Rorty y La Filosofía de La Historia

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Rorty and HistoryFrank Ankersmit

New Literary History, Volume 39, Number 1, Winter 2008, pp.

79-100 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press

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New Literary History, 2008, 39: 79100

Rorty and History

Frank Ankersmit

I. Introduction

The topic of Rorty and history is, at rst sight, not a verypromising one. Rorty never discussed any of the great historiansfrom the past and the present, such as Gibbon, Ranke, Burckhardt,

Huizinga, Meinecke, or Braudel. 1 He was even less interested in philoso-phy of history and considered this discipline to be devoid of interest andsignicance. 2 He never commented on the work of Hayden Whitethemost inuential contemporary philosopher of historythough he musthave been quite well aware of its existence 3 and of how close it came tohis own scholarly interests. 4

Next, it is true that Rorty wrote quite a lot on political philosophy,philosophy of culture, and literary theory, all of them elds that are nottoo remote from the professional interests of historians and philosophersof history. But he never felt attracted to the typically historical aspects ofpolitics, culture, and literary theory. It was Rawls whom he chose for hismain guide in political philosophyhence, the political philosopher who,

with his notorious veil of ignorance, had removed in one fell swoop allthings historical from the political philosophers agenda. Next, Derrida

was Rortys hero for the domains of culture and literary theory. And,

again, Derridas fetishization of the text left no room whatsoever forthe historians traditional concerns. In sum, history, historical awareness,historians, and historical thought never scored high on the list of Rortysprofessional interests. 5

However, there is one signal exception to Rortys indifference towardshistory. And this is Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature his rst book,and the one that made him famous. Upon publication he became anintellectual celebrity almost overnight and none of his later works everhad such a tremendous impact again. 6

History is very prominently present in this book. Rorty attacked in itthe core business of contemporary philosophy of languageepistemology.He argued that epistemology resulted from an improper demarcationof philosophy from science by seventeenth-century philosophers such


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as Descartes and Locke. So epistemology was the intellectual offspringof some (unfortunate) historical contingency and one that can only beaccounted for historically . Had the historical facts about European intel-lectual history from Descartes to Kant been just a little bit different,philosophers would have ended up doing other and probably betterthings than presently is the case. Rortys use of the weapon of historicalcontextualization was all the more effective since he proved himself tobe an absolutely brilliant historian of philosophy. Moreover, throughouthis book, Rorty took Thomas S. Kuhns recommendation to heart, that

when reading the work of an important thinker, we should preferablylook for the apparent absurdities in the text and then ask ourselves howa sensible person could have written them. 7 This is pure historicism, of

course. Think of the old historicist demand that the historian must cometo a Verstehen of what may, at rst sight, seem strange and unfamiliarto us in the doings and saying of our ancestors.

But even more important is that a most powerful philosophy of history can be detected in the book. Rorty already implied as much himself byhaving the message of the book culminate in its last two chapters onHans Georg Gadamers hermeneutics. The suggestion clearly is that ifone follows the history of Western thought since Descartes and extrapo-lates from there to the future (as Rorty tentatively did himself in these

two last chapters), it will be hermeneutics, hence a philosophy of history ,that we shall end up with. Moreover, the book offered already sometantalizing insights into what this new philosophy of history might looklike: it would, minimally, apply the technical sophistication of analyticalphilosophy of language to the problems traditionally investigated inphilosophy of history.

So philosophers of history (such as myself) eagerly awaited Rortys nextbook in the expectation that this would full the promises of the end ofPMN . But, alas, when Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity nally came out in1989, it was clear that Rorty had abandoned the project he had suggestedat the end of PMN . No sequel to that book would ever be forthcomingand the watershed of philosophy of language and of history would beallowed to persist. Hermeneutics, history, and historical awareness areall absent in what Rorty wrote since PMN .

This may make clear what I hope to do in this essay. Having been in- vited to write on Rorty and history, I must focus on where Rorty reallycame closest to history, hence on PMN .8 References to his later work willtherefore be relatively scarce in this essayand my main aim will be togive an outline of what philosophy of history is implicit is PMN and howthis philosophy of history might be elaborated.


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the mind than the mind itself, knowledge of objects in the mind willbe prototypical of the most certain and reliable kind of knowledge wecan havehence Cartesian rationalism and its love affair with logic andmathematics.

In a brilliant exposition Rorty demonstrates next how Locke couldcome to similar conclusions even though his point of departure was muchdifferent from that of Descartes. Rorty distinguishes (with Wilfrid Sellars)between: (1) an impression of a red triangle as a red and triangular itemthat is immediately and noninferentially known to exist and to be redand triangular and (2) an impression of a red triangle as a knowing thata red and triangular item exists ( PMN 14344). And he then goes on toargue that the tablet metaphor Locke relies upon for explaining how

sense-experience produces knowledge leads him to confuse (1) and (2),since it will be hard to distinguish between the dents on the tablet ofour mind caused by senseexperience and our awareness of these dents.The tablet metaphor is neutral with regard to both these two options.So this is why Locke could imperceptibly shift from (1) sense-experienceto (2) the awareness of something, or to the knowledge that something isthe case. But the shift is a most momentous one for it is the exact (em-piricist) counterpart to the Cartesian postulation of the forum internum as the receptacle of knowledge. Thus the idea idea came into being

as embodying the contents of the mind and against which Thomas Reid(and Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi) would struggle in vain at the end of theeighteenth century. 11

In this way Descartes and Locke paved, in a curiously united effort, the way for Kant (about whom Rorty is relatively silent). For in his attack on what he took to be the dogmatism of both rationalism and empiricism,Kant immeasurably enlarged the responsibilities of the Cartesian andLockean forum internum by transforming it into the supreme philosophicalauthority for proffering a transcendental explanation of how knowledgeis possible an issue that had never occurred to either Descartes or Locke(or Hume). With Kants transcendentalization of rationalism and empiri-cism, epistemology had taken on the philosophical armour that it hasretained to the present day. Philosophy, that is, epistemology, now beganto emulate the sciences, not only by being no less rigorous and exactingin its argument than the sciences, but also by its pretension to be evendeeper than the sciences themselves when explaining their possibility .Philosophy thus became foundationalist, in the sense of exposing thefoundations of the sciences. As Rorty pitilessly comments: the result wasthat the more scientic and rigorous philosophy became, the less ithad to do with the rest of culture and the more absurd its traditionalpretensions seemed. The attempt of both analytic philosophers and phe-nomenologists to ground this and to criticize that were shrugged off


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by those whose activities were purportedly being grounded or criticized.Philosophy as a whole was shrugged off by those who wanted an ideol-ogy or a self-image ( PMN 5). This is how Rorty used history in PMN for robbing epistemology of its claims to philosophical eminence. Not

philosophy itself (as had still been the case with Wittgenstein), but history was thus given the honor of being the therapy for the neuroses ofcontemporary philosophy. 12 Needless to say, this did not endear Rortyto his history-hating colleagues in the philosophy departments of Anglo-Saxon universities. 13 In fact, the immense success of PMN was to a largeextent un succs de scandale, unredeemed by Rortys own undeniablegenius as a practitioner of the philosophy of language. Or, rather, hissuperior command of the techniques of the discipline made things only

really bad for him. Nobody had worried much about Kuhns appeal tohistory, since his philosophical blunders made abundantly clear thathe was not an enemy to be feared. 14 But this was different with Rorty.So with PMN Rorty acquired for himself the aura of a fallen angel, of aLuciferand that is a sin for which no remission exists.

III. Pure and Impure Philosophy of Language

Rorty then went on to investigate epistemologys fate in the 20th cen-tury. The main insight is that representation now came to be understoodas linguistic rather than mental ( PMN 8). 15 Whereas Descartes, Locke,and Kant had wanted to answer the question of how knowledge is pos-sible by focusing on the mind (and on how what went on in it relatedto the world outside), the intuition was now that knowledge is alwaysexpressed in language and that the crucial question therefore is howlanguage makes knowledge possible. Rorty discerns three stages in thehistory of the philosophy of language.

The rst stage is that of Gottlob Frege, of the Bertrand Russell ofthe Principia Mathematica , of the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus , and ofRudolf Carnaps Logische Aufbau, where language is reduced to logic.The philosophers main task then is to t the sentences spoken in a(natural) language into a logical framework. This stage quickly ended

with the demise of logical positivism. Then came the second stage of thephilosophy of language (or analytical philosophy). The problems of truthand knowledge were now cut loose from logic and investigated, instead,by analyzing them in the context of how language hooks onto the world.Language was transcendentalized, in the sense meant by Kant:

[T]he second source for contemporary philosophy of language is explictly episte-mological. The source of this impure philosophy of language is the attempt to


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retain Kants picture of philosophy as providing a permanent ahistorical framework for inquiry in the form of a theory of knowledge. . . . Treating philosophyas the analysis of language seemed to unite the merits of Hume with those ofKant. Humes empiricism seemed substantively true, but methodologically shakybecause it reposed on nothing more than an empirical theory of the acquisitionof knowledge. Kants criticisms of bad philosophy (e.g. natural theology) seemedboth more systematic and more forceful than Humes. ( PMN 25758)

In this way philosophy of language can be seen as continuing the oldtranscendentalist Kantian program, though with new and better, thatis, linguistic instruments. So this is what the so-called linguistic turn

was basically about. 16 But, as already suggested by the use of the word impure in the pas-

sage that I quoted just now, Rorty discerns still a third phase in philoso-phy of language. That is the phase of pure philosophy of language(inaugurated by Sellars and Donald Davidson) avoiding the pitfalls ofimpure, epistemological philosophy of language and of which he hasthe highest hopes.

In order to grasp the nature of Rortys pure philosophy of language, we had best begin by opposing Truth to truth, Reference to reference,and Meaning to meaningand by insisting that Rorty has no problems

with truth, reference, and meaning, but only with their counterpartsbeginning with a capital letter and standing for how these notions areused in epistemology. It immediately follows from this that one can-not misunderstand Rorty more than by seeing him as a relativist or asa historicist skepticist. Rorty is no less sure that most of what we say istrue and based on sufcient and convincing evidence than all of us inordinary life, or when we are doing science or writing history. In fact, it israther the reverse: his amazing view is that relativism and skepticism willbe hard to avoid as soon as one attempts to discover an epistemological

foundation for truth and knowledge. When we are no longer content with truth, reference, and meaningthough that is all we needandaim for Truth, Reference, and Meaning (without having an idea of what

we are looking for), we will rst raise a dust and then complain that we cannot see, to paraphrase Berkeley. It was the Lockeans and theKantians who raised this dust by interposing entities like the mind,the idea idea, or the categories of the understanding between theknowing subject and what it has knowledge of. But these entities needto be cut out ruthlessly since they are never more than Wittgensteins

wheel that can be turned though nothing else moves with it and are,therefore, not part of the mechanism.

Hence Rortys denunciation of truth as correspondence. Again, thisshould not be read as a concession to relativism or skepticism, but,


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instead, as an attack on the (albeit often unconscious) postulation of aframework encompassing what we say and what it is about and is claimedto explain truth (epistemologically) in terms of correspondence. Itmust be conceded, though, that Rorty is not wholly consistent here. Forhe is in the habit of recommending a conversationalist model of Truthto replace the correspondence model: our certainty will be a matter ofconversation between persons, rather than a matter of interaction withnon-human reality. . . . We shall be looking for an airtight case ratherthan an unshakable foundation. We shall be in what Sellars calls thelogical space of reasons rather than that of causal relations to objects(PMN 157). The idea here is that Truth is what proves to be the outcomeof the conversation of scientists and historians. The afnities with the

pragmatist, Peircean conception of Truth will need no elucidation,17

northose with the coherence theory of Truth. And this should awaken oursuspicions. For does the conversation model not create an encompassingframework as well? Namely the one enclosing all that we say betweennow and the End of History? 18

Anyway, we are now in the position to grasp Rortys opposition ofpure versus impure philosophy of language, and why he rejects thelatter. Impure philosophy of language reects on how truth, reference,and meaning can be explained epistemologically within the framework

of Truth. This is the position he identies with linguistic transcendental-ism as we may nd it in Hilary Putnam, Quine (sometimes), and in themajority of contemporary philosophers of language. Pure philosophyof language, on the other hand, is best exemplied by Davidson, and,especially, by Davidsons notorious attack on conceptual schemesanattack that Rorty recognizes as the basis and program (I had almost said:foundation) of his own pure philosophy of language.

In Rortys account, Davidsons overall strategy is to disconnect thequestion of how language works from the question of how knowl-edge works, hence, meaning from truth ( PMN 259). And, needless tosay, this hits impure transcendental philosophy where it hurts most,for there the rst question was always expected to answer the latter. Inagreement with this disjunction, Davidson proposes a neo-Wittgenstei-nian, holistic theory of meaning in which meaning is not achieved byanchoring language to the world, but by seeing how the meaning of

words and sentences affects those of other words and sentences. And where holism should not be associated with some closed whole (asin the case of Kuhns paradigms): it is just a matter of all the sentencesthat we happen to useand there is no limit to them. 19

The alternative is, indeed, to anchor language rmly to the world byadopting some theory about where and how language and the world reallyhook onto each other. There is a great variety of such theories; one may


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think here of the empiricists conception of experience, of sense-data, ofthe idea idea, of the mind, of observation-sentences, of (theories of)reference, of Saul Kripkes rigid designators, and so one may go onfor quite some time. In fact, only the long history of epistemology willprovide us with the complete list of these theories. And what all thesetheories have in common is (1) that they discover in the place wherelanguage and the world meet, so to say, the matrix for all that can, ata later stage, truthfully be said about the world. This matrix thus is thescheme for (all) later content . And (2) Truth (in the sense of epistemologicalTruth) will be here the basis for, and condition of, Meaning. For outsidethe scheme there may be truththe scheme-dependency of Truth doesnot exclude the possibility of truths generated by other schemesbut they

will be inaccessible to us; we shall not be able to give them a meaning. As Rorty puts it:

[T]his picture of holism ceasing to apply at the point where reference is leastproblematicat the interface between language and the world where demonstra-tives do their workis one way to get the scheme-content distinction going. If

we think of language in this way, we will be struck by the thought that somebodyelse (the Galactics, say) will have cut up the world differently in their originalacts of ostension and thus given different meanings to the individual words inthe core of their language. The rest of their language will thus be infected bythis divergence from our way of giving meaning to the core of English, and sothere will be no scheme for us to communicateno common points of refer-ence, no possibility of translation. ( PMN 304)

The scheme/content distinction thus locks us up in the scheme that wehave happened to opt for and has, for the epistemologist, the particularlynasty result of generating a truly invincible variant of (scheme-) relativ-ism, as Putnam found out to his dismay ( PMN 28485).

Taking all this together, we get the following picture of Rortys oppo-sition between impure and pure philosophy of language. Impurephilosophy of language starts off with the postulation of some all-en-compassing framework or scheme, within which to t all that we can say(whether the framework or scheme is xed for eternity as with Kant, or

whether it can develop through time as is the case with Putnams meta-physical or internal realism makes no difference in this context). Theepistemological question is, next, how to tie back again all that we say tothe scheme. In this way Truth, Reference, and Meaning can, allegedly, be

xed and dened. Because of the great variety of all our truth claims thisis a difcult question and it will require an immense effort to deal withit. How do the truths of science relate to those of history?to mention

just one example. But more importantly, considering the nature of the


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task, one may well have ones worries about its glaring circularity. Firstone builds an ideal or imaginary structure around our justied truebeliefs, to use Rortys terminology, and then one asks oneself how thisimaginary structure may justify the beliefs that we had already acceptedas justiably true. What is the use of the whole enterprise? What may

we hope to learn from it? These are even more difcult questions thanthose of epistemology itself. . . .

On the other hand there is pure philosophy of languagewhere therst step is to disconnect truth and meaning. This liberates philosophyof language from the (arrogant) pretension of competing with the sci-ences in their aim for truth (by allegedly founding the scientists truthin Truth). Here the very notion of a conceptual scheme is abandoned

(though there may well be schemes that are internal to science, but thesehave no philosophical import). So Davidson and Rorty are happy to as-sume that most of what we say is trueand we could even not understand

what it might mean to question this, since this could only be done by anappeal to an alternative scheme than the one we allegedly possess (butsuch a scheme would be untranslatable into our own and, hence, notunderstandable). This effectively destroys the skepticists case. As Rortyquotes Davidson: given the dogma of a dualism of scheme and reality,

we get conceptual relativity, and truth relative to a scheme. Without

the dogma, this kind of relativity goes by the board. Of course truth ofsentences remains relative to language, but that is as objective as can be.In giving up the dualism of scheme and world, we do not give up the

world, but reestablish unmediated touch with the familiar objects whoseantics make our sentences and opinions true or false. 20 I emphasize thephrase reestablish unmediated touch with the familiar objectsand to

which I shall return in the section on experience. 21Finally, we must ask ourselves (and Rorty) what will be left to do for

his pure philosophy of language, now that most of contemporaryphilosophy of language has been robbed of its purpose and meaning.It is true that Rorty himself presents in PMN Gadamerian hermeneuticsas the most likely candidate for what a pure philosophy of languagemight look like in actual practice. But the arguments he has for this atthe end of his book are deplorably sketchyand he never elaboratedthem in his later work. Nevertheless, when coming up with this sugges-tion, he must have felt that history which is what hermeneutics is allaboutwill, somehow, answer the question of what pure philosophyof language might look like. So this will be the topic to be addressed inthe next section.


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IV. Pure Philosophy of Historical Language

Rorty says about theories of reference that these are roughly coex-

tensive with what I have been calling impure philosophy of language(PMN 270). This need not surprise. Reference is a device enabling usto move from language to the world; so all that is problematic aboutepistemology, and impure philosophy of language in general, is likelyto announce itself here most clearly. Next, when discussing reference itis best to begin, again, by contrasting Reference with reference. Rorty

will be perfectly willing to allow that both in science and in our dailytalk we do often refer to things in reality, in the trivial, nontechnicalsense of talking about. Ordinarily no complications will arise. But

there are problem cases: can we refer to Sherlock Holmes, to God, tothe GNP of France in 1970 (or in 1530), to the morally good, or to aes-thetic beauty? Or think of the strings of string-theory. Or of the kindof entitiessuch as the Renaissance, social class, conservatism, ortrade unionismthat are discussed by historians.

Rortys point of departure when discussing reference is the issue ofsameness of reference . So, if we have different people, using different words,different texts in different contexts, what legitimates us to say that, undercertain circumstances, they are still speaking about the same referent?Suppose, for example, that S talks about topic T, but that most of hisbeliefs about T are false. Can he then still be said to refer to T? Thereare two options, writes Rorty. One may say that S is talking about T allright (is referring to it), even though practically everything he says aboutT is false. The other possibility is to say that since practically nothingthat S says is true of T, S cannot possibly be talking about T (referringto it). 22 To get out of the dilemma, we will appeal to the Searle-Strawsoncriterion for reference, rendered by Rorty as follows: that S refers to Tin his use of T if most of his central beliefs are true of T ( PMN 288). Itthen follows that S can still be said to refer to T if his false beliefs are notcontradicted by these central beliefs mentioned by the Searle-Strawsoncriterion, and that there will be no reference, if that would be the case.

Rortys argument here is of interest for the philosopher of history forseveral reasons. In the rst place, observe that matters of truth and falsityare the decisive criterion for reference here. However, this will be of littlehelp for the writing of history, since disagreements amongst historianscan only rarely be rephrased in terms of truth and falsity. When assess-

ing each others work, historians are only rarely interested in the truthand falsity of what is said at the level of a historical narratives individualassertions about past states of affairs (and to which the truth/false dis-tinction can only meaningfully be applied). In fact, normally they simplyassume that all that a historian says at that level is true. At that level his-


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torians are all, unwittingly, Davidsonians, so to say. However, historiansare far more interested in what the Searle-Strawson criterion describesas central beliefs. Indeed, their discussions ordinarily focus on whatare the central beliefs we have to take into account, if we wish to havea proper grasp of (some part or aspect of) the past. For example, thedisagreement between the liberal and the Marxist interpretation over theFrench Revolution is not a disagreement about the facts of the Revolu-tion, but about whether a proper understanding of the Revolution willrequire us to focus on political facts (the liberal interpretation) or onsocioeconomic facts (the Marxist interpretation).

So, where does this leave us with reference? Obviously, the Searle-Straw-son criterion can be of no help here anymore. For central beliefs are

there the criterion for deciding about reference and this criterion can-not show us what are and what are not the central beliefs in individualcases. But there seems to be an easy way out of the problem. We mightsaywith William Walsh 23that the disagreement between the liberaland the Marxist about the French Revolution is, from a logical pointof view, no different from the disagreement between someone saying

what a chair looks like if seen from this side and someone else telling us what it looks like from another perspective. Both may have their goodreasons for looking at the chair from a specic perspective and even

believe their own perspective to be superior to any othernevertheless, we will always be talking here about one and the same chair. So same-ness of reference seems to be guaranteed in these cases, as in the caseof the controversy between the liberal and the Marxist interpretation ofthe French Revolution.

Having arrived at this stage I propose to distinguish between biogra-phies (of, for example, Charlemagne or Napoleon) on the one handand, on the other, history books on such misty entities as the FrenchRevolution or the Renaissance. It will then be clear that the Walsh solu-tion works excellently for biographies: if one biographer presents centralbeliefs about Napoleon suggesting that he was a benefactor of mankind,

whereas another proposes central beliefs presenting Napoleon as aproto-Hitler, both biographies will still refer to one and the same per-sonthat is, the human being of esh and blood who lived from 1769to 1821 and became Emperor of the French in 1804.

But things are more problematic with these misty entities: what exactlyis the object of reference in the case of the French Revolution or theRenaissance? All we have here are different histories of these things,but there are no objects preexisting these histories, that we can referto by means of a proper name (such as Napoleon) or an identifyingdescription (such as the man who was Emperor of the French from 1804to 1815) and that may serve as a kind of referential or epistemological


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anchor for all the possible histories we will have of them. Surely, we willall agree that the Revolution began in 1789, that it contains the guil-lotining of Louis XVI and of Robespierreand so one may go on forquite some time. But these facts are the merely necessary but not sufcient conditions for xing the reference of the term French Revolution. Forthe Marxists will drape around these facts quite different additional factsthan the liberal historian, and each will go on to accuse the other of notreally talking about or referring to the French Revolution.

Almost all philosophers (of history) and historians will now be temptedto say that there must be something wrong with this account. For whocould possibly doubt that there has been a French Revolution, that wecan refer to and that will function as the empirical touchstone for his-

torians in their controversies about that most sublime event in Westernhistory? So they will now be tempted to yield to what one might call thereferential illusion, hence the idea that the past simply must contain areferent for the notion of the French Revolution, just as the past containsreferents for proper names such as Charlemagne and Napoleon . Would not allhistorical discussion of the French Revolution be the discussion of anillusion in the absence of such a referent?

What is wrong with the referentialist illusion was made clear in LouisO. Minks argument against Universal History, that is, the idea that

the past itself is a kind of (still) untold story and that historians try tocopy as closely as possible when writing their own stories of the past. Butthough the past may give us all the arguments we need for deciding whatare good and bad histories of the pastMink was no irrationalist!it isnot itself a story (just as nature is not an unwritten physical law itself ,though, again, it may provide the physicist with the data for how to for-mulate his laws). Mink thus urges us: to abandon the remnant of theidea of Universal History that survives as a presupposition, namely theidea that there is a determinate historical reality, the complex referentfor all our narratives of what actually happened, the untold story to

which narrative histories approximate. 24 What originally had been ametaphysical or ontological speculationthat is, a speculative philosophyof history as formulated in the prophecies of Daniel, or by St. Augustine,Kant, Hegel, Marx, and so forthsurvived as a referential fallacy, thatis, as the epistemological speculation that the writing of history makesno sense, unless there is an untold story of the past in the past itself,and to which all historical narratives refer (although the truth of whatthey say in these narratives about this object of reference will always besubject to historical discussion).

Assuming that Mink is basically right, we may now recognize how veryuseful Rortys pure philosophy of language can be for a better under-standing of historical writing. To begin with, observe that nobody in this


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discussion doubts the possibility of true statements (about the past), orof statements expressing justied true belief, to use Rortys terminol-ogy. The disagreement has to do, instead, with the issue of whether theavailability of justied true beliefs is sufcient basis for the claim thatthe conditions for reference have been adequately fullled. Mink, forhis part, does not think so. And so it is with Rortys pure philosopherof language when criticizing epistemology for its habit of postulatingreferents where they are not. Furthermore, the pure philosopher oflanguage will be adamant that there is no reason for despair here, andthat precisely the disconnection of truth (that is, of true statementsabout a referent) and meaning guarantees that meaning does not go bythe board, if Truth does. Of course, we must carefully distinguish here

between the true statements contained by a historical narrative (and where truth is trivially present) and the narrative taken as a whole, and where meaning is given to notions such as that of the French Revolutionor of the Renaissance.

It must strike us, next, that pure philosophy of (historical) languagealso gives us a new, and technically sophisticated argument in favor ofthe old distinction between historical research (Geschichtsforschung)and historical writing (Geschichtsschreibung): 25 impure philosophyof language is OK as long as we have to do with truth and reference at

the level of historical research, but pure philosophy of language showsus why it is wrong when we start to talk about the Truth and Referenceof historical writing. Then meaning is all that is left to us, and the crucialissue then becomes how the meaning of one set of words, sentences,and texts may affect that of other words, sentences, and texts. And thisissue can only be handled adequately within a holist conception of thisinteraction between words, sentences, and texts.

Rortys pure philosophy of language may give us, rst, a new accountof historical changeneedless to say a topic of the greatest interest inphilosophy of history. We must distinguish here between two kinds ofchange, one in which we have an unproblematic subject of change andanother in which there is none. Examples of the rst kind of changeare biographies of historical personages such as Charlemagne or Napo-leonand where these personalities themselves can be said to functionas subjects of change. Nothing of great philosophical interest is at stakehere. This was the model of historical change adopted in the writing ofhistory until the Enlightenment: historical reality was believed to consistof a number of entities all remaining substantially the same throughchange and to which change could be predicated. This was different

with nineteenth-century historicism where change was believed to involvethe domain of substance as well. Nothing was a priori excluded fromchange within the historicist dynamization (Mannheim) of our view of


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the world. Whereas the traditional conception of change left referenceintact, this will be different with historicist change. If A develops intoB and if B is substantially different from A, then reference to A (or B)must get dislocated somewhere on the trajectory from A to B.

So let us return now to the French Revolution and Renaissance cases where we have this kind of change involving the substance of the phe-nomena in question. We have here dramatic changewhat change can bemore dramatic than one from coming into being to ceasing to exist?and

yet there is no subject of change in the sense of some identiable objectin past reality substantially remaining the same through change and to

which all sentences describing change do refer. Change now lost its ref-erential anchor in past reality itself not as an irresponsible concession to

idealismbut because this is how we use historical language when havingto deal with historicist change. The subject of change has emigrated, soto say, from the past itself to the historians text; the historians languageitself now became the scene upon which these more drastic, historicist

variants of historical change are enacted. Finally, the argument here isholistic in the sense that the text as a whole, made up of individualjustied true statements, is at stake here. History and historical debateis holistic in that the universally shared assumption in historical writingis that only the whole of the text conveys the historians cognitivist mes-

sage, and to which the parts only contribute. 26 Next, there are some fascinating analogies between historical narra-

tives and Gottfried Leibnizs monads as he dened these in his Monad- ology . Like monads, narratives are windowless insofar as there is nodirect interaction between them; next, the account of the past given bya historical narrative is closely similar to the entelechies that Leibnizattributed to his monads: 27 both monads and narratives are dened bythe perspective they have on the world. And both are holist in a doublesense: (1) their whole is their identity, and (2) they are the componentsof either a narrativist or monadological universe.

Think, then, of each historical narrative as a monad, and assume, fur-thermore, that the narrativist universe contains not only all the narrativesthat have been or will be written on the past, but also all possible narra-tives. This is in agreement with the Leibnizian rule that the realizationof a full universe is the greatest of all goods. One might then say thathistorical reality arises out of these monads just like space and time ariseout of Leibnizs monads. 28 Space and time, as the most general proper-ties of the objects of external reality, are the product of how thinkingmonads make sense of their perceptions; similarly, historical reality ishow the historical mind makes sense of the true statements formulatedin the past tense.

Obviously, this quasi-Leibnizian claim is wholly in agreement with theantiepistemological Rortyan argument as expounded above: we should


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not think of historical reality as the already existing Referent to whichall our narratives refer, but as coming into being only to the degreethat historical discussionconversation as Rorty would have put ithimselfprogresses successfully. The existence of historical reality thusis a matter of degree : the more agreement there is, the more secure itsexistential status will becomewith the ironic implication that histori-cal reality only achieves the status of existence if historical debate hascome to an end and there is nothing left to be historicized. Historythen supersedes itself.

V. Experience

In the rst half of PMN we shall nd a lot of discussion on feelings andon so-called raw feels such as pain. Though these discussions are partof Rortys attack on epistemology, they acquire an extra interest if seenfrom the perspective of philosophy of history. That will provide me withthe material for this last section of my essay on Rorty and history.

Philosophers with a behaviorist and physicalist cast of mindsuch as Wittgenstein, Ryle, and Rorty himselfwish to do away with the Carte-sian dualism of res extensa and res cogitans as a metaphysical prejudice.

Neo-dualists are ready to see their point and will therefore look for analternative justication of their intuitions that there must be, somehow,somewhere, an ontological and/or epistemological gap between mindand body. Their rst strategy will be to say that we have to do here withtwo different vocabularies one for the mind and another for the bodyand material reality in generaland that one commits a categorymistake

when trying to reduce the former to the latter. A large part of Rortysown argument aims at the defusion of this neo-dualist position. His mainstrategy here is that this peaceful coexistence of the two vocabularies ismerely a matter of historical contingence and, more specically, of somepurely local peculiarities of seventeenth-century philosophical debate.Since then, Cartesian dualism became a kind of gesunkenes Kulturgut,so that we now all believe that there must be some truth in the Cartesianpicture, after all, and that it is the philosophers task to nd out aboutthis. Rorty then goes on to show that Aristotle and the whole Aristoteliantradition had no use for the dualism, and that we can quite well imaginea community of language-users saying all that we say, but for whom thedualism of mind and body would be incomprehensible. 29 It is here thatRorty is at his very best as a historian (of Western philosophy).

Rorty emphasizes that the debate between neo-dualists (such as ThomasNagel) and behaviorist physicalists (such as himself) will naturally centeraround these feelings and raw feels. They are the transition, so to speak,between body and mind; and neo-dualists will therefore be quick to real-


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(and raw feels) can only be a matter of the body and not of the mind.But thats mere prejudice: the Romantics were right when insisting thatmeaning can be experienced no less than light, sound, smell, or roughand smooth surfaces. There is an indissoluble continuity between thought(meaning) and feeling (experience). Or, to put it with Rousseau: sentir,cest penser.

Surely, one might object now that this experience of language isenacted on the level of language only, insofar as being informed by onesgeneral practitioner about ones imminent death will provoke a numberof thoughts all of them only expressible in language if we are to attributeany meaning to themand this would tie us to the level of language, asopposed to that of experience, or that of raw feelings. But this would

be no less dogmatic than maintaining that a raw feel might be causallyrelated to language but will always be clearly distinguishable from it inthe way that cause and effect are distinguishable. Only dogmatism canprevent us from recognizing that the realms of experience and languagedo interpenetrateand that experience may sometimes be linguistic andlanguage experiential.

The dogma of the invincible barrier between experience and lan-guagewith the claim that the link between the two of them can neverbe more than merely causalhas severely hindered our understanding

of the humanities. The dogma made historyand the humanities gener-allyinto an exclusively linguistic affair (Derrida being the paradigmaticexample). The main intuition being the fallacy of arguing from the factthat we can get access only by means of language to what is investigatedin history and the humanities (which is correct), to the claim thatexperience has no role to play in them (which is false), or only in thetrivial sense of the experience of reading (hence in the sense that justanything going on in our life and minds can be labelled experience).In agreement with the neo-dualist and physicalist prejudice, feelings, forexample, feelings of pain, of pleasure, and so forth, were not only radi-cally cut loose from the language we use for speaking about them, butalso excluded from further analysis. De nobis ipsis silemus . This robbedhistory and the humanities of their most natural subject matter and madethem into the dry-as-dust-affair that they so often are nowadays and thatmay drive us to boredom and despair.

Rorty ends his book with some musings about the notion of edica-tion, which is the word he proposes for the German Bildung. Bil-dung evokes associations with formation and of being the product ofa process of formation. Think of the Bildungsroman, such as GoethesWilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre , showing how and thanks to what experiencessomeone came to be the person he or she is. So the idea is that our(life) experiences do not leave us basically unalteredin the way that ascientist is not involved in his or her own experiments.


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At this stage it is worthwhile to recall that Aristotle certainly belongsto the good guys in Rortys account of the history (and emergence) ofepistemology. Admittedly, we will look in vain in Aristotle for the sophis-ticated behaviorist and physicalist arguments that Rorty marshals againstthe epistemologist. But unfortunately, Rorty never asks himself whetherperhaps something could not be learned, after all, from Aristotles an-tiepistemology avant la lettre . Recall, furthermore, that for the Aristotleof De Anima the sense of touch is the model for his conception of theacquisition of knowledge. 30 For just as in the sense of touch there is animmediate contact between the object itself and the sense of touch sothat the sense of touch (our hands, for example) takes on the form ofthe object, 31 so it is with knowledge in general: the sentient subject, as

we have said, is potentially as the object of sense is actually. Thus duringthe process of being acted upon it is unlike, but at the end it becomeslike that object, and shares its quality. 32 Knowledge consists in the sub-

ject actually becoming like the objectan intuition that is still clearlypresent in the old scholastic formula of truth being an adaequatio rei etintellectus . Rorty is well acquainted with these aspects of Aristotles theoryof knowledge, 33 but by the time he expounds at the end of his book hisconception of Bildung and of edication he seems to have whollyforgotten about them. For what account of knowledge is better suited

to express and to sustain what he wishes to do with these notions thanthe relevant passages from De Anima ?

Had he returned to Aristotle, there he might have shown how we mayproperly be said to be changed and formed (gebildet!) by the objectof knowledge. And he might have gone on to argue that this is exactly

where Aristotles account perfectly ts the facts about our dealing withthe world of history and of the humanitiesand where we can truly besaid to (have) become what we know about that world. Wasnt the histori-cist basically right when always insisting that we are the products of ourcultural and intellectual history? And in a way that would make no sensefor the historians colleagues in the departments of the sciences?

It then also follows that we should distinguish between two variants ofexperience. There is, on the one hand, the kind of experience that weassociate with empiricism, that was always discussed in the philosophy ofthe sciences and that occasioned epistemological problems. But there is,on the other hand, the kind of formative experience that we typicallyencounter in history and the humanities and where epistemological wor-ries are as irrelevant and inappropriate as they were already in Aristotlestheory of knowledge. The practice of history and the humanities suggestshere wholly new avenues for philosophical reectionand from which

we may expect results that will not only revolutionize historical thoughtitself, but philosophy of language in general.


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VII. Conclusion

Rorty sometimes says the weirdest things. For example: but what could

show that the Bellarmine-Galileo issue differs in kind from the issuebetween, say, Kerensky and Lenin, or that between the Royal Academy(circa 1910) and Bloomsbury? ( PMN 331). Or think of his notoriousargument about texts and lumps to the effect that there should be nointeresting differences between the humanities (dealing with texts)and the sciences (dealing with lumps). 34 One may then recall Kuhnsrecommendation that one should take precisely this kind of pronounce-ment quite seriously and then ask oneself how a sensible person couldpossibly say such weird and patently counterintuitive things.

This may help us reveal the secret of Rortys (early) writings. Epis-temology had always been the discourse philosophers relied upon intheir effort to discover the secrets of knowledge and of the differencesbetween the sciences and the humanities. So taking out epistemology

would have a sudden and unexpected rapprochement of the sciencesand the humanities as its predictable, but unintended side effect. Nowthat the traditional epistemological wedge between the sciences and thehumanities had been eliminated with epistemology itself, it might seemthat a time of peaceful coexistence of the sciences and the humanitieshad arrived, and this is how Rorty conceived of it. But, obviously, this isa non sequitur. Even though one argument for distinguishing between A(i.e. the sciences) and B (i.e. the humanities) has been exposed as use-less, there may well be other sound arguments for distinguishing between

A and B. So this may explain how Rorty came to say the kind of sillythings I quoted just now. Those kinds of things are still a hangover ofepistemology. Only someone who still takes epistemology seriously canclaim that avoiding the (big) error of epistemology will automaticallyresult in new and surprising insights in the relationship between thesciences and the humanities.

But the situation is, rather, that the blackboard has now been wipedclean of old and remarkably persistent errors, and that we can now startanew with our researches. Nevertheless, people who have made us awareof our oldest and most persistent mistakes are often good guides for thefuture as well. And this is certainly true of Richard Rortyas I have triedto demonstrate in this essay.

Groningen University

NOTES

1 It is true, he occasionally mentions Foucault, but he saw him as a political thinkerrather than as a historian; moreover, apparently he felt little sympathy for him. He thus


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speaks disparagingly about the extraordinary dryness of Foucaults work. See RichardRorty, Philosophical Papers , vol. 2, Essays on Heidegger and Others (Cambridge: CambridgeUniv. Press, 1991), 173. And in his only lengthier discussion of Foucault, Rorty discusses(again critically) Foucaults political and moral views, but not his historical work. See Rorty,

Moral Identity and Private Autonomy: The Case of Foucault, in Heidegger and Others ,19398.2 Rorty wrote just one essay that could be seen as a contribution to philosophy of his-tory: The Historiography of Philosophy: Four Genres, in Philosophy in History: Essays on theHistoriography of Philosophy , ed. Rorty, J. B. Schneewind, and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge:Cambridge Univ. Press, 1984), 4977. It is one of Rortys less inspired essays and I shall notdiscuss it here. Similarly, the philosopher of history electried by the mere title of Holismand Historicism is in for a bad surprise: for he will discover that the word historicismoccurs only once in the essay and, moreover, in a context devoid of any interest. Rorty,Philosophical Papers , vol. 4, Philosophy as Cultural Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press,2007), 17683.3 The two scholars were good friends when both taught at Stanford at the end of the1990s.4 It is much the same with Arthur Dantothat other major contemporary Americanphilosopher of historyand in whom Rorty might even have found a useful ally in hisattack on the orthodoxies of philosophy of language.5 The term is Hayden Whites. See White, The Absurdist Moment in ContemporaryLiterary Theory, in Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore, MD: JohnsHopkins Univ. Press, 1978), 26182.6 Part of the explanation undoubtly is that he never again undertook to write a book

with such scope and force as PMN ; since then he published mainly articles on Anglo-

Saxon and Continental philosophers, which had the consequence that he remained inthe shadow of those on whose work he commented, however brilliant his comments always were. The only exception is Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ.Press, 1989), but this book lacks the drive, gusto and bravura that made PMN into suchfascinating reading.7 See Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), 323 (hereaftercited as PMN ), where Rorty approvingly quotes Kuhn on this.8 Moreover, as far as I can see, Rorty never changed his mind about any topic that re-ally mattered to him. So everything was there alreadyand also in its proper place andcontextin PMN .9 Thus Rorty quotes Saul Kripke as follows: Thus it is not possible to say that althoughpain is necessarily identical with a certain physical state, a certain phenomenon can bepicked out in the same way we pick out pain without being correlated with that physicalstate ( PMN 79). Both necessarily go together.10 But that it momentarily lost again with Rousseaus sentir, cest penser.11 See my forthcoming essay, Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, Champion of Realism, Fatherof Romanticism and Beacon for Our Time, Common Knowledge (Spring 2008), in which Ishow what Jacobi and Rorty have in common.12 Rorty endorses the later work of Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Dewey in that it istherapeutic rather than constructive, edifying rather than systematic, designed to makethe reader question his own motives for philosophizing rather than to supply him with a

new philosophical program ( PMN 56).13 As Rorty emphasizes, analytical philosophy followed the Cartesian and Kantian pattern when conceiving of itself an an attempt to escape from history ( PMN 9).14 For these blunders, see John H. Zammito, A Nice Derangement of Epistemes: Post-Positiv- ism in the Study of Science From Quine to Latour (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2004),5290.


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15 I am using the term representation here in the sense meant by Rorty; hence in the way we may say that the sciences offer us true representations of the world. So the termhas no aesthetic connotations here, in the sense that we can say of the work of art that it isa representation of what it represents.

16 I shall mean by linguistic philosophy the view that philosophical problems are prob-lems which may be solved (or dissolved) either by reforming language, or by understandingmore about the language presently in use. Rorty, Introduction, in The Linguistic Turn:Recent Essays in Philosophical Method , ed. Rorty (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1967), 3.17 Though Rorty elsewhere expresses his hesitations with regard to Peirce ( PMN 29697).18 Both Gadamer and Dewey seemed to be happy with this framework, and Rortys sym-pathy for these two philosophers suggests his failure to recognize their embrace of themyth of the framework.19 Davidson partially repudiated Rortys interpretation of his work in Donald Davidson,The Structure and Content of Truth, Journal of Philosophy 87, no. 6 (1991): 279328. Whendiscussing Davidsons criticisms, Rorty recognizes what separates him from Davidson: Iam quite willing to withdraw my 1986 claim that true has no explanatory use, which wasa misleading way of putting the point that its true is not a helpful explanation of whyscience works or of why you should share my beliefs. Rorty, Is Truth a Goal of Inquiry?Donald Davidson versus Crispin Wright, in Philosophical Papers , vol. 3, Truth and Progress (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998), 25n. But, at the same time, he upholds thesubstance of his own views as recorded here. Apparently, there is a divergence of opinionbetween the two. So below I shall present what Rorty ascribes to Davidson as Rortys ownopinions, and leave it to others to decide whether Rorty correctly interpreted Davidsonor not.

20 Davidson, On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme, Proceedings and Addresses of theAmerican Philosophical Association 47 (197374): 20; quoted in PMN , 310.21 The phrase must remind us of Jacobi whose critique of Kantian epistemology is similarto Davidsons and Rortys argument, and Jacobi also insisted on the immediacy of ourcontact with the world.22 PMN , 80; I disregard here the distinction Rorty makes between reference and talk-ing about, where the latter term is reserved for speaking about ctional entities, such asSherlock Holmes. See PMN , 289, for talking about.23 W. H. Walsh, An Introduction to Philosophy of History , 3rd ed. (London: Hutchinson,1967), 107114.24 Louis O. Mink, Narrative Form as a Cognitive Instrument, in Historical Understanding ,ed. Brian Fay, Eugene O. Golob, and Richard T. Vann (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press,1987), 202.25 See Wilhelm Freiherr von Humboldt, Gesammelte Schriften , vol. 2 (Berlin: KniglichPreussische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1903), 230.26 See, for a further elaboration of this holism, my Narrative Logic: A Semantic Analysis ofthe Historians Language (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1983), ch. 5. Historical conceptssuch asthe Renaissance or the Enlightenment are analyzed here in agreement with Leibnizspredicate in notion principle. This principle entails: (1) that the meaning of such conceptscan be xed or dened only by an enumeration of all of its semantic properties, and (2)that the complete list of all these semantic properties can only be established by reference

to all other uses of these concepts. To put it summarily: historian Hs conception of theRenaissance can only be identied by means of where it differs from conceptions of theRenaissance proffered by other historians. Precision depends therefore on the quantity ofother such conceptions: the more conceptions we have of the Renaissance alternative tothe one proposed by H, the more clarity there will be about Hs conception of the Renais-


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Rorty y La Filosofía de La Historia