good line by Rorty

I’m not the world’s biggest fan of Richard Rorty. Often enough he is facile, and just as often rather trite in his relativism. One of my undergraduate classmates asked one of our teachers to explain Rorty’s philosophy, and his response was both witty and accurate: “Basically, you debunk everything, and what you’re left with is pragmatism and American democracy.”

However, Rorty does have a lot of really nice (and sometimes important) moments when he cuts through the crap and sees things very clearly. Here is one such moment, cited by Bogost in his Alien Phenomenology. The occasion was some remarks he delivered about Marjorie Grene at the Western Division APA meeting in 1996:

“For [many philosophers] ‘doing philosophy’ is primarily a matter of spotting weaknesses in arguments, as opposed to hoping that the next book you read will contain an imaginative, illuminating, redescription of how things hang together. Many of our colleagues think that one counts as doing philosophy if one finds a flaw in an argument put forward in a philosophical book or article, and that one is a good philosopher if one is quick to find such flaws and skillful at exhibiting them.”

This dovetails nicely with Whitehead’s outstanding remarks near the beginning of Process and Reality about why philosophy is not a deductive enterprise designed to avoid mistakes by drawing conclusions from undeniable first principles. It follows from this that philosophies are abandoned, not refuted. Show me a philosophy that doesn’t already have 50 counterarguments made against it. This is a fairly derivative part of the enterprise.