PRivate irony and public decency

Private Irony and Public Decency: Richard Rorty's New PragmatismAuthor(s): Thomas McCarthySource: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 16, No. 2 (Winter, 1990), pp. 355-370Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1343617 .Accessed: 06/07/2011 09:14

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Private Irony and Public Decency: Richard Rorty's New Pragmatism

Thomas McCarthy

In November 1985, at the InterAmerican Congress of Philosophy tak-

ing place in Guadalajara, Mexico, Richard Rorty, Kenan Professor of Humanities at the University of Virginia and MacArthur Fellow, sparked the meetings' major flare-up by closing his plenary address with the words:

philosophy should be kept as separate from politics as should religion . . . the attempt to ground political theory in overarching theories of the nature of man or the goal of history has done more harm than good. We should not assume that it is our task, as professors of philosophy, to be the avant-garde of political movements. ... We should think of politics as one of the experimental rather than of the theoretical disciplines.'

To the numerous Latin American philosophers in the audience, the relevance of philosophy to politics was a matter of course. In fact, prior to Rorty's talk, discussion at the plenary sessions had been dominated by questions of cultural imperialism in the relation of European and North American to Latin American thought.

But why was this incident in any way remarkable? After all, Amer- ican philosophy had been cutting its ties to the public culture since the

1. Richard Rorty, "From Logic to Language to Play: A Plenary Address to the InterAmerican Congress," Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Associa- tion 59 (1986): 752-53. This is a revised version of the actual talk, from which the first line quoted was removed.

Critical Inquiry 16 (Winter 1990) ? 1990 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/90/1602-0008$01.00. All rights reserved.

355

356 Thomas McCarthy Private Irony and Public Decency

late 1930s-ties that had been intricately woven in the heyday of American pragmatism by philosophers of world rank like William James, John Dewey, and George Herbert Mead. Deeply influenced by currents of nineteenth-century thought flowing from German idealism, the pragmatists had made philosophy's relevance to the whole of life and culture the cornerstone of their thinking. But this all changed with the ascendency of logical positivism in the years after the Second World War. The positivist outlook that was carried to England and America with the migration of prominent members of the Vienna Cir- cle (for example, Rudolf Carnap) merged with homegrown varieties of

philosophical analysis (for example, those developed by Bertrand Rus- sell and G. E. Moore) to produce a new and radically different philosophical culture: the dominant models of knowledge and

understanding came now from the physical and formal sciences (especially mathematical logic). Other areas of culture-art, religion, mo-

rality, politics-were viewed either as lying completely outside the domain of the rational or as dealing with "values," not "facts," and therefore as matters for decision, not demonstration.

The hegemony of logical positivism was already on the wane in the 1960s as a result of penetrating criticisms by thinkers both inside and outside the movement. But its legacy continued to exert a forma- tive influence on the less doctrinaire and more diverse varieties of

"analytic philosophy" that succeeded it. For one thing, occasional dis- claimers to the contrary notwithstanding, the physical and formal sciences have continued to exercise a stranglehold on philosophical imagination. This has not excluded the development of more or less intimate relations with linguistics, especially formal linguistics, or a current love affair with cognitive science and artificial intelligence. But it has choked off any deep influence from the arts and humanities, as it has from history and the social sciences. And just because these latter domains have continued to be of central importance for Continental philosophy, we are left with the spectacle of "two philoso- phies"-analytic and Continental-mirroring the infamous split between the "two cultures." As part of the same syndrome, analytic philosophy has become increasingly professional and technical and, consequently, largely invisible to the wider culture; whereas Continen- tal philosophy, while far from popular, has nevertheless maintained its ties to culture and society at large. The public roles of Jean-Paul Sartre and Michel Foucault in France, or of Theodor Adorno and Jiir-

Thomas McCarthy is professor of philosophy at Northwestern University. He is the author of The Critical Theory of Jirgen Habermas (1978). This essay is part of a work-in-progress on philosophy and critical theory.

Critical Inquiry Winter 1990 357

gen Habermas in Germany, have had no equivalent in American philosophy since the death of Dewey. Philosophers here think of themselves as scientists rather than as public intellectuals.

This picture is, of course, drastically oversimplified, but not, I think, misleading. There have always been a small number of writers whose work was both respected by the analytic establishment and of interest to scholars from a variety of other fields. John Rawls's theory of justice is an obvious case in point. And for some time now there has been a surge of interest in "applied philosophy"-medical ethics, business ethics, philosophy and public affairs, philosophy of peace, ecology, sex and love, and so forth. But these developments have had little metaphilosophical impact on the self-understanding of mainstream analytic philosophy. For one thing, most of the efforts at "ap- plication" take for granted the adequacy of existing tools and results. More serious metaphilosophical challenges have arisen from among the ranks of feminist thinkers, who have called into question, as they have in other disciplines, taken-for-granted categories, assumptions, problems, and practices. To this point, however, feminist criticism has had less of a transformative effect in philosophy than in most other areas of the humanities. This is perhaps due in part to analytic philosophy's scientistic ethos: there can no more be fundamentally different

ways of doing philosophy than there can be of doing physics. So while feminist philosophy has stirred things up on the edges, mainstream

Anglo-American philosophy has continued to flow along in the accustomed channels.

In the last decade or so, there has been another major source of

agitation on the periphery: the wholesale importation of Continental thought. If Anglo-American philosophers could not or would not produce models serviceable to the broader culture, the French and Ger- mans were happy to oblige. Thus the stock of thinkers like Foucault and Jacques Derrida, Habermas and Hans-Georg Gadamer has been

steadily on the rise here. More and more, younger philosophers-and some older ones as well-have turned to their work to learn how to think philosophically about wider cultural and social issues; and non-

philosophers are increasingly looking to them, rather than to their colleagues down the hall, to supply philosophical impulses to their own work. And yet, in the midst of this turbulence, the established center has managed to hold, largely by ignoring rather than by re- sponding to metaphilosophical challenges on the ever-broader periphery.

It is in this context that Rorty's unique significance has to be un- derstood. A highly respected member of the philosophical establishment well into the 1970s, he has since turned revolutionary critic. After having taught for years at Princeton, one of the citadels of analytic philosophy, and after having edited an extraordinarily influential


volume documenting "the linguistic turn" in analytic philosophy,2 he has managed to become its most effective native critic. At the same time, he has absorbed into his critique the main lines of Continental thought from Hegel to Heidegger and Habermas. Rorty is without equal in his mastery of the two philosophical cultures; he stands al- most alone in having written penetrating essays on many of the major problems and figures of both. What is more, he has deployed this vast competence in a sustained effort to forge a new pragmatism that aims to be as broadly relevant as the original. Armed with a readable style and a witty irreverence, he promotes this cause not only in scholarly journals but, like James and Dewey before him, in mass periodicals as well.

We seem to have here all the makings of a new American philosopher-hero. But that hasn't happened, and trying to understand why not will take us to the heart of contemporary metaphilosophical debates. The reasons why Rorty has been treated as a pariah by the analytic establishment are obvious enough; but why does he provoke such critical reactions from other philosophical disestablishmentarians, especially politically minded ones like feminists and critical social theo- rists? This is substantially the same question as how someone with his neopragmatist aspirations could come to make the statement I quoted at the start of this essay, a statement that might well have made Dewey uneasy in his grave. The answer lies in Rorty's peculiar view of the relation of philosophy to politics, which I shall discuss in part 2 below. Before doing so, however, I want to consider a facet of his thought that is not at all peculiar to him but common to many "postmodernist" thinkers, especially those with a French accent: his radically historicist deconstruction of the Enlightenment notion of universal reason.

1. After the Linguistic Turn

It seems clear now that the linguistic turn was only a half mea- sure. If traditional philosophical analyses of consciousness rested on a questionable abstraction from intersubjectively valid structures of language, subsequent analyses of language rested on a no less dubious abstraction from historically changing structures of social practice. It was not long before the embeddedness of language in lifeworlds and forms of life drew philosophical attention to the variability of structures of thought and action, the conventionality of criteria of rationality, the embodied, practical, and desirous nature of rational subjects- in short, to the impurity of "pure reason." When something like this

2. See The Linguistic Turn: Recent Essays in Philosophical Method, ed. Rorty (Chicago, 1967).


happened in the first half of the last century, it gave rise to various

left-Hegelian attempts to refract philosophical problematics in the denser medium of sociocultural analysis. The main reaction this time around has been more akin to the historicist turn at the end of the

century; and in this country Rorty is its most influential exponent. Through emphasizing the radically temporal, local, contingent character of patterns of thought and action, his new pragmatism seeks to cut off rather than to continue-through-transforming philosophical lines of thought.

In his very influential Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Rorty develops a critique of analytic philosophy that could only have been written by someone on the inside.3 Though he does draw on a number of Continental thinkers, most of his key arguments are appropri- ated from the works of mainstream Anglo-American philosophers. But he deploys them to his own radical purposes, under the banner of an "epistemological behaviorism." Criticizing both the traditional idea of the mind as a special field for philosophical investigation and its re-

placement by "the logical analysis of language," he proposes instead a turn to social practice to bring us down from the clouds back to earth -that is, back to the concrete forms of life in which our working notions of "reason," "truth," "objectivity," "knowledge," and the like are embodied.

The key to Rorty's epistemological behaviorism is viewing justification as a social phenomenon, so that understanding knowledge becomes a matter of understanding the social practices in which we

justify beliefs. The traditional philosophical investigation of "the nature of human knowledge" becomes the study of certain modes of action and interaction, especially those that count "as justification within the various disciplinary matrices constituting the culture of the day" (PMN, p. 340 n.20). Studies of this sort do not require special philosophical methods, but draw instead on "the usual empirical-cum-hermeneutic methods" of cultural anthropology and intellectual history (PMN, p. 385). Explicating rationality and epistemic authority is not, then, a matter of coming up with transcendental arguments but of providing thick ethnographic accounts of knowledge-producing activities: "if we understand the rules of a language-game, we understand all that there is to understand about why moves in that language-game are made" (PMN, p. 174).

As an expression of opposition to the traditional quest for ultimate foundations, this is all to the good. But Rorty goes beyond that to a radically historicist account-he denies it is a theory-of "reason," "truth," "objectivity," "knowledge," and related notions. This

3. Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, N.J., 1979); hereafter abbreviated PMN.


account is spiced with such formulae as "what our peers will . . . let us get away with saying" and "conformity to the norms of the day" (PMN, pp. 176, 367). Less epigrammatically, Rorty defends the cur-

rently widespread view that "truth and knowledge can only be judged by the standards of the inquirers of our own day. . . . nothing counts as justification unless by reference to what we already accept . .. there is no way to get outside our beliefs and our language so as to find some test other than coherence" (PMN, p. 178). There is a way of un-

derstanding this in which it is unexceptionably but uninterestingly true: we can't get outside our own skins, we have to start from where we are, we have to judge things by our own lights-in short, we have to make do without a God's-eye point of view. Rorty's way is more in-

teresting but also easier to take exception with. It amounts to flatten-

ing out our notions of reason and truth by removing any air of transcendence from them. He allows that Socrates and Plato intro- duced into our culture "specifically 'philosophical"' uses of these terms which, like Kant's ideas of pure reason, were "designed precisely to stand for the Unconditioned-that which escapes the context within which discourse is conducted and inquiry pursued" (PMN, p. 309). But, he adds, these are nothing like the "ordinary" uses of these terms, the "homely and shopworn" uses with which we make do outside of philosophy, where there is no divide between what can be justi- fied by the resources of our culture and what is rational, true, real, objectively known, and so forth. It is the specifically philosophical uses that cause all the trouble, and the remedy has been familiar since Lud-

wig Wittgenstein: we are to get rid of the philosophical cramps caused

by any such transcendent ideas through restricting ourselves to the commonsense notions immanent in our culture.

This move is not as unproblematic as it might-and given its

widespread acceptance, apparently does-seem. To begin with, it runs counter to the general thrust of epistemological behaviorism by seek-

ing not to describe but to reform (some of) our practices. Rorty ac-

knowledges this, but he thinks that we have little to lose from

dropping ideas that were invented by philosophers and have never been of much use outside philosophy. It would be possible, I think, to show that other, "non-Platonic" cultures also have context-transcend-

ing senses of truth and reality, but I won't attempt to argue that here. It would also be possible to open the Bible and show that its authors

regularly assumed senses of truth and reality (and, of course, justice) beyond conformity to the norms of their culture, and to trace the routes by which they entered into the pores of our culture together with the religions of the Bible, but I won't attempt that either. What I would like to point out is that, whatever the sources, our ordinary, nonphilosophical truth-talk and reality-talk is shot through with just the sorts of idealizations that Rorty wants to purge.


More generally, our culture is everywhere structured around transcultural notions of validity. We are heirs to centuries of distin-

guishing between appearance and reality, truth and opinion, prejudice and reason, custom and morality, convention and justice, and the like. To justify his beliefs to us, Rorty cannot simply appeal to peer agreement, established norms, or anything of the sort. And it is of course

telling that he never attempts to do so. Instead, he presents us with

just the sorts of reasons we are accustomed to receiving for claims such as he makes, reasons meant to support their truth, not just for us, but for their truth "period." For us to use the forms of justification prevalent in our culture means, in many pursuits at least, attempt- ing to construct arguments that claim to be valid transculturally. For this is what we have long been up to, not only in philosophy but in ethics and law as well as in science and technology. Thus Rorty's "frank ethnocentrism" seems to land us right where we were to begin with; when we want to argue with members of our culture, we should continue to do as we have done, that is, to appeal to universal, context-transcending notions of truth and reality, right and good. An

epistemological behaviorism of the sort Rorty envisions could be erected only on a site from which all such idealizing elements had been cleared. The result, then, is the not inconsiderable irony that a project designed to promote a frank self-acceptance of our culture

against its philosophical critics is metamorphosed into a deflationary revisionism supported primarily by philosophical arguments.

This is obviously not what Rorty has in mind. He is thinking of the ways in which historical, social, and cultural studies have gradually but inexorably eroded our cultural self-confidence, shaken our universalist self-understanding, and made us ever more aware of our own particularities and limitations. Though we still have a long way to go, we have at least begun to see the importance of considering alternative possibilities existing in other cultures when trying to determine what is true and false, right and wrong, good and bad. But throwing historical and comparative considerations into the balance does not magically absolve us from weighing claims to validity on our own. That we now understand our capacities for reasoning to be rooted in culturally variable and historically changing forms of social practice can mean the end of the Enlightenment only for thinkers who remain so captivated by absolutist conceptions of reason, truth, and right that their passing means there is nothing left that really makes a difference -the "God is dead, everything is permitted" fallacy of disappointed expectations.

Ours is and has been for some time a highly reflective culture. The round of reflexivity set in motion by the rise of the cultural and human sciences in the last century is proving to be as profound in its effects on our self-understanding as were the rounds begun in ancient


Greece and in early modern Europe. The real issue here is how to as- sess those effects. The paradoxes and contradictions that beset neohistoricist reactions to the desublimation of reason make it imperative to

explore other, less radically antirationalist responses.

2. Sublimity and Decency

Whereas Rorty's epistemological behaviorism is a variant of the antirationalist historicism common to most postmodernist thinkers, his views on politics and society are by no means typical. But they are nevertheless of general significance, for he defines his own standpoint by reference to the other principal positions in the contemporary debates on postmodernism. To put it somewhat crudely, Rorty finds himself in broad agreement with the philosophical views of French post-Nietz- scheans and post-Heideggerians while he disagrees rather sharply with the social and political conclusions they draw from them. On the other hand, he finds himself in broad agreement with what he takes to be the social and political views of Habermas while he disagrees em-

phatically with the philosophical ideas Habermas sees as undergirding them. The question that interests us here could be put as follows: are Habermas and the French post-structuralists all wrong about the con- nections they think exist between their views on philosophy and politics, or is Rorty wrong to think that he can have it both ways?

Rorty credits Foucault with showing that what counts as "ration-

ality" at a given time is radically contingent, the outcome not of universal historical tendencies but of rather suddenly formed "grids," ways of ordering things, whose genealogies reveal the multiple forms of power invested in them. On the other hand, Foucault's resentment of bourgeois society was so deep that it blinded him to its undeniable social and political achievements and led him to represent it one-

dimensionally, merely as a disciplinary society. There is, says Rorty, no "we" to be found in Foucault's writings: "He forbids himself the tone of the liberal sort of thinker who says to his fellow citizens: 'We know that there must be a better way to do things than this; let us look for it together.' "4 In a similar vein, Rorty endorses

Jean-Fran;ois Lyotard's incredulity toward philosophical metanarratives about the

progress of reason and freedom, the emancipation of humanity, and the like. Lyotard is right, in his view, to resist the nostalgia for unity, totality, and foundations that haunts Western logocentrism and to seek to bring an end to the philosophical tradition that is its expression. But his politics also suffer from a deficient sense of community,

4. Rorty, "Habermas and Lyotard on Postmodernity," in Habermas and Modernity, ed. RichardJ. Bernstein (Cambridge, Mass., 1985), p. 172.


as is reflected in his attempt to extend the ideology of innovation and

experimentation from the aesthetic into the social domain. Like other

post-Nietzschean thinkers, he tends to confuse legitimate personal needs with social purposes. But, Rorty objects,

Social purposes are served, just as Habermas says, by finding beautiful ways of harmonizing interests, rather than sublime ways of detaching oneself from others' interests. The attempt of leftist intellectuals to pretend that the avant-garde is serving the wretched of the earth by fighting free of the merely beautiful is a hopeless attempt to make the special needs of the intellectual and the social needs of his community coincide.5

If the great temptation of left-Nietzscheans is the inflation of philosophical antifoundationalism into a politics of the sublime, the temptation of post-Heideggerians is to repeat the errors of philosophical fundamentalism by inflating the overcoming of metaphysics into a substitute for politics. The problem started with Heidegger himself, who used his "ontological difference" between Being and beings as a

springboard to a "history of Being" in which "the scientific, cultural, and political life of a society" was viewed as the "working-out of a set of [philosophical] ideas." In line with this, Heidegger "carried over into philosophy the attitude characteristic of religious prophets: that their own voice is the voice of some greater power . . that is about to

bring on a new age of the world."6A cogent critique of the philosophical tradition gets translated into a questionable politics, this time because philosophy is taken too seriously.

According to Rorty, the same temptation lay along the path trav- eled by Derrida, but he managed in the end to resist it and give us

Heidegger without the Seinsfrage.7 In fact, of all the postmodernist "overcomers" on the contemporary scene, Derrida is obviously Ror-

ty's favorite. He has been sufficiently vague on the subject of politics to avoid giving offense to Rorty's liberal sensibility while he does to

philosophy what Rorty himself wants to do, namely treat it as a genre of "literature." On this view, philosophy seeks constantly, and without

argument, to displace accepted vocabularies, problems, criteria, and so on, by inventing new and more interesting ones.

According to Rorty, it was Hegel's great accomplishment to have transformed our conception of philosophy by shifting our attention from the truth and falsity of propositions to the advantages and disad-

vantages of vocabularies. In doing so, he created a new literary genre

5. Ibid., pp. 174-75. 6. Rorty, "Taking Philosophy Seriously," The New Republic, 11 Apr. 1988, p. 34. 7. Rorty, "Philosophy as a Kind of Writing: An Essay on Derrida," Consequences of

Pragmatism (Essays: 1972-1980) (Minneapolis, 1982), pp. 90-109, esp. pp. 99-109.


"which exhibited the relativity of significance to choice of vocabulary, the bewildering variety of vocabularies from which we can choose, and the intrinsic instability of each."8 To be sure, Hegel presented this as a new kind of Wissenschaft that brought us, step by step, to the philosophical truth achieved finally in his own system. But Nietzsche and James and others have since taught us how to live without such

"metaphysical comfort." This is what lies behind Rorty's characteriza- tion of the postphilosophical philosopher as a kind of literary intellectual who reads and writes for the purpose of playing off vocabularies

against one another, trying to see how they all hang together, and at-

tempting to invent new ones.9 But that cannot be the whole story for someone who conceives of himself as renewing the pragmatist tradition, for it leaves out one of its main concerns, the social-political concern with improving the lot of humankind.

Rorty's recent essays are in fact preoccupied with the tension he feels between the aestheticist and elitist tendencies of the literary culture and the civic-minded and egalitarian ethos of social-democratic liberalism. Are philosophers qua literary intellectuals to identify with the human struggle for happiness or ironically to distance themselves from it? Should criticism respect and enrich the common moral consciousness or playfully mock it? Rorty wants somehow to combine both: the literary intellectual's self-centered aestheticism with the pragmatist's sense of common humanity, the search for self-creation and private fulfillment with a concern for public morality and justice. How can the poet and the liberal reformer, the ironist and the social engineer be brought together under one roof? Or, if not to cohabit, at least to cooperate? Or, failing this, at least to coexist peacefully?

Rorty's answer is, in essence, a separation of powers and a corre-

sponding demarcation of spheres of influence. Poetry and philosophy are to be private matters. The big mistake of universalist intellectuals from Socrates to Sartre was to take philosophy seriously, to think that they could somehow contribute to the public good by getting clear about the nature of reason and truth, morality and justice. Post-structuralist thinkers have helped us to see that any such effort is con- demned to failure, that philosophy, as a kind of writing, can aspire to no more than other genres of literature, namely to private edification. Once we accept this fact, we can leave the public sphere to piecemeal reform free of philosophical pretensions, to social engineering that does not claim to be based on grand theoretical constructions of any sort.

8. Rorty, "Nineteenth-Century Idealism and Twentieth-Century Textualism," Consequences of Pragmatism, p. 148.

9. See Rorty, "Pragmatism and Philosophy," in After Philosophy: End or Transfor- mation? ed. Kenneth Baynes, James Bohman, and Thomas McCarthy (Cambridge, Mass., 1987), pp. 55-66.


This way of resisting the post-Nietzschean temptation to project an aesthetics of the sublime into the social-political realm generates its own problems. To begin with, Rorty conveniently forgets that he is

talking about "a kind of writing" when he consigns philosophy qua literature to the sphere of the intellectual's private pleasure. Writing be-

longs, of course, to the public sphere, and so the claim Rorty has to defend is that the public political sphere can and should be insulated from the public cultural sphere, or at least from all aspects of the latter inspired by quests for the sublime. It is difficult to see how he could make such an arrangement fit comfortably with his professed liberalism. I shall not pursue that question, however, but shall turn di-

rectly to his account of the political sphere itself. For this purpose he has come to rely increasingly on a peculiar adaptation of Rawls's notion of reflective equilibrium.

Politics, Rorty urges, can and should be separated from matters of ultimate importance. Just as the establishment of the democratic constitutional state involved privatizing religion, treating it as "irrelevant to social order, but relevant to, and possibly essential for individ- ual perfection," so its continued health depends on privatizing philosophy.1' His strategy is to follow Rawls in "'stay[ing] on the surface, philosophically speaking,"' by restricting political theory to the method of "reflective equilibrium" ("PDP," p. 264). We must confine ourselves to collecting the settled convictions of our political tradition and organizing "'the basic intuitive ideas and principles implicit in these convictions into a coherent concept of justice' " ("PDP," p. 262). Rorty thinks that this is all we need to rid our political culture of its bad philosophical residues, for it restricts the scope of justification to a particular community and the basis of justification to that communi-

ty's shared beliefs. In his view, the question of whether justifiability to the community with which we identify entails validity is simply irrelevant ("PDP," p. 259). But to whom is it supposed to be irrelevant? Certainly not to a community nurtured on the Bible, on Socrates and Plato, on the Enlightenment. In short, we are back to the problems of the first part of this paper. "Our" settled convictions include things like basic human rights, human dignity, distinctions between mores and morals, justice and prudence-and most of the other things Rorty wants to get rid of. On the other hand, he would not find among our settled convictions the belief that what is settled among us is ipso facto right. That is, he will not find his detached observer's view to be the content of our engaged participants' view. So, if he wants to deuniver- salize our political culture, he will have to do this too not as a reporter

10. Rorty, "The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy," in The Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom: Its Evolution and Consequences in American History, ed. Merrill D. Peter- son and Robert C. Vaughan, Cambridge Studies in Religion and American Public Life (Cambridge, 1988), p. 257; hereafter abbreviated "PDP."


or "equilibrator" but as a deflationary critic. And this is, in fact, what we find him doing. He hopes to preserve liberal institutions while getting rid of such universalist "props" as the idea of the community of all human beings and their intrinsic dignity and inalienable rights, or the "illusory contrast between loyalty to a person or a historical com-

munity and to something 'higher' than either."" He admits that the

self-image of liberal democracies is indeed bound up with such notions, but he thinks that we would be better off without them-better off, that is, "defending, on the basis of solidarity alone, a society which has traditionally asked to be based on something more" ("PBL," p. 584). One would expect a self-professed pragmatist to consider carefully the possibility that this could weaken the glue holding our institutions together and thus might not be "good in the way of belief" after all. But he does not back up his sanguine prognosis with

any large-scale analysis of contemporary society, of its history and its

prospects, for he emphatically denies the usefulness of such a genre. Politics, remember, is an "experimental" and not a "theoretical" dis-

cipline. And so Rorty is left with his poets on the one side and his engi-

neers on the other. There are no mediating links between them, no

socially minded philosophers or philosophically minded social theo- rists. Philosopher-poets are permitted to indulge in a radical and total

critique of the Enlightenment concept of reason and of the humanistic ideals rooted in it, but only in private. They must not push this too far, as Nietzsche and Heidegger and many of their followers have done. Philosophically inspired cultural and political criticism of liberal

practices and institutions is ruled out of court. The theorist simply comes to a halt at the boundaries of the public sphere. On the other side of these boundaries are the civic-minded social reformers who, when considering questions of social policy, are required to "'stay on the surface' " by appealing only to the settled convictions of the "rich North Atlantic democracies" to which they belong ("PBL," p. 585). They are forbidden to delve into philosophy for purposes of criticiz-

ing their culture and institutions. At most, they can draw quietly upon it to cleanse the public sphere of the dross of Enlightenment univer- salism. There must be no possibility of illusory public appeals to ideas of reason or truth or justice that transcend the prevailing consensus, or to large-scale analyses of contemporary society that call into question its basic structures.

It is no small irony that this absolute split between a depoliticized theory and a detheorized politics should be the final outcome of a project that understands itself as a pragmatic attempt to overcome the

11. Rorty, "Postmodernist Bourgeois Liberalism," Journal of Philosophy 80 (Oct. 1983): 583-84; hereafter abbreviated "PBL."


dichotomy between theory and practice. A contributing factor is clearly Rorty's attempt to neutralize the political implications of radical theorizing of any sort, whether postmodernist or neo-Marxist. Critical thought is aestheticized and privatized, stripped of any social- political implications. There can be no politically relevant critical theory and hence no theoretically informed critical practice. No place is allowed to those large-scale theoretical accounts of social-structural change that are basic to any politics that aims at restructuring social institutions. We are prevented from even thinking, in any theoretically informed way, the thought that the basic structures of society might be inherently unjust in some way, that they might work to the systematic disadvantage of certain social groups.'2

3. Avoiding the Ethnocentric Predicament

Thus it was that Richard Rorty, the outspoken critic of analytic philosophy's isolation from the public culture, the fervent apostle of pragmatism's marriage of theory to practice, could come to say what he said in Guadalajara. It is a story worth considering, for it takes us to the heart of the metaphilosophical debates raging today. Philoso- phy is widely perceived to be at another major turning point, one marked by a shift in the level of analysis from language to social practice. The question is where we go from there. Rorty adds his voice to the chorus of "posties" who see this as signaling a radical critique of received notions of reason, truth, and justice-the end of the Enlight- enment. But he parts ways with them in wanting to retain the political and social fruits of the Enlightenment heritage, albeit without the traditional conceptual garnishings. The snares and pitfalls he encounters on both legs of his journey suggest that we try another route. If the subject of knowledge and action can no longer be viewed as solitary, disengaged and disembodied, and if structures of reason can no longer be viewed as timeless, necessary and unconditioned, then a re- direction of philosophy toward sociohistorical inquiry is indeed the order of the day. But this by no means warrants a pendulum swing to the antirationalist extremes promoted by post-Nietzscheans and post- Heideggerians. We need rather to develop concepts of reason, truth, and justice that, while no longer pretending to a God's-eye point of view, retain something of their transcendent, regulative, critical force.

A first step-but only a first step-in this direction is suggested by neo-Kantian thinkers like Hilary Putnam and Habermas who seek

12. Nancy Fraser makes this point very convincingly in "Solidarity or Singularity? Richard Rorty between Romanticism and Technocracy," Unruly Practices: Power, Dis- course, and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory (Minneapolis, forthcoming).


social-practical analogues to certain of Kant's ideas of reason.'" The basic move here is to locate the tension between the real and the ideal within the domain of social practice by showing how ordinary language communication is everywhere structured around idealizing, context-

transcending presuppositions. Let me try to indicate, very briefly and

very roughly, where this line of thought leads, by exploiting similari- ties between contemporary historicist accounts of the "end of the sub-

ject" and the conformity and consensus models that dominated

sociological action theory following World War II. Social actors were

depicted there as by and large committed, in consequence of socializa- tion, to prescribed courses of action while social action was concep- tualized as normatively regulated behavior such that deviations from established patterns would, regularly enough, be sanctioned. Subse-

quently, in the sociologies of everyday life developed by Erving Goff- man, Harold Garfinkel, and others, this picture of social actors as unreflective rule-followers was rendered implausible beyond repair. In his "Studies of the Routine Grounds of Everyday Activities," for instance, Garfinkel showed how models of the agent as a "judgmental dope" who acts "in compliance with preestablished and legitimate al- ternatives of action that the common cultures provides" systematically ignore the agent's own understanding of social structure and his or her reflexive use of it.'4 On his account, we orient our behavior to shared schemes of interpretation and expectation, mutually attribut-

ing knowledge of them to one another, and holding each other accountable in terms of them. We use that knowledge to analyze, manage, and transform the very situations in which we are involved. This is not a matter of following set rules in predefined situations, for social rules are neither fully spelled out nor algorithmically applicable and social situations are not wholly predefined but actively constituted

by the participants' own activities. Accordingly, in normal social interaction, we reciprocally impute practical rationality to interaction part- ners, credit them with knowing what they are doing and why they are

doing it, view their conduct as under their control and done for some

purpose or reason known to them, and thus hold them responsible for it. Although this pervasive supposition of rational accountability is fre-

13. See, for instance, Hilary Putnam, "Why Reason Can't Be Naturalized," in Af- ter Philosophy, pp. 222-44, and Jiirgen Habermas, "Philosophy as Stand-In and Inter- preter," in After Philosophy, pp. 296-315. The ideas that follow are developed at greater length in my "Philosophy and Social Practice: Avoiding the Ethnocentric Predica- ment," in Zwischenbetrachtungen im Prozess der AuJkldirung, ed. A. Honneth et al. (Frank- furt am Main, 1989), pp. 190-209.

14. Harold Garfinkel, "Studies of the Routine Grounds of Everyday Activities," Studies in Ethnomethodology (1967; Cambridge, 1984), p. 68. John Heritage, in Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology (Cambridge and New York, 1984), reads Garfinkel much as I do here.


quently-strictly speaking, perhaps even always-counterfactual, it is of fundamental significance for the structure of human relations that we normally deal with one another as if it were the case.

The accent here certainly falls differently than in models of social practice without a subject, where the determining factors are language, tradition, society, power relations, structures, rules, or the like. Garfinkel's thicker description of making sense in everyday settings, with its emphasis on the agent's own practical reasoning, brings the subject back into social practice. The idealizing supposition of ration- ally accountable subjects figures in turn in the idealizing supposition of an independent reality known in common: competent subjects are expected to deal with conflicts of experience and testimony in ways that themselves presuppose and thus reconfirm, the intersubjective availability of an objectively real world.'5 Discrepancies are to be at- tributed to errors in perception, interpretation, reporting, and the like-that is, to be resolved by procedures based on the very presupposition they maintain. In this sense, the objectivity of real-world events-as Kant would say, their validity for "consciousness in general," or as we can say in a more social-practical mode, their intersubjective validity-is an idealizing presupposition of social action for which social actors are held sanctionably accountable, and with good reason: it is the basis of their cooperative activities.

As the repeated attempts to identify truth with idealized rational acceptability, assertability under ideal conditions, or the like indicate, idealizing presuppositions of rational accountability and intersubjective validity figure in our conception of truth as well. There is no need to insist on defining truth in this way (and thus on courting a na- turalistic fallacy); what is important for our purposes is the internal relation between truth and idealized rational acceptability that is embedded in our practices of truth-telling-such that, for instance, it makes perfectly good sense to say things like: "We have every reason to believe that p and we are all agreed that it is so, but of course we may be wrong, it may turn out to be false after all." Any adequate account of our practices of truth will have to attend not only to the situ- ated, socially conditioned character of concrete truth claims and of the warrants offered for them, but to the situation-transcending im- port of the claims themselves. While we have no idea of standards of truth wholly independent of particular languages and practices, "truth" nevertheless functions as an "idea of reason" with respect to which we can criticize not only particular claims within our language but the very standards of truth we have inherited. Though never di- vorced from social practices of justification, from the rules and war-

15. See Melvin Pollner, "Mundane Reasoning," Philosophy of the Social Sciences 4 (Mar. 1974): 35-54.


rants of this or that culture, truth cannot be reduced to any particular set thereof. We can and typically do make contextually conditioned and fallible claims to unconditional truth (as I have just done); and it is this moment of unconditionality that opens us up to criticism from other points of view. Without that idealizing moment, there would be no foothold in our accepted beliefs and practices for the critical shocks to consensus that force us to expand our horizons and learn to see things in different ways. It is precisely this context-transcendent, "regulative" surplus of meaning in our notion of truth that keeps us from being locked into what we happen to agree on at any particular time and place, that opens us up to the alternative possibilities lodged in otherness and difference that have been so effectively invoked by post-structuralist thinkers.

Rorty's neohistoricist emphasis on the particular, changeable, and

contingent is an understandable reaction to the traditional preoccupa- tion with the universal, timeless, and necessary. But it is no less one- sided for that, nor is it any less questionable in its practical implications. To dispense with the ideal in the name of the real is to throw out the baby with the bathwater. Idealized notions of rational

accountability, objectivity, and truth, among others, are pragmatic presuppositions of communicative interaction in everyday and scientific settings. They are at the basis of our shared world and the motor force behind the expansion of its horizons through learning, criticism, and self-criticism. In the encounter with other worlds, they represent a principal alternative to resolving differences through coercion, the alternative of rational dialogue. Replacing rational accountability with

conformity to established patterns, ideal acceptability with de facto ac-

ceptance, and objectivity with solidarity, as Rorty does, undercuts that alternative. It entraps us in an ethnocentric predicament that, while somewhat roomier than its egocentric prototype, is no more livable.'6 An alternative is to recognize the idealizing elements intrinsic to social

practices and build on them.

16. Putnam draws this analogy in "Why Reason Can't Be Naturalized," pp. 230-35.

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