Richard Rorty

A.J. Ayer began his Bertrand Russell with his customary insouciance, saying that Russell was ‘unique among the philosophers of this century in combining the study of the specialised problems of philosophy, not only with an interest in both the natural and the social sciences, but with an engagement in primary as well as higher education, and an active participation in politics’. Dozens of 20th-century philosophers have, I imagine, met those specifications. But the one who comes first to an American’s mind is John Dewey: a man whose engagement in primary and higher education, and whose active participation in politics, were considerably more extensive than Russell’s – and, I should argue, more focused, intelligent and useful.’

Recent attempts to dismiss Heidegger as ‘a Nazi philosopher’ resemble the Nazis’ attempt to dismiss Einstein’s theory of relativity as ‘Jewish physics’. In both cases, we are urged to test a body of thought not against competing bodies of thought but against something more easily accessible – our moral intuitions. If you know that the very idea of relativity is a product of cultural decadence, you are spared the trouble of labouring through a lot of equations and then deciding whether the phenomena can be explained non-relativistically. If you know that the very idea of ‘authentic existence’ or of ‘harkening to the voice of Being’ is inherently fascistic, you are spared the trouble of comparing Heidegger’s account of the history of Western philosophical thought with, for example, Hegel’s, Dewey’s, Popper’s or Blumenberg’s. You need not labour through Heidegger’s fantastic etymologies and idiosyncratic neologisms. What is more, you can brush aside the books of the people influenced by Heidegger – Derrida, de Man, Foucault – as just more of the same discredited claptrap.’

A third-rate critic of an original philosopher usually attacks him (or her) for frivolous irresponsibility, or corrupting the youth, or for having (by underhand ‘rhetorical’ means) briefly made the worse appear the better cause. By contrast, a second-rate critic will spot lacunae in the philosopher’s arguments, ambiguities in her use of terms, and vagueness in her conclusions. Such a critic defends the conventional wisdom which the radical philosopher criticised, and does so by detailed examination of the ipsissima verba of those criticisms, pointing out how often they either missed the point or begged the question.

If one says, as I did in ‘The Contingency of Language’, that truth is not ‘out there’, one will be suspected of relativism and irrationalism. If one suggests, as I then did in ‘The Contingency of Selfhood’, that we no longer need a distinction between morality and prudence, one may seem to be encouraging immorality. By way of defence, I shall argue here that these distinctions between absolutism and relativism, rationality and irrationality, morality and expediency, are obsolete and clumsy tools – remnants of a vocabulary which we should try to replace. But, as I suggested earlier, ‘argument’ is not the right word. For on my account of intellectual progress as the literalisation of selected metaphors, rebutting objections to one’s redescriptions of some things will be largely a matter of redescribing other things, trying to outflank the objections by enlarging the scope of one’s favourite metaphors. So my strategy will be to try to make the vocabulary in which these objections are phrased look bad, thereby changing the subject, rather than granting the objector his choice of weapons and terrain by meeting his criticisms head-on.’