this characterization will be a form of Wissenschaft. And if we strive for the principle of possibility of this common ground we might even establish a form of transzendentale Wissenschaft—the ambition of Habermas or Apel.

[54] David Ingram argues, ‘the philosophical hermeneutics developed by Gadamer [represents] an alternative to the holistic relativism advanced by Rorty (though Rorty conveniently elides this fact…)’ (Ingram 1985, p. 33). Perhaps the harshest critic of Rorty on this score is John Caputo, who holds ‘that the “hermeneutics” which Rorty advocates is a shadow of the real thing’. For Caputo, Rorty's true affiliation is neither with Gadamer nor with Heidegger, but with Derrida. As Caputo puts it, Rorty's ‘conversation of mankind is not thought, but talk, just “saying something”’. Gadamer's fundamental seriousness (‘the full weight of our historical situatedness in the world’) is nowhere to be found: ‘Rorty's language games are weightless creatures and his hermeneutics a mechanics of weightlessness’. For Caputo there is about Rorty's readings too much appropriation to his own ‘edifying discourse’. Such ethnocentrism seems only dubiously hermeneutical (Caputo 1985, pp. 248–262); see also Bernstein (1986) and Guignon (1983).

[55] On the relation of Gadamer to Habermas, see Ormison and Shrift (1990), Part Two: ‘Hermeneutics and critical theory: dialogues on methodology’, with detailed bibliography.

[56] The same issue came to formulation in the encounter (such as it was) between Derrida and Gadamer, where precisely what was at issue was the ethical claims of a conversation. See Simon (1989) for a provocative exposition of the deep issues for communicative rationality posed by the debate.

[57] Hence Ingram terms them ‘meta-hermeneutical’.

[58] Though it may be observed that his handling of other philosophers throughout his writing has more the form of the Platonic philosopher-king than that of the hermeneutic broker. Tone matters in such a rhetorically grounded philosophy as Rorty's, and his tone, beneath all the irony, has a dangerous propensity to superciliousness.

[59] In ‘The pragmatist's progress’, Rorty makes it pretty clear where he lands: ‘all the great dualisms of Western philosophy—reality and appearance, pure radiance and diffuse reflection, mind and body, intellectual rigor and sensual sloppiness, orderly semiotics and rambling semiosis—can be dispensed with. They are not to be synthesized into higher unities, not aufgehoben, but rather actively forgotten’ (Rorty 1992, pp. 91–92).

[60] Richard Bernstein has noted that ‘sometimes Rorty writes as if any philosophical attempt to sort out the better from the worse, the rational from the irrational (even assuming that this is historically relative) must lead us back to foundationalism and the search for an ahistorical perspective’ (Bernstein 1985, p. 78).

[61] White (1973); Kellner (1989); Ankensmit (1986); Cohen (1978). See also Carr et al. (1982).

[62] On this classic phrase of hermeneutics, see Behler (1984) and Müller-Vollmer (1972).