Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature by Richard Rorty
An overview of the introduction to Rorty’s pragmatic text
Introduction to Rorty
An American philosopher specializing in history of philosophy and analytic philosophy, Richard McKay Rorty is best known for his books — Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Consequences of Pragmatism, and more. He is also known as the founder of neo-pragmatism. It is believed that the influence of the philosophy and writings of Hegel, Heidegger, Darwin and Gadamer is the reason Rorty became a pragmatist.
Overview of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature
There is a temptation to believe that we humans are perceiving the universe adequately. This temptation is foul, and unfortunately, the whole of philosophy has succumbed to it. Rorty argues that the ideas that we think of as being ‘true’ or ‘objective’ are nevertheless entirely subjective as human consciousness is restricted by perception.
Using the tools of language, Rorty states that our understanding of ‘reason’ is that it involves speculation on the basis of limited facts. In the same way, what we understand to be ‘objective’ is merely a language game of a group of people agreeing to a particular idea, then proclaimed as ‘truth’. So for something to be the truth, all it requires is that group’s approval.
Rorty points that there have been paradigm shifts that have subverted some of the beliefs that were taken to be common and fundamental (take the flat earth theory, for example). It has been observed that scientific breakthroughs and cultural revolutions historically metamorphose what we classify as ‘facts’ and ‘truths’. Keep this in mind, we should take the ‘truths’ of today with a grain of salt.
The Introduction Part of the Book
In the beginning of the Introduction, Rorty highlights the aim of the book after giving an overview of philosophical methodology thus far.
He says — Philosophy, as a discipline ‘sees itself as an attempt to underwrite or debunk claims to knowledge made by science, morality, art or religion’.
Rorty questions the general theory of representation — in which every culture represents a distorted claim of what reality is. Philosophy has convinced us that as a pivotal part of culture, there is a need to find the meaning of our lives.
It is because of this race to become more rigorous and scientific that philosophy has lost a majority of its relevance to the rest of the culture.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger and John Dewey are three philosophers that are portrayed in a positive light throughout the book. What these three have in common is their journey as philosophers, in Rorty’s words — “(each trying) in his early years, to find a new way of making philosophy ‘foundational’. (The three of them then) broke free of the Kantian conception of philosophy as foundational.” After reaching this realization, each tried to warn their readers against evaluating themselves using the 17th century conception of knowledge and mind.
The subsequent work of these three philosophers is ‘therapeutic’ instead of ‘constructive’, ‘edifying’ instead of ‘systematic’.
So, what they tried to do was to make their readership think why they were philosophizing, instead of supplying them with a new philosophical program.
Rorty intends to — “undermine the reader’s confidence in the ‘mind’ as something about which one should have a ‘philosophical’ view, in ‘knowledge’ as something about which there ought to be a ‘theory’ and which has ‘foundations’, and in ‘philosophy’ as it has been conceived since Kant.”
Rorty believes that the idea of knowledge as as true representation should be let go of. In saying so, he emphasizes on the necessity of questioning.
Like his philosophical idols (Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Dewey), he choose not to be a constructive philosopher while understanding the appeal of his approach is itself dependent and — “parasitic upon the constructive efforts of the very analytic philosophers whose frame of references I am trying to put into question.” By this, Rorty is referring to the Descartes-Locke-Kant practice of seeing “pictures rather than propositions, metaphors rather than statements…(for deriving) most of our philosophical convictions.”
Philosophy is imprisoned by our conception of mind as a “great mirror containing various representations…capable of being studied by pure, non-empirical methods.” Rorty believes that it is because we think of our mind as a mirror that there exists the idea of knowledge as accuracy of representation.
The Significance of the Mirror
Rorty says — “If we have a Wittgensteinian notion of language as a tool rather than a mirror, we will not look for necessary conditions of the possibility of linguistic representation.”
Then he says — “If we have a Heideggerian conception of philosophy we will see the attempt to make the nature of the knowing subject a source of necessary truths as one more self-deceptive attempt to substitute a ‘technical’ and ‘determinate’ question for that openness to strangeness which initially tempted us to begin thinking.”
Conclusion
As per Rorty, the mirror of nature is responsible for manifesting unrealistic and misleading conclusions of philosophical findings that do not align with the heart. Thus, subjectivity and objectivity of truth should not be wholly dependent on philosophical findings.
Through the medium of (the introduction part of) this book, Rorty tries to give arguments against those parts of philosophy that seem unfounded to him. For him, instead of being an object to be discovered and kept, truth is a social tool. Our search for truth is just us participating in the language game of finding it in the society’s pool of views and ideas.
