zammito. rorty, 'historicism' and the practice of history

ARTICLES

Rorty, ‘Historicism’ and thePractice of History: A PolemicJohn H. Zammito

Rorty’s extravagant postures on hermeneutics and incommensurability seem

ultimately irreconcilable with the practical exigencies of historical inter-pretation. This essay highlights Rorty’s views on historical reconstruction to

demonstrate his ironic relation to historical practice. To make the case fully, itsituates Rorty’s views on historical method within his larger campaign

against the distinctiveness of the ‘interpretive’ approach to human studies. Inparticular, the essay contests his claim for support from Gadamerian

hermeneutics. The object is to expose the sort of ‘conversation’ he envisionsas falling far short of the authentic dialogue with the past he professes torecognize as essential for contemporary culture.

Keywords: Rorty; Historicism; Gadamer; Historical reconstruction; Historyof philosophy; Hermeneutics

David Hollinger would have historians believe that Richard Rorty, the

master ironist of contemporary American philosophy, is something like anapostle of intellectual history within his discipline, who would indeed wishphilosophy annexed to history.1 Hollinger observes: ‘Rorty is a ‘‘historian’s

philosopher’’—like Kuhn—in that he articulates and defends in circlesbeyond the historical profession a basic historicism with which historians

are generally quite content’ (Hollinger 1985, p. 167). I suggest we have noreason to be so content with the ‘historicism’ Rorty purveys.2 On careful

consideration, Rorty turns out to be quite ironical about the historicalapproach.3 Indeed, there are grounds to challenge the compatibility with

historical practice of Rorty’s avowed historicism.4

Rethinking HistoryVol. 10, No. 1, March 2006, pp. 9 – 47

ISSN 1364-2529 (print)/ISSN 1470-1154 (online) ª 2006 Taylor & FrancisDOI: 10.1080/13642520500474790

The essay in which Rorty most explicitly addresses himself to questions ofhistorical method, ‘Historiography of philosophy: four genres’ (Rorty 1984),

insinuates a remarkable repudiation of key methodological premises ofhistorical reconstruction. The context in which Rorty’s essay appeared is

critical for an appraisal of its strategic point: the inaugural volume, Philosophyin History (Rorty et al. 1984b), of a major series in intellectual history, ‘Ideas in

Context’ from Cambridge University Press.5 That volume proposed topromulgate—by justifying and exemplifying—a line of contextualist

intellectual history identified with one of the series editors, Quentin Skinner.6

In a book under such auspices, what must appear provocative about Rorty’s

contribution is that he discredits Skinner’s approach—not just through hisown essay but through his domination of the joint introduction to the volumewritten with Skinner (and J. Schneewind).7

I wish to highlight Rorty’s views on historical reconstruction todemonstrate his ironic relation to historical practice. Rorty’s extravagant

postures on hermeneutics and incommensurability seem ultimatelyirreconcilable with the practical exigencies of historical interpretation. To

make my case fully, I will situate Rorty’s essay within his larger campaignagainst the distinctiveness of the ‘interpretive’ approach to human studies

and in particular contest his claim for support from Gadamerianhermeneutics. My object is to expose the sort of ‘conversation’ he envisionsas falling far short of the authentic dialogue with the past he professes to

recognize as essential for contemporary culture.

Rorty’s ‘Four Genres’: A Digest of the Argument

In ‘Historiography of philosophy: four genres’, Rorty presents fourostensible ‘genres’ as constitutive of history of philosophy: ‘rational

reconstruction’, ‘historical reconstruction’, ‘doxographies’ and ‘Geistes-geschichte’. Rational reconstruction involves the reformulation of arguments

from historical philosophers in the language and context of contemporarydebates. Historical reconstruction, by contrast, seeks to situate the discourseof philosophers in their own historical context. These two genres are the

traditional forms in which the history of philosophy has been conceived, andover whose relative merits the discipline has long fruitlessly wrangled.8 Rorty

dismisses the genre of doxographies, i.e. traditional compendia ofphilosophical positions in chronological order, as altogether worthless. He

proposes that such doxographies be replaced by what he idiosyncraticallyterms Geistesgeschichte.

This notion of Geistesgeschichte is Rorty’s most original contributionin the ‘Four genres’ essay. He terms it ‘a certain particularly abstract and

10 J. H. Zammito

free-wheeling kind of intellectual history’ (Rorty 1984, p. 60) which ‘meetsneeds which neither unphilosophical history nor unhistorical philosophy is

likely to fulfill’ (Rorty 1984, p. 59n). Rorty uses Geistesgeschichte tocharacterize a canon-forming, or ‘honorific’, history of philosophy devoted

to settling ‘the question of which problems are ‘‘the problems ofphilosophy’’, which questions are philosophical questions’ (Rorty 1984,

p. 58). It accomplishes this ‘by assembling a cast of historical characters,and a dramatic narrative, which shows how we have come to ask the

questions we now think inescapable and profound’ (Rorty 1984, p. 61).By displacing doxographies with Geistesgeschichte Rorty reduces his

number of genres (momentarily) to three. While in practice a work inhistory of philosophy will have some of all three remaining genres, he claims,one will preponderate. Indeed, Rorty insists that rational and historical recons-

tructions ought to be undertaken quite separately (Rorty 1984, p. 49).9

However, the three genres are linked: Geistesgeschichte is ‘parasitic upon, and

synthesizes’ the other two genres (Rorty 1984, p. 61); they ‘form a niceexample of the standard Hegelian dialectical triad’ (Rorty 1984, p. 68).

To complicate this story, Rorty introduces a new fourth genre, ‘intellectualhistory’, as ‘a much richer and more diffuse genre—one which falls outside

this triad’ (Rorty 1984, p. 68). His concern is with the relation of the history ofphilosophy (as a particular instance of disciplinary history) to genericintellectual history.

The Introduction to Philosophy in History (under the influence of Rorty)claims that for the sake of comprehensiveness the genre of intellectual

history tends to annul discriminations of discipline and of validity, thusturning itself into ‘a chronicle rather than a treatise’ (Rorty et al. 1984a,

p. 2).10 Rorty goes so far as to term intellectual history ‘the raw material forthe historiography of philosophy . . . the ground out of which histories of

philosophy grow’ (Rorty 1984, p. 70). ‘The more intellectual history we canget, of the kind which does not worry about what questions are

philosophical and who counts as a philosopher, the better our chances ofhaving a suitably large list of candidates for a canon’ (Rorty 1984, p. 74).

Quite differently from the ‘Hegelian’ triadic movement, what Rorty

ultimately suggests is that history of philosophy develops in a moreelaborate sequence of four genres. First, intellectual history serves as

‘chronicle’, gathering together thick descriptions of what intellectuals wereup to at given times (Rorty 1984, pp. 59, 68 – 69). This then gets taken up

into Geistesgeschichte through the selection of canonical figures definingphilosophy as a disciplinary practice. Thereupon, rational reconstructions

can proceed to picking through these canonical figures of the Geistes-geschichte for their ‘re-educated’ answers to the ‘better questions’ animating

Rethinking History 11

current practice (Rorty 1984, p. 51). Finally, historical reconstruction willrefer back to intellectual history to contend that those were not the

concerns of the historical figures, and that ‘re-education’ has distorted whatthey meant in their own terms.

The analogy driving Rorty’s reasoning takes the form: rationalreconstruction is to historical reconstruction as Geistesgeschichte is to

intellectual history. The principle of relation among the terms is theopposition, ‘progress’ versus ‘honesty’.11 According to Rorty, both rational

reconstruction and Geistesgeschichte are necessary in order for philosophyto conduct its disciplinary business in the present.12 They entail a strongly

anachronistic or teleological conception of the relation between presentpractice and the past, i.e. ‘progress’. What historical reconstruction andintellectual history provide is the sobering reminder (‘honesty’) of the

‘contingent arrangements’ (the phrase is Quentin Skinner’s) of presentdisciplinary matrices through the ‘historical knowledge’ of difference.

Yet the force of this honesty check, the warrant of historical knowledge,is eviscerated over the course of Rorty’s writing. The claims of historical

reconstruction prove entirely futile within a disciplinary community benton formulating its self-affirming rational reconstructions. Historical

protests against rational reconstructions or Geistesgeschichten on thegrounds of anachronism have no real leverage, no critical force, if onereads Rorty carefully. ‘The only problems they raise are the verbal ones of

whether rational reconstructions are to be viewed as ‘‘making clear what thedead really said’’, and the equally verbal one of whether rational

reconstructions are ‘‘really’’ doing history. Nothing turns on the answerto either question’ (Rorty 1984, p. 53).

Still, ‘doing history’ is somehow essential for Rorty’s sense of thedisciplinary coherence of philosophy: that is the point of Geistesgeschichte.13

Rorty seems committed to the view that philosophers require historicallegitimation. Philosophers of the present cannot agree in picking out the

great dead philosophers, but there is an even bigger problem: that ofdeciding what philosophy itself means. Rorty concedes, ‘nobody is quitesure whether the issues discussed by contemporary philosophy professors

(of any school) are issues which are ‘‘necessary’’ or merely part of our‘‘contingent arrangements’’’ (Rorty 1984, p. 60). What emerges is that

Rorty really needs Geistesgeschichte because the contemporary philosophicalworld is in controversy. As the Introduction to Philosophy in History asserts,

there are sharp rivalries in contemporary practice and hence nothing likeagreement on ‘which schools or movements within contemporary

philosophy count as ‘‘genuine’’ or ‘‘important’’ philosophy’ (Rorty et al.1984a, p. 7). Faced with the radical historical contingency of the present,

12 J. H. Zammito

Rorty proposes that persons interested in justifying the disciplinary matrixof their own community of philosophy will be compelled to offer a

convincing narrative of how that community’s concerns emerged as the‘better’ questions and problems for philosophy, and that will lead to

‘radically innovative Geistesgeschichte’ (Rorty 1984, p. 72).This is not a view which goes unchallenged among philosophers,

prominent among whose objections is the question how a ‘dramaticnarrative’ can validate. Richard Bernstein, for example, claims that such

Geistesgeschichten as Rorty’s own Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature orAlasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue

are not just telling us likely stories that are intended to make sense of ourpresent predicament. They are making claims to validity . . . which mustthemselves be subjected to careful scrutiny and evaluation . . . [A]nappeal to the past, to the history of philosophy, or to a more generalcultural and social history is never sufficient . . .

I . . . reject the idea that history—in any of its forms—is or can be afoundational discipline, that it can answer the questions that we ask inphilosophy.

(Bernstein 1987, p. 11, 17)14

What is historical legitimation? How can and should the past have suchbearing on present dispute? Why does narrative authorize?15 These are criticalquestions for the place of history of philosophy in philosophy, questions

which Rorty’s notion of Geistesgeschichte provokes but does not resolve.Rorty’s ‘Four genres’ essay consequently raises two orders of question:

first, what role should history play in the self-conception of philosophy,and, second, more primordially, how can history be philosophically (or at

the very least methodologically) grounded? He thrusts us into the mostcontested border disputes between the two disciplines. Indeed, one can

hardly reflect upon the grounding of history of philosophy without beingcarried across the chiasmus into philosophy (epistemology) of history. But

I suggest Rorty also obfuscates both questions, ‘changes subjects’ in hisnow-famous ironic manner, and achieves a curious erasure of the veryrelations he ostensibly set out to distinguish and warrant, thereby effecting

the return of a surreptitious but all the more hegemonic form of presentist(and ‘ethnocentric’) appropriation, even if packaged in Rorty’s alluring

labels of ‘edifying discourse’ and the ‘conversation of mankind’.16

‘Conversation’ in ‘Four Genres’

Rorty’s ‘Four genres’ essay professes concern to preserve ‘that sense ofcommunity which only impassioned conversation makes possible’ (Rorty


1984, p. 74). According to Rorty, ‘we would like to be able to see the historyof our race as a long conversational interchange . . . in order to assure

ourselves that there has been rational progress in the course of recordedhistory—that we differ from our ancestors on grounds which our ancestors

could be led to accept’ (Rorty 1984, p. 51).17 What sort of ‘community’ hasRorty envisioned here? First, it is a community premised on inequality: the

present commands the past, actualizing ‘rational progress’. Rorty identifiesinterest in this ‘conversation’ with the dead as a matter of warranting our

sense of progress or superiority. The desire to get the dead ‘to admit that wehave gotten . . . ideas clearer’ (Rorty 1984, p. 52) is paramount in Rorty’s

attitude.The crucial phrase is ‘grounds which our ancestors could be led to

accept’. What does that mean? How could that be developed? Rorty

proclaims that ‘we should treat the history of philosophy as we treat thehistory of science’ (Rorty 1984, p. 49). That is, we should simply say that

old philosophers made mistakes and we now know better.18 ‘We need tothink that, in philosophy as in science, the mighty mistaken dead look

down from heaven at our recent successes, and are happy to find that theirmistakes have been corrected’ (Rorty 1984, p. 51). Rorty draws parallels to

the instance of bringing an aborigine to accept an account of his kinshipsystem as perpetuating unjust economic arrangements in his tribe, or aGulag guard to recognize his betrayal of his fellow Russians. Rorty writes:

‘each of these imaginary people, by the time he has been brought to acceptsuch a new description of what he meant or did, has become ‘‘one of us’’’

(Rorty 1984, p. 51). Exactly. Such re-education in fact entails abandonmentof the cultural system they partook of, and entry into our own: this is not

only a reinterpretation, it is a hegemonic appropriation. We must concludewith Alasdair MacIntyre that this project entails dissolution of all

alternative cultures into Rorty’s ‘homogeneous’ one.19

Rorty holds to a notion of ‘progress’ that quite literally entails

ethnocentrism, for he repudiates not only pluralism but universalism aswell: ‘We should justify ourselves by claiming to be asking better questions,not by claiming to give better answers to the permanent, ‘‘deep,

fundamental questions’’ which our ancestors answered badly’ (Rorty1984, p. 63). The notion that there are ‘better’ questions makes a mockery

of pluralism by clearly privileging what is ‘ours’ over against the other.20

The denial that there are ‘deep, fundamental questions’ which we share with

others is a denial not merely of the adjectives, but of the noun, and hence ofsharing altogether, and thus dismisses universalism. These two postures

amount to serious ethnocentrism—in a word, to condescension towardsalterity.21

14 J. H. Zammito

Rorty follows this line of thought into a methodological distinction: ‘It isone thing to say that a great dead philosopher would have been driven to

have a view on a certain topic if we had had a chance to talk to him, thusenabling him to see what the fundamental questions of philosophy really

were. It is another thing to say that he had an ‘‘implicit’’ view of that topicwhich we can dig out of what he wrote’ (Rorty 1984, pp. 63 – 4). I submit

that distinction is untenable. When Rorty says we ask better questions, he issaying both that we know better what the true topics of philosophy ought

to be and that our ancestors did not ask these questions. Therefore, whenwe turn to them, the question is: what are we seeking? Establishment that

they asked the wrong questions? What ‘edification’ is there in demonstrat-ing that philosophers of the past do not ask present-day questions? Is thatsense of ‘progress’ really important to the discipline of philosophy? Or can

it be that inferences from their answers to wrong questions conjecturallyand counter-factually might answer ours? First, is that significantly

different, methodologically, from imputing to them ‘an ‘‘implicit’’ viewof that topic’? If not, how are these fantasy positions (re)constructed? If

there is no determinate position from which the answer to our question isimagined to issue, are we not putting not only our question but also

our answer arbitrarily into their mouths? Second, if present-dayphilosophers do ask ‘better questions’, why do they need their ‘great dead’predecessors? Can it be that the great dead explored inferior questions yet

still offer indispensable answers to the ‘better’ ones of the present? Whyshould this be? And if they are merely inept at our questions, one is left with

doubts about why such superior present-day minds as Rorty would need tobother with the ignorant dead. It does seem a bit tawdry to drag the body of

the vanquished so many times round Troy.If we honestly desire a conversation of mankind, does that not

presuppose at least a minimum commonality through and upon whichdiscourse arises? This may not deserve Rorty’s honorific ‘deep, fundamental

questions’ but at least it conceives conversations in which both partiescan speak authentically from their own position, instead of reducing one tothe puppet of the other. Rorty’s idea of a ‘conversation’ is stunningly

undialogical. Indeed, history of philosophy as he conceives it is merely thevictor’s story, and the texts of the great dead appear mere trophies of

conquest by retrospect. What exactly do we hear from the dead? Rorty’sfirst gesture to historical reconstruction of the texts of great dead

philosophers associates it with ‘making their falsehoods look less silly byplacing them in the context of the benighted times in which they were

written’ (Rorty 1984, p. 49). The obvious irony—or simple condescension—of these sentences needs to be registered and queried. One would like to


think that Rorty is being tongue-in-cheek about cultural difference, but theevidence mounts that he is not, and his condescension needs to be taken

seriously.22 Rorty’s ironic tone intimates that a merely historical readingleaves the great dead philosophers unredeemed. From Rorty’s tone and

wording, they appear invariably primitive, outdated, inferior to ourselves.Why are they great dead if they are so full of falsehoods and look silly? What

makes the past worth knowing about? ‘The main reason we want historicalknowledge of what unre-educated primitives, or dead philosophers and

scientists [note the linkage!], would have said to each other is that it helps usto recognize that there have been different forms of intellectual life than

ours’ (Rorty 1984, p. 51). Different—as in backward? What exactly—beyonda polite bow to ‘contingency’—follows from Rorty’s notice of ‘historicalknowledge’? Does it, in fact, contest the orthodoxy inscribed in the

prevailing Geistesgeschichte or discredit the appraisals of predecessors in agiven rational reconstruction, or is it a redundant supplement? Difference in

Rorty’s framework is domesticated as a wild beast in a zoo-cage: it poses nodanger and lies open to ridicule.

‘If we want self-justification through conversation with the dead thinkersabout our current problems, then we are free to indulge in as much of it as

we like, as long as we realize that we are doing so’ (Rorty 1984, p. 55). Is theself-consciousness that legitimizes all manner of rational reconstructionsanything more than the barren concession that, of course, we see from our

present vantage but then we have made a virtue of that necessity? It isaltogether puzzling how Rorty can claim that the justification of this form

of history of philosophy is ‘that we cannot get along without heroes’ (Rorty1984, p. 73) when all Rorty affirms is the present’s having surpassed them.

How, given Rorty’s professed requirement for a ‘rational progress’ ofphilosophy (culminating, ironically, in its present ‘therapeutic’ dismember-

ment into his ‘edifying discourse’), is this historical knowledge to serve anyconstructive function? When and how does the dead philosopher’s text

speak in the course of the conversation? How might it correct the present?That prospect is undermined by the very construction he puts onthe ‘conversation’. The neglected possibility here is that philosophers of

the past might well have raised and explored other questions that put thecurrent presumption of ‘better questions’ itself into question. What gets

lost is the possibility that criteria for validity and principles for organizationare not timeless, and perhaps even that past thought is not always and

invariably surpassed thought.23 Thus, what must be queried if we are tohave a true ‘conversation of mankind’ is precisely the presumption of

‘progress’ which Rorty posits as the basis for caring to have suchconversations. However, it is precisely here that Rorty’s methodological

16 J. H. Zammito

strictures against historical reconstruction impose a bar, for they suggestour situatedness in the present incapacitates us to receive illumination from

alterity.

Rorty’s Disputation of Historical Interpretation

Despite his ostensible coauthorship, the Introduction to Philosophy inHistory challenges Quentin Skinner by maintaining: ‘[I]t is not clear that

[intellectual history] tells you what the sentences of the past meant’ (Rortyet al. 1984a, p. 4).24 The Introduction continues:

what the original inscriber of the sentence would have said he meant,what he would have said to a whole range of questions from hiscontemporaries about the kind of speech-act he was performing andabout its expected audience and impact, all this information is of littleuse in choosing between interpreting the sentence, for purposes ofconfrontation with reality, as p or as q. ‘P’ and ‘q’ are sentences in ourlanguage, convenient and elegant sentences designed to fit the contoursof the world as we know it to be.

(Rorty et al. 1984a, p. 5)

The first part of this citation is a summary description of the historicalmethod of interpretation that Skinner has tried to work out. Skinner wishes toreserve the term ‘meaning’ to the sense of an utterance in its immediate

historical context. In his own essay Rorty cites the ‘maxim’ Skinner hasproposed to limit at least the vagaries of interpretation by a criterion of

historical specificity: ‘‘‘No agent can eventually be said to have meant or donesomething which he could never be brought to accept as a correct description

of what he had meant or done’’’ (Rorty 1984, p. 50).25 As against Skinner’shistorical notion of contextualization, Rorty prefers ‘a way [of construing

meaning] which permits there to be as many meanings of a text as there aredialectical contexts in which it can be placed’ (Rorty 1984, p. 54). Rorty’s

sense of context is a linguistic one that transcends the historical point oforigin—indeed, renders that particular context nugatory—namely, the entiretradition of discourse involving a text up through the philosophical present.26

Every interpretive context will generate a distinct ‘meaning’, and, crucially,there can be no privileged nonlinguistic referent to delimit the proliferation.

We can, of course, restrict the term ‘meaning’ . . . If we wish to restrict it,we can adopt E. D. Hirsch’s distinction between ‘meaning’ and‘significance’, and confine the former term to what accords with theauthor’s intentions around the time of composition, using ‘significance’for the place of the text in some other context.

(Rorty 1984, pp. 54 – 55)27


But Rorty does not endorse such a move; instead, he repudiates it. Heemphatically rejects the claim to priority implicit in historical reconstruc-

tion shared by Skinner, Hirsch and Michael Ayers.28 The ‘assumption thathistorical reconstruction is naturally prior to rational reconstruction,

and . . . that discovery of meaning is naturally prior to discovery ofsignificance, both seem to me to rest on an insufficiently holistic account

of interpretation’ (Rorty 1984, p. 55n). Rorty in fact assigns priorityprecisely inversely.29 For Rorty, the term ‘meaning’ only signifies within a

philosophy of language with radically presentist implications.30 How thisone-sidedness can be ‘holistic’ remains to be seen. Moreover, Rorty’s

claim, when it is clearly grasped, takes aim not only at the priority ofhistorical reconstruction but at the very theoretical integrity of historicalinterpretation.

It is essential to grasp the radical sense in which Rorty privileges rationalreconstruction. ‘I agree with Jonathan Bennett’s claim . . . that ‘‘we under-

stand Kant only in proportion as we can say, clearly and in contemporaryterms, what his problems were, which of them are still problems and what

contribution Kant makes to their solution’’’ (Rorty 1984, p. 52n).31 WhatRorty takes to be essential in Bennett’s assertion is putting things in

contemporary terms: ‘Translation is necessary if ‘‘understanding’’ is tomean something more than engaging in rituals of which we do not see thepoint, and translating an utterance means fitting it into our practices’

(Rorty 1984, p. 52n). Resorting to an analogy to the ethnographic fieldworker (an argot which Rorty has adopted from Donald Davidson and

Willard Quine), the Introduction observes: ‘Years of living among . . . atribe puts the anthropologist in the best possible position to translate their

sentences . . . but he may have a lot of further work to do before beingable to actualize this capacity’ (Rorty et al. 1984a, p. 4). Having the

knack of the alien language is not enough. ‘What we want to be told iswhether the tribe has anything interesting to tell us—interesting by our

lights, answering to our concerns, informative about what we know toexist . . . [the anthropologist] is, after all, working for us, not forthem’ (Rorty et al. 1984a, pp. 6 – 7). Rorty requires that the anthropologist

‘know how to put one of the sentences quoted in [the object language] in aform which allows confrontation with the way the world is’ (Rorty et al.

1984a, p. 4).What, then, is the point or value of historical reconstruction? ‘One

cannot figure out whether Spinoza got anything right before figuring outwhat he was talking about’ (Rorty et al. 1984a, p. 10). ‘The historian of

philosophy cannot ignore intellectual history . . . He will become anhistorical scholar and re-translator whether he wants to or not. He will

18 J. H. Zammito

find himself driven to read the treatments of Spinoza’s intellectualenvironment in the works of intellectual historians in order to know how

to translate’ (Rorty et al. 1984a, p. 10).32 That would seem to give backalmost all the ground that he had previously taken away from Ayers,

Hirsch and (by implication) Skinner, but then we come upon the followingsentence:

Since Spinoza himself may not have known what he was talking aboutwhen he wrote a given sentence (because he was so confused about whatthe world really is like) one will not know how to map his sentence on tothe world as we now know it to be without reading lots and lots of thosesentences in the hermeneutic, reconstructive, charitable ways character-istic of intellectual historians.


Wading through the countervailing ironies of the subordinate and themain clauses of such a sentence illustrates what it means to fall under

Rorty’s new dispensation of philosophy. First, we must reckon with theironic sense involved in the phrases ‘may not have known what he was

talking about’ and ‘was so confused about what the world really is like’with reference to one of the avowedly ‘great’ dead philosophers. Thesephrases can be read literally as parallel the condescension a contemporary

physicist might show toward medieval impetus theories. Rorty certainlysuggests such a literal sense of his language. On the other hand, they can be

read with a ‘postmodern’ irony which (‘honestly’) acknowledges thatcontemporary quantum physics may look equally pathetic from some

future (equally self-infatuated) vantage. Those who sympathize with Rortyurge that only the latter is a legitimate reading. Of course, the idea that

there should be only one legitimate reading suggests a lack of . . . postmo-dern irony. For the purposes of this essay, the irony in the main clause is

even more important: ‘reading lots and lots of sentences in thehermeneutic, reconstructive, charitable ways characteristic of intellectualhistorians’. Hollinger and others wish to read this phrase altogether

literally. They wish to believe that Rorty finds no fault with these ‘ways’.Moreover, when Rorty writes, ‘When we draw back from the philosophical

canon in the way made possible by reading the detailed and thicklyinterwoven stories found in intellectual history, we can ask whether it is all

that important for students to understand what we contemporaryphilosophers are doing’ (Rorty 1984, p. 72) they think he really means

it.33 This essay operates upon the premise that it is here that Rorty may beat his most ironic.


That which cannot be translated into any plausible truth statement in theinterpreter’s context, Rorty insists, must simply be passed over as precisely

meaningless. What the interpreter

needs is a sense of when it is permissible to simply filter out thesentences for which such problems of interpretation seem insoluble andconfine himself to those sentences where a translation into modernidiom can be hammered out . . . By filtering out certain sentences asirrelevant to his concerns, and to the concerns the author himself wouldhave had if he had known more about how the world is, while giving asympathetic rendering of the remainder, the historian of philosophyhelps the dead philosopher put his act together for a new audience.


What is at stake is not simply how a contemporary philosopher might goabout his present business by appropriating suitably refurbished chunks of

earlier thought, but rather how one might pursue that ‘sufficiently holistic’interpretation which alone makes possible, according to Rorty, either

rational or historical reconstruction (Rorty 1984, p. 55n). Yet the verypossibility of ‘historical knowledge’, that monitory sense of the contingency

of the present, is washed away under the insistence upon presentunderstanding of ‘reality’ as ‘how the world is’ as ‘we know it’. Can Rortysimply be using such phrases ironically? What would that betoken? Must

we—as ‘postmodern ironists’—reckon present convictions as to ‘how theworld is’ ineluctable for ourselves, all the while knowing their ficticity?

Alternatively, might it be that the claim that ficticity is so ironicallyrampant turns out wondrously liberating because it allows us to play the

devil with all alterity? Who could ever call one to court? Truth claims wouldalways be contingent upon the situatedness of the interpreter. Why worry?

Misreading is not only such fun; it’s all there is!This issue, however glib its postmodern formulation, has been with us

for a long time under the rubric of the ‘hermeneutic circle’.34 There are,however, differing uses of this classic conundrum. It can become a cavaliervehicle for ‘strong misreading’, but it can also be a sober warning of the

limits of a historian’s access to the past.35 While there is much to suggestthat it is the first of these possibilities that Rorty actually prizes, it is crucial

to the disciplinary constitution of our community to make the case for thesecond. ‘No intellectual historian can avoid the kind of selectivity which

automatically results from an awareness of present-day science, theology,philosophy and literature’ (Rorty et al. 1984a, p. 9). This is obviously,

trivially true. The historian’s own temporality or historicity inevitablycolors his or her construction of the past. But the issue cannot be left at that

20 J. H. Zammito

order of generality. What matters is the practical implication ofthis situatedness: does it utterly vitiate access to the historical past

(‘incommensurability’) or only render it always merely provisional? Con-versely, can the historian raise up something unfamiliar to the present and

occasion interest in it that does not simply get reduced to somecontemporary banality?

Rorty’s position, of course, evokes central issues in current philosophy,particularly the challenge posed to hermeneutical theory by poststructur-

alism, and deconstruction most specifically.36 Yet we need to know howironically Rorty means ‘the hermeneutic, reconstructive, charitable ways

characteristic of intellectual historians’, as well as a ‘sufficiently holisticaccount of interpretation’, if we are to establish what Rorty really means forhistorical practice. Altogether too much gets left in the form of innuendo in

the ‘Four genres’ essay, and we must turn to his other works to clarify thequestions.

Rorty’s Quarrel with the Geisteswissenschaften

To understand the complex implications of the ‘Four Genres’ essay, we

must situate that work in the context of a larger campaign Rorty has beenwaging, formulated most explicitly in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.37

Rorty wishes both to dispel forever the impression that natural science has

some privileged access to reality which makes it paradigmatic forknowledge on the basis of ‘correspondence’, and at the same time to deny

any metaphysical or spiritual claim to difference on the part of the‘interpretive’ human sciences. The attack on Skinner, Ayers and Hirsch in

‘Four genres’ is part of Rorty’s critique of the new ‘interpretive turn’ in thehuman sciences, with its claim that there is a philosophically grounded

difference in the methods of the ‘science of man’ as against the ‘science ofnature’.38 Rorty urges that ‘we go slow about assuming that the discovery of

things like ‘‘discourse’’, ‘‘textuality’’, ‘‘speech-acts’’, and the like haveradically changed the philosophical scene’ (Rorty 1982, p. 208). The new‘interpretive’ social science ‘goes too far when it waxes philosophical and

begins to draw a principled distinction between man and nature’ (Rorty1982, p. 199).

Rorty is committed to what Herbert Dreyfus has called ‘theoreticalholism’ (Dreyfus 1980). That is, in Rorty’s own words, ‘thinking of the

entire culture, from physics to poetry, as a single, continuous, seamlessactivity in which the divisions are merely institutional and pedagogical’

(Rorty 1991, p. 76).39 In another context, Rorty puts it this way: ‘we shallsay that all inquiry is interpretation, that all thought is recontextualization’


(Rorty 1991, p. 102). Or, in yet a third formulation, ‘To say that somethingis better ‘‘understood’’ in one vocabulary than another is always an ellipsis

for the claim that a description in the preferred vocabulary is more usefulfor a certain purpose’ (Rorty 1982, p. 197).

His theoretical holism does not permit any fundamental categorydistinction to be undertaken between the Naturwissenschaften and the

Geisteswissenschaften. Rorty acknowledges that

There seems to be a difference between the hard objects with whichchemists deal and the soft ones with which literary critics deal. Thisapparent difference is the occasion for all the neo-Diltheyan theorieswhich insist on a distinction between explanation and understanding,and all the neo-Saussurean theories which insist upon a distinctionbetween lumps and texts.

(Rorty 1991, p. 83)

Rorty insists strategies for interpreting ‘texts’ and ‘lumps’ are for the mostpart assimilable to each other.40 ‘My holistic strategy . . . is to reinterpret

every such dualism as a momentarily convenient blocking-out of regionsalong a spectrum, rather than as recognition of an ontological, or

methodological, or epistemological divide’ (Rorty 1991, p. 84). While Rortyis perfectly comfortable with the notion that different vocabularies are‘irreducible’, he insists that it is wrong to think ‘that the irreducibility of

one vocabulary to another implies something ontological’ (Rorty 1982,p. 201). He concludes: ‘I have been arguing . . . that the notion that we know

a priori that nature and man are distinct sorts of objects is a mistake. It is aconfusion between ontology and morals’ (Rorty 1982, p. 203). ‘The

‘‘irreducibility of the Geisteswissenschaften’’ is not a matter of metaphysicaldualism’ (Rorty 1979, p. 358). He cautions that it ‘would be better to drop

the spirit – nature distinction altogether’ (Rorty 1979, p. 352) to avoiddrifting back towards 19th-century German Idealist metaphysics.

The dissolution of boundaries that Rorty carries out between theNaturwissenschaften and the Geisteswissenschaften has a profoundly ironicdimension, perhaps best caught in the image Taylor conjured in the

colloquy reproduced in Review of Metaphysics: ‘Old-guard Diltheyans, theirshoulders hunched from years-long resistance against the encroaching

pressure of positivist natural science, suddenly pitch forward on their facesas all opposition ceases to the reign of universal hermeneutics’ (Taylor

1980, p. 26). For Taylor, this result seems highly dubious, and he and manyothers find this collapse into indiscriminate ‘pragmatism’ implausible,

insisting not only on the uniqueness of humanistic inquiry, but also on adistinctive epistemological claim for scientific knowledge beyond Rorty’s

22 J. H. Zammito

contingent ‘agreement’ of a disciplinary community.41 Taylor has been apowerful source of the ‘interpretive’ approach since his famous essay

‘Interpretation and the science of man’ (Taylor 1977), arguing in this and aseries of parallel pieces that the domain for investigation in the sciences of

man is constituted out of the conscious linguistic and social acts of itssubjects, and that therefore this subjective construction of their behavior

could not be excluded from any such inquiry (Taylor 1985a, 1985b, 1987).This results in what Anthony Giddens has called a ‘double hermeneutic’,

that of the inquirer dealing with the subject material from his ownsituatedness, and that intrinsic to the matter investigated, since that is itself

always already interpreted by its subjects (Giddens 1976).42

Rorty suspects something dubiously metaphysical in all this. Hence hisrejoinder to Taylor: ‘The sense in which human beings alter themselves by

redescribing themselves is no more metaphysically exciting or mysteriousthan the sense in which they alter themselves by changing their diet, their

sexual partners, or their habitation’ (Rorty 1979, p. 350). There is thereforeno metaphysical reason to take seriously the language of the subjects of

inquiry. ‘Understanding the language spoken by the subjects, graspingthe explanations they give of why they are doing this and that, may be

helpful or may not . . . The privilege attached to it is moral, rather thanepistemic’ (Rorty 1979, p. 348). Rorty insists, ‘there are lots of thingsyou want to do with human beings for which descriptions of them

in nonvoluntary, ‘‘inhuman’’ terms are very useful; there are others(e.g., thinking of them as your fellow-citizens) in which such descriptions

are not’ (Rorty 1982, p. 197).Rorty is prepared to posit a unique moral status for man, but he insists

‘we need to think of our distinctive moral status as just that, rather than as‘‘grounded’’ on our possession of mind, language, culture, feeling,

intentionality, textuality, or anything else’ (Rorty 1982, p. 203). Rortydenies any rational grounding for moral judgments. They are ‘unjustifiable

but unconditional’ (Rorty 1979, p. 384) and any effort to explain them orto provide a method for making moral judgments is a venture intometaphysics in the precise, positivist-pejorative sense of ‘knowledge of what

science cannot know’ (Rorty 1979, p. 384). Rorty presents himself in thiscontext as a radical moral decisionist, and that impression is strengthened

by other passages. Here Rorty dissolves too many distinctions; his moraldecisionism gives no purchase on ‘hermeneutical phronesis’ because he

cannot inform this phronesis with any principles of practice. Rorty’s‘pragmatism’ becomes a blanket warrant for ethnocentrism and a cavalier

disdain for rational adjudication of dispute. To this we must return, but itis necessary to draw into consideration first the decisive pillars of Rorty’s


pragmatism, his use of Donald Davidson’s philosophy of language and ofThomas Kuhn’s philosophy of science.

Rorty and Davidson’s ‘Radical Interpretation’

Rorty specifically invokes Donald Davidson’s theory of ‘radical interpreta-

tion’ and ‘holism’ in his attack on historical reconstruction in ‘Four genres’(Rorty 1984, p. 55n) Rorty began to draw upon Davidson already in

Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Rorty 1979). Subsequently, Rorty’sDavidsonian bent has become more accentuated. In ‘Pragmatism, Davidson

and truth’, Rorty tried to persuade Davidson to come over entirely to hisown construction of Davidson’s work as a ‘pragmatist’ view of truth, onlyto meet polite resistance on Davidson’s part (Rorty 1986b).43 In Objectivity,

Relativism, and Truth (Rorty 1991), his attentiveness to Davidson ismarked.44

As Rorty understands Davidson, there has been a gradual evolution of histhought. In his seminal early essay, ‘Truth and meaning’ (in Davidson 1984,

pp. 17 – 36), ‘Davidson seems an arch-representationalist’, Rorty admits,but 20 years of philosophy of language have led Davidson to an anti-

representationalist notion of truth (Rorty 1991, p. 153). Rorty’s ultimateinference from Davidson’s theory of radical interpretation is: ‘[T]here is noroom for the notion of ‘‘thought’’ or ‘‘language’’ as capable of being mostly

out of phase with the environment’ (Rorty 1991, p. 10). Or, in other terms, ‘forDavidson, everybody has always talked about mostly real things, and has made

mostly true statements’ (Rorty 1991, p. 159). Rorty explains Davidson’s‘Principle of Charity’ as amounting to ‘saying that our form of life and the

natives’ already overlap to so great an extent that we are already, automatically,for free, participant-observers, not mere observers’ (Rorty 1991, p. 107).

Despite his obvious expertise, Rorty’s invocation of Davidson is notaltogether suited to some of the claims he makes in ‘Four genres’. Davidson

points out that what he is addressing concerns any and every dialogicalencounter: ‘all understanding of the speech of another involves radicalinterpretation’ (Davidson 1984, p. 125). He does not condescend to

‘unreconstructed primitives’ in the manner of Rorty, and their prominencein his work (and that of his mentor, Quine) arises out of the presumption

of the utter alienness of their linguistic and cultural practices, whichhighlights the problems of radical interpretation. The point is fairly

straightforward: ‘If we cannot find a way to interpret the utterances andother behaviour of a creature as revealing a set of beliefs largely consistent

and true by our own standards, we have no reason to count that creature asrational, as having beliefs, or as saying anything’ (Davidson 1984, p. 137).

24 J. H. Zammito

What that means, however, is ‘that we take the fact that speakers of alanguage hold a sentence to be true (under observed circumstances) as

prima-facie evidence that the sentence is true under those circumstances’(Davidson 1984, p. 152). In another context Davidson elaborates: ‘A theory

of interpretation cannot be correct that makes a man assent to very manyfalse sentences’ (Davidson 1984, p. 169).45 Moreover, since ‘uttering words

is an action’, it must be connected with ‘beliefs and desires’; hence ‘toexplain why someone said something we need to know, among other

things, his own interpretation of what he said, that is, what he believes hiswords mean in the circumstances under which he speaks’ (Davidson 1984,

p. 161). And, crucially, ‘most of the sentences a speaker holds to be true—especially those he holds to most stubbornly, the ones central to the systemof his beliefs—most of these sentences are true, at least in the opinion of the

interpreter’ (Davidson 1986, p. 316). Davidson takes this to mean that ‘itbecomes impossible to hold that anyone could be mostly wrong about how

things are’ (Davidson 1986, p. 317).In both tone and substance, this is profoundly distant from the sort of

condescension which Rorty is ratifying in ‘Four genres’. More specifically,Davidson’s holism discredits the kind of partial annexations characteristic

of ‘rational reconstruction’ Rorty affirms in such practitioners as Bennett.Rorty cannot, despite his extraordinary flexibility, have it both ways andargue that Ayers and Hirsch have been insufficiently ‘holistic’ in their

approach to interpretation while defending the selective and partialpractices of ‘rational reconstructors’ like Bennett. Indeed, I would contend,

pace Rorty, that Davidson can be assimilated far more effectively to thehermeneutical strategies of historical reconstruction and intellectual

history, and that he gives critical bite to their protests against ‘rationalreconstruction’ and even against Rorty’s own Geistesgeschichte. With

Davidson’s holism, honesty can matter.

Kuhn and ‘Incommensurability’

In Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Rorty contends that philosophy

‘centers on one topic rather than another at some given time not bydialectical necessity but as a result of various things happening elsewhere in

the conversation . . . or of individual men of genius who think of somethingnew . . . , or perhaps of the resultant of several of these forces’ (Rorty 1979,

p. 264). The important thing Rorty wishes to derive from this alteredconception is that ‘interesting philosophical change (we might say

‘‘philosophical progress’’, but this would be question-begging) occurs notwhen a new way is found to deal with an old problem but when a new set of


problems emerges and the old ones begin to fade away’ (Rorty 1979, p. 264).The model we should adopt is one ‘of new philosophical paradigms nudging

old problems aside, rather than providing new ways of stating or solvingthem’ (Rorty 1979, p. 264). The source of this model is, foremost, the

philosophy of science of Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend, but Rortyfinds confirmation in his pragmatist forefather, John Dewey: ‘in fact

intellectual progress usually occurs through sheer abandonment ofquestions together with both of the alternatives they assume—an

abandonment that results from their decreasing vitality and a change ofurgent interest. We do not solve them, we get over them’ (Dewey 1977, p. 14,

cited in Rorty 1991, p. 96n). What Rorty is doing under the auspices ofKuhn, Feyerabend and Dewey is constructing philosophical change as‘genealogical’ in Foucault’s (and Friedrich Nietzsche’s) sense (Foucault

1977; Nietzsche 1989).46 This undermines any pretense to be progressive orteleological, however, which is why he calls such notions ‘question-begging’.

Rorty’s concern is with moments of rupture ‘where we do notunderstand what is happening’ (Rorty 1979, p. 321). For Rorty the crucial

such moments are ‘the transitions between the ‘‘archaeological strata’’which Foucault discerns’ (Rorty 1979, p. 322) or the paradigm shifts of

Kuhn. His point is that historical change just happens, and one can describeit but one cannot make a theoretical law about why it had to happen. Onemust not confound history and logic. Historical success does not mean

logical necessity; change is not rational progress in the sense of following adevelopmental-rational principle. (This is the anti-Hegelian argument that

Foucault makes about a ‘genealogical’ approach to history, e.g. in his essayon Nietzsche.) This has drastic consequences for the relation of philosophy

to history, Rorty claims, which are best captured by Kuhn’s notion of‘incommensurability’.47 For Rorty ‘commensurable’ means: ‘able to be

brought under a set of rules which tell us how rational agreement can bereached on what would settle the issue on every point where statements

seem to conflict’ (Rorty 1979, p. 316). He contends that ‘the dominatingnotion of epistemology is that to be rational, to be fully human, to do whatwe ought, we need to be able to find agreement with other human beings’

(Rorty 1979, p. 316). Rorty associates the shock at Kuhn and Feyerabendwith their challenge to this posture: ‘To suggest that there is no such

common ground seems to endanger rationality’ (Rorty 1979, p. 317).The question is, of course, how to account—even descriptively—for

shifts in paradigm. That is the crucial issue between Kuhn and his critics,according to Rorty: whether ‘philosophy of science could construct an

algorithm for choice among scientific theories’ (Rorty 1979, p. 322). ‘Thehorror which greeted Quine’s overthrow of the dogmas, and Kuhn’s and

26 J. H. Zammito

Feyerabend’s examples of the ‘‘theory-ladenness’’ of observation, was theresult of a fear that . . . there would be nothing to distinguish science from

religion or politics’ (Rorty 1979, p. 269). The response to Kuhn andFeyerabend was a search for ‘a ‘rational’ and principled change of meaning’,

i.e. ‘some criteria for knowing when and why it was rational to adopt a newconceptual scheme’ (Rorty 1979, p. 270 – 271). This was the precise sense of

the term ‘rational reconstruction’ as it developed within history andphilosophy of science.48 As Rorty spells this out, ‘the crucial question is

whether we can find a range of specifically scientific values which shouldaffect such choice, as opposed to ‘‘extraneous considerations’’’ (Rorty 1979,

p. 327). Hence what one needs to determine is ‘whether the sort of‘‘deliberative process’’ which occurs concerning paradigm shifts in thesciences . . . is different from the deliberative process which occurs

concerning, for example, the shift from the ancien regime to bourgeoisdemocracy, or from the Augustans to the Romantics’ (Rorty 1979, p. 327).

The core of Rorty’s claim is: ‘the change was not brought about by ‘‘rationalargument’’ in some sense of ‘‘rational’’ in which, for example, the changes

lately brought about in regard to society’s attitude toward slavery, abstractart, homosexuals, or endangered species would not count as ‘‘rational’’’

(Rorty 1979, p. 332).What remains to elucidate is whether Rorty himself would construe any

such wider sense of ‘rational’ as available to historical interpreters. Rorty

bluntly rejects that possibility: ‘In my view there is no such system—nooverarching structure of rationality’ (Rorty 1979, p. 271n). Instead, what

scientists and philosophers interested in the history of science have toconsole themselves with is the following:

The historian can make the shift from the old scheme to the new oneintelligible, and make one see why one would have been led from theone to the other if one had been an intellectual of that day. There isnothing the philosopher can add to what the historian has already doneto show that this intelligible and plausible course is a ‘rational’ one.

(Rorty 1979, p. 272)

He concludes: ‘as soon as it was admitted that ‘‘empirical considerations’’ . . .incited but did not require ‘‘conceptual change’’ . . . , the division of

labor between the philosopher and the historian no longer made sense’(Rorty 1979, p. 272). Philosophy has nothing to add.49 More generally,

to seek a ‘rational choice theory’ is ‘roughly, a demand for a decision-procedure for solving difficult cases in historiography, anthropological

description, and the like—cases where nothing save tact and imaginationwill serve’ (Rorty 1979, p. 293).


The issue becomes clearer in Rorty’s elaboration of ‘conversation’ interms of normal and abnormal discourse. Rorty distinguishes ‘participating

in a conversation’ from ‘contributing to an inquiry’ (Rorty 1979, p. 371);the latter, as he sees it, falls under the constraint of a disciplinary

community and its ‘normal discourse’. A conversation need not do so;conversations can continue by ‘changing the subject’. The course of a

conversation is not governed by the terms of a given subject. Hence it canbe ‘abnormal discourse’. Rorty invokes Oakeshott’s distinction of

universitas from societas to articulate the distinction between conversationalpartners within a normal discourse and those talking across different

normal discourses (Rorty 1979, p. 318), but the language of ‘normal’ versus‘abnormal’ discourses is, obviously, a generalization of the Kuhniancontrast between ‘normal’ and ‘revolutionary’ science (Rorty 1979, p. 320).

Indeed, the decisive influence of Kuhn in this aspect of Rorty’s thought is asevident as the influence of Davidson in his approach to meaning and truth.

Linking them together is the essence of Rortian ‘pragmatism’.50

Opposition to Kuhn needs to be stood on its head, according to Rorty:

‘to look for commensuration rather than simply continued conversation—to look for a way of making further redescription unnecessary . . . is to

attempt to escape from humanity’ (Rorty 1979, p. 376). Rorty argues thatany effort at ‘truth’ as ‘ultimate commensuration’ seeks ‘to see humanbeings as objects rather than subjects’ (Rorty 1979, p. 378). For Rorty,

‘keeping the conversation going’ is a way of resisting ‘proposals foruniversal commensuration through the hypostatization of some privileged

set of descriptions’ which is all that he thinks can be meant by ‘objectivetruth’ (Rorty 1979, p. 376). He sees such proposals for commensuration as

inevitably a ‘freezing-over of culture’ and ‘dehumanization of humanbeings’. In the extraordinary pathos of these lines Rorty betrays the very

sort of ‘ontological’ subreption that he faults so severely in the ‘interpretive’school, and with vastly less warrant. His panic seems to be that should all

discourse be reduced to normal discourse, creativity will dry up.Rorty resists the idea that there might be any norms governing the

passage from one discourse to another. He vehemently objects to any

enterprise—and a fortiori to Habermas’s specific enterprise—to formulatethe ‘transcendental conditions’, the necessary, prior rules for conversational

progress: ‘‘‘transcendental hermeneutics’’ is very suspicious . . . a way ofseeing freedom as nature’ (Rorty 1979, p. 380), i.e. of rendering human

subjects into objects.51 More pointedly, ‘the product of abnormal discoursecan be anything from nonsense to intellectual revolution, and there is no

discipline which describes it, any more than there is a discipline devoted tothe study of the unpredictable, or of ‘‘creativity’’’ (Rorty 1979, p. 320).

28 J. H. Zammito

What Rorty means is that there are not—cannot be—meta-level general-izations about variety or shifts in discourse. ‘There is no point in trying to

find a general synoptic way of ‘‘analyzing’’ the ‘‘functions knowledge has inuniversal contexts of practical life’’ [because] cultural anthropology (in a

large sense which includes intellectual history) is all we need’ (Rorty 1979,p. 381). Shifts and difference in discourse merely happen, and what is

available to us at that juncture is only intellectual history or ethnography.These practice not ‘epistemology’ but ‘hermeneutics’.

While epistemology seeks commensuration, ‘hermeneutics is largely astruggle against this assumption’.52 Rorty proposes to use ‘hermeneutics’ as

‘an expression of hope that the cultural space left by the demise ofepistemology will not be filled’ (Rorty 1979, p. 315). Rorty proclaims thathermeneutics should disown ‘knowing’. That is, we should abandon any

prospect of method and give ourselves over to ‘tact and imagination’ (Rorty1979, p. 293). He proposes to strip hermeneutics of its methodical

significance and reorient it to an overall conversational style, appropriate towhat he calls ‘abnormal discourse’. Hermeneutics is simply ‘discourse

about as-yet-incommensurable discourses’ (Rorty 1979, p. 343). ‘Herme-neutics sees the relations between various discourses as those of strands in a

possible conversation, a conversation which presupposes no disciplinarymatrix which unites the speakers, but where the hope of agreement is neverlost as long as the conversation lasts’ (Rorty 1979, p. 318).

In Rorty’s usage, ‘‘‘hermeneutics’’ is not the name for a discipline, norfor a method . . . , nor for a program of research’ (Rorty 1979, p. 315).

‘Hermeneutics is not ‘‘another way of knowing’’—‘‘understanding’’ asopposed to (predictive) ‘‘explanation.’’ It is better seen as another way of

coping’ (Rorty 1979, p. 356). Rorty claims ‘coming to understand is morelike getting acquainted with a person than like following a demonstration’

(Rorty 1979, p. 319). That is, it is a matter of kennen, not wissen.53 ‘Gettinginto a conversation with strangers is, like acquiring a new virtue or skill by

imitating models, a matter of phronesis rather than episteme’ (Rorty 1979,p. 319). The relation it seems that Rorty is proposing is: ‘coping’ is to‘knowing’ as ‘phronesis’ is to ‘episteme’; hence, too, ‘hermeneutics’ to

‘epistemology’. Rorty talks about needing ‘practical wisdom’ to ‘participatein a conversation’ (Rorty 1979, p. 372). ‘We need a sense of the relativity of

descriptive vocabularies to periods, traditions and historical accidents. Thisis what the humanist tradition in education does’ (Rorty 1979, p. 362).

None of this is particularly illuminating. ‘Coping’ in Rorty’s usage is veryfar from clear. How to construe his sense of phronesis and ‘practical

wisdom’ carries us further into obscurity. Does Rorty intend ‘tact andimagination’ to stand as irreducibly ‘irrational’? Is that what ‘edifying


discourse’ means? How is it that intellectual history can ‘make . . .intelligible, . . . make one see why’ (Rorty 1979, p. 272)—i.e. persuade?

Everything hinges on what it means to ‘be able to find agreement with otherhuman beings’ (Rorty 1979, p. 316). Rorty insists that hidden in the

assertion of this ‘ability to find’ is the enforcement of a code of rules forinquiry which are preestablished and irrefragable. That, however, need not

be conceded. Why must we accept Rorty’s suggestion that ‘we would do wellto abandon the notion of certain values (‘‘rationality’’, ‘‘disinterestedness’’)

floating free of the educational and institutional patterns of the day’ (Rorty1979, p. 331)? Is the search for consensus the aspiration to stasis? Is the

inevitable outcome a fixity of all human enterprise? Why must we believethat? The question is whether we could not broaden the concept ofrationality, rather than forsake it. We cannot dispense with the principle

of ‘hope of agreement’. When Rorty disparages in epistemology ‘the hope ofagreement as a token of the existence of common ground, which, perhaps

unbeknownst to the speakers, unites them in a common rationality’ (Rorty1979, p. 318), he is in fact denying the only coherent sense of the phrase even

for his own hermeneutics. To be sure, to be rational in the hermeneuticsense ‘is to be willing to refrain . . . from thinking that there is [already

established] a special set of terms in which all contributions to theconversation should be put’ (Rorty 1979, p. 318). Precisely because there isno shared premise at the outset, the only hope of agreement is in this move,

but that is what makes it a rational move. Hermeneutics must presume thatsome common ground will be found through dialogue, or the ‘hope of

agreement’ is fatally compromised and the benefit of conversation overestrangement is lost. Dialogues cannot be undertaken without affirming the

possibility of ‘reaching understanding’. To be hermeneutical is to aim atcommensuration, and not as failure, foreclosure or freezing of all creativity,

but precisely as community. The idea of a ‘hope of agreement’ is the veryessence of the ‘rationality’ principle which animates traditional hermeneu-

tics, and which both dares to suspend prior disciplinary assumptions andseeks to establish some common understanding.

Rorty, Gadamer and ‘Hermeneutics’

Rorty claims to find support for his view in Hans-Georg Gadamer becausethe latter seems to reject the idea of hermeneutics as a ‘method’ and

presents it rather as a situation or condition in which humans areinextricably enmeshed. His invocation of Gadamer as ally has been hotly—

and appropriately—disputed.54 Rorty believes the key to his affinity withGadamer is in their shared ‘polemical’ purpose of attacking ‘method’

30 J. H. Zammito

(Rorty 1979, pp. 357 – 358). But, as Theodore Kisiel has argued, Gadamer’sphilosophical hermeneutics was ‘not intended to supersede methodological

hermeneutics but to explore dimensions which underlie the latter . . . toclarify the conditions under which understanding actually happens’ (Kisiel

1985, pp. 5 – 6). Two central concepts of Gadamerian hermeneutics are‘fusion of horizons’ and ‘effective historical consciousness’ (wirkungs-

geschichtliches Bewußtsein). Rorty belies Gadamer’s conception of the firstand trivializes his conception of the second.

Assuredly, Gadamer and Rorty share the view (perhaps most originallyarticulated by Heidegger in Being and Time) that humans are always

situated, gripped by the historical and social finitude of their moments.Rorty brashly termed this ‘ethnocentrism’, but he has repented somewhat inlight of a deluge of criticism (Rorty 1991, p. 15). Where Gadamer and Rorty

differ is in how each conceives the historical subject taking up this burden ofhistoricity, and principally in how each conceives the hermeneutic

conversation. Rorty lays enormous stress on the intractability of one’spresent orientation, while, as Georgia Warnke has argued, Gadamer’s

hermeneutics ‘is an act of integration which tries to expand consensusbetween different cultures and historical perspectives by mediating their

claims to truth’ (Warnke 1985, p. 339). For Gadamer, the model for thehermeneutic conversation is Socratic dialogue not because it generatesaporia but because it has reaching understanding as its highest principle

of reason (Gadamer 1976, 1980, 1986). This idea of reason as ‘regulativeideal’ is what links Gadamer and his sometime critic, Jurgen Habermas,

over against Rorty’s ‘free-floating’ conversationalism, or ‘edifying dis-course’.55 According to David Ingram, Rorty ‘denies that hermeneutics is

in the business of showing that discourse and interpretation ingeneral presuppose consensus regarding the very rules of hermeneutic

interplay’ (Ingram 1985, p. 39). That is not altogether true, for Rorty doesadmit that ‘we do have a duty to talk to each other, to converse about our

views of the world, to use persuasion rather than force, to be tolerant ofdiversity, to be contritely fallibilist. But that is not the same thing as a duty tohave methodological principles’ (Rorty 1991, p. 67). For Rorty these are

merely ethical posits. Recalling Rorty’s ‘decisionist’ claims, however, theseposits are in fact arbitrary preferences, and to talk of ‘duty’ is to whistle in

the wind.56

For Gadamer, mutual recognition and openness are the necessary

conditions for the pursuit of a ‘shared understanding (agreement) . . . thatresists reduction to either of the interlocutors’ privileged intentions’

(Ingram 1985, p. 41).57 As Kisiel puts it, ‘the fundamental thrust of thehermeneutic consciousness is . . . to establish accord . . . [T]he creative


conversation translates its participants into a new community in the subjectmatter through a language which is a possession of neither one but which

rather lies between them’ (Kisiel 1985, pp. 9 – 10). That is, ‘to strive foraccord in the subject matter means to strive for a higher universality that

transcends both my own partiality and the other’s’ (Kisiel 1985, p. 12). Thehermeneutic dialogue with the alien thus occasions a ‘fusion of horizons’.

For the individual subject the hermeneutic encounter with the pastresults in Bildung, a process of self-transformation that attends each

broadening of horizons. Gadamer calls this wirkungsgeschichtlichesBewußtsein, a phrase very difficult to render without remainder into

English. Perhaps the best way to grasp it is in the terms of RichardBernstein: ‘It is only through the dialogical encounter with what is handeddown to us that we can test and risk our prejudices’ (Bernstein 1985,

p. 275). Warnke explicates the phrase by suggesting that interpreters ‘mustapply the text to themselves and allow it to speak to their own concerns’

(Warnke 1985, p. 350). This sense of ethical and existential self-testingshould be contrasted with Rorty’s understanding of this idea:

Gadamer develops his notion of wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewußtsein (thesort of consciousness of the past which changes us) to characterize anattitude interested not so much in what is out there in the world, or inwhat happened in history, as in what we can get out of nature andhistory for our own uses . . . finding a new and more interesting way ofexpressing ourselves, and thus of coping with the world.

(Rorty 1979, p. 359)

Perhaps the most fruitful contemporary theoretical effort to grasp the

essence of Gadamer’s notion is Dominick LaCapra’s exploration of‘anxiety’ and ‘transference’ in the relation of the historian to the matter

under examination. It is the inescapable impingement of history, its claim,that occasions anxiety, because it will not submit to our arbitrary

reconfiguration, and, worse, always already implicitly configures us(LaCapra 1983, 1985, 1989). In Rorty’s ‘new and more interesting way ofexpressing ourselves’, however, the very thought of self-risk has evaporated.

Nevertheless, Rorty claims that he achieves his phraseology of ‘edification’by reworking Gadamer’s term Bildung (Rorty 1979, p. 360). Here is an

instance in which ‘translation’ into his own terms devastates any possibilityof interpretation adequate to the matter at stake. What Rorty misses is that,

again citing Warnke, ‘the entire thrust of [Gadamerian] hermeneuticsis . . . ‘‘commensuration’’’ (Warnke 1985, p. 356).

In Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature Rorty offers two alternativemodels of what it means to be a ‘philosopher’: first, ‘the informed

32 J. H. Zammito

dilettante, the polypragmatic, Socratic intermediary between variousdiscourses’ (Rorty 1979, p. 317) and second, ‘the cultural overseer . . . the

Platonic philosopher-king who knows what everybody else is really doingwhether they know it or not’ (Rorty 1979, p. 317). Rorty repudiates the

second form, especially in its modern ‘epistemological’ posture ofpositivistic dogmatism.58 It is the first form we must consider carefully.

Rorty claims that in the presence of such a philosopher-intermediary,disciplinary specialists will ‘open up’ and engage in ‘conversation’. Thus

‘disagreements between disciplines and discourses are compromised ortranscended in the course of the conversation’ (Rorty 1979, p. 317). What

needs to be clarified, in my view, is how Rorty intends ‘compromised’. Doesit mean ‘achieved wider consensus’ or is it merely ‘betrayed’? Similarly, howis ‘transcended’ to be understood—as a Hegelian Aufhebung, which

preserves the concerns of the interlocutors but lifts them into a moreencompassing perspective (‘fusion of horizons’ in Gadamerian terms), or

simply as a ‘change of subject’ which leaves those concerns behind asobsolete?59 Quite simply, Rorty has not convincingly established the

efficacy of his ‘polypragmatic intermediary’. Rorty’s adamant refusal toinquire into the skills of phronesis or of hermeneutics leaves us with ‘tact

and imagination’, to be sure, but that cannot suffice.What makes such hermeneutics actualizable? Rorty’s celebration of

hermeneutics as ‘abnormal discourse’ clashes irretrievably with his

evocation of intellectual history and cultural anthropology which undertaketheir hermeneutic procedures precisely as normal discourse. Rorty cannot

leave ‘hermeneutical phronesis’, the skills involved in being hermeneutical,completely unreflected. as if it were utterly separate from reason.60 We

must seize from his own words the decisive starting point: ‘the possibility ofhermeneutics is always parasitic upon the possibility (and perhaps upon the

actuality) of epistemology’ (Rorty 1979, p. 320). ‘Hermeneutics is the studyof an abnormal discourse from the point of view of some normal

discourse—the attempt to make some sense of what is going on’ always andinvariably from some particular vantage in some particular moment (Rorty1979, p. 320). ‘The fact that hermeneutics inevitably takes some norm for

granted makes it, so far forth, ‘‘Whiggish.’’ But insofar as it proceedsnonreductively and in the hopes of picking up a new angle on things, it can

transcend its own Whiggishness’ (Rorty 1979, p. 321). Here Rortyacknowledges that while we are always initially culture-bound, we can

accept and integrate novelty, which is the movement Gadamer calls a‘fusion of horizons’. The ‘Whiggishness’ with which hermeneutics

commences is its burden, not its privilege. It cannot be shrugged off(that’s the point of ‘holistic’ radical interpretation and the ‘hermeneutic


circle’ alike) but it can, patiently and with openness to the possibility, be‘compromised and transcended’.

To bring this problem back squarely to the problems of a history ofphilosophy, this Rortian extremity of ‘abnormal discourse’ or ‘incommen-

surability’ puts in intense question how historical narratives, as exercises inhermeneutics, can possibly be composed. Essentially, what is the procedure

by which ethnographers and intellectual historians narrate the story acrossruptures? We are faced with essential questions regarding how and why

narratives persuade, or, in other language, how narratives claim validity orexplanatory status. Such narratives fall under all the ‘epistemological’

scruples raised for historians by the ‘linguistic turn’.61

It behooves historians to affirm, vis-a-vis Rorty (and poststructuralism,as well), that ‘historical reconstruction’ is itself normal discourse, rational

procedure undertaken and policed (yes) by a ‘disciplinary community’.Practicing intellectual historians will certainly acknowledge that to

understand is only possible if one can explain, i.e. offer a fulleraccount—a narrative in one’s own terms—which reveals factors which

the philosopher simply took for granted as well as conflicts and confusionsin the argumentation of which the philosopher appeared unconscious.

Thus, intellectual history, as a normal discourse of ‘hermeneuticalphronesis’, acknowledges, at least as a regulative ideal, the familiar phrase,‘to understand the author better than he understood himself ’.62 Such

understanding situates the philosophical text in a diachronic frame, inwhich, to be sure, what comes after can be quite revelatory. But that is not

license for the teleological ‘presentism’ Rorty proffers in ‘Four genres’.Quite often it is the diachronic past more than the future that proves

crucial in understanding or explaining a text’s project and even itsperplexities. The point is, I think, to distinguish historical reconstruction,

which via narrative ‘thick description’ seeks to establish what grounds canbe imputed to the philosopher or the text for the arguments articulated,

from ‘reconstruction’ (or deconstruction) in the various forms ofrefurbishing for contemporary relevance, ‘genealogical’ debunking, or‘strong misreading’ as creative criticism.

Notes

[1] ‘If Rorty’s reform of his own discipline were to be actually carried out, the voiceof philosophy would begin to sound rather like the voice of intellectual history’(Hollinger 1985, p. 169).

[2] Rorty certainly professes to be a historicist, but that is a notoriously slipperyterm. On the ambiguity of ‘historicism’, see: Iggers (1995); Ree (1990, 1991); andMakkreel (1990).

34 J. H. Zammito

[3] Anthony Cascardi links Rorty with Lyotard: their approaches, ‘although historicistinsofar as they assert the contingency of all discourse, constitute further refusals ofthe attempt by history to mediate and thereby recuperate the differences amongdivergent accounts of human nature or the world’ (Cascardi 1989, pp. 219 – 220).

[4] For a very insightful discussion of Rorty’s ‘historicism’, see Hall (1994, pp. 14 –64, esp. 54ff ), where Hall explores the question whether Rorty ‘may havestretched the word ‘‘historicism’’ beyond usable limits’. Hall concludes that Rorty‘ought to reconsider his claim to be a historicist’ since ‘Rorty’s historicism is apoeticized one’ and Hall finds it ‘better . . . to take full responsibility for one’sliterary pretensions than to mask them by claims to historicist practice’ (p. 63).

[5] The prospectus for the series, as presented facing the title page of Philosophy inHistory, reads: ‘The books in this series will discuss the emergence of intellectualtraditions and of related new disciplines. The procedures, aims and vocabulariesthat were generated will be set in the context of the alternatives available within thecontemporary framework of ideas and institutions. Through detailed studies of theevolution of such traditions, and their modification by different audiences, it ishoped that a new picture will form of the development of ideas in their concretecontexts. By this means, artificial distinctions between the history of philosophy,of the various sciences, of society and politics, and of literature, may be seen todissolve’ (my italics).

[6] See Skinner (1966, 1969, 1970, 1971, 1972a, 1972b, 1975); and Tully (1988).[7] Should any doubts remain about the authorship of the introduction based on

stylistic and argumentative evidence alone, let me point out that I have spokenindividually with Quentin Skinner and with J. B. Schneewind, and both of themfreely acknowledge that Rorty took charge of the writing of that text.

[8] Alasdair MacIntyre has polarized these positions into a deliberately drasticdilemma: ‘Either we read the philosophers of the past so as to make them relevantto our contemporary problems and enterprises, transmuting them as far aspossible into what they would have been if they were part of present-dayphilosophy, and minimizing or ignoring or even on occasion misrepresentingthat which refuses such transmutation because it is inextricably bound up withthat in the past which makes it radically different from present-day philosophy;or instead we take great care to read them in their own terms, carefully preservingtheir idiosyncratic and specific character, so that they cannot emerge into thepresent except as a set of museum pieces’ (MacIntyre 1984, p. 31). From this it isonly too clear how the debate has often descended to reciprocal charges of‘anachronism’ and ‘antiquarianism’. For recent runs of the debate, see Ree(1988); Bennett (1988); and Wilson (1992).

[9] The question of the separability and the priority of these two conventionalapproaches will be a recurrent element in the dispute with Rorty taken up in thisessay, but the most fundamental concern will be with Rorty’s query of themethodological legitimacy of historical reconstruction.

[10] In his own essay, Rorty observes: ‘Intellectual history can ignore certain problemswhich must be settled in order to write the history of a discipline—questionsabout which people count as scientists, which as poets, which as philosophers,etc.’ (Rorty 1984, p. 68).

[11] ‘[I]ntellectual history works to keep Geistesgeschichte honest, just as historicalreconstruction operates to keep rational reconstruction honest. Honesty here


consists in keeping in mind the possibility that our self-justifying conversation iswith creatures of our own phantasy rather than with historical personages, evenideally re-educated historical personages’ (Rorty 1984, p. 71).

[12] Thus ‘[Geistesgeschichte] aims at self-justification in the same way as does rationalreconstruction, but on a different scale’ (Rorty 1984, pp. 56 – 57). It ‘works at thelevel of problematics rather than of solutions to problems . . . [considering] thephilosopher in terms of his entire work rather than in terms of his mostcelebrated arguments’ (Rorty 1984, p. 57).

[13] Norris (1985, pp. 145ff ) makes this point quite well.[14] Among other philosophers who bluntly query what history can possibly have to

offer, see: Graham (1982); Cohen (1986); Powers (1986); Winfield (1987); Mash(1987).

[15] On the question of narrative and its validity, see: Mink (1978); Roth (1988,1989); Anchor (1987); and Carroll (1990).

[16] Rorty derives his phrase ‘conversation of mankind’ from Michael Oakeshott. SeeOakeshott (1991). Whether Rorty’s borrowing is in the spirit of its originator is aquestion he disregards systematically, and there will be no point in raising it here.

[17] ‘We cannot give up this idea without giving up the notion that the intellectuals ofthe previous epochs of European history form a community, a community ofwhich it is good to be a member. If we are to persist in this image of ourselves,then we have to have both imaginary conversations with the dead and theconviction that we have seen further than they. That means we needGeistesgeschichte’ (Rorty 1984, p. 73). This is merely ‘a fulfillment of the naturaldesire to talk to people some of whose ideas are quite like our own, in the hope ofgetting them to admit that we have gotten those ideas clearer, or in the hope ofgetting them clearer still in the course of the conversation’ (Rorty 1984, p. 52).

[18] ‘We take the pardonable ignorance of great dead scientists for granted. Weshould be equally willing to say that Aristotle was unfortunately ignorant . . . Wehesitate merely because we have colleagues who are themselves ignorant . . . andwhom we courteously describe not as ‘‘ignorant’’, but as ‘‘holding differentphilosophical views’’’ (Rorty 1984, p. 49). Therefore we need to add to theAristotle who walked the streets of Athens another—‘an ideally reasonable andeducable Aristotle . . . who can be brought to describe himself as having mistakenthe preparatory taxonomic stages of biological research for the essence of allscientific inquiry’ (Rorty 1984, p. 51). Rorty concedes that the historical Aristotlecould have ‘meant’ few of the things rational reconstructions ascribe to himanachronistically. He implies that Aristotle would be of little interest to a present-day philosopher absent this reconstruction.

[19] MacIntyre (1987a); see also MacIntyre (1977, 1982, 1987b).[20] See Hollinger’s second thoughts about Rorty in this light (Hollinger 1993).[21] On the problems with Rorty’s ethnocentrism, see his exchange with Clifford

Geertz (Geertz 1986; Rorty 1986a).[22] Donald Livingston, for one, is suspicious of this penchant in Rorty’s approach to

conversation, which Livingston believes deafens him to the conversationalpossibilities with remote but powerful minds. For Livingston, the art of thehistorian is to listen to the great dead philosophers’ ‘voices and the peculiar idiomin which they speak’. Livingston takes his idea of conversation, like Rorty, fromMichael Oakeshott, but he insists it is ‘quite different from Rorty’s conception’

36 J. H. Zammito

(Livingston 1993, p. 112n). He seems to harbor the suspicion that Rorty’s idea of‘conversation’ might, in the apt phrase of Clifford Geertz, entail ‘making theworld safe for condescension’ (Geertz 1986, p. 111).

[23] That is, the past—the other, generally—has something we can learn. This is theview advocated by Skinner, Taylor, MacIntyre and others in Philosophy inHistory. It is what gives intellectual history and history of philosophy theauthenticity to teach—to form and to change minds.

[24] In his disquieted comments on the volume, John Yolton observes that theIntroduction ‘is often in conflict with [Quentin] Skinner’s views’. It is beyond thescope of this essay to establish why Skinner allowed this to happen; what is atissue is what Rorty intrudes upon the question of contextual and generalintellectual history in relation to philosophy. Yolton makes it quite clear that hefinds the position Rorty develops incompatible with historical reconstruction(Yolton 1985, p. 573).

[25] Skinner (1969, p. 28). This maxim is, of course, neither self-evident noruncontroversial. What is at issue here is merely Rorty’s specific stance towardSkinner.

[26] This approach can be related to the idea of ‘reception theory’. On ‘receptiontheory’ in this context, see esp. Jauss (1982) and Thompson (1993).

[27] See Hirsh (1967).[28] Rorty targets Michael Ayers specifically in this argument (Rorty 1984, p. 55n).

Ayers had taken a salient stance in this dispute in sharp attacks on JonathanBennett and his work. See Ayers (1970), a critique of Bennett (1965), as well asAyers (1978). Ayers launched one of the most lively and noteworthy debates onthe relative merits of historical versus rational reconstruction in history ofphilosophy. Ayers and Daniel Garber have continued to claim that ‘‘‘we mustcertainly understand past philosophers before we can legitimately or helpfully usethem’’’ (Wilson 1992, p. 199, citing from the Prospectus Garber and Ayers issuedfor their Cambridge History of Seventeenth Century Philosophy). For anothermajor exponent of historical reconstruction, see Ree (1978, 1985).

[29] ‘[T]he more competing Geistesgeschichten we have at hand—the more likely weare to reconstruct, first rationally and then historically, interesting thinkers’(Rorty 1984, p. 74). Why first rationally and then historically? That question leadsus to the radicalism of Rorty’s agenda.

[30] There is something not altogether consistent going on in his usage. A. Rosenberg getsthat point just right: ‘Rorty’s argument trades on an equivocation about meaning.Sometimes ‘‘meaning’’ is used as a semantic notion, in which it has intentionalcontent, but sometimes ‘‘meaning’’ has a thoroughly different significance, one whichhas nothing to do with ‘‘interpretation’’’ (Rosenberg 1989, p. 494).

[31] Rorty is citing the back cover of Bennett (1966). Bennett baldly upholds hisnarrowness of approach: ‘How if at all is literary structure relevant tointerpretation? I’m sorry, but I have no opinions about that’. So much for theentire question of rhetoric posed by poststructuralism. ‘The relevance of societiesand institutions to interpretation in philosophy is not a topic that I have thoughtabout, and I have nothing to say about it.’ So much for contextualism. Now forhistorical reconstruction: ‘I take issue with Garber about the idea of under-standing a past author’s text in his own terms . . . To understand someone’sthought you must get it into your own terms’ (Bennett 1988, pp. 64, 67).


[32] In his book on Spinoza, Bennett makes the same point: ‘I need to consider whatSpinoza has in mind, for readings of the text which are faithful to his intentionsare likely to teach me more than ones which are not—or so I believe, as I thinkhim to be a great philosopher. And one can be helped to discover his intentionsby knowing what he had been reading, whose problems he had been challengedby, and so on’ (Bennett 1984, pp. 15 – 16).

[33] For Hollinger, Rorty ‘does manifest real respect for intellectual history . . . YetRorty offers no assessment of intellectual history as actually practiced’ (Hollinger1985, p. 175). Because a careful reading of Rorty’s work shows the secondsentence is in fact false, the first becomes a matter of ironic interpretation.

[34] Rorty would have us believe that historians would be surprised to learn that truthclaims are always contingent upon the situatedness of the interpreter. He chargesthat history labors under ‘romantic’ illusions: ‘The idea of ‘‘the truth about thepast, uncontaminated by present perspectives or concerns’’ is . . . a romantic idealof purity which has no relation to any actual inquiry which human beings haveundertaken or could undertake’ (Rorty et al. 1984a, p. 7). Yet historians were notabsent among those who articulated the conundrum of the ‘hermeneutic circle’.The classic statement of the hermeneutical circle as a methodological problem isWilhelm Dilthey’s fragmentary ‘critique of historical reason’ (Dilthey 1989). SeeMakkreel (1975) and Ermarth (1981). This issue was broadened into aphilosophical problem by Martin Heidegger. See e.g. Bambach (1995). Thisphilosophical aspect was brought further to bear on the problem of historicalinterpretation above all in Gadamer (1976, 1992). For further development ofthis consideration, see: Palmer (1969); Hoy (1978); Ricoeur (1981); Weinsheimer(1985); and Warnke (1987).

[35] A major formulation of ‘strong misreading’ with decisive relevance to Rorty’stheory and practice is Bloom (1973). Hall terms this ‘a crucial work for Rorty’sentire historiographical project’ (Hall 1994, p. 15). In what seems a particularlyrelevant passage for Rorty’s approach to historiography, Bloom writes: ‘I meansomething . . . drastic and (presumably) absurd, which is the triumph of having sostationed the precursor, in one’s own work, that particular passages in his workseem to be not presages of one’s own advent, but rather to be indebted to one’sown achievement, and even (necessarily) to be lessened by one’s greater splendor.The mighty dead return, but they return in our colors, and speaking in ourvoices, at least in part, at least in moments, moments that testify to ourpersistence, and not their own. If they return wholly in their own strength, thenthe triumph is theirs’ (Bloom 1973, p. 141).

[36] For deconstruction’s disputation of hermeneutic possibilities, see above allSilverman and Ihde (1985) and Michelfelder and Palmer (1989).

[37] This campaign achieved its contour in Rorty (1979), and in a series of essays thatappeared in that context, notably his exchange with Charles Taylor and HerbertDreyfus in Review of Metaphysics (Rorty 1980), and in his essay ‘Method, socialscience, and social hope’, reprinted in Rorty (1982). See also Rorty (1989, 1991).

[38] See Rabinow and Sullivan (1979, 1987); Hahn et al. (1983); and Hiley et al.(1991). Rorty argues that this school has a serious misconception of itsmethodological uniqueness and privilege.

[39] This is a variant of the ‘web of belief ’ approach developed by Willard Quine. SeeQuine and Ullian (1978).

38 J. H. Zammito

[40] Rorty does acknowledge that Hirsch has discerned a unique aspect of texts asagainst lumps in authorial intention. The upshot of his reflection, though,suggests that it is a trivial uniqueness (Rorty 1991, pp. 87 – 89). For a laterinsistence on the meaninglessness of the sorts of distinctions involved withSkinner and Hirsch—this time disputing distinctions proffered by Umberto Eco,see Rorty (1992, esp. pp. 93ff.).

[41] For the highly controversial question of the natural sciences and their distinctiveclaim, perhaps the most cogent objections have been entered by Williams (1983).Even such an admirer as Hollinger finds Rorty’s posture on natural scienceunpersuasive (see Hollinger 1985, p. 168). Rorty’s insistence that thedistinctiveness of the human sciences has no ontological foundation has drawnthe support of some, and the opposition of many. For support see Okrent (1984);for opposition see, of course, Taylor and Dreyfus themselves, notably Taylor(1981) and Dreyfus (1986).

[42] It is noteworthy that this interpretation is affirmed by Habermas but rejected byRorty (Rorty 1991, p. 97n). Warnke (1985) defends Taylor and the notion of adouble hermeneutic.

[43] For Davidson’s resistance, see Davidson (1986, p. 310). But see Davidson (1990,p. 134), where he writes: ‘Rorty urges two things: that my view of truth amountsto a rejection of both coherence and correspondence theories and shouldproperly be classed as belonging to the pragmatic tradition . . . I pretty muchconcur with him on both points’.

[44] In the introduction Rorty acknowledges, ‘I have been writing more and moreabout Davidson . . . The four chapters which make up Part II of this volume are amixture of exposition of Davidson and commentary on him’ (Rorty 1991, p. 1).

[45] He is not maintaining that individual subjects cannot be found to be in error.Error is what the idea of ‘belief ’ permits, but only against the backdrop of a‘social theory of interpretation’. In that context, ‘belief is built to take up the slackbetween sentences held true by individuals and sentences held true (or false) bypublic standards. What is private about belief is not that it is accessible to onlyone person, but that it may be idiosyncratic’. Thus ‘to interpret a particularutterance it is necessary to construct a comprehensive theory for theinterpretation of a potential infinity of utterances. The evidence for theinterpretation of a particular utterance will therefore have to be evidence forthe interpretation of all utterances of a speaker or community’ (Davidson 1984,p. 148).

[46] For more of Foucault’s theories, see Foucault (1972, 1973, 1988).[47] According to Rorty what Kuhn is claiming is: ‘there is no commensurability

between groups of scientists who have different paradigms of a successfulexplanation, or who do not share the same disciplinary matrix’ (Rorty 1979,p. 323). His goal in making this argument was to persuade historians of sciencethat a shift in interpretation meant a shift in observation, that all facts were‘theory-laden’. Rorty agrees that ‘we . . . need to give up the notion of ‘‘data andinterpretation’’ with its suggestion that if we could get to the real data,unpolluted by our choice of language, we should be ‘grounding’ rational choice’(Rorty 1979, p. 325). But even if there were a neutral observation language itwould, Rorty avers, be ‘of no help whatever in bringing decision between theoriesunder an algorithm’ (Rorty 1979, p. 324).


[48] See: Zammito (2004); Kuhn (1970, 1977); Lakatos and Musgrave (1970); Lakatos(1970); Feyerabend (1975); Laudan (1976).

[49] This is the language which inspired Hollinger’s appraisal of Rorty.[50] Though here, too, the presence of Bloom is not to be underestimated:

‘Discontinuity is freedom’ (Bloom 1973, p. 39). Bloom, too, despises ‘normaldiscourse’—‘most so-called ‘‘accurate’’ interpretations of poetry are worse thanmistakes; perhaps there are only more or less creative or interesting misreadings,for is not every reading necessarily a clinamen [deviation]?’ (Bloom 1973, p. 43).

[51] For Rorty’s criticism of Habermas, see Rorty (1985, 1989, pp. 65 – 69).[52] As Bloom puts it, ‘The strong imagination comes to its painful birth through

savagery and misrepresentation’ (Bloom 1973, p. 86).[53] Yet once we become Bekannte, we can talk about and formulate the matters

which constitute our newly established community, our common ground:Gemeinschaft. And this characterization will be a form of Wissenschaft. And if westrive for the principle of possibility of this common ground we might evenestablish a form of transzendentale Wissenschaft—the ambition of Habermas orApel.

[54] David Ingram argues, ‘the philosophical hermeneutics developed by Gadamer[represents] an alternative to the holistic relativism advanced by Rorty (thoughRorty conveniently elides this fact . . .)’ (Ingram 1985, p. 33). Perhaps the harshestcritic of Rorty on this score is John Caputo, who holds ‘that the ‘‘hermeneutics’’which Rorty advocates is a shadow of the real thing’. For Caputo, Rorty’s trueaffiliation is neither with Gadamer nor with Heidegger, but with Derrida. AsCaputo puts it, Rorty’s ‘conversation of mankind is not thought, but talk, just‘‘saying something’’’. Gadamer’s fundamental seriousness (‘the full weight of ourhistorical situatedness in the world’) is nowhere to be found: ‘Rorty’s languagegames are weightless creatures and his hermeneutics a mechanics of weightless-ness’. For Caputo there is about Rorty’s readings too much appropriation to hisown ‘edifying discourse’. Such ethnocentrism seems only dubiously hermeneu-tical (Caputo 1985, pp. 248 – 262); see also Bernstein (1986) and Guignon (1983).

[55] On the relation of Gadamer to Habermas, see Ormison and Shrift (1990), PartTwo: ‘Hermeneutics and critical theory: dialogues on methodology’, withdetailed bibliography.

[56] The same issue came to formulation in the encounter (such as it was) betweenDerrida and Gadamer, where precisely what was at issue was the ethical claims ofa conversation. See Simon (1989) for a provocative exposition of the deep issuesfor communicative rationality posed by the debate.

[57] Hence Ingram terms them ‘meta-hermeneutical’.[58] Though it may be observed that his handling of other philosophers throughout

his writing has more the form of the Platonic philosopher-king than that of thehermeneutic broker. Tone matters in such a rhetorically grounded philosophy asRorty’s, and his tone, beneath all the irony, has a dangerous propensity tosuperciliousness.

[59] In ‘The pragmatist’s progress’, Rorty makes it pretty clear where he lands: ‘all thegreat dualisms of Western philosophy—reality and appearance, pure radianceand diffuse reflection, mind and body, intellectual rigor and sensual sloppiness,orderly semiotics and rambling semiosis—can be dispensed with. They are not to

40 J. H. Zammito

be synthesized into higher unities, not aufgehoben, but rather actively forgotten’(Rorty 1992, pp. 91 – 92).

[60] Richard Bernstein has noted that ‘sometimes Rorty writes as if any philosophicalattempt to sort out the better from the worse, the rational from the irrational(even assuming that this is historically relative) must lead us back tofoundationalism and the search for an ahistorical perspective’ (Bernstein 1985,p. 78).

[61] White (1973); Kellner (1989); Ankensmit (1986); Cohen (1978). See also Carret al. (1982).

[62] On this classic phrase of hermeneutics, see Behler (1984) and Muller-Vollmer(1972).

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Ayers, M. (1970) ‘Substance, reality, and the great, dead philosophers’, AmericanPhilosophical Quarterly, vol. 7, pp. 38 – 49.

Ayers, M. (1978) ‘Analytical philosophy and the history of philosophy’, in J. Ree,M. Ayers and A. Westoby (eds), Philosophy and Its Past, Humanities, AtlanticHighlands, NJ, pp. 41 – 66.

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Behler, E. (1984) ‘What it means to understand an author better than he understoodhimself: idealistic philosophy and romantic hermeneutics’, in Literary Theory andCriticism: Festschrift Presented to Rene Wellek in Honor of His 80th Birthday, vol. 1,Peter Lang, Bern, Frankfurt and New York, pp. 69 – 92.

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