[FRA:] Habermas memorializes Rorty

[Ralph Dumain]

". . . And to define America, her athletic democracy."
The Philosopher and the Language Shaper:
In Memory of Richard Rorty

by Jürgen Habermas

An address delivered by Jürgen Habermas at 
Stanford University on Friday, November 2, 2007. 
New Literary History will publish it in early 
2008, in an issue devoted to Richard Rorty.

Reproduced by Telos News & Notes in 3 parts:

<http://www.telospress.com/main/index.php?main_page=news_article&article_id=204>part 
1

<http://www.telospress.com/main/index.php?main_page=news_article&article_id=205>Part 
2

<http://www.telospress.com/main/index.php?main_page=news_article&article_id=206>part 
3

Habermas describes his initial aversion to 
Rorty's attempt to put Heidegger, Wittgenstein, 
and Dewey in the same bag, which he subsequently 
overcame.  Then he characterizes his encounter 
with Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 
which, from Habermas' description, looks pretty 
bankrupt to me. Then, Consequences of Pragmatism. 
Habermas praises Rorty the man to the skies, but 
what about his philosophy? Habermas evinces some 
admiration for Rorty's Whitmanesque style.

Part 2: Habermas distinguishes between hard and 
soft naturalism, the latter validating the experience of autonomy.

>Rorty quite simply had to protest this move 
>toward scientism. Because he fully elaborates 
>his own concept of man in a Darwinist language, 
>he had now to introduce a stop rule into this 
>kind of soft naturalism. In order to be able to 
>reject the hard naturalism of a Daniel Dennett 
>as "scientism," he has to offer an explanation 
>of the uncautious inflation of objectifying 
>research approaches to the status of a pseudo-scientific objectivism.

Furthermore:

>He hoped to find such an explanation by 
>embedding the spectator model of knowledge in a 
>sweeping deconstruction of the history of 
>metaphysics. In this broader context he 
>established scientism's affinity to Platonism. 
>Both share the bad habit of conceiving of human 
>knowledge as a vision from nowhere, thus moving 
>all of our constructive research practices 
>beyond the limits of our or of any world: "The 
>last line of defense for essentialist 
>philosophers is the belief that physical science 
>gets us outside ourselves, outside our language 
>and our purposes to something splendidly 
>nonhuman and nonrelational." [5] With the help 
>of Heidegger's and Wittgenstein's critique of 
>the ontological implications of the language of 
>physicalism, Rorty claims to uncover even in the 
>reductionist strategies of cognitive scientists 
>and biologists the Platonic heritage of the 
>assumption of world-less objectivity that 
>supposedly allows for a view from nowhere.

However, Habermas does not buy into Rorty's 
anti-realism and turn to Heidegger. In this 
Habermas sees a nostalgic and paradoxically Platonist motivation.

>The melancholy in this gesture of breaking away 
>and surpassing reveals a Platonist motivation 
>behind Rorty's anti-Platonism, as in 
>Heidegger's. Rorty bemoans the state of a 
>discipline that retains the name philosophy but 
>has forfeited any public relevance. In 
>particular, the analytical orthodoxy whence 
>Rorty himself originated has eased an 
>accelerated philosophy's transformation into a 
>highly specialized and departmentalized 
>discipline. Here, only those questions are 
>considered serious as are raised by the profession, and not longer by "life."

The result is a rhetoric of debunking and 
ultimately the philosophy of edification. Rorty 
played a dual role of interacting with the 
professional philosophers and the general public.

Part 3: Rorty mastered the Anglo-American and the 
continental philosophical worlds and had a great 
impact on the latter. Her was also a masterful writer.  As to politics . . .

>Finally, in Rorty we encounter an old-fashioned 
>sort of leftist intellectual who believes in 
>education and social reform. What he finds most 
>important about a democratic constitution is 
>that it provides the oppressed and encumbered 
>with instruments with which they "can defend 
>themselves against the wealthy and the 
>powerful." The focus is on abolishing 
>institutions that continue exploitation and 
>degradation. And it is on promoting a tolerant 
>society that keeps people together in solidarity 
>despite growing diversity and recognizes no 
>authority as binding that cannot be derived from 
>deliberation and revisable agreements of all 
>involved. Rorty terms himself a red 
>diaper-anticommunist baby and a teenage Cold War 
>liberal. But that past did not leave the 
>slightest trace of resentment in him. He was 
>completely free of the scars so typical of 
>former radicals as well as of many of the older 
>and some of the younger liberal hawks. If he 
>gave a somewhat trenchant political response, 
>then it was the one he directed against a 
>cultural Left which he felt had bid farewell to 
>the efforts of the arena: "Insofar as a Left 
>becomes spectatorial and retrospective, it ceases to be a Left."

Habermas also praises Achieving our Country.

After reading all this, I am not terribly 
impressed.  A detailed examination of Rorty's 
debates with other philosophers would be of 
interest, but the rest smells of intellectual bankruptcy to me.