Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature by Richard Rorty

Abstract

494 BOOK REVIEWS Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. By RICHARD RoRTY: Princeton University Press, 1979. xv + 401 pp. $~0.00 cloth, $6.95 paper. The philosophical tradition is surely unique in the place its adherents have given to thinkers who reject not just reigning schools of thought but even the very enterprise commonly called philosophy. W0 have only to think of the influence of David Hume, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Martin Heidegger. Richard Ro1ty calls these thinkers " edifying philosophers "; and, although he asks no special status for his own work, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature qualifies as a major contribution to the literature of edification. Rorty sees philosophy as having been governed, particularly since Descartes , by a pre-occupation with discovering the foundations of knowledge and bewitched by the metaphor of mind as a mirror reflecting an autonomous nature. Insofar as philosophers have believed themselves to have a special mission to analyze, purify, and preserve the mirror, they have assumed for philosophy the position of a critic establishing principles for and setting limits to the sciences and other cultural enterprises. The position of this book is that the foundations cannot be found, that the mirror does not exist, and that philosophy has no rights to establish principles and set limits for human thought and activity. The great edifiers made it into the anthologies not by merely mocking the tradition, but by doing battle with the arguments of their more ambitious peers; and Rorty takes little time entering the fray with his predecessors and contemporaries. First he deals with the classical writers from Plato and Aristotle through Augustine and Aquinas to Locke and Kant and then moves on to the efforts of present-day analytic philosophers to put empirical psychology or language theory in the place of representational epistemology. There are no quick dismissals of any of these thinkers and movements. Rather they are handled carefully, respectfully and indeed laboriously with the result that the therapy for misgnided philosophy requires a great deal of intellectual effort on well-known philosophical puzzles. The attack on the mirror bewitchment leans heavily on the efforts of W.V.0. Quine against the language-fact distinction and of Wilfred Sellars against the myth of the given. With these important notions undermined, Rorty is ready to dismiss any correspondence theory of truth and any realist claims about objective readings of a world out-there-even if these come with Kantian provisos. When these old projects go, so does the pursuit of unified science. Rorty can, as a result, adopt a deterministic physicalism without a reductionism challenging treasured beliefs and practices in art, morality, or religion. Each can have its own historically conditioned, diverse , and changing method and structure. BOOK REVIEWS 495 What is left for philosophers if they, like everyone else, must give up the old hope for unadulterated truth and objectivity and if they can no longer play midwife to narrower enterprises? They can, in Michael Oakshott's expression, be simply but importantly " a voice in the conversation of mankind " without trying to stake out a secure fach for themselves. The principal models cited for this shift are Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and John Dewey, all of whom renounced knowledge as their aim for the sake of edification, "the project of finding new, better, more interesting, more fruitful ways of speaking." What these ways were for them Rorty does not really say. The models he presents in detail are rather Hans-Georg Gadamer with his subtle negotiation of the hermeneutic circle and Jean-Paul Sartre with his insistence on being-for-itself as defining the world and its own place in it. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature is one of the most interesting and challenging books which I have read in recent years. If for nothing else, it would be notable for combining a careful argument with an appreciative consideration of thinkers as diverse as Sellars and Quine on the one hand and Gadamer and Sartre on the other. No one who has witnessed the parochial quarrels among professional philosophers in the United States can fail to welcome this accomplishment. On the substantive level, Rorty disposes effectively of the imperial pretense...