My fellow Rortian, Stephen Taylor, has written a thought provoking post on Rorty’s relationship with language (Rorty Therapy). I take away the following claims from his post:
- Rorty views language as humanity’s most important tool.
- Rorty goes beyond this to privilege language as uniquely constitutive of our human way of being.
- Rorty fails to see that the sum of all instrumental relations (both linguistic and non-linguistic) falls well short of constituting the whole.
- Rorty fails to see interaction, not language, as the essential ingredient of a human being.
For a Rortian, the first claim goes without saying, so I won’t address it further.
The second claim is a legitimate one to lay at Rorty’s feet. After all, he does say things like, Nothing can serve as a criticism of a person save another
person, or of a culture save an alternative culture — for persons and
cultures are, for us, incarnated vocabularies. Claiming that a person is an incarnated vocabulary strongly suggests that Stephen’s second claim is correct: For Rorty, language is uniquely constitutive of being human.
But I think this is merely a case of Rorty’s occasional hyperbole because Rorty clearly rejects the notion of essences in general and the notion of a human essence in particular. He discusses his anti-essentialism most extensively in his essay A World without Substances or Essences. Interestingly, a draft of this essay exists in the Rorty archives. It’s title is Panrelationalism. I will be quoting from both (without citation), interchangeably. (Bolding has been added unless otherwise noted.)
He opens the essay by aligning himself with a wide range of thinkers, including, most interestingly for our present discussion, Bruno Latour:
One way to describe this commonality is to say that philosophers as diverse as Davidson and Derrida, Putnam and Latour, Brandom and Foucault, are in the main, and despite occasional backsliding, panrelationalists. … They are trying to replace the various world-pictures constructed with the aid of these Greek oppositions by the picture of a flux of continually changing relations, relations whose terms are themselves dissoluble into nexus of further relations.
This description seems to fit Latour to a tee. But it is a description that Rorty also uses to describe himself. And being a panrelationalist means being an avowed antiessentialist:
Panrelationalism holds that it also does not pay to be essentialist about tables, stars, electrons, human beings, academic disciplines, social institutions, or anything else. We suggest that you think of all such objects as resembling numbers in the following respect: there is nothing to be known about them except an infinitely large, and forever expansible, web of relations to other objects.
Being a panrelationalist, Rorty would deny Stephen’s second claim: Language is not uniquely constitutive of human beings because nothing is. To be clear, Rorty does think that language is a tool that is only available to human beings. But he does not think language is in some sense essential to being a human being, because human beings, like everything else, have no essence at all. (While it is difficult to imagine a nonlinguistic human being, it is not impossible.)
Let’s turn to Stephen’s third claim regarding Rorty’s instrumentalism. This is a tough one. It’s taken me the entire week to cohere my thoughts on this issue. After a week of intensive rereading of Panrelationism and intensive rethinking, I’ve come to the conclusion that Rorty claims that all that human beliefs and actions (both linguistic and nonlinguistic) are instrumental, and I wholeheartedly agree with this claim. Here is how Rorty puts it:
The suggestion that everything we say and do and believe is a matter of fulfilling human needs and interests might seem simply a way of formulating the secularism of the Enlightenment — a way of saying that human beings are on their own, and have no supernatural light to guide them to the Truth.
Relativism: Finding and Making
But this is not the same as claiming that human beings are the sum of their instrumental relations (both linguistic and non-linguistic), because, at the very least, human beings are also comprised of needs, interests, desires, loves, hopes, etc. Let’s first look at Rorty’s views on instrumental relations before turning to what else comprises human beings.
The behavior of human beings is not fundamentally different from the behavior of any other species of animal:
Darwin, however, made it much harder to be a Kantian than it had previously been. Once people started experimenting with a picture of themselves as what Darwin’s fervent admirer pupil, Nietzsche, called “clever animals”, they found it very hard to think of themselves as having a transcendental or a noumenal side….Darwinian evolutionary theory made it possible to see all of human behaviour — including that “higher” sort of behaviour previously interpreted as fulfilment of the desire to know the unconditionally true and do the unconditionally right — as continuous with animal behaviour.
To be a Darwinian is to see all human behavior as nothing more than the behaviors of clever animals.
I don’t think anyone would object to the claim that all animal behavior is instrumental behavior. In fact, most of evolutionary biology deals with explaining all the behaviors of all life in terms of their instrumentality, i.e., what goals are they serving. So if one actually believes that humans are nothing more than animals, as I do, then one must believe that everything we believe and everything we say and everything we do is instrumental to our goals.
Even though humans are as thoroughgoingly instrumentalist as any other species of animals, some clever humans feel the need embrace some framework of beliefs (call it a philosophy or a theology) that posits a purpose for humanity than transcends the life of any particular human, including themselves. They posit the concept of ends-in-themselves. I count myself among such humans. (However, it is interesting to note that there are plenty of humans around that feel no need for such a framework.)
But Rorty has convinced me that even such frameworks — including supposed ends-in-themselves — are merely instrumental to human needs:
One obvious advantage of panrelationalism is that it lets one put aside the distinction between subject and object, between the elements in human knowledge contributed by the mind and those contributed by the world. It does so by saying that nothing is what it is under any and every description of it, what it is as undescribed, apart from its relations to the human needs and interests which have generated one or another description.
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To say that everything is a social construction is to say that our linguistic practices are so bound up with our other social practices that our descriptions of nature, as well as of ourselves, will always be a function of our social needs.
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For once you have said that all our awareness is under a description, and that descriptions are functions of social needs, then “nature” and “reality” can only be names of something unknowable — something like Kant’s “Thing-in-Itself.” The whole movement of Western philosophical thought since Hegel has been an attempt to avoid such an unknowable.
Rorty’s own framework is posited on the claim that all of our frameworks for making sense of the world, for imbuing our lives with meaning, for declaring ends-in-themselves, are just descriptions that serve social needs, i.e., are nothing more than social constructions. Even frameworks that claim there is something beyond humanity, beyond mere human needs, beyond mere instrumentality (such as Stephen’s) are descriptions of the world that, you guessed it, serve human needs.
The reason I love Rorty so much is that he is self-aware enough to turn his method on his own framework: Even antiessentialist, panrelationalist frameworks, like Rorty’s, are just descriptions that serve social needs, and are no more grounded in reality than the frameworks he opposes:
Or, to put the point less invidiously, the project of seeing all our needs from the point of view of someone without any such needs is just one more human project. Stoic absence of passion, Zen absence of will, Heideggerian Gelassenheit, and physics-as-the-absolute-conception-of-reality are, from this angle, just so many variations on a single project — the project of escaping from time and chance.
We panrelationalists, however, cannot afford to sneer at this project. For…we cannot afford to sneer at any human project, any chosen form of human life, any description which aids. In particular, we should not allow ourselves to say what I have just said: that by taking this view of physical science we seem to see ourselves as more than human. For a panrelationalist cannot invoke the appearance-reality distinction. … Seeing ourselves as participating in the divine life by describing ourselves under the aspect of eternity is not an illusion or a confusion; it is just one more attempt to satisfy one more human need. Seeing ourself as at last in touch, through physical science, with the ultimate nature of reality, is also not an illusion or a confusion; it is one more human project which may, like all human projects, eclipse the possibility of other, incompatible, projects.
Nor can we panrelationalists let ourselves get away with saying that our essentialist opponents mistakenly think that they have “eluded human finitude” by taking refuge in a secularized version of a theology of power. It is not as if human finitude is the ultimate truth of the matter, as if human beings are intrinsically finite. In our view, human beings are what they make themselves, and one of the things they have wanted to make themselves is a divinity — what Sartre calls a “being in and for itself”. We panrelationalists cannot say, with Sartre, that this attempt is a “futile passion”. The metaphysical systems of Aristotle and Spinoza, or Kant’s fanatical pursuit of the unconditional, are not exercises in futility, any more than are the antimetaphysical systems of William James, Nietzsche and Sartre himself. There is no inescapable truth which either metaphysicians or pragmatists are trying to evade or capture, for any candidate for truth can be escaped by a suitable choice of description and can be underwritten by another such choice.
What about the Sartrean proposition that “human beings are what they make themselves”, which I have just put forward as panrelationalist doctrine? Is that proposition true? Well, it is true in the same way that Peano’s axioms for arithmetic are true. These axioms sum up the implications of the use of a certain vocabulary, the vocabulary of numbers. But suppose you have no interest in using that vocabulary. Suppose, for example, that you are willing to forgo the advantages of counting and calculating. Suppose that, perhaps because of a morbid fear of technology, you are willing and eager to speak a language in which no mention of the number 17 occurs. For you, those axioms are not candidates for truth — they have no relevance to your projects.
I love how Rorty admits that all philosophical/theological frameworks are on equal footing (or lack thereof), despite the fact that Rorty’s rhetoric sometimes suggests otherwise, i.e., often suggests that his opponents are simply wrong. But what really drove home the usefulness of this way of looking at competing descriptive frameworks is his analogy to axiomatic frameworks in mathematics. Having read Penelope Maddy’s wonderful book, Defending the Axioms: On the Philosophical Foundations of Set Theory, I now see how amazingly apt this comparison (should I say metaphor?) is. What Maddy demonstrates in her book is that the axioms of pure mathematics are not based on reality, or truth, or correspondence to the world. They are based on nothing more than fruitfulness:
What’s striking is that all these perfectly reasonable ways of proceeding are in fact grounded in their promise of leading to the realization of more of our mathematical goals, to the discovery of more fruitful concepts and theories, to the production of more deep mathematics. Ultimately we aim for consistent theories, for effective ways of organizing and extending our mathematical thinking, for useful heuristics for generating productive new hypotheses, and so on; intrinsic considerations are valuable, but only insofar as they correlate with these extrinsic payoffs. This suggests that the importance of intrinsic considerations is merely instrumental, that the fundamental justificatory force is all extrinsic. This casts serious doubt on the common opinion that intrinsic justifications are the grand aristocracy and extrinsic justifications the poor cousins. The truth may well be the reverse!
In any case, this is what the Objectivist would tell us. For her, the be-all and end-all of mathematics isn’t a remote metaphysics that we access through some rational faculty, but the entirely palpable facts of mathematical depth. She seeks concepts and assumptions that illuminate previously intractable problems, that reveal surprising interconnections, that open up new areas of mathematical understanding, and she does so using the familiar methods of mathematics itself, all carefully honed for just this undertaking. From this point of view, being part of our current concept only matters insofar as that concept is well-chosen; presented with a fruitful avenue that runs counter to current thinking, the Objectivist will happily throw the old concept over and embrace the new without regret. Indeed for her the often vexed distinction between finding out more about an existing concept and changing to a new one matters not at all. What does matter, all that really matters, is the fruitfulness and promise of the mathematics itself.
Think of it. Here is a philosopher of mathematics, considered by many the most rigorous discipline with regard to concepts like truth, provability, consistency, etc., echoing Rorty’s broader claims about axiomatic frameworks: the only criteria for evaluating the success of such a framework is by its fruitfulness! I wish Rorty had lived to read Maddy’s book.
So how does this axiomatic approach to philosophical/theological frameworks serving human needs square with Stephen’s third claim regarding what constitutes the whole human? Well, Rorty is clearly claiming that all human behaviors and beliefs are instrumental to human needs, even the descriptive frameworks in which such claims are made and debated. But does he claim that the sum of all these instrumental beliefs and behaviors constitutes the whole human? I don’t think he does.
First, he is not an idealist (despite some critics claims to the contrary). Humans exist in a world of causal forces over which we have no control. These forces are also part of the whole human. Second, at least some human needs (desires, interests, aspirations, loves) are not instrumental, they are the ends or goals of all human instrumental relations. (What is difficult to determine is the degree to which a particular need or desire is instrumental to some other need of desire. This discussion requires its own essay.) Human needs are also part of the whole human.
So the sum of the parts that constitute the whole human includes instrumental relations plus human needs plus causal forces. All three of these constitute the whole human, and nothing more. We can think of this triumvirate mapping onto Aristotle’s four causes. The causal forces of the world map to his efficient and material causes, the instrumental human relationships, including philosophical/theological frameworks map to his formal cause and ultimate human needs map to his final cause.
Finally, let’s address Stephen’s fourth claim, that Rorty fails to see (all) interaction as the essential ingredient of a human being. First, let’s drop essential, because Rorty is an antiessentialist. Second, let’s observe that interaction is ubiquitous to all things: atoms, planets, animals, fundamental forces of physics, and humans. In fact, if one is a panrelationalist, as Rorty is, then one is also a paninteractionist, because interactions are yet another kind of relation. All that being said, I think it is fair to say that Rorty’s body of work is primarily aimed at one particular kind of interaction: the interaction between animals using complex marks and noises known as language:
Plants and the other animals can interact, but their success in these interactions is not a matter of their finding increasingly more profitable redescriptions of each other. Our success is a matter of finding such redescriptions.
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To keep faith with Darwin, however, we should think of the word “language” not as naming a thing with an intrinsic nature of its own, but as a way of abbreviating the kinds of complicated interactions with the rest of the universe which are unique to the higher anthropoids. These interactions are marked by the use of complex noises and marks to facilitate group activities, as tools for coordinating the activities of individuals.
I wish he had looked a bit more broadly at other fields because I think he would have found discussions of nonlinguistic interactions that would have complemented his framework quite nicely. I’m thinking in particular of the quantum physics interpretation known as QBism and the philosophy of science known as structural realism; not to mention the actor-network theory of Latour, whom Rorty highlights as a fellow panrelationalist early in his essay. But I also wish Rorty had shown more interest in Taoism and Buddhism — alas he didn’t.
