Richard Rorty's bet: a liberal society can do without the truth

Richard Rorty was born in New York City on 4 October 1931 and died of pancreatic cancer at his home in Palo Alto on 8 June 2007, at 75. Between those dates he did something few philosophers manage: he made the discipline angry with him for forty years and then, after his death, indispensable. In 2016, as the American presidential campaign curdled, a paragraph from a book he had published in 1998 began to circulate on social media. It predicted that the non-suburban electorate, abandoned by both parties, would "start looking around for a strongman to vote for". Readers who had never heard of him took it for prophecy. His colleagues, who had spent decades telling him that a philosophy without foundations could not defend liberal democracy, found themselves quoting him.

That reversal is the puzzle. Rorty's reputation rests on a denial. He denied that the mind mirrors nature, that truth is a goal distinct from justification, that moral progress is the discovery of anything, and that philosophy has any business trying to ground politics. Yet he was, by his own description, a bourgeois liberal, a patriot and a social democrat who thought the point of the whole exercise was to make cruelty harder to ignore. The question his critics pressed, and still press, is whether the first half of that sentence leaves anything standing for the second half to rest on. Rorty's answer was that it does not need to. The case for liberal societies was never a philosophical case. It was a hope, and hopes do not require foundations; they require people willing to keep them.

We noted in September the appearance of his writings on religion in book form; this is the longer view.

Philosophy has been trying to do a job that does not exist#

Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, 1979) was written by a tenured Princeton professor who had edited a well-regarded anthology on the linguistic turn and could be expected to know the rules. He broke them from inside. The book's target is an image rather than a thesis: the mind as a glassy essence, a mirror in which the world is reflected, with philosophy as the specialist in polishing the glass and certifying which reflections are accurate. Descartes gave the image its modern shape, Locke turned it into a theory of knowledge and Kant made that theory the tribunal before which the other disciplines had to appear. Rorty's claim was that the whole arrangement was optional. Nothing in the practice of science, art or politics required a discipline whose job was to say which of them had touched reality.

The argument was borrowed, and Rorty was candid about it. Wilfrid Sellars had shown that nothing is simply "given" to the mind; Quine had dissolved the line between truths of meaning and truths of fact; Davidson was dismantling the idea of a conceptual scheme standing between us and the world; Kuhn had described the history of science as the replacement of one vocabulary by another. Put together, Rorty argued, these pieces of orthodox analytic philosophy leave no room for the project of epistemology. Knowledge is a matter of what one can justify to one's peers. Truth, he wrote in a sentence that followed him to the grave, is "what our peers will, ceteris paribus, let us get away with saying".

That sentence is the hinge of the whole career, and it is worth getting it right. Rorty was not saying that bridges stay up because engineers agree they will. He was saying that nothing we can do with the word "true" adds anything to what we already do with "justified", except the reminder that today's justification may be tomorrow's error. The world constrains our beliefs by knocking down bridges. It does not tell us which description of the collapse to adopt. Philosophers who wanted "truth" to name a relation between sentences and the way things are in themselves were, on his view, asking for a vantage point outside all vocabularies from which vocabularies could be compared, and no one has ever stood there.

Critics found the move too quick, and they had a point. Davidson declined to be enlisted, insisting that truth was a primitive concept. Hilary Putnam, who shared much of Rorty's pragmatism, thought that reducing truth to warrant left no way to say that a whole community might be wrong. Bernard Williams, in Truth and Truthfulness (2002), argued that the virtues of accuracy and sincerity were unintelligible without a notion of truth that went beyond consensus. Rorty's reply to all three was the same, and it was not a refutation. He granted that we need the distinction between being justified and being right. He denied that the distinction needed a theory. What we mean by "right" is "justified to an audience better than this one", and the better audience is an aspiration, not a fact about the universe.

The liberal ironist and the limits of private perfection#

Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge, 1989) turned the epistemological argument into a picture of a person. The book's central figure, the liberal ironist, holds two commitments that philosophers had assumed were incompatible. She is an ironist because she has, in Rorty's phrase, "radical and continuing doubts" about her own final vocabulary, the set of words with which she justifies her life and which she cannot justify in turn without circularity. She knows the vocabulary was handed to her by a particular family, language and century, and that someone raised elsewhere would hold another. She is a liberal in the sense Rorty borrowed from Judith Shklar: she believes that cruelty is the worst thing we do.

Rorty's innovation was to refuse to connect the two. Ironism is a private virtue, the business of self-creation, and its heroes are Nietzsche, Proust and Heidegger. Liberalism is a public one, and its heroes are Orwell, Dickens and the authors of pamphlets about the condition of the poor. Nothing in the first grounds the second. The attempt to derive "do not be cruel" from a theory of human nature was, Rorty thought, the Enlightenment's mistake, an attempt to replace God with Reason that left the believer exactly as exposed when Reason failed to deliver. Better to admit that the liberal's commitment is as contingent as the ironist's self-image, and to notice that this admission changes nothing about how firmly one holds it. People die for contingent loyalties all the time.

The second half of the book argues that solidarity expands by description, not by discovery. We do not come to care about distant strangers by finding out that they share a rational essence with us; we come to care by having their suffering made vivid, usually by a novelist or a reporter. Rorty's reading of Nabokov's Lolita turns on a single detail, the barber who mentions his dead son while Humbert is not listening. His reading of Orwell's 1984 concentrates on O'Brien, the intelligent torturer whose cruelty takes the form of making Winston believe that two and two make five. The lesson is the same in both: the moral imagination is a capacity for noticing, and it is trained by books rather than by arguments.

Here the objections are stronger than Rorty usually allowed. A moral sense built on sympathy extends to whoever one has been taught to see, and no further. Rorty conceded the point by calling his position "ethnocentrism" and accepting the label: we start from where we are, and the only honest universalism is the attempt to widen "we". But the critics had a second point. Shklar's liberalism was a doctrine of institutions, of checks on power, a liberalism of fear. Rorty's was a liberalism of sentiment. Sentiment is what carried the abolitionists; it is also what carried the mobs who opposed them. A politics that rests on which stories people happen to find moving has no answer when the stories change.

The priority of democracy to philosophy#

The essay that gives Rorty's politics its name appeared in 1988, in a volume on Jefferson's Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, and its title is its thesis: "The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy". Jefferson had thought it possible to be a good citizen without settling questions about the soul. Rorty generalised. A liberal society need not agree on the nature of the self, the existence of rights or the foundations of justice; it needs only to agree on procedures for living together while disagreeing about the rest. Philosophy, on this account, is one more private pursuit the society makes room for, like religion, rather than its ground floor.

John Rawls had reached a similar position from the other direction, describing his theory of justice as "political, not metaphysical", and Rorty was pleased to recruit him. Jürgen Habermas, who liked Rorty personally and argued with him for twenty-five years, would not go that far. Habermas held that the practice of giving reasons already commits speakers to standards of validity that transcend any local consensus; to deny that is to saw through the branch one is sitting on. Rorty answered that the "commitment" Habermas detected was a description of how democratic citizens happen to talk, and that nothing was lost by saying so. The dispute has not been settled, and it is probably not the kind of thing that gets settled. What is clear is which side has had the harder decade. A politics that relies on nothing more than a shared willingness to keep talking is in trouble when one side stops.

The strongman passage#

Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America (Harvard, 1998) grew out of the Massey Lectures Rorty gave at Harvard in 1997. It opens with a line he meant as a provocation to his own side: "National pride is to countries what self-respect is to individuals: a necessary condition for self-improvement." The book's argument is that the American left of Dewey, Whitman and the labour movement, a reformist left that wanted the country to live up to its promises, had been displaced after the 1960s by a cultural left that preferred diagnosis to reform, that read Foucault instead of organising, and that had stopped talking about money. The displaced constituency, he warned, would not stay quiet.

The passage that was rediscovered in 2016 is on pages 89 and 90, and it deserves to be quoted at length rather than clipped:

Members of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers—themselves desperately afraid of being downsized—are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else.

At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for—someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots.

He went on: "One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion." And then: "All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet."

Two things about the passage are usually missed. The first is that the prediction is not made in Rorty's own voice. He is summarising a scenario from Edward Luttwak's The Endangered American Dream (1993) and saying he finds it plausible. The second is that the passage is an argument against a certain reading of Rorty himself. The man who had been accused for twenty years of relativism, of leaving liberal democracy without defences, was telling the left that its defences were economic and not philosophical. The thing that holds a liberal society together is not a theory of truth, and not a sentiment either; it is a credible expectation that the system will not let one's wages sink. When that expectation fails, no amount of irony will help.

That is the real test of the Rortyan position, and it cuts both ways. If he was right that liberalism rests on hope rather than foundations, then the collapse of hope should have the consequences he described, and it has. But a critic can reply that his own diagnosis shows why sentiment is not enough. Rorty's liberal ironist was a reader of novels and a widener of sympathies. The constituency in the strongman passage was not looking for wider sympathies. It wanted its own suffering noticed, by people who had been too busy noticing everyone else's. Rorty's book is, among other things, a confession that the academic left he belonged to had failed the test he set for it.

What survives#

His maternal grandfather, Walter Rauschenbusch, had been the theologian of the Social Gospel; his parents were Trotskyist intellectuals; he began at the University of Chicago at fifteen and finished at Yale; and he wrote in "Trotsky and the Wild Orchids" that he had spent his youth trying to reconcile social justice with a private passion for orchids, and his maturity deciding the two did not need reconciling. After Princeton he went to Virginia in 1982 as Kenan Professor of the Humanities, a post that let him stop calling himself a philosopher, and in 1998 to Stanford's department of comparative literature.

What survives is less a doctrine than a dare. Rorty dared philosophers to say what their theories of truth added to the practice of inquiry, and the answers have been more careful for it. He dared liberals to defend their politics without pretending it followed from the structure of reason, and the ones who took the dare, from Rawls to Shklar's heirs, are the ones who have aged best. He dared the left to talk about wages again, and it did, eventually, after the strongman arrived. The ironist's doubt about her own vocabulary was never supposed to weaken her grip on it. Rorty held his to the end. Whether a whole society can do the same, as opposed to one unusually serene professor who liked birds and orchids, is the question he left open, and the past decade has not closed it in his favour.