Plato thought that conceptualization and argument would eventually bring one to a full stop, to a point beyond which no new chasms opened. His hope that argument will eventually bring us to a point where it will be unnecessary to leave three dots at the end epitomizes the jigsaw puzzle view of the human situation—the view that there is a grand overall meaning to human life in general, rather than merely small transitory meanings that are constructed by individuals and communities and abandoned by their successors.
The romantics became convinced that conceptualization and argumentation would always leave three dots at the end, and then concludedthat it is the poet, or, more generally, the imaginative genius, who will save us from finitude, rather than the Socratic dialectician. Berlin says that Friedrich Schiller introduced , “for the first time in human thought”, the notion that “ideals are not to be discovered at all, but to be invented; not to be found but to be generated, generated as art is generated.” (RR, p. 87) Simultaneously, Shelley was telling Europe that the poet glimpses the gigantic shadows that futurity casts upon the present. For both, the poet does not fit past events together in order to provide lessons for the future, but rather shocks us into turning our backs on the past and incites the hope that our future will be wonderfully different.
So much for Berlin’s account of the romantic revolt against universalism. When this revolt was modulated into a philosophical key the result was a series of attempts to describe what Habermas calls “an other to reason”. Philosophers made such attempts because they thought of depth as providing a kind of legitimacy that would substitute for the legitimacy that resides in universal agreement. Agreement is, for many of the romantics, as more recently for Foucault, simply away ofprocuring conformity to current beliefs and institutions. Depth does not produce agreement, but it for romantics it trumps agreement.
In the dialectic that runs through the last two centuries of philosophical thought, and that Habermas summarizes in his book, the universalists decry each new other to reason as endangering both rationality and human solidarity. The romantics then rejoin that what is called rationality is merely a disguise attempts to eternalize custom and tradition. The universalists rightly say that to abandon the quest for intersubjective agreement is to abandon the restraints on power which have made it possible to achieve some measure of social justice. The romantics say, with equal justice, that acquiescing in the idea that only what everybody can agree on can be regarded as true means surrendering to the tyranny of the past over the future.
Formulating the opposition in these terms brings me to my central thesis: that pragmatism, and its defense of Protagorean anthropocentrism,should be viewed, not as a version of romanticism, but as an alternative to both universalism and romanticism. This is why the philosophers’ quarrel with the sophists is not the same as their quarrel with the poets. Pragmatism simply discards the notion of “legitimacy” invoked by both universalists and romantics, and puts short-term utility in its place. The pragmatist response to the dialectic Habermas summarizes in THE PHILOSOPHICAL DISCOURSE OF MODERNITY is to say that talk of universal validity is simply a way of dramatizing the need for intersubjective agreement, while romantic ardor and romantic depth are simply ways of dramatizing the need for novelty, the need to be imaginative.
Neither need should be elevated over, or allowed to exclude, the other. So, instead of asking epistemological questions about sources of knowledge, or metaphysical questions about what there is to be known, philosophers might be content to do what Dewey tried to do: help their fellow-citizens balance the need for consensus and the need for novelty. Suggesting how to achieve such balance is not, of course, not something that philosophy professors are better at than members of other academic disciplines. To suggest ways of achieving such balance is the work of anyone with ambitions to reshape the surrounding culture. That is whycarrying through on F. C. S. Schiller’s humanism—his attempt to rehabilitate Protagoras’ claim that man is the measure of all things—would mean giving up the idea that there is a special sort ofactivity called “philosophizing” that has a distinctive cultural role.
On the view of culture I am suggesting, intellectual and moral progress is achieved by making claims that seem absurd to one generation into the common sense of the later generations. The role of the intellectuals is effect this change by explaining how the new ideas might, if tried out, solve, or dissolve, problems generated created by the old ones. Neither the notion of universal validity nor that of a privileged access to truth are necessary to accomplish this latter purpose. We can work toward intersubjective agreement without being lured by the promise of universal validity. We can introduced and recommend new and startling ideas without attributing them to a privileged source. What both Platonist universalists and Nietzschean romantics find most exasperating in pragmatism is its suggestion that we shall never be either purified or transfigured by drawing upon such a source, and will never do more than tinker with ourselves.
If one thinks that experimentalist tinkering is all we shall ever manage, then one will be suspicious of both universalist metaphors of grandeur and romantic metaphors of depth. For both suggest that a suggestion for further tinkering can gain strength by being tied in with something that is not, in Russell’s words, merely of here and now—something like the intrinsic nature of reality or the uttermost depths of the human soul. Universalists who relish metaphors of height to suggest that rational consensus is a matter of the attractive force exerted on the human mind by something super-human, something located, as Plato put it, beyond the heavens—the place where the pieces of the jigsaw come together and form luminously clear pattern.People who relish those metaphors see inquiry as having an exalted goal called “Truth”, which they think of as something more than successful problem-solving, something like breaking through to the way things really are, independent of human needs and interest.
By contrast, Berlin’s view that the best we can do in politics is to iron out as many conflicts as possible exhibits the same pragmatist attitude as Kuhn’s view that the best we can do in science is to resolve anomalies as they arise.But for thinkers like Russell and Nagel,universal agreement on the desirability of a political institution or the truth of a scientific theory is not, as it is for pragmatists, just a happy social circumstance, but also a sign that we are getting closer to the true nature of man or of nature.
Romantics who relish metaphors of depth are better able to resist the lures of the jigsaw puzzle view of reality and of the correspondence theory of truth than universalists. But they often do make the mistake of which Habermas accuses them: they neglect their responsibility for making imaginative suggestions plausible by explaining how the new institution or the new theory might solve problems that the old institutions or theories could not handle. The romantic often tells us that what is needed is authenticity rather than argument, as if the fact that she has had a new idea were enough to exempt her from the responsibility of explaining the utility of that idea.
Thus when Christ is described as the way, the truth and the life, or when Heidegger tells us that Hitler is the present and future reality of Germany, the claim is that our old ideas, our old problems, and our old projects, should simply be shelved, in order that our minds may be completely taken over by the new. The sheer breathtaking novelty of the claim is treated as making it unnecessary to make it plausible. Instead of being awed by superhuman grandeur, we are to be awed by Promethean daring. Instead of being told that we have been elevated to the level of unchanging Truth, we are told that we have finally been put in touch with our deepest, self.
If we abandon metaphors of height, we shall see neither the ability to attain universal agreement on some updated version of Newton’s Principia, nor the need for universal respect for the provisions of the Helsinki Declaration on Human Rights, as an indication that these documents somehow correspond to reality.Both the prospect of a fully unified system of scientific explanation and that of a world civilization in which human rights are respected have grandeur. But grandeur in itself is obviously not an indication of validity. Grandeur is inspiring, and if we had no taste for it we should make little progress. But it is neither more nor less inspiring than depth.For the appeal to something overarching and invulnerable, and the appeal to something ineffable and exhaustibly deep, are both just advertising slogans, public relations gimmicks—ways of gaining our attention.
To say these appeals as gimmicks is to suggest that we can dispense with words like “intrinsic”, “authentic”,“unconditional”, “legitimate”, “basic”, and “objective”. We can get along with such banal expressions of praise or blameas “fits the data”, “sounds plausible,” “would domore harm than good”, “offends our instincts”,might be worth a try” and“is too ridiculous to take seriously”.Pragmatists who findthis sort of banality sufficient thinkthat no inspired poet or prophet should argue for the utility of his ideas from their putative source in some “other to reason”. Nor should any defender of the status quo argue from the fact of intersubjective agreement to the universality and necessity of the belief about which consensus has been reached. But one can still value intersubjective agreement after one has given up both the jigsaw puzzle view of things and the idea that we possess a faculty called “reason” that is somehow attuned to the intrinsic nature of reality. One can still value novelty and imaginative power even after one has given up the romantic idea that the imagination is so attuned.
I shall conclude by returning to the contrastbetween the days when philosophy was central to intellectual life and our own time. The main reason for philosophy’s marginalization, as I said earlier, is the same as the reason why the warfare between science and theology looks quaint—the fact that nowadays we are all common-sensically materialist and utilitarian.But there is a further reason. This is that the quarrels which, in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, graduallyreplaced the warfare between the gods and the giants—the quarrels between philosophy and poetry and between philosophy and sophistry-- have themselves become tedious.
The intellectuals of recent times have grown weary of watching philosophical fashion swing back and forth between enthusiasts for enduring grandeur such as Russell and Nagel and celebrants of ineffable profundity like Bergson and Heidegger. It has become harder to persuade them that the fate of civilization depends either on avoiding the excesses of scientific rationalism or on guarding against the frivolous irrationalism of the litterateurs. The arguments about relativism between pragmatists like myself and those who denounceus as “deniers of truth” excite only very languid interest. The idea that the philosophical foundations of our culture need attention or repair now sounds silly, since it is a long time since anybody thought that it had foundations, philosophical or otherwise. Only the philosophy professors still take seriously the Cartesian idea of a “natural order of reasons”, a ahistorical and transcultural inferential structure that dictates the priority of the questions philosophers ask to the questions other intellectuals ask.
Perhaps the best way to describe the diminishing interest in philosophy among the intellectuals is to say that the infinite is losing its charm.We are becoming common-sensical finitists—people who believe that when we die we rot, that each generation will solve old problems only by creating new ones, that our descendants will look back on much that we have done with incredulous contempt, and that progress toward greater justice and freedom is neither inevitable nor impossible. We are becoming content to see ourselves as a species of animal that makes itself up as it goes along. The secularization of high culture that thinkers like Spinoza and Kant helped bring about has put us in the habit of thinking horizontally rather than vertically—figuring out how we might arrange for a slightly better future, rather than looking up to an outermost framework or down into ineffable depths. Philosophers who think all this is just as it should be can take a certain rueful satisfaction in their own steadily increasing irrelevance.
Richard Rorty
April 21, 2003