On June 8th 2007 the Sea of Faith Movement lost an important philosophical ally with the death of the American neo-pragmatist, Richard Rorty. Here I want to express my own appreciation of his work through a brief account of the key idea that animated it and make reference to his recent writings about religion. I hope I create sufficient curiosity that readers will wish to explore Rorty’s works for themselves.
The key idea for which Rorty is famous is antirepresentationalism, an idea akin to Don Cupitt’s non-realism. Rorty claims that human knowledge is not to be understood as finding the right mental or linguistic representation by which to depict or describe the non-mental and the non-linguistic world. The mind and language are not like mirrors reflecting or representing the world for our inspection. The view that they are, with its correspondence theory of truth and its various philosophical distinctions such as appearance-reality, subject-object, value-fact, and emotional-rational has held Western philosophical culture captive for far too long. For Rorty, anti-realism, idealism and a coherence theory of truth are equally unwelcome consequences of representational thinking. Indeed, his view that it is unhelpful to consider language as providing knowledge by representing non-linguistic reality, does not mean that language can break free of the causal impacts made by people and things. Yet, of course, people and things are always contextualised and recontextualised in language. It is, however, only thinking representationally that would lead one to suppose that there is a gap between causal impacts and contextualisation. Rorty’s antirepresentationalist sees no such gap. For her, Rorty writes, in Philosophy as Cultural Politics: Philosophical Papers Vol 4 published just before his death, nothing can ‘put us in relation to an object different than that of simply talking about that object in sentences whose truth we have taken into our lives.’ (p. 139).
This is not the place to discuss the debates that have forged a Rortyan take on the question of truth but his take on truth exemplifies his antirepresentationalist position well. He is clear that, ‘Everybody knows that the difference between true and false beliefs is as important as that between nourishing and poisonous food’ (p. 89) However, for ‘the man who killed truth’, as Rorty has been described, it is important that we refuse the representationalist view of truth. To fail to do so is to see truth as something non-human, a surrogate for the position once held by God, something about which it makes sense to talk about getting closer to, a non-human reality behind the appearances which has been waiting for the correct language to come along and describe. Rather, antirepresentationalists translate such ‘truth talk’ as ‘the love of reaching intersubjective agreement, the love of getting mastery over a recalcitrant set of data, the love of winning arguments, and the love of synthesising little theories into big ones.’ (p. 35) Instead of speaking of progress, for example, in terms of getting closer to the realist’s ‘redemptive truth’, Rorty suggests that we understand progress as individuals and communities coming up with new and imaginative ways of solving problems and creating greater human solidarity and more human happiness. The only uses of ‘truth’ worth talking about are those everyday uses which endorse or commend beliefs and caution against other beliefs (a belief being simply a rule for action) in the process of inferential justification present in everyday conversation. ‘Information [and hence knowledge that can be either true or false] came into the universe,’ Rorty writes, ‘when the first hominids began to justify their actions to one another by making assertions and backing up those assertions with further assertions.’ (p. 113) For an anti-representationalist it does not much matter whether we talk of a true belief or a belief that we can justify to a given audience. ‘The ability to wield the concept of ‘true belief’, notes Rorty, ‘is a necessary condition for being a user of language.’ (p. 89). It is not a warrant of access to the really real as representationalists might have us believe.
Rorty urges us to try out an anti-representational way of thinking simply because of the benefits it produces, ridding us of philosophical problems and distinctions that have become more trouble than they are worth. However, ‘If one’s heart leads one toward realism,’ Rorty writes, ‘then one will take representationalism… seriously.’ (p. 144) Emotional attractiveness rather than knock-down argument carries the weight of the decision between representationalism and anti-representationalism.
The same, Rorty argues, goes for whether one continues to be religious or not.
One reason for discussing Rorty’s Philosophy as Cultural Politics here is that the opening section of this, his last book, brings together two of his recent writings on religion. Rorty reiterates his earlier claim that people have a right to hold religious beliefs as long as they do so in private. He notes that, ‘It is never an objection to a religious belief that there is no evidence for it. The only possible objection to it can be that it intrudes an individual project into a social and cooperative project, and thereby offends against … one’s responsibility to cooperate with other human beings.’ (p 35) For an anti-representationalist, any expression, even those of the religious realist, can have a sense if you give it one but some expressions complicate the narratives which presently enable us to achieve the social purposes we currently have. That is not to deny that a narrative about God has served human purposes usefully in the past but now it is a relic we can do without, given our current need for social co-operation.
For Rorty, religious belief remains a possibility for private devotion but we are better off understanding it, like every other set of beliefs, as a feature of cultural politics rather than a variety of ontological speculation, for there are no neutral social norms that would allow us to regulate discussion about questions such as ‘Does God exist?’ as if a really real God required to be talked about in a specific way still to be decided. This is an idea that does not work for antirepresentationalists because, for them, we only know the items we do (including God) through the language we use to talk about them. All such language is a human social affair belonging to the realm of cultural politics and within which any religious language game can be played with its own internal criteria of truth and falsity but without ontological implications beyond the language game being played.
This is an argument Rorty develops in perhaps his most important essay on religious belief, ‘Cultural Politics and the Question of the Existence of God’ (pp. 3-26). Here, Rorty offers a concise introduction to the thought of Robert Brandom, which Rorty sees as an extension of his own anti-representationalism, and places his account of religious belief within it. In this context, we cut ourselves off from all varieties of realist God-talk ‘not because of an ontological fact about… God [i.e. that God does not exist after all] but because of sociological facts about the unavailability of norms to regulate discussion.’ (p. 23) Without such social norms realist religious belief must remain a private affair. But, in my view, this leaves entirely open the extent to which a non-realist outlook which shares Rorty’s anti-representationalism might attempt to re-weave a religious narrative into the socio-political fabric of human life.
Anyone who has already read some of Rorty’s work will know that he writes with a lucid and often playful style. They will know that he is at home discussing the range of issues that interest philosophical culture and that he slides effortlessly across the analytic-continental philosophical divide. If you are someone who thinks that knowledge has no non-human foundation, that creating human solidarity is more important than knowledge of something non-human and that such solidarity is best served by persuading the emotions to allow us to consider ever wider groups of people as ‘part of us’ then you will be grateful to Rorty for providing a clear articulation of this position. Like me, your gratitude will be equally evident if you are someone who wishes to clear the religious garden of its metaphysical and ontological weeds in order to allow its non-realist flowers to bloom. Just as there are many varieties of orchid, much loved by Rorty, so there are many ways in which Rorty has contributed to the general conversation of humankind. Assisting the religious non-realist gardener is just one such contribution for which many of us are deeply thankful.
Dr. Philip Knight, who wrote his PhD on Rorty and Sea of Faith Non-Realism, teaches Religious Education in Canterbury. For a more detailed discussion of Rorty’s account of truth see my chapter ‘Religious Belief without Representational Truth’ in Time and Tide: Sea of Faith Beyond the Millennium (O Books, 2001).
Reviewed: Philosophy as Cultural Politics: Philosophical Papers Vol. 4 by Richard Rorty, Cambridge University Press, 2007, pbk, £15.99, ISBN:0521698359.