Sam Pawlett wrote:
> Have you read Rorty's magnum opus Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature?
yep.
> His whole, project, as I read it, is to dethrone academic
> philosophy making it a part of the English or Humanities department.I hope
> the heavyweights on this list correct me if I'm wrong.
'heavyweights'? mmm... continuing the conversation of the Greats perchance?? should all us lesserweights interrupt this conversation? Comay argues, quite convincingly, that the attempt by rorty to reduce the immanent contradictions within liberalism suggests that this conversation - in the flattened out terms of rorty's version of a one-dimensional (or anti-foundationalist liberalism) - has never really ever begun.
a few further comments by rebecca comay on rorty:
"... liberalism without tears ... ... Rorty reproduces the terms of the bourgeois liberal tradition - cut off from its rationalist justifications...; shorn of its universalist pretensions; cut off from its utopian 'truth'. Existing bourgeois liberalism is to be promoted, without argument, as the 'best example of ... solidarity we have achieved' (CP 207). 'We should be more willing than we are', avers Rorty, 'to celebrate bourgeois capitalist society as the best polity actualized so far, while regretting that it is irrelevant to most of the problems of most of the population of this planet' (CP 210 n16). ... in simply jettisoning the idea of universality - instead of interrogating it and wresting it free from its essentialist trappings - Rorty tacitly accepts all the terms of classical rationalism. By dismissing the very demand for universalisation as so much transcendent hype, Rorty not only accedes to the verdict of the natural law tradition (universal = eidos = telos); indeed he relies on this verdict so as to immunize the present from all criticism and change. ... in this way Rorty occludes what were the real contradictions in classical liberal thought (the gap between its theoretical premises and the social practices it sanctioned, ... between the formal egalitarianism it preached and the material requirements). By promoting a liberalism which need no longer even pretend to loftier 'principle', Rorty ends up shielding classical liberalism from all the embarrassments which had typically plagued it. As such he deflects all criticism of an immanent or dialectical sort and thereby seals off the liberal tradition from realizing its latent hope and promise. Precisely where Rorty's historicism could have been put (in pragmatic terms) to 'good use' - by exploding the myth of the given; by insisting that our present conceptual modes are relative to a specific social or institutional context ('made' rather than 'found', in Rort's terms); by refusing to legitimate or embalm any given cultural code through an appeal to eternal or transcendental standards; by mocking the conceit of philosophy (as purveyor of essences) and thus challenging not only its intellectual hegemony but its institutional self-enclosure - precisely where Rort's hermeneutic pragmatism, if pursued rigorously, could and should have led philosophy in the direction of a general social and political project, Rorty shrinks back from the potentially subversive or utopian implications of his own undertaking and retreats to safer ground. Culture is both aggrandized and debilitated here, and philosophy both idealized and belittled. The mirror, flattering philosophy's self-importance even as it condemns it to narcissistic self-enclosures, cuts off the critical distance between philosophy and its 'lifeworld', and thus simultaneously sequesters and 'profanes' it"
angela
(ps. apologies for not referencing the comay essay - it was passed on to me by a friend who neglected to note the references. but, it's "Interrupting the Conversation: Notes on Rorty". anyone know where this article appeared? there's also an excellent comay piece in the Stanford French Review, v15 n1-2, 1991, called "Geopolitics of Translation: Deconstruction In America". a pretty excellent writer/theorist/critic is comay.)