Rorty

[Terrance]

"While earlier Philosophers sought to inquire and reason
about God, humanity and the world, modern Philosophers took
a mental step back (or up), asking what could be
known about the very processes of knowing, inquiring, and
reasoning. When the
authority of revelation ceased to be of philosophical
significance, the reference
point of knowledge became the knower. Philosophy, following
Descartes' lead,
turned inward, taking the investigation of the interior of
the knower as a problem
prior to the knower's investigation of the exterior.
Philosophy became largely
concerned with examining the methods, the results, and the
statements of results
of the labors of natural scientists."

If you listen to this story enough you begin to accept it as
an accurate history of philosophy, but nothing could be
further from the case. The fact is, that what can be known
and how it can be known and how we know that we know is
nothing new or different under the sun or in the mirror. The
history of philosophy exhibits a cycle of epochal shifts.
The epistemic shift  noted above is one such shift in a
series of shifts from Being to Knowing to Meaning. 



         His own goal is that of traditional pragmatism: to
remove the throne upon which
         deluded philosophers sit while they pretend to
dispense decrees and judgments
         about what is "true," what is "valid," while
pretending to think about what is "real."

This is not traditional pragmatism, but Neo-pragmatism. What
does that mean? I don't know. Let's take a closer look and
see if the pragmatism, which is very attractive, refreshing,
constructive, can be "Neo-ed" or if it is deserving of the
name Pragmatism at all, since it is entirely Sophistic, and
not anything new under the sun or in  Aristotle's,
Descartes' and Kant's mirror.  

 His major deconstructive tool is historicism: he seeks to
tell the story about          how Philosophers came
mistakenly to believe that they were experts on "knowing,"
that  they knew something about knowing that one had to be a
philosopher to know. In summary his story is this:

             It is pictures rather than propositions,
metaphors rather than
             statements, which determine most of our
philosophical convictions.
             The picture which holds traditional philosophy
captive is that of the
             mind as a great mirror, containing various
representations -- some
             accurate, some not -- and capable of being
studied by pure,
             non-empirical methods. Without the notion of
mind as mirror, the
             notion of knowledge as accuracy of
representation would not have
             suggested itself. [6]

Here Rorty simplifies one of the most complex and most
important developments in the history of thought. 

Why did it suggest itself? Why did it not suggest itself to
Plato or Plotinus or Dewey, Augustine? Why is this notion of
the mind as mirror, represented by great minds across
history? How is it represented differently through the
cycles of Being, Knowing, Meaning? In its various
representations it can identified as an essential element
in  Anaxagoras, Aristotle, Aquinas, Hegel, Descartes,
Spinoza, Husserel, the Stoics, Kant, also,  James Clark
Maxwell and James Joyce.

Dewey took one step away from Aristotle as Kant did with his
transcendent unknowables, but here Rorty takes Dewey's one
step and takes three more giant steps into the pure
Sophistic. And that position is so very difficult to keep
from elusively slipping out of constructive discourse and
into its method of conflict. The truth is, the sophistic
position is a liberating one.  Someone mentioned a book on
the Sophists and why they are being revived today? It's the
most creative position!  Rorty's attempt to harness the
flux: the perspective that is whatever  perspective we have;
the reality, whatever is real to us;  and of course, the
principle of freedom--liberated from all external or a
priori restrictions,  seems very much what the postmodern
world wants to justify most.   Free, free to affirm or deny
anything whatever. Moreover, It is liberation or
enlightenment that cannot be specified, even by specifying
that it can never be specified. But is this free floating on
the flux constructive? Pragmatic? And what of the Sophistic
method? Rorty pretends to float, but soon or later, the
method is one of conflict, irreconcilable difference. 

TBC