Pragmatism and the Enlightenment

Brandom adds some more background in support of Rorty’s claim that American pragmatism represents a kind of second Enlightenment.

“The motor of the first Enlightenment was the rise of the new natural science — in particular, the mathematized physics of Galileo, Descartes, and Newton…. Because their thought was principally oriented by this project, all of the canonical philosophers from Descartes through Kant can sensibly be seen as at base philosophers of science” (Pragmatism and Idealism, pp. 18-19).

“The physical science they were inspired by and interpreters of put forward mathematical theories in the form of impersonal, immutable principles formulating universal, eternal, necessary laws. Enlightenment empiricism sought to ground all our knowledge in self-contained, self-intimating sensory episodes whose brute occurrence is the most basic kind of knowing. Just how the natural light of reason could extract secure and certain knowledge of things as law-governed from those deliverances of fallible perception was a perennial puzzle” (p. 19).

To put it bluntly, the empiricist theory of knowledge lacks the resources to explain the results of modern mathematicized science. The emperor has no clothes.

“Even had Hume succeeded in his aspiration to become ‘the Newton of the mind’ by perfecting Locke’s theoretical efforts to understand the psychological processes of understanding in terms of the mechanisms of association and abstraction, the issue of how the subject of that science was to be found among the furniture of the universe described by the real Newton would have survived untouched, as an apparently intractable embarrassment” (ibid).

“The founding genius of American pragmatism, Charles Sanders Pierce, was, like the original Enlightenment philosophes, above all, a philosopher of science…. He was impressed by the broadly selectional forms of explanation that he presciently saw as common to Darwinian evolutionary biology, at the level of species, and the latest psychological theories of learning, at the level of individual organisms. And he was impressed by the new forms of statistical explanation that were both essential to the new physical science of thermodynamics and becoming increasingly central to the new social sciences of the late nineteenth century” (pp. 19-20).

“Accounts that appeal to natural selection in biology, or to supervised selection in learning, or to statistical likelihood (whether in physics or sociology or economics), show how observed order can arise, contingently, but explicably, out of an irregular background of variation…. Pierce saw this as nothing less than a new form of intelligibility. Understanding whose paradigm is Darwin’s evolutionary theory is a concrete, situated narrative of local, contingent, mutable, practical, reciprocal accommodations of particular creatures and habitats. Pierce speculatively generalized this model to a vision in which even the most fundamental laws of physics are understood as contingently emerging by selectional processes from primordial indeterminateness. No less than the behavior of biological organisms, those laws are to be understood as adaptational habits, each of which is in a statistical sense relatively stable and robust in the environment provided by the rest” (pp. 20-21).

My late father would have appreciated this tribute to the importance of Pierce, in the face of Dewey and Rorty’s neglect. While writing his dissertation on Pierce in the 1950s, he was denied access to various manuscripts by the executors of the Pierce archive at Harvard. He speculated that the executors, who were very concerned to make Pierce “fit in” with the narrow orthodoxy that dominated American academic philosophy at the time, were suppressing evidence of Pierce’s broader interests. Years later, it turned out he was right.

Many writers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries treat a new appreciation for process and the emergence of new forms as characteristic of modernity. Of course, they were preceded in this by Hegel. (And if we read Aristotle on his own terms, rather than in ways beholden to later religious traditions, then behind Hegel stands Aristotle as a philosopher of process and emergence.)

“On the pragmatist understanding, … knower and known are alike explicable by appeal to the same general mechanisms that bring order out of chaos, settled habit from random variation: the statistical selective structure shard by processes of evolution and of learning. That selectional structure ties together all the members of a great continuum of being stretching from the processes by which physical regularities emerge, through those by which the organic evolves locally and temporarily stable forms, through the learning processes by which the animate acquire locally and temporarily adaptive habits, to the intelligence of the untutored common sense of ordinary language users, and ultimately to the methodology of the scientific theorist — which is just the explicit, systematic refinement of the implicit, unsystematic but nonetheless intelligent procedures characteristic of everyday practical life…. This unified vision stands at the center of the classical American pragmatists’ second Enlightenment” (pp. 24-25).

The selectional structure Brandom speaks of here is not necessarily normative. Darwinian natural selection in terms of utility and practical success is its main inspiration. But it does already go beyond a narrowly mechanical view of causality.

“This happy concord and consilience between the distinctively pragmatist versions of naturalism in ontology and empiricism in epistemology stands in stark contrast, not only to the prior traditional British empiricism of the Enlightenment, but also to the subsequent twentieth-century logical empiricism of the Vienna Circle. The reductive physicalist version of naturalism and the reductive phenomenalist version of empiricism they inclined to endorse were exceptionally difficult to reconcile with each other. Hume had already shown how difficult it is to provide suitable empiricist credentials for the way in which mathematical laws supporting subjunctive reasoning — the crowning glory of Newtonian physics — outran observable regularities, not only epistemically, but semantically. Adding the powerful methods of modern logic to articulate the phenomenal deliverances of sense did not alter this fundamental mismatch. A threatening and recalcitrant tension accordingly concerned how to proceed when respect for the deliverances of natural science as the measure of what there is and how it is in nature collides with empiricist strictures on when we are entitled to claim to know what there is and how it is” (p. 25).

Without hyperbole, Brandom points out the conflict between mechanist and phenomenalist strategies for explanation.

He exalts the original Enlightenment in the following terms.

“The Enlightenment marks the ending of humanity’s self-imposed tutelage, the achievement of our majority and maturity, for the first time taking adult responsibility for our own character and destiny. It is our emancipation from submission to the alien, nonhuman-because-superhuman authority of Old Nobodaddy in matters of practical conduct. Henceforth we should deem it incompatible with our human dignity to understand ourselves as subject to any laws other than those we have in one way or another laid down for ourselves. No longer should our ideas about what is right and good be understood as having to be dictated to us by a superhuman authority” (p. 27).

“Old Nobodaddy” is a reference to the poetry of William Blake.

(I like to tell a similar story about the birth of ethical reason with Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. For me, it is Plato and Aristotle (humanity’s greatest teachers, in Hegel’s words) who are the original sources of this “adulthood” of humanity that Brandom so eloquently commends. They certainly did not take what is right and good to be dictated to us by a superhuman authority. Most of the leading lights of the Enlightenment were more timid by comparison. But Brandom also does not acknowledge the ways in which Hegel uses Aristotle to solve Kantian problems, pointed out so well by Robert Pippin. Dewey, Rorty, and Brandom all show little interest in pre-modern philosophy. Even the great have weaknesses.)

“The first Enlightenment, as Rorty construed it, concerned our emancipation from nonhuman authority in practical matters: issues of what we ought to do and how things ought to be. The envisaged second Enlightenment is to apply this basic lesson to our emancipation from nonhuman authority in theoretical, cognitive matters” (p. 28, emphasis in original).

The “non-human authority” in this latter case is what Rorty calls Reality with a capital R, which is supposed to be what it is completely independent of human discourse and judgment, and which is nonetheless claimed to be somehow known as such by some humans. This was already an implicit target of Kant’s critique of dogmatism. (And once again, Aristotle discusses being principally in terms of the normative saying of “is”, and everywhere inquires about the natures of real things in ways that cannot be separated from a consideration of discourse, language, and judgment. Our nature is to be animals that are in some degree capable of discourse, which is the origin of second nature.) But Rorty and Brandom are quite right in the sense that the kinds of things that Kant collectively called dogmatism have by no means disappeared from the scene today, even though they have long been called out by name.

Authority, Representation, Pragmatism

The controversial American philosopher Richard Rorty was a mentor and colleague of Robert Brandom. In the essay I will treat here, he presents himself as especially identifying with the pragmatism of John Dewey.

According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Rorty’s 1967 edited collection The Linguistic Turn “did much to cement the idea of a linguistic turn… as a sea change in the history of philosophy”. He came to sharply criticize analytic philosophy as then practiced, as well as the prevailing self-perception of modern science, but did so from a modernist point of view.

Rorty is best known for his radical critique of modern representationalism — from Descartes to analytic philosophy — in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979). Like Brandom’s more constructive development of an “inferentialist” alternative approach to meaning in Making It Explicit (1994), that book takes as its point of departure Wilfrid Sellars’ critique of the Myth of the Given in “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind”, and W. V. O. Quine’s essay “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”.

Here, however, I will focus on Rorty’s very informal 1999 essay “Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism”. For an initial sketch of my own views relevant to this, see Authority. This is all in preparation for upcoming coverage of recent lectures by Brandom that shed new light on Brandom’s extremely important work, by explicitly relating it to Rorty’s.

Rorty begins, “There is a useful analogy to be drawn between the pragmatists’ criticism of the idea that truth is a matter of correspondence to the intrinsic nature of reality and the Enlightenment’s criticism of the idea that morality is a matter of correspondence to the will of a Divine Being. The pragmatists’ anti-representationalist account of belief is, among other things, a protest against the idea that human beings must humble themselves before something non-human, whether the Will of God or the Intrinsic Nature of Reality. Seeing anti-representationalism is a version of anti-authoritarianism permits one to appreciate an analogy which was central to John Dewey’s thought: the analogy between ceasing to believe in Sin and ceasing to accept the distinction between Reality and Appearance” (p. 7).

The parallelism he points out between two kinds of correspondence does seem significant. This is actually the main contribution of Rorty’s essay. However, the essay’s main body consists of Rorty’s historical storytelling about pragmatism, with a digression on Freud’s critique of religion.

The formulation about ceasing to accept the distinction between appearance and reality is too blunt. Their relation is very far from being a simple binary opposition, but they cannot simply be identical either. Explanation, understanding, and intelligibility depend on making distinctions of degrees of reality within appearance. This is part of what Hegel calls the “logic of essence”.

Epistemological foundationalism — typically associated with a correspondence theory of truth — is the claim that there is such a thing as noninferential knowledge. I say that whatever is claimed to be noninferential knowledge is not knowledge at all in the proper sense, but rather what Plato called opinion (doxa). And again, knowledge in Aristotle’s sense is an ability to explain itself. Explanation appeals to inference, not to a supposed registering of brute facts. Foundationalism is dogmatic in Kant’s sense. It puts ultimate principles beyond any possibility of explanation or understanding. This also makes it arbitrary.

Representationalist theories of knowledge are implicitly foundationalist, and commonly have recourse to a correspondence theory of truth. Pragmatism, meanwhile, is largely defined by its opposition to the correspondence theory. Pragmatists also tend to downplay the distinction between ontology and epistemology. It does seem that the correspondence theory of truth implies something like Rorty’s Reality with a capital R, that is what it is entirely independent of the knower. This ignores the essential role of interpretation and relating things together in understanding.

What Brandom calls the authority-obedience model of normativity is presented by Rorty, not unreasonably, as an insistence on simple correspondence or conformity to the presumed will of God. Simple obedience and simple correspondence have equally little use for reasons or reasoning. For them, everything is supposed to be a matter of sheer fact, with no thought required in its uptake. Hegel’s Phenomenology and Logic preceded the pragmatists in showing that purported facts alone (mere being or objects of immediate consciousness, in Hegel’s terms) do not provide an adequate basis for either understanding or ethical action.

Some of Rorty’s claims about Dewey have been disputed. Not knowing Dewey very well, I am unsure how close the part about ceasing to believe in Sin is to Dewey’s own ways of expressing himself. Rorty doesn’t say much here about what he means by the belief in Sin that he rejects, but I think his idea is that it stresses mere obedience over actual ethical goodness.

I would say that the kind of view that unequivocally puts divine will or command first, above any consideration of the good, is far from accurately typifying all religion. Such radical voluntarism or commandism is indeed horrible in its consequences, but it is certainly not good Thomism, to mention but one example.

Much more common than radical voluntarism are views that equivocate in this area. Rorty seems to lump those who equivocate together with the unequivocal voluntarists. But Leibniz sought to convince equivocating mainstream theologians to actively side with him against radical voluntarism. I like this more optimistic point of view.

Pragmatists are generally recognized as having their own distinctive theories of truth — in one way or another emphasizing the roles it plays in human practices — in competition with the correspondence theory, which is closely tied to representationalism. The correspondence theory of truth, while formally distinct from any particular variety of philosophical realism, at the same time seems to suggest a kind of naive realism that is difficult to separate from the dogmatism that was criticized by Kant. I put Aristotle closer to the pragmatists here than to medieval or modern realists or representationalists.

Rorty continues, “Dewey was convinced that the romance of democracy, a romance built on the idea that the point of a human life is free cooperation with fellow humans, required a more thorough-going version of secularism than either Enlightenment rationalism or nineteenth-century positivism had achieved. As Dewey saw it, whole-hearted pursuit of the democratic ideal requires us to set aside any authority save that of a consensus of our fellow humans” (ibid).

Democracy and consensus were strong themes of Dewey’s. But even to my shallow acquaintance, the picture Rorty paints of Dewey’s views of religion is a bit one-sided. In A Common Faith (1934), Dewey seems to aim to heal the rift between science and religion. He says in effect that the dogmatically religious and the dogmatically anti-religious both identify religion with belief in the supernatural. Dewey rejects that identification, as Hegel does. As a pragmatist, he is more concerned with what people actually do in their lives.

Rorty continues, “Dewey was quite willing to say of a vicious act that it was sinful, and of ‘2+2=5’ or ‘Elizabeth the First’s reign ended in 1623’ that these sentences were absolutely, unconditionally, eternally, false. But he was unwilling to gloss ‘sinful’ or ‘falsehood’ in authoritarian terms. He did not want to say that a power not ourselves had forbidden cruelty, nor that these false sentences fail to accurately represent the way Reality is in itself. He thought it much clearer that we should not be cruel than that there was a God who had forbidden us to be cruel, and much clearer that Elizabeth I died in 1603 than that there is any way things are ‘in themselves’. He viewed the theory that truth is correspondence to Reality, and the theory that moral goodness is correspondence to the Divine Will, as equally dispensable.”

“For Dewey, both theories add nothing to our ordinary, workaday, fallible ways of telling right from wrong, and truth from falsity. But their pointlessness is not the real problem. What Dewey most disliked about both traditional ‘realist’ epistemology and about traditional religious beliefs is that they discourage us by telling us that somebody or something has authority over us. Both tell us that there is Something Inscrutable, something toward which we have duties, duties which have precedence over our cooperative attempts to avoid pain and obtain pleasure” (pp. 8-9).

These two paragraphs seem pretty solid. He then gives a capsule history of pragmatism, seemingly intended as a sort of advertisement. In another part, he says one of the things he likes about Dewey is Dewey’s historical storytelling. Here Rorty practices such storytelling himself.

“Peirce kicked pragmatism off by starting from Alexander Bain’s definition of belief as a rule or habit of action. Starting from this definition, Peirce argued that the function of inquiry is not to represent reality, but rather to enable us to act more effectively. This means getting rid of the ‘copy theory’ of knowledge which had dominated philosophy since the time of Descartes — and especially of the idea of intuitive self-knowledge, knowledge unmediated by signs” (p. 10).

Hegel was Pierce’s great predecessor in the critique of representation. This has not been adequately appreciated. And Dewey’s views on democracy in part reflect a continued serious engagement with broadly Hegelian themes.

“Peirce was anti-foundationalist, coherentist, and holist in his view of the nature of inquiry. But he did not, as most of Hegel’s anglophone followers did, think of God as an all-inclusive, atemporal experience which is identical with Reality. Rather, as a good Darwinian, Peirce thought of the universe as evolving. His God was a finite deity who is somehow identical with an evolutionary process” (ibid).

James and Dewey “focused on the profound anti-Cartesian implications of Peirce’s development of Bain’s initial anti-representationalist insight. They developed a non-representationalist theory of belief acquisition and testing” (ibid).

“Peirce thought of himself as a disciple of Kant, improving on Kant’s doctrine of categories and his conception of logic. A practicing mathematician and laboratory scientist, he was more interested in these areas of culture than were James or Dewey. James took neither Kant nor Hegel very seriously, but was far more interested in religion than either Peirce or Dewey. Dewey, deeply influenced by Hegel, was fiercely anti-Kantian. Education and politics, rather than science or religion, were at the center of his thought” (p. 11).

“James hoped to construct an alternative to the anti-religious, science worshipping, positivism of his day” (ibid).

“Dewey, in his early period, tried to bring Hegel together with evangelical Christianity” (ibid).

“The anti-positivist strain in classical pragmatism was at least as strong as its anti-metaphysical strain” (ibid).

“All of Dewey’s books are permeated by the typically nineteenth-century conviction that human history is the story of expanding human freedom” (p. 12).

“I take the anti-representationalist view of thought and language to have been motivated, in James’ case, by the realization that the need for choice between competing representations can be replaced by tolerance for a plurality of non-competing descriptions, descriptions which serve different purposes and which are to be evaluated by reference to their Utility in fulfilling these purposes rather than by their ‘fit’ with the objects being described” (p. 14).

This idea of a plurality of noncompeting descriptions serving different purposes is no less important for being elementary. But for foundationalists and fundamentalists, everything has to reduce to black and white, and claims to truth are exclusive.

“If James’ watchword was tolerance, then Dewey’s was, as I have said, anti-authoritarianism. His revulsion from the sense of sinfulness which his religious upbringing had produced led Dewey to campaign, throughout his life, against the view that human beings needed to measure themselves against something non-human. Dewey used the term ‘democracy’ to mean something like what Habermas means by the term ‘communicative reason’: for him, the word sums up the idea that human beings should regulate their actions and beliefs by the need to join with other human beings in cooperative projects, rather than by the need to stand in the correct relation to something non human. This is why he grabbed hold of James’ pragmatic theory of truth” (ibid).

The connection he makes between Dewey and Habermas seems sound to me.

There is a multi-page digression on Freud’s Moses and Monotheism, which I will skip. According to Rorty, Freud would have “seen worship of the bare Idea of Father as the origin of the conviction that it is knowledge, rather than love, which is the most distinctively human” (p. 18).

Here I must beg to differ. I see no polar opposition between knowledge and love. The twin pinnacles of Aristotle’s ethics are intellectual virtue, and friendship or love. Hegel stresses both as well. A principled rejection of epistemological foundationalism does not entail the rejection of knowledge — quite the contrary.

“This conviction of the importance of knowledge runs through the history of what Derrida calls ‘the metaphysics of presence’…. The quest for such a reassuring presence is, for all those who resonate to Aristotle’s claim that ‘all men by nature desire to know’, the proper way of life for the good child. To devote oneself to getting knowledge as opposed to opinion — to grasping unchanging structure as opposed to awareness of mutable and colorful content — one has to believe that one will be cleansed, purified of guilt and shame, by getting closer to something like Truth or Reality” (ibid).

The sharp Platonic opposition between knowledge and opinion is something I want to defend. I would completely dissociate it from bad or harmful concepts of authority and representation (still leaving aside the relation between these two). I would sooner associate bad or harmful concepts of authority with opinion that is claimed to take precedence over actual knowledge.

The story about Aristotle and presence is Heidegger’s, not Aristotle’s. Derrida’s critique of the metaphysics of presence really has nothing to do with Aristotle (his immediate target was actually Husserl). I agree that the metaphysics of presence — a variant of the privileging of immediacy that Hegel opposes — is a terrible idea. At least from the time of Plotinus and perhaps from that of the Stoics, the Western tradition has been affected by it. But to claim that the whole history of philosophy has been hegemonically dominated by it is a gross oversimplification.

Strangely, Rorty finishes, “[Dewey’s] anti-authoritarianism was a stage in the gradual replacement of a morality of obligation by a morality of love. This is the replacement which, in the West, is thought to have been initiated by certain passages in the New Testament” (p. 20).

I would say that the moment Socrates initiated the free ethical inquiry that was taken up and developed by Plato and Aristotle, the authority-obedience model no longer universally held sway. Plato and Aristotle are less beholden to it than the leading lights of the moderate Enlightenment. Even among the Latin scholastics, there was plenty of genuine inquiry.

Rorty never gets any further in explaining the relation between representationalism and authoritarianism that he began with. It seems this is just a provocative metaphor, with a conciliatory gesture at the end. But my real interest is in Brandom’s very different presentation, when he relates and contrasts his own work and Rorty’s.

The globally negative reference to obligation may also reflect Rorty’s very negative view of Kant.

In a footnote, Rorty claims with winking anachronism that “eventually [Dewey’s] bete noir became the doctrine which [later writer Thomas] Nagel makes explicit: that something less contingent and more universal than the empirical, environmental conditions which shape a human being’s moral identity is necessary if morality is not to be an illusion” (p. 16n).

This goes way beyond the scope of the rest of the essay. I have little appreciation for arguments that claim something else is necessary for morality to be possible, so I was hoping to find common ground. But now Rorty is objecting to anything “less contingent and more universal than the empirical, environmental conditions”. To me, this sounds more like the positivism that the historic pragmatists opposed.

The pragmatist tradition in general has an ambiguous relation to mainstream varieties of empiricism. Here Rorty sounds like an empiricist.

Earlier in his career, he was known as a defender of eliminative materialism, the view that mental states simply do not exist. Coming from this kind of direction, he would scarcely have needed metaphorical talk about authoritarianism to arrive at a repudiation of representationalism.

I’m very critical of the notion of mental states myself. But I don’t see this as a black-and-white question of whether or not something exists. It is rather a question of how we interpret things. Posing the question in terms of existence implies that there is nothing to interpret, that we already know what all the things in life are. This is an example of the attitude that Kant called dogmatic.

Life: Between Nature and Meaning

I have wanted to emphasize the goodness of life, in spite of the fact that many things are wrong in the world. But what is “life”? I don’t have a completely satisfying answer, but I do have a few thoughts.

Nature is said in many ways, of course, and these yield different perspectives on life from the side of nature. In an evolutionary context, I prefer to stress the marvelous diversification of organic forms over competition between individuals or species. Life, I think, is better understood in terms of purposes and what Aristotle calls “that for the sake of which”, than by attempting to reduce it to elements and efficient causes. All those purposes are intrinsic to the nature of the things that have them, and indeed they constitute that nature.

It does not make sense to inquire about “the” meaning of life. Rather, life is meaning, in superabundance and overflow. We should look at life not in terms of minimal biological prerequisites, but in terms of its highest development in each of the many kinds that flourish. That is the real significance of Aristotelian and Hegelian “actuality”.