Consequences of Pragmatism: Essays, 1972-1980

Rorty has collected a selection from his vast number of essays under the title "Consequences of Pragmatism". Spanning the time range of his work from the early 1970s to the early 1980s, they represent Rorty's development and exposition of his views after he made the sudden turn from analytic philosophy to his anti-essentialist pragmatism. Many of the essays are meant to explain how his view contrasts with the tradition in philosophy he is arguing against, which he identifies as the Cartesian-Kantian one, as well as the analytic philosophical tradition he used to belong to. However, some of the later essays also serve to defend his views against some common criticisms. Also included are essays which compare his views with those of people working or having worked along similar 'counter-tradition' lines, such as of course his inspiration Dewey, but also Heidegger, Foucault, and Cavell. The essays are well-written and generally not too difficult, so they should be an accessible summary of his philosophical views for the intellectual reader. Despite the sometimes rather dry subject-matter, such as reviewing the developments in 20th Century philosophy of language, Rorty applies humor and optimism to skilfully polemicize against this tradition. This leads to witty phrases and interesting observations such as: "taking how and what one does in bed as definitive of one's being seems a specifically masculine trait", "granted that Derrida is the latest and largest flower on the dialectical kudzu vine of which the 'Phenomenology of Spirit' was the first tendril, does that not merely show the need to uproot this creeping menace? Can we not all see (...) the need to strip the suckers of this parasitic climber from the still unfinished walls and roofs of the great Kantian edifice which it covers and conceals?" or "our tyrants and bandits are more hateful than those of earlier times because (...) they pose as intellectuals. Our tyrants write philosophy in the morning and torture in the afternoon; our bandits alternatively read Hölderlin and bomb people to bloody scraps". Despite the repetition of the collection, unfortunately inherent due to the need for exposition of the same misunderstood theme over and over again, this kind of writing keeps it intriguing and insightful. And since Rorty is committed to seeing philosophy as similar to literature, this is serious praise.

This book might be a good place to start trying to gain a complete knowledge of the historicity of secret thoughts. "Hegel's historicism" (p. 3) might be compared with Americans who thought that World War Two was a great event, but this book is more concerned with "The notion of alternative conceptual frameworks." (p. 3). There is no entry in the index for historicity, but the idea of historicity, which is so important in understanding arguments about right and wrong, could teach us more than the index, which has the names of lots of philosophers in unusual conceptual combinations: Hegel and truth, Hegel and Kuhn, Hegel and Bloom, Nietzsche and James, Kant and James, and names that only appear in the notes at the end of the essays in this book. Published in 1982, the final note for Essay 3, "Overcoming the Tradition: Heidegger and Dewey" contains an acknowledgement, thanking "my late colleague Walter Kaufmann for helpful comment on a draft of this paper." (p. 59, n. 73). Essay 3 was originally read at a conference in 1974 and published in `The Review of Metaphysics' in 1976, a few years before Walter Kaufmann's death in September, 1980. Overcoming tradition might be a small accomplishment, compared to living in a time so comic that laughter might be considered an important cause of the death of an arguer. Having many philosophers and no Philosophy, as much of this book implies, might be as funny as the fatal truth that hardly anyone could believe any of this stuff before, during, or after its historicity.I would prefer to review this book as if the particular philosophical questions which it collected in the essays (set in the subtitle in the timeframe 1972-1980) serve as a better example of the comedy which was popular in the field of topical humor about politics in a time of turbulent opinions during those years after the death of Lenny Bruce from an overdose of narcotics and before we could watch "South Park" and, unfortunately, of more interest to us today than what Truth or Philosophy might mean. The Introduction, in particular, which attempted to tie the essays together in a manner which suggests that Rorty would prefer some intellectual position that defines the nature of his self, but admitting that a thorough reading might convince us that he had not yet achieved an understandable consistency, fades into insignificance when we readers confront such statements as "Even if I were thinking, which I am not, that would not show that I exist." (p. 7). Ha? Ha? Ha?Is a title like "The World Well Lost" (pp. 3-18) even decent? Does humor form a barrier to understanding the title "Keeping Philosophy Pure: An Essay on Wittgenstein" (pp. 19-36) when a key theme of the essay is "Yet Wittgenstein came in the end to mock his own creation," (p. 19) "vapid imitation" (p. 22), and that philosophers' attempts to understand Wittgenstein involve "the same paradoxes elaborated by Wittgenstein himself (who cheerfully tosses out half-a-dozen in

Roty, the grand disciple of Dewey and the most articulate pragmatist, elucidates some of the most bothering aspects of pragmatism in this book. In some of these essays, however, one could not help but feel that Roty is over enthusiastic in pushing the pragamtism agenda: he sounds almost evangelistic. If pragmatism wishes to achieve the kind of ideal that Dewey and others like James and Pierce has set out to achieve, the ideal of a democratic capitalist society, such dogmatism may sound a little unwarranted.