I went back to Rorty’s the Consequences of Pragmatism this morning and re-read “Professionalized Philosophy and Transcendental Culture”. As a philosopher in an English department, it’s good therapy. However, I am confronted again and again by why I hate Rorty’s work. In this essay, like so many others, Rorty makes interpretive leaps by situating him between the history of literary criticism in the 18th and 19th centuries and being an analytic philosopher turned eclectic. It does seem that Rorty has read widely, but he also has a bit of egotistical flare. He never justifies these interpretive leaps. There are no footnotes when he speaks of Keats praising Shakespeare in the four claims mentioned below.
“This transcendentalist point of view is the mark of the highbrow. It is the attitude that there is no point in raising questions of truth, goodness, or beauty because between ourselves and the thing judged there always intervenes mind, language, a perspective chosen among dozens, one description chosen out of thousands. On one side, it is the lack of seriousness which Plato attributed to the poets, the negative capabilities for which Keats praised Shakespeare” (CoP, 67).
Now, I think the highbrow, or the rise of the highbrow, may be contested as there is no reference to the history of criticism in this piece nor are examples offered about criticism that exemplifies what he says emerges. Instead, Rorty name drops on the previous page Vaihinger and Valery, Marlowe and Hobbes as he does here. Left undefended are a host of implicit claims. 1. There is some attitude and standpoint called the highbrow, to which I think is also a comment about self-description). He merely claims the existence of this standpoint in the history of the academy. He cites no examples consistent with this claim. 2. Somehow the rise of this thing called highbrow culture “sees no point in raising questions of truth, goodness, or beauty.” He does not see them as worthwhile to answer with the demand I am claiming about support since there’s no one “fact of the matter” to be decided. He never supports this claim with examples or footnotes of highbrow figures that do not care for these things. That’s a sweeping claim, it seems. 3. He says that mind, language, perspective and the contingency of life do not ground any attempt at making sense of texts and culture. This is at least consistent with his claims that there are no final vocabularies. Unlike Arendt, all of it seems ephemeral, but at least with Arendt deep footnotes and competency with English, German, French, Latin and Greek all come together in a way that Rorty can never achieve. Instead, he floats on the ether of his own story.
It’s 4 that bothers me. 4. Keats praises Shakespeare because of an implied lack of seriousness Plato attributed to the poets. This claim is so ephemeral, and maybe it’s true. Maybe it is not, but my academic brain wants a footnote, some textual support to defend the set of claims made. The strange thing is Rorty, like me, is also an academic. When does Keats praise Shakespeare for a lack of seriousness that exemplifies Plato’s attribution of the poets? Does Rorty mean the negative capabilities of poets in the Republic? If so where? How does Rorty understand Plato’s critique of the poets at all?
The strange irony is if Rorty sees himself as exemplifying the highbrow standpoint then he need not see my demand as anything serious. I am just one person in a sea of shifting concepts and contexts making demands for an argument because I am accepting in this critique of his sloppy scholarship the “Platonic conception of truth as accuracy of representation” (CoP 67). However, it’s entirely possible that a genteel mind could paint eloquent pictures and hide in plain sight because no matter what room he entered in his life, his erudition meant that most people are not as well-read as he was in both literature and philosophy. It’s possible to hide one’s badly defended claims in plain sight with the rhetoric and superficial engagement of authors. And the fact that many recognize this, it becomes impossible to tell if Rorty is swindling with historical claims when he speaks about literature. So when he says, “Novels and poems [in the nineteenth century] are now the principal means by which a bright youth gains a self-image” with no evidence whatsoever, how can he then use this as evidence to say that “nineteenth century imaginative literature took the place of both religion and philosophy in forming and solacing the agonized conscience of the young” (CoP, 66). Is there a who or set of examples that inform this claim?
Everything Rorty writes is underdetermined in this way and probably on purpose.
The Horizon and The Fringe 