Yong paper for ETS 2002 - all rights reserved - p. 7
our vocabularies, and be cautious about the mirroring metaphors we use in our exercising rhetorical
power. In short, we need to shift from talk about correctness of representation to talk about warranted
practices instead.
Now whatever we make of Rorty`s project--keeping in mind both the extremely misleading
generalizations of the preceding paragraphs and that criticisms of Rorty`s project have not abated since
the publication of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature--clearly he has deployed the discourse of
Philosophy for his own purposes precisely by redescribing it as driven by inner contradictions. The result
is an exposé of its questions as non-questions, and an argument for a post-Philosophical philosophy of
edifying conversation for its own sake. If critics charge Rorty with impropriety in his retelling the history
of philosophy, he can respond that he is not providing argument but simply narrating another (better) way
of envisioning the tradition (and is that not what all historical reconstruction is at least in part about?
15
).
If other critics then dismiss Rorty`s neo-pragmatism as an illegitimate exercise of poetic, literary and
rhetorical license, he can complain that they are not taking his Philosophic (re)descriptions seriously. His
point, however, is to negate the inextricable conundrums of Philosophy in order to make room for
philosophy understood as private conversation in liberal, democratic societies.
Undoubtedly, the genius of Rorty`s strategy has been confirmed repeatedly over the past twenty
plus years given the widespread hearing his project has gained. But, ironically, this demonstrates my
point that while designed to fuel conversation in democratic societies, Rorty`s attempts to promote
edifying discussion could just as well terminate engagement prematurely.
16
Insofar as he neither
provides nor wishes to present arguments for his proposals, how can his views be engaged? More to the
15
See Rorty`s Inquiry as Recontextualization: An Anti-Dualist Account of Interpretation, in Objectivity,
Relativism, and Truth, 93-110, and The Historiography of Philosophy: Four Genres, in Rorty, Truth and Progress:
Philosophical Papers, vol. 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 247-73. The latter piece discusses
historical reconstructions; rational or systematic reconstructions; Geistgeschichte as canon formation (e.g., Hegel);
and finally, what we can do without, the dubious and generic doxographies. Rorty sees the first three as combining to
enable human beings to use the past to cope with the present and the future.
16
I am grateful to James K. A. Smith for helping me begin to see this point. See also Rebecca Comay,
Interrupting the Conversation: Notes on Rorty, in Evan Simpson, ed., Anti-Foundationalism and Practical
Reasoning: Conversations between Hermeneutics and Analysis (Edmonton, Al.: Academic Printing and Publishing,
1987), 83-98, for an assessment of Rorty the conversation-stopper.