Robert Piercey
It might seem strange to include a discussion of Richard Rorty in a volume on hermeneutics. Rorty did toy with the idea that “hermeneutics” was a good label for the type of philosophy he wanted to do. But he used this term in an unusual way, and his relations to more traditional hermeneutical philosophers—Dilthey, Heidegger, and Gadamer, for instance—are far from straightforward. Rorty is a pragmatist, and pragmatists have a tendency to dismiss the insights of hermeneutical philosophy as commonplaces translated into “transcendental German” (Hook 1974, 103). To make matters worse, Rorty’s remarks about specific hermeneutical thinkers can be astonishingly obtuse. At one point, he describes Gadamer as agreeing with Derrida that “our culture has been dominated by the notion of a ‘transcendental signified’” (Rorty 1982, xx); elsewhere, he says that Gadamer has an “‘existentialist’ theory of objectivity” (Rorty 1979, 360). Nevertheless, there are striking similarities between Rorty’s concerns and those of more traditional hermeneutical thinkers. These include a refusal to reduce rationality to scientific method; a belief in the centrality of language to philosophy; and an appreciation for the contingency of human practices. Even Rorty’s departures from more mainstream hermeneutics are instructive. He draws on this tradition in idiosyncratic, selective ways, but in doing so, helps highlight what is distinctive about it—and where its boundaries lie.
Rorty’s path to hermeneutics was different from that taken by most other philosophers. He first studied philosophy at the University of Chicago when it was dominated by Leo Strauss, who would later attack what he saw as the historicist tendencies of Gadamerian hermeneutics. After writing a historically oriented doctoral thesis at Yale under Paul Weiss, Rorty became a fairly conventional analytic philosopher, working mainly in the philosophy of mind. However, Rorty later said that he was always “dubious about analytic philosophy as disciplinary matrix” (Rorty 2007, 126), seeing it as too reductive, too ahistorical, and too confident that it had at last put philosophy “on the secure path of a science” (Rorty 2007, 124). These reservations intensified in the early 1960s when he read Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Gross 2008, 202). Intrigued by Kuhn’s claim that what counts as scientific rationality depends on extra-scientific cultural factors, Rorty concluded that there is “no algorithm for choice among scientific theories” and that scientific inquiry is “rather more like ordinary conversation … than the Enlightenment had suggested” (Rorty 1979, 322). He began reading hermeneutical philosophers, who, he suspected, held similar views about the social nature of rationality and inquiry. Hubert Dreyfus helped expose him to Heidegger’s work (Woessner, 214); Alasdair MacIntyre introduced him to the writings of Gadamer (Rorty 1979, 358n.1). Rorty saw these philosophers as advancing many of the same holistic, anti-foundationalist views he had encountered in Dewey. He decided to use their ideas as part of an attempt “to blend a criticism of the Cartesian tradition with [a] quasi-Hegelian historicism,” a critique to be expressed in “a quasi-Heideggerian story about the tensions within Platonism” (Rorty 1999, 12).
Rorty eventually made this critique in his 1979 book Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. The book’s target is metaphilosophical: a flawed conception of what philosophy is and what role it plays in a culture. Rorty contends that it is “pictures rather than propositions, metaphors rather than statements, which determine most of our philosophical convictions” (Rorty 1979, 89). Traditionally, philosophy has been captivated by the image “of the mind as a great mirror, containing various representations—some accurate, some not—and capable of being studied by pure, nonempirical methods” (Rorty 1979, 89). The dominance of this image has led philosophers to think that they can provide a foundation for the rest of culture: that they can “underwrite or debunk claims to knowledge made by science, morality, art, or religion,” on the basis of their “special understanding of the nature of knowledge and of mind” (Rorty 1979, 84). Needless to say, Rorty rejects this mirror imagery—not because he thinks philosophers can do without metaphors, but because this particular metaphor has proved unfruitful. Philosophy’s failure to accomplish what the mirror image commands should lead us to think that “the slogan ‘let’s get it right!’ needs to be replaced by something like ‘let’s try something different!’” (Rorty 2007, 125).
Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature suggests that this “something different” should be called hermeneutics. Rorty uses this term as a name for philosophy that is opposed to the “epistemologically centered philosophy” (Rorty 1979, 315) that has been dominant since Plato. But Rorty does not see hermeneutics as a new subject capable of performing the functions once performed by epistemologically centered philosophy. As he sees it, hermeneutics is not a subject at all, but rather “an expression of hope that the cultural space left by the demise of epistemology will not be filled” (Rorty 1979, 315). In Rorty’s sense, therefore, hermeneutics is simply the refusal to make philosophy foundational: an abandonment of the search for a meta-discourse in which the claims of science, morality, literature, politics, and so on, can all be adjudicated. Philosophers who abandon this goal do not strive to be “systematic” or “constructive,” and they no longer see “‘knowledge’ as the goal of thinking” (Rorty 1979, 359). Instead, they seek edification—a term Rorty proposes as a translation of Bildung, which he finds “a bit too foreign” (Rorty 1979, 360). Edification is a matter of discovering new, interesting, and useful ways of speaking. This usually happens through the process of “making connections between our own culture and some exotic culture or historical period, or between our own discipline and another discipline,” or through “the ‘poetic’ activity of thinking up such new aims, new words, or new disciplines, followed by … the attempt to reinterpret our familiar surroundings in the unfamiliar terms of our new inventions” (Rorty 1979, 360). In short, for Rorty, hermeneutics strives “to keep the conversation going rather than to find objective truth” (Rorty 1979, 377). Conversations are unruly and can lead us down blind alleys. They are ends in themselves rather than means to something else. There is never a guarantee that a conversation will succeed, and more importantly, “we do not know what ‘success’ would mean except simply ‘continuance’” (Rorty 1982, 172).
It is not entirely clear why Rorty thinks “hermeneutics” is a good name for this enterprise. At one point, he suggests it is because edification can require us to interpret familiar things in new, potentially useful ways. (Confusingly, Rorty also calls this process “the inverse of hermeneutics” (Rorty 1979, 360), since it tries to make the familiar unfamiliar rather than the reverse.) Elsewhere, he suggests that edification is hermeneutical because it proceeds through something like a hermeneutic circle. Seeking edification, Rorty says, is like getting to know a person. I come to understand someone’s actions by viewing those actions in the context of her whole character, but at the same time, my impression of her character is formed on the basis of her individual actions. Similarly, when we try to understand a culture, and to discover new and useful ways to talk about it, we must proceed holistically as well as atomistically: “We cannot understand the parts … unless we know something about how the whole thing works, whereas we cannot get a grasp on how the whole works until we have some understanding of its parts” (Rorty 1979, 319). In both cases, we pursue insight without algorithms. We have to proceed unsystematically, relying on guesses, experience, and the best judgment we can muster.
Rorty revisited the hermeneutical tradition sporadically throughout the 1980s. The papers collected in Essays on Heidegger and Others—“the fruits of an abortive, abandoned attempt to write a book about him” (Rorty 1991b, 1)—present an ambivalent view of the philosophers in this tradition. While applauding their anti-Cartesianism and anti-essentialism, Rorty laments “their failure to take a relaxed, naturalistic, Darwinian attitude toward language”—a failure he blames on “the Diltheyan distinction between Geist and Natur” (Rorty 1991b, 3). In his 1989 book Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Rorty presents Heidegger as an example of how to use philosophy “as a means to private perfection” (Rorty 1989, 96): a way of reinventing oneself rather than discovering the way things really are. Rorty’s use of Heideggerian ideas is selective to the point of perversity. He claims that Heidegger is useful only after we replace “bad questions like ‘What is Being?’… with the sensible question ‘Does anybody have any new ideas about what we human beings might manage to make of ourselves?’” (Rorty 2010, 477). As the 1980s gave way to the 1990s, Rorty drew less and less on figures like Heidegger, and became more and more convinced that the most edifying areas of contemporary culture were literature and literary theory, not philosophy. As Martin Woessner puts it, “Rorty gave up on philosophy at about the same time he gave up on Heidegger” (Woessner 2011, 221).
Though Rorty’s use of the term “hermeneutics” is idiosyncratic, there is still a sense in which it is helpful to call him a hermeneutical thinker. Paul Ricoeur has identified a handful of traits that mark philosophers as hermeneutical, and Rorty’s work displays several of them. One is a suspicion of “the ideal of scientificity” (Ricoeur 1991, 30). In Ricoeur’s view, hermeneutical philosophers do not equate rationality with the application of scientific method, and they do not see natural science as an ideal that all philosophers ought to emulate. Rorty agrees. He insists that no discourse, not even that of physics, is in principle privileged over all others. At bottom, he claims, science is simply a type of writing, and Rorty argues that “the only sense in which science is exemplary is that it is a model of human solidarity” (Rorty 1991a, 39). For his part, Rorty is “betting” that “what succeeds the ‘scientific,’ positivist culture which the Enlightenment produced will be better” (Rorty 1982, xxxviii) than what preceded it. A second mark identified by Ricoeur is that hermeneutical thinkers believe in “the necessity for all understanding to be mediated by an interpretation” (Ricoeur 1991, 31). Rorty displays this mark as well. He rejects the notion of an uninterpreted reality, going so far as to say that “the very idea of a ‘fact of the matter’ is one we would be better off without” (Rorty 1991a, 193). But he resists the implication that thinkers are trapped within private vocabularies, paradigms, or traditions. He accepts Donald Davidson’s critique of the idea of conceptual schemes, and agrees with Davidson that by rejecting it, we “reestablish unmediated touch with the familiar objects whose antics make our sentences true and false” (Davidson 1984, 198). Yet another mark identified by Ricoeur is the belief that interpretation culminates in appropriation: that an interpreter “responds to the matter of the text, and hence to the proposals of meaning the text unfolds” (Ricoeur 1991, 37). Appropriation is an ethical process, a matter of accepting or rejecting the existential possibilities outlined by a text. Rorty often expresses a similar view. He argues that the humanities involve “reading a lot more books in the hope of becoming a different sort of person” (Rorty 1999, 304), and he praises “inspirational” authors who are able to “recontextualize much of what you previously thought you knew” (Rorty 1998, 133).
But in other respects, Rorty is a non-hermeneutical thinker—even an anti-hermeneutical thinker. One of these is his attitude toward truth. Hermeneutical philosophers often reject traditional approaches to the topic of truth, but they take the topic seriously, and they consider it important for philosophers to have substantive views about it. These views are often ontological. Heidegger and Gadamer, for instance, characterize truth as an event in which entities disclose themselves as they are, while simultaneously concealing other aspects of their being. Rorty, on the other hand, dismisses philosophical inquiry into truth as “fatuous and pointless” (Rorty 2010, 475). He agrees with Davidson that “there is little to be said about truth, and that philosophers should explicitly and self-consciously confine themselves to justification, to what Dewey called ‘warranted assertibility’” (Rorty 1999, 32). In Rorty’s view, a concern with truth is a mere historical accident: a bump on the journey from a religious culture to a literary one (Rorty 2010, 476). Of course, he recognizes that the concept of truth plays a critical role in many practices, and is unlikely to stop doing so. But he insists that, in these practices, it functions as a mere honorific, a label applied to beliefs that have been “justified to the hilt” (Gutting 1999, 25). For most practical purposes, philosophers could replace the notion of truth with that of justification and be no worse off.
Rorty’s approach to social phenomena is also anti-hermeneutical. Hermeneutical thinkers tend to be suspicious of individualistic or atomistic accounts of human existence. They prefer holistic accounts that see the social dimension of human existence as primary, and individuals as abstractions from it. Hermeneutical philosophers also tend to think that conveying the primacy of the social requires distinctive, inventive language. Heidegger’s talk of Mitsein and Gadamer’s talk of the event of tradition are good examples. At first glance, Rorty seems sympathetic to this approach to social phenomena. His writings are full of references to solidarity and social hope. His friend and supporter Richard Bernstein even claims that the most distinctive feature of Rorty’s work is his “deep humanism”—his conviction that there is “nothing that we can rely on but ourselves and our fellow human beings” (Bernstein 2010, 211). But, in reading Rorty, it quickly becomes clear that his privileging of the social is only skin deep. He conceives of social groupings in traditionally modern terms: as aggregates of autonomous individuals who form and break attachments as it suits their purposes. Consider Rorty’s view of the hermeneutic circle. Heidegger and Gadamer describe it as an event not under the control of any individual thinker. Rorty characterizes it as something individuals do. In getting to know a person or coming to understand a culture, I have to shuttle back and forth between my grasp of the whole and my grasp of the parts. But, in Rorty’s account, I do these things. They are not reciprocal interactions between interpreter and interpreted, but techniques the interpreter applies to a separate object.
Consider as well Rorty’s account of the emergence of new meanings. Gadamer describes this emergence as a fusion of horizons, an event that is not determined by the interpreter alone or the interpreted alone. Rorty describes it as a thoroughly individualistic affair: a matter of “imaginative breakthroughs by heroic figures” (Rorty 1998, 129), namely, the “strong poets” (Rorty 1989, 41), who decide to start speaking in new, innovative ways. Even when Rorty discusses the limits of individual autonomy, he puts free subjects front and center. Granted, he argues that all the constraints on inquiry are ultimately social—as in his notorious characterization of truth as “what our peers will … let us get away with” (Rorty 1979, 176). But in Rorty’s conception of inquiry, individual thinkers get to decide when their peers have and have not let them get away with something. Rorty exemplified this view repeatedly in his own debates with his critics. When he found a criticism of his work unproductive or uninteresting, he either ignored it or redescribed it in self-serving terms. In a memorable exchange, Jeffrey Stout called this tendency a form of “narcissism” (Stout 2007, 9). Rorty then proved Stout’s point by redescribing the charge: “What Stout calls narcissism, I would call self-reliance … We are not responsible to the atoms or to God, at least not until they start conversing with us” (Stout 2007, 9).
For all his talk of solidarity and social hope, Rorty is a fundamentally modern, non-hermeneutical philosopher. He is interested in interpretation and conversation, but, at bottom, he sees them as things autonomous subjects do. Hermeneutics, by contrast, is concerned with “not what we do or what we ought to do, but what happens to us over and above our wanting and doing” (Gadamer 1992, xxviii).