A Note on Criticism
“Critics, in their secret hearts, love continuities, but he who lives with continuity alone cannot be a poet.” — Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence
Few things are better than spending a vacation perusing local bookshops or finding new and interesting beverages from nearby distilleries and breweries. And such were my activities for the few days I spent in Michigan’s crown, but still somewhat unknown, jewel, Traverse City.
After having had a few sips of a nice French-Oak aged Rye whiskey, I wandered, much to the denial and dismay of my partner in crime, over to a wood clad bookshop that caught my eye earlier in the day. I am often dubious of “local” bookshops nowadays. Like the label “organic” or “natural,” the word “local” — both explicitly stated and suggested by the “look” and decor — is often a cover to get you in, which, like biting into something organic, ends up being either a lie or a huge letdown.
So went this particular shop where I was immediately greeted by full-priced, hot off the press hardcovers, while the meat of the store was filled with mass-market paperbacks — mostly romance — that people, I’m assuming, dropped off on their way downtown to drink whiskey with the five bucks they earned. But I slogged on — as I often do just for good measure — and was pleasantly surprised when my whiskey-warmed self was presented with an odd and small selection of books under the shelf heading “politics.” Which, to be sure, was simply everything that wasn’t fiction.
To my even further delight I found a book entitled The Betrayal of Liberalism, a collection of essays edited by Hilton Kramer and Roger Kimball. It was mostly the editors and contributors’ names that drew me in, and though most of them are either squarely in the reactionary camp they are nonetheless interesting to read. I just prefer conservatism.
I’ve developed this odd habit over the years of skimming the index for the names of authors and thinkers of whom I believe I’ve been most influenced by — for this collection, I would be on the lookout for Oakeshott, Minogue, Berlin, Gray, etc., of course The Betrayal of Liberalism would come to mention some of these towering figures. But sneaking in somewhere between Oakeshott and Minogue on my own list — if not before Oakeshott — is the brilliant Richard Rorty. The sighs and ‘neath-the-breath murmurings I can hear, no doubt.
Sure enough Rorty was mentioned in the index with a whopping page reference of “9–14.” I always get nervous at junctures like these, knowing that a book with this lineup of contributors wouldn’t like Rorty, however, I can rest content with this — I’m no anti-Millian, blocking out everything to the contrary. Knowing a critic won’t like someone I like isn’t the core of my nervousness: it is the ever-present fear of disingenuousness and misunderstandings, both blatant and accidental.
Far from being the bastion of “you just don’t understand,” I have my own problems and criticisms of Mr. Rorty, of which a few critics here and there have duly met (and Mr. Rorty is even found conceding this and that point). I am very much unlike those who can find no fault with their intellectual heroes or find it necessary for those heroes to be paraded as flawless and utterly divine. It is a disease whose strand runs through both Black Lives Matter and The Tea Party right up through the culture of mutual exclusivity as a whole. As Aaron Haspel writes: “Those who say ‘you’re either part of the problem or part of the solution’ are part of the problem.”
What irks me isn’t the fact that people have criticisms of other people’s work. It’s more the fact that these criticisms are often criticisms of the critic’s own interpretation of said work. This is, no doubt, a banal and obvious point to make, but, I think, it is a point worth making considering the events that were to unfold that fateful day in the bookshop. There are, obviously, various interpretations of any given thinker. There are also, on the whole, better and worse interpretations. As a confessed pragmatist I would even go as far to say that original intent aside, there are more and less useful readings.
I don’t think I’ve dug myself too much of a fashionable and impregnable postmodern trench by admitting these propositions, but some, no doubt, will see it that way. The editors of The Betrayal of Liberalism presented their interpretation of Rorty in the introduction, and since it is stuck in ink I suppose I shall have to live with it. I will be presenting a more genuine — not necessarily more sympathetic — reading of Rorty over and against Kimball and Kramer. One of the better interpretations.
Nothing pointed more clearly to the poverty of the editors’ understanding of Rorty — or perhaps was more representative of the fact that Achieving Our Country is seemingly the only book they’ve bothered to pick up by him— than their claim that Rorty’s concept of the “reformist Left” couldn’t be “more opposed to Trilling’s call for liberalism to embrace an ‘awareness of complexity and difficulty.’” They go on: “In Rorty’s updated version [of the Left], there are no complexities or difficulties to be entertained.”
It is unclear where the editors find support for this view: Rorty always believed that democracy, whatever the word meant specifically, was generally messy. And at the end of the day he believed, with Dewey, that it was to be looked at as an experiment. Rorty’s words were “wishy-washy.” He constantly railed against Utopian politics and visionaries just as his Dewey did with Marx and his followers.
Achieving Our Country, as I see it, is quite simply a call for retreated academics to come down from the ivory tower and engage in political reformism once again. The word reformism taken even at face value as “the belief that gradual changes through and within existing institutions can ultimately change a society’s fundamental economic system and political structures” seems to entail running into difficulties and requires one to be willing to compromise, negotiate, persuade, etc. The simple and easy route — and thus worse route for Rorty (and Dewey for that matter) — is one of revolution or violent overthrow. “I think the Left should get back into the business of piecemeal reform,” Rorty said near the end of the book. If things were truly simple, or had Rorty offered the view that they ought to be simple, it’s hard to see why he would go on to acknowledge piecemeal reformism as opposed to, say, revolution.
The editors go on to quote Rorty disapprovingly:
Among these ideals are participatory democracy and the end of capitalism. Power will pass to the people, the sixties Left believed, only when decisions are made by all those who may be affected by their results… when they do, capitalism as we know it will have ended, and something new will have taken its place.
The editors sarcastically — and rightly I might add — write in reply:
Yes, and the state will ‘wither away’, as the Marxists kept promising us, bourgeois capitalism will slide into the ‘dustbin of history’, replaced by the promised Utopia of freedom, virtue, and liberal unanimity on every issue.
The irony, of course, is that Rorty was characterizing the views of the “cultural Left” in the passage quoted by the editors, and so he’s actually in agreement with the pejorative reply about the promise of the state “withering away.”
Whether willful or not, this misunderstanding is egregious. It is, essentially, reading an author say “I disagree with such and such because they believe in a, b, and c,” and then going on to accuse the author of agreeing with a,b, and c. It’s hard to believe that keen and astute critics as Kimball and Kramer are, that this boulder “slipped” through the cracks.
Back to the text, Rorty says of this “cultural Left” that they produce “dreams not of political reforms but of inexplicable, magical transformations,” and adopt ideals “which nobody is yet able to imagine being actualized,” i.e. believing that the state will wither away and capitalism will slide in the dustbin. Rorty, again, is admonishing the cultural and overly-academic Left in the book, and wants them to once again join hands with the reformist Left; to those on the ground so to speak. These are just the beginning of the dangers, I suppose, of lifting quotes out of context. I am grateful, however, that I didn’t have to look much further than the preceding sentence of said lifted passage to rectify the error.
On the subject of the reformist Left, the editors are rightfully wary of Rorty’s history, though they would not have had much of a problem if they were acquainted with a bit more of Rorty’s work. It is true that Rorty presents a romantic version of the reformist Left he envisions at work in the first half of the 20th Century — but he also presents a romantic version of the history of philosophy, Plato, Aristotle, Heidegger, Dewey, Wittgenstein, Whitman, Davidson, Putnam, metaphysics, pragmatism, realism, objectivity and so on and so forth for just about everything he came into contact with.
The point is that Rorty’s work is — and this is something he admits to time and time again — narrative- as opposed to historically-centered. When not read through the lens of Bloom’s concepts of the “strong poet” and “strong misreadings” the reader will inevitably see a distorted view of Rorty’s project. Though perhaps the irony of strongly misreading Rorty to present one’s own view is something I am missing.
So no, the editors are not wrong per se, they just haven’t grasped Rorty’s larger project: holding his feet to the fire for not being historically nuanced enough will invite Rorty’s famous shrug and perhaps a casual ‘That’s not what I’m trying to do’ retort. He wasn’t trying to present history qua history, such that if one does happen to have criticisms at this level, it would be better to criticize Rorty’s larger meta-philosophical project rather than the smaller points that actually can be slogged off with a “You just don’t understand…” As Oakeshott said, “Not to detect a man’s style is to have missed three-quarters of the meaning of his actions and utterances.”
The last bit of the Rorty reference ends with the slight that the “ironic liberalism [Rorty] champions is much more likely to foster intellectual conformity and a stultifying regimen of political correctness in which every aspect of life is subjected to ideological scrutiny.” Perhaps I will end with a fuller length quote Rorty wrote at around the same time as Achieving Our Country. I hope I am not being unsympathetic to the editors in quoting another work, but the errors ought to be addressed. Though in my defense even in the book they chose to cite from, Rorty criticizes extreme political correctness and goes on to present the “dark side to the story” he’s been telling, which, in sum, is this:
I didn’t foresee what has actually happened: that the popularity of philosophy (under the sobriquet “theory”) in our literature departments was merely a transitional stage on the way to the development of what we in America are coming to call “the Academic Left.”’ This new sort of “left” has been called, by Harold Bloom, “the School of Resentment,” and the name fits. Its members are typically no more interested in the romance of the Nietzsche-to-Derrida tradition than in that of the Shakespeare-Milton-Wordsworth tradition or the Jefferson-Jackson-Teddy Roosevelt-John F. Kennedy tradition. They prefer resentment to romance. They view themselves as “subverting” such things as “the humanist subject” or “Western technocentrism” or “masculist binary oppositions.” They have convinced themselves that by chanting various Derridean or Foucauldian slogans they are fighting for human freedom. They see the study of literature and philosophy simply as a means to political ends. The political uselessness, relative illiteracy, and tiresomely self-congratulatory enthusiasm of this new Academic Left, together with its continual invocation of the names of Derrida and Foucault, have conspired to give these latter thinkers a bad name in the United States. This complicates my own situation, since I have to keep insisting that my admiration for these two men does not extend to an admiration for their disciples, the resentful specialists in subversion. Nevertheless, philosophical colleagues who have remained resolutely analytic often say to me: “See what you’ve done! You helped smooth the way for these creeps! Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?”
It sure feels like the usually wonderful editors of this collection are the one’s echoing Rorty, screaming “See what you’ve done!” Surely, they can find much clearer targets at which to shoot.
After this little foray into the introduction, I noticed that Roger Kimball, one of the editors, mentions Rorty in a number of his books and in a particularly long essay entitled “Experiments Against Reality,” in which the same dart of postmodern relativism qua chaos is slung at a picture of Rorty on the wall. So I read the piece, but decided against the books. Perhaps one day.
Kimball begins his piece with a prefatory “summing up” up of Rorty’s corpus by reproducing a quote: “I do not have much use for notions like ‘objective value’ and ‘objective truth.’” This, no doubt, meant to send shivers down the spines of readers until they come back up and out as audible gasps, thus pre-preparing them for the journey ahead. But Kimball isn’t arbitrary or wholly off the mark with his summations; he just more or less brings each and every one of Rorty’s points to a reductio ad absurdum. For example, Kimball says
In brief, Rorty wants a philosophy (if we can still call it that) which “aims at continuing the conversation rather than at discovering truth.” He can manage to abide “truths” with a small t and in the plural: truths that we don’t take too seriously and wouldn’t dream of foisting upon others: truths, in others words, that are true merely by linguistic convention. In a word, truths that are not true. What he cannot bear — and cannot bear to have us bear — is the idea of Truth that is somehow more than that.
It is true that Rorty wants it as Kimball has in the beginning of this quote, but as he goes on the close reader of Rorty can tell that the ideas aren’t situated correctly in Kimball’s mind. Getting an idea or philosopher’s work situated correctly takes more than being familiar with some catchy and controversial quotes.
Kimball goes on to claim that truths that are “true merely by linguistic convention… are not true.” I’m baffled as to what he means by this. Saying something is true by linguistic convention, for Rorty, is a descriptive statement alluding to the idea that we cannot step outside our linguistic practices. In a word, our context. But it doesn’t make the statements any less true in the way it’s situated in Kimball’s mind. Saying something is linguistically relative doesn’t make it any less true, it simply morphs your relationship to that statement. It opens the door to “ironism.”
Kimball, to be fair, does go on to present Rorty’s views somewhat accurately — that is to say in the genuinely trying to understand meaning of the term — sprinkling his summations with witty retorts here and there that make for entertaining reading. Kimball then leaps over the line of description to fanciful commentary on Rorty’s views, proving well beyond accurate Blumenberg’s quip that “dissatisfaction lacks diagnostic precision,”
Rorty recognizes that most people (“most nonintellectuals”) are not yet liberal ironists. Many people still believe that there is such a thing as truth independent of their thoughts. Some even continue to entertain the idea that their identity is more than a distillate of biological and sociological accidents. Rorty knows this. Whether he also knows that his own position as a liberal ironist crucially depends on most people being non-ironists is another question. One suspects not.
Again because Kimball departs from probing descriptive analysis, it is unclear where or how Rorty’s view implicitly suggests that his position “crucially depends” on people not like him. It is true that Rorty often wanders into flamboyant territory when he says things like
On my definition, an ironist cannot get along without the contrast between the final vocabulary she inherited and the one she is trying to create for herself. Irony is, if not intrinsically resentful, at least reactive. Ironists have to have something to have doubts about, something from which to be alienated (emphasis mine).
It is true, then, that Rorty’s ironist needs an entrenched vocabulary to work against, but nowhere in this endorsement is the idea that the ironist should rebel against that vocabulary for the sake of rebellion. Nor is there in this statement anything interesting — or rather anything different — about the phenomenon of change or progress. I would even go as far to say that Rorty was exaggerating a bit here, and that his exaggeration makes a relatively banal point seem world-ending.
So on a theoretical level the point Kimball is trying to make is awkward: didn’t Christ’s position “require” that there be people unlike him? Didn’t Copernicus’ view “require” people who didn’t agree with him? The criticism lands well wide and well short of the mark. Rorty is responding to a tradition in hopes that more people become liberal ironists just as Christ was responding to a world fraught with evil in hopes that they come to see that the only law is love. In an odd sense, then, Kimball is right: Rorty didn’t think the ironist vocabulary should become the dominant one, but neither did he think it could anyway. Without diving too deep into the matter, Rorty valued private irony, not a public one. In any case, I’m struggling to think of any position that can be staked staked out without referring to other positions — a standard Kimball elevates to nobility and then scoffs at Rorty for not holding.
It is true that Rorty could embellish a bit; he considered himself a storyteller above all, waiting for others to present other stories as opposed to pointing out the inconsistencies in his own (though he wasn’t against this so much as he regretted this was his legacy). This, it could be added, is as nonsensical, or at least irresolvable and inconsequential, as criticizing narrative inconsistencies in novels. In any case, Rorty does indeed say that he wants to
get to the point where we no longer worship anything, where we treat nothing as a quasi divinity, where we treat everything — our language, our conscience, our community — as a product of time and chance.
But this is hardly the end of the story for Rorty. What would it look like not to worship anything? What it would it look like to treat nothing as a quasi-divinity? I’m not sure Kimball devotes adequate reflection to these questions, as the implication throughout is that he believes chaos to be the only alternative to a belief in “something more” or a divine power, a dichotomy, like most dichotomies, Rorty and the pragmatists eschewed. “Let us remember,” Thomas Reid warns us with a bit of adjustment, “how common the folly is of going from one [position] into its opposite.”
We should be careful, then, not to hear Rorty saying something he isn’t, i.e. hear him putting forth a positive doctrine with regards to religious faith or a belief in the divine. Nor should we — and this is the more obvious of points — hear him saying that we cannot find meaning within certain spheres of life. In Kimball’s mind, Rorty putting things negatively in this way is akin to bestowing his stamp of approval upon the positive opposite: since you think believe “thou shalt not kill,” you must also believe “thou shalt give life,” no? When reading criticism such as Kimball’s, I am often reminded of Emerson’s comment about hobgoblins and foolish minds: inconsistency is both the easiest “flaw” to find and the least consequential.
Worship, for Rorty, is a sort of blind faith in the unreachable, reminiscent of Dewey’s anti-clericalism. This judgement standing in contrast to weak readings often pointing to Dewey or Rorty’s blatant atheism, which there is very little evidence for. Rorty is not merely skeptical of but worries about things done and said in the name of a divinity or in the name of Ultimate Authority or Reality. He wanted us only to answer to ourselves; the human community. And it takes a particularly tortured, reading to go from ‘we ought to think of ourselves as answerable only to the human community’ to ‘so now there is no moral code and anyone can do whatever they want; no standards — nothing.’
To be sure, Rorty doesn’t believe we shouldn’t believe in meaning or, to a certain extent, a spiritual life, but rather he sees all these things as distinctly human creations and thus, somewhat ironically, more meaningful. Meaning found in divine or metaphysical realms are of a different kind, but human life is none the worse for it. Rorty’s humanism shines by arguing, au contraire, the beauty that our terrestrial life can offer us if we look. “There is nothing deep down inside us except what we have put there ourselves.” All he disdains, really, are divine justifications in politics and human affairs for doing this or that. He is not all that different from Arendt in this sense.
Rorty goes on to say in “Pragmatism as Romantic Polytheism” that you are a polytheist “if you think that there is no actual or possible object of knowledge that would permit you to commensurate and rank all human needs.” This is all he means by worship. Knowing our beliefs are formed by time and chance gives us the ability to be ironists, but it is, in some senses, not as detrimental as Kimball’s dramatic dichotomy would have us believe.
The whole point of the matter is, more or less, about criticism, the uses of criticism, and its potentially dangerous suppositions. Kimball’s treatment of Rorty here is too wise to be strawmanning but it is too weak to be steelmanning. Perhaps it is straw dipped in plaster: hard, feels rigid enough when a light touch is applied, but absolutely shatters when struck with any significant force.
But this is all a bit greater than Kimball’s remarks. This isn’t, on first glance, just about correcting the errors or misgivings in Kimball’s thoughts, but is an attempt to show what is at stake in this culture of criticism. By culture I mean the actual genre, not that we are, in fact, a culture of criticism, though that might hold too.
What if, for example, someone were to read Kimball’s analysis without ever having read Rorty? What if they come away not wanting to read him because it doesn’t sound up her alley or in her wheelhouse, never realizing that — or questioning whether — Kimball’s treatment is oblique and crude? What if she further recounts to other people, when Rorty is referred to or brought up in conversation, how Rorty was delusional, misguided, and didn’t believe in reality (maybe she only read the title)? She might get nods of approval or squints of acquiescence, assuring herself that her analysis is apt, when it is, in reality, just uncontested. And surely, she is talking out of turn, no? Not to mention this is talking out of turn twice removed. Blueprint for a silo.
What does it mean to speak out of turn? It is, according one source, “To say something erroneous, foolish, or imprudent at an inappropriate time or when one does not have the authority to do so.” While a good starting point, this is far too general. Knowing when one is talking out of turn may be the only cure for the illness in addition to others pointing it out. I believe that Kimball was talking out of turn, but does he think so? Did he think that when he began writing that piece that he had a masterful grip on Rorty’s philosophy? Or even a firm one? Has he spent years scouring the literature, scanning the counter-points brought up by Rorty’s serious critics and the latter’s response to them? I am willing to bet not — because he writes as if he is utterly unaware of them — but in the spirit of this essay I will hedge that bet a bit.
Let me try to illustrate my point a little further. I’ve read Mill’s On Liberty countless times; I’ve grasped the ideas and wrestled with the points. However, I would feel in no way comfortable in seriously critiquing his views or hoisting upon Mill the blame for this or that social phenomena. Something Kimball is happy to do to Nietzsche and by extension Rorty when he says,
For despite the tenacity of non-irony in many sections of society, there is much in our culture — the culture of Europe writ large — that shows the disastrous effects of Nietzsche’s dream of a postmetaphysical, ironized society of putative self-creators.
Getting back to Mill, the reason I would feel uncomfortable is twofold: I am far from feeling as though I have done my due diligence in truly trying to understand Mill’s points beyond my superficial readings, nor do I think it is necessary to use Mill, throw him in front of the bus so to speak, in order to present my own views. Criticizing bad maps doesn’t give us a better one. This isn’t an offshoot from the idea that to criticize is much easier than to be original or some silly derivative of such. It is a plea to criticize intelligently — sympathetically with an aim at understanding as best as possible the object of one’s criticism. Shortsightedly criticizing a “post-modernist ironist-liberal” to bolster one’s own views on any given topic is akin to the felt need to claim that the United States was founded as a Christian nation in order to parade the importance of Christianity in culture and society today. The two claims are separable, and it seems unnecessary — if not intellectually reprehensible — to derive an ought from an inaccurate is. Or rather a not-fully comprehended or understood “is.”
I think it’s worth repeating Oakeshott: “Not to detect a man’s style is to have missed three-quarters of the meaning of his actions and utterances.” It is style that criticism (like Kimball’s) often misses. It’s as if meaning simply presents itself as words are strung together on the page, and not, as it were, found in between the lines. In the pauses, the tone, the silences — what he or she doesn’t say might be of greater interest and insight than anything that he or she does say. Criticism isn’t easy, but let us not fall prey to the illusion that dissatisfaction stands in for it.
Mill once said that “he who knows only his own side knows little of that.” What he didn’t realize was that the “other” side is often — often; not all the time — just a viewpoint built off the flimsy and often knee-jerk interpretation of some other viewpoint, such that it does actually make it worthwhile to reconcile and rehabilitate rather than to build another flimsy structure.
Not all conflicts are reducible to misunderstandings, we are told, but how could we ever know that? We’ve never even come close to seeing if it were true — we’re too busy slogging through and fighting in the swamps of superficiality.
