Richard Rorty’s new book—the third volume of his philosophical papers—has three sections. Part 1 consists of disquisitions on, or rather against, the idea of objective truth; part 2 discusses moral progress; and part 3, which has the not quite accurate title “The Role of Philosophy in Human Progress,” comprises essays about the history of philosophy.

I’ll begin with a short description of part 3. In its first essay, Rorty gives a rather interesting account of some possible ways of writing history of philosophy. One might write about a philosopher, say Kant, from what one hopes would be Kant’s own point of view, or from the point of view of a later school of thought, or as part of the project of describing the spirit (Geist) of the eighteenth century. All these approaches are O.K., says Rorty, but he condemns a fourth way, labelled doxography. By doxography he means the system used by weary professors when they convert their ancient lecture notes into books for students. Doxography, he says, de-brains the great philosophers whose work it tries to explain. The second essay is a review of a book about John Locke by Michael Ayers. The third essay links Hegel, Dewey, and Darwin and considers the question of their separate and compound influences on the ideas of today. In the fourth essay, Rorty explains why he loves Habermas and Derrida. They don’t exactly agree with one another so he tries to bring about a reconciliation. The last essay in this section (and in the book) is a dithyramb on the charms of Professor Derrida.

Rorty is at his best when writing about the history of philosophy. His work in that area is not always affected by the neo-pragmatism expounded whenever he writes directly on truth, reason, and objectivity. In part 3 of the book under review, the discussion of pragmatism as such is incidental, not central—though occasionally one hears a muted banging of drums. The we-talk so typical of this author (see below) appears now and then, as when he insists (thump, thump, thump) that “we no longer believe in God.” Who is this “we”?, one asks. Well plainly it is he, Rorty—and come to that it is also me most of the time. At this point, however, a list of real, contemporary, living-and-breathing, God-believing philosophers, physicists, biologists, academic lawyers—and even a few professors of theology—appear before the mind’s eye. Rorty must be living a pretty hermetic kind of life if he has never heard of these other we’s. And what about the teeming Hindu millions of India and Nepal and Sri Lanka? What about the Jews who keep the Sabbath in every country in the world? What about all those Catholics in South America? What about the Irish? What about Islam? Perhaps, for Rorty, these people are not we. Perhaps they are only them.

Let’s now turn to part 1, “Truth and Some Philosophers.” One of my acquaintances has a bee in the bonnet about Thomas Malthus and the so-called population crisis. The bee is so huge and so dominating that its host believes ethnic cleansing is a legitimate way of coping with “the problem of too many people.” One day the aforesaid host (who is seventy-five years old) remarked in slightly boastful tones: “And I’ve not changed my mind about these matters since I was twenty.” In spite of this disheartening piece of news, I still try, occasionally, to dislodge that dominating bee. One should never completely give up hope.

My inflexible friend has not read much philosophy, but would philosophy have made a difference? Does it make people more open to new ideas than they would be otherwise? Do philosophers and philosophy professors find it easy or difficult to change their minds? Well, there are certain famous examples. Plato changed his mind about the theory of forms for reasons expounded in the dialogue Parmenides. Kant claimed to have woken from dogmatic slumbers after reading Hume. Frege abandoned a theory when Russell showed him that it contained a paradox. Russell himself adopted, then abandoned, several different philosophical systems. After careful study, McTaggart gave up his belief in Hegelian idealism. In the 1930s, Wittgenstein denounced his own book, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. It’s also the case that some academics never change their minds. Such cases are only interesting when the explanation has to do with the kind of philosophy they profess. Frege, as mentioned above, abandoned an important conclusion because he saw that it generated paradox, but Richard Rorty (and others) would perhaps ridicule the idea of taking a logical objection so seriously.

Rorty relates that he started life as “a thrusting young analytic philosopher,” but he soon converted to a different way of thinking. He calls this way of thinking pragmatism, though a number of authors regard it as a rogue version of that doctrine; Susan Haack, for example, takes this view. Rorty’s neo-pragmatism precludes the possibility of further change because it armors him very thoroughly against reasoned criticism. He is armored because he either rejects, or reductively redefines, all the concepts that reasoned criticism relies on. Those concepts include truth and falsehood, proof and fallacy, evidence and guesswork, clarity and ambiguity, coherence and contradiction, validity and non-validity.

One way to understand Rorty’s philosophy is to consider the methods he uses in dealing with critics. Part 1 of Truth and Progress contains replies to critics such as Hilary Putnam, John Searle, and Charles Taylor. In his replies, he performs certain very simple but very effective maneuvers. Similar maneuvers appear in his other books and in my view they encapsulate the essence of his works.

Refusing to talk, I: In the early pages, Rorty suggests that there are people with whom one should not bother to discuss anything serious. He does not name or describe them but probably has in mind loners and eccentrics and individuals who by choice or by accident often turn out to be in a minority of one. In my opinion the fat boy, Piggy, in William Golding’s novel Lord of the Flies is a good example of the type.

Refusing to talk, II: Rorty suggests there are many questions which everyone should refuse to discuss because they are idle. The notion of an idle question comes to us first from Hume and then from the logical positivists. For these philosophers, an idle question is one which cannot conceivably be answered. Rorty’s concept of idleness is much more variegated. According to him, ontology is idle because it resembles theology, is a waste of time, and is not something that people care about any more. For these redneck reasons, he describes, on page 169, loss of interest in the question, What is human nature?, as “an important intellectual advance.” The question as to whether the solar system existed before Kepler discovered its laws is said to be idle because the answer cannot be found, while the idleness of asking, Are giraffes part of reality?, lies in the supposed fact that the answer is no. In chapter 9, a repetition of his Oxford Amnesty lecture, he condemns the question as to whether human beings really have the rights listed in the Helsinki Declaration as “out-moded,” “not worth raising,” and “not relevant to moral choice.” This is a tactless and disheartening message for Amnesty supporters and at the same time one which suggests that its author thinks really having a right would be like really having a pair of shoes. Some of his other, allegedly, idle questions are: asking, with Kant, how synthetic a priori judgments are possible; wondering whether literary criticism produces knowledge; and trying to find out whether (American) higher judges make law or merely interpret the Constitution.

Rejecting distinctions: Rorty explicitly or implicitly rejects the distinctions upon which all reasoning relies. Thus, he explicitly rejects the following: objective truth versus consensus, in-itself versus for-us, bad answers versus bad questions, appearance versus reality, scheme versus content, language versus world, intrinsic versus relational, form versus matter, and intellectual discovery versus reaction to peer pressure. Because he collapses intellectual discovery into peer pressure, he has to reject the distinction between reasoning and asserting. When he writes “we pragmatists argue,” these words are either followed by restatements of the position being argued for or by insults thrown at “the other side.”

The word argument is ambiguous, of course. In intellectual discussions, it refers to reasoning in its various modes: syllogism, the principles used in mathematical proofs, statements of probability, references to empirical evidence, and lists of illustrative examples. But it can also refer to mere disagreement; thus exchanges of the form “You did”--“I didn’t”--“did”~dash\“didn’t”--“did”~dash\“didn’t” can be called arguments, as can tu quoque quarrels along the lines of “you did such and such”—“you did too.”

Rortian “arguments” tend to be personalized. A passage from chapter 11 is characteristic: “We pragmatists are often told that we reduce moral disagreement to a mere struggle for power by denying the existence of reason or human nature… . We often rejoin that the need for … something ahistorical that will ratify one’s claims is itself a symptom of power worship… .”

Simplification, straw men, and capital letters: Rorty simplifies the theses of his opponents, then mocks his straw men with the jejune device of capitalization. All non-pragmatists are lumped together as (supposedly) holding to a correspondence theory of truth and then labelled Searchers After Reality As It Really Is.

It has been known for a long time that there are serious defects in the correspondence theory, but Rorty does not mention these. Nor does he seem to realize that it is possible to be an objectivist without holding a correspondence theory of truth. The redundancy theories of Frank Ramsey, Dorothy Grover, and C. J. F. Williams are compatible with objectivism.

Reduction: Reductive redefinition is an important part of Rorty’s armor because it gets rid of the concepts that participants in serious discussions normally rely on. In this way, he removes his critics’ weapons before they can get started. Rorty’s redefinitions include: objective truth=inter-subjective agreement and coherent=familiar.

Rorty’s critics point out that in cutting the ground from under their feet he cuts it from under his own. If he thinks truth is nothing over and above inter-subjective agreement, then his own neo-pragmatism will cease to be true whenever people disagree about it. If all truth is relative, then neo-pragmatism is only true for the time being. If true means true for the time being there is no sense in Rorty’s urging us to aim for a certain kind of future. By the time the desired future—the Rortian liberal utopia— arrives, it will no longer be true that it was a good one to aim for. By insisting that all our theories, including all our ideas about morality, change continually, and independently of reason, Rorty does away with the possibility of giving reasons in favor of his own philosophy and his own value system. Yet, he takes it for granted that his own moral opinions are the right ones.

These topics bring us to part 2, “Moral Progress,” which comprises essays on ethical and social questions examined from a more or less historical point of view. As noted above, Rorty can be interesting when he writes about the history of ideas; moreover, he is less liable to trip himself up in that area than in philosophy proper. The reason? Well, a single contradiction can wreck a philosophical theory, but occasional mistakes of fact need not matter very much in a historical discourse. When Rorty says that the proposition “the truth shall make you free” comes to us from neo-Platonism, and even contrasts it with the teachings of Jesus Christ, this egregious error (supposing it is only an error and not a manifestation of secularism) does not wreck the whole essay in which it occurs (“Human Rights, Rationality and Sentimentality”).

Still, some blunders have more destructive effects than others, and the following mistakes seem quite important to me. Rorty castigates traditional philosophy because, he says, it is based on foundationalism. Philosophers in the past, he says, have tried to prove the reality of human rights by seeking foundational premises about the intrinsic nature of mankind. He writes “people like Darwin and Dewey and myself” know that human beings are malleable and therefore have no intrinsic nature. This suggests that chewing-gum, unlike a diamond perhaps, has no intrinsic nature; but as an anti-essentialist Rorty need not, and indeed should not, must not, appeal to special facts about human beings or chewing-gum. If essentialism is false, then nothing at all can have an intrinsic nature. (Anti-essentialism, though, is a kind of superstition. What is so terrible about admitting that human beings are intrinsically malleable?)

Rorty’s description of philosophers who theorize about human rights is wrong if he means to refer to Hobbes and Locke. Hobbes’s natural right is self-defense and he derives it not from the intrinsic nature of man but from the dangerous character of social life without government. His description of the struggle for survival is not unlike Darwin’s. Locke defined persons as beings with reason and memory but states that it is men, not persons, who are the bearers of rights. What are men? Locke says little about their intrinsic nature beyond the statement that they are living creatures, an animal species. He writes “there is nothing more evident than that creatures of the same species should be equal amongst one another” (my italics). In other words, the proposition about the right to equality is more evident than any supposed foundation. It is itself a foundation.

Everyone is a foundationalist. Everyone has to take some propositions as bedrock. Rorty himself is a foundationalist in that he takes it completely for granted that the universalization of liberalism and democracy and human well-being is not to be questioned. But because he supposes himself to be an anti-foundationalist he cannot openly say that his values are self-evident or undeniable. Neo-pragmatism has no room for the idea of the undeniable. Yet although he cannot say his moral beliefs are foundational, he nevertheless treats them as such. Well, meaning is use, as Wittgenstein almost suggested. Belief is behavior, as old-style pragmatists used to teach.

In an earlier book, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, Rorty wrote that reason is “a ladder which ought to be thrown away … in order to bring the liberal utopia into being.” It seems he now wants to reclaim the label reasonable, which he once rejected. How to do it? Easy-peasy: just redefine the word rational. Rorty’s new definition gives the word three senses. In his first sense, rational refers to a Darwinian ability to cope with one’s environment. Squids, he says, are rational in this sense, though human beings, especially technologists, are more so. In Rorty’s second sense, the word refers to a quality which according to him is nonexistent because regarded as intrinsic. Only outmoded people like Aristotle could believe in such a quality. In his third sense, the word refers to a bunch of virtuous attitudes: tolerance, non-aggression, being against slavery, and being in favor of Dewey and Democracy and Darwin, not to mention liberalism and feminism and anti-racism. No doubt he holds that “people like Dewey and Derrida and myself” are rational in the third sense.

The whole Rortian account of rationality, however, is stipulative, question-begging, self-serving, and tendentious. It has nothing to do with any definition of rationality in any language, in any dictionary, in any country. It should therefore be rejected. Rorty’s stance is still best described as a variety of philosophical irrationalism.

The basis of Rorty’s philosophical decisions is summed up on page 171 of Truth and Progress: “All we philosophers can do when asked for standards or methods of disinterested … inquiry is to describe how the people we most admire conduct their inquiries.” If that is all “we philosophers” can do there can, of course, be no justification for our admiration. To ask what makes “the people we most admire” worthy of admiration will be forbidden. It will be an idle question.

Readers know who Rorty himself admires because he has a habit of invoking names. When he writes “philosophers like Davidson and Derrida and myself” or “thinkers like Darwin and Dewey and myself,” it is fairly clear that these Big D’s are in some sense Daddy figures. And the one he most admires is John Dewey. This is appropriate because Dewey was a father of American pragmatism and an author who theorized about education. One of his better-known theories is the notion that an important function of schools, at least in democratic America, is to socialize children, to make them into good citizens. A consequence of that idea, in America and elsewhere, has been the production of over-socialized adults.

What do I mean by over-socialization? The behavior of over-socialized adults resembles the behavior of the boy-gang depicted in Lord of the Flies. It resembles the behavior of the “We-Speakers” described by Ayn Rand in one of her short stories (I realize, of course, that Ayn Rand, even in her wildest dreams or nightmares, could never have been admitted to membership of Rorty’s pantheon of persons to admire). In Rand’s futuristic story, politicians and educators abolish the words I and you, so that eventually everyone speaks only of We. The moral of the tale is that those who can only speak of We suffer from all kinds of weakness and wimpishness. For instance, they cannot accept personal responsibility and they have no concept of truth.

Rorty’s writing, especially in the book under review, is full of the first person, both singular and plural. The plural forms are invoked whenever he sets out to defend irrationalism. The expression “my side” is expanded into “we followers of Nietzsche,” “we supporters of Davidson,” “we pragmatists,” “we twentieth century philosophers,” “we modern thinkers,” and “philosophers like myself and N,” where N is maybe Darwin or Dewey or Derrida or some other well-known or well-paid heavyweight. Expressions like these occur over and over again, dozens of times, scores of times.

Neo-pragmatism is a philosophy of consensus for gangs and peer groups. It is the Philosophy of We.

The irrationalist cast of mind and way of thinking is simultaneously mushy and impervious. One might wonder why authors such as Charles Taylor, Tom Nagel, Susan Haack, and John Searle have seemingly tried to convert its adherents. It would be a great triumph, of course, to dislodge the bee of irrationalism from the bonnet of even one professor, but I do not think that is, or should be, a primary aim. In spite of appearances, Taylor, Nagel, Haack, and Searle are not talking directly to the adherents of irrationalism; they are talking to third parties.