Rorty: Idealism and Textualism
Going through some old notes, I came across an outline I pieced together on a Richard Rorty essay devoted to idealism and textualism that really impacted me. I was a big Rorty fan in graduate school, and I’ve probably never drifted that far away from his brand of pragmatism. I always felt he had a “clear mind, full heart” approach to the humanities in general, even if he was publicly circumspect about philosophy. He was probably right about that, too. From the vantage point of 2023, it’s striking how much textualism has essentially swallowed up and coopted the “strong criticism” Rorty describes. Since the 1970s, moral concern in the humanities has largely become a shadow of itself, a highly textualized (and unmistakably highbrow) simulacrum of concern that has launched a thousand academic careers while improving very little. Put another way, Harold Bloom and William James lost badly.
Reader's Guide to: Rorty, Richard. "Nineteenth-Century Idealism and Twentieth-Century Textualism." Consequences of Pragmatism: (Essays: 1972-1980), U of Minnesota P, 1982, pp. 139-59.
Basic Terms
19th-Century Idealism: "Nothing exists but ideas."
20-Century Textualism: "Nothing exists but texts."
Science: An endeavor in which argumentation is made easy by a common vocabulary that is understood to abide.
Literature: An endeavor in which no abiding or shared vocabulary really exists. By its nature, literature constantly generates new vocabularies.
Vocabulary: A system of language and reference, and elements of that system (such as theories). For example, "God" is part of the vocabulary of scholasticism, but not of modern philosophy.
Romanticism: The idea that science is mundane, and that once-vaunted objectivity is mere conformity to rules (an inversion of Kant's distinction between determinate and reflective judgment).
Similarities
Both are antagonistic to science
Both state that we cannot compare human thought or language to reality
Textualists: All distinctions are language-relative—the results of a certain language game.
Both share a stance on art.
Idealism: Art puts us in touch with what science can't know (spirit)
Textualism: We make, not find reality and respond to texts, not things.
For both, the scientist naively thinks that they are dealing with reality, or the world "as it is."
According to both, there is no need to give science primacy: shift from "objectivity" to "mere objectivity" is key.
Differences
Idealism posits philosophy as a sort of super-discipline that can serve as the metaphysical support for a genuine search for truth. Textualism rests on no discipline or metaphysical thesis—it is distinctly literary, but it does not present literary analysis as the successor of philosophy as a discipline uniquely equipped to reach truth.
Textualists claim to have let go of what Heidegger termed the "onto-theological tradition" in Western thought.
Idealists represent a philosophical tradition, while textualists are suspicious of philosophy (e.g., Derrida's notion that philosophy is in essence a "style of writing").
Three Key Moments
The advent of Metaphysical Idealism, or the idea that we can understand the ultimate nature of reality through those traits that distinguish humans as spiritual beings (key: reality exists "out there" and science can't put us in touch with it, but philosophy can).
Hegel stands as the beginning of the end for idealism and for philosophy. He replaces Kant's "transcendental ego" with "idea," in the process converting philosophy into a literary genre by situating all thought (and thus vocabularies) in time, place, and thus flux. Hegel takes reason outside the sphere of argumentation, into an "ecstasy of spiritual freedom." The principal legacy of metaphysical idealism (through Hegel) is "the ability of the literary culture to stand apart from science, to assert its spiritual superiority to science, to claim to embody what is most important to human beings" (149).
Friedrich Nietzsche and William James take a pragmatist turn. Instead of saying that new vocabularies can bring once-hidden universal truths to light, they say that new vocabularies can help us get what we want. According to both, philosophy had merely taken over from science the practice of producing "comforting pictures." They are part of the first generation to believe that they did not have the truth. This change in philosophy provoked changes in literary culture, as well. There was a concerted move to show what a world without "metaphysical comfort" might be like (a key component of modernism and the central project of postmodernism).
Two Main Forms of Textualist Thought
Weak Textualism: Job of critic is to find the principal of internal coherence that abides in any given text (e.g., New Criticism, Formalism)
Strong Textualism: Job of critic is to offer a "strong misreading" of the text, paying no attention to "authorial intent" (e.g. Foucault, Deconstructionism, Feminist Criticism, Queer Theory, Psychoanalytic Theory, Post-Colonial Theory, etc.).
Two Sorts of Strong Textualists
Those like Bloom and James who identify with the struggles of finite humans.
Those like Foucault and Nietzsche who are disdainful of our finitude.
Two Criticisms of Textualism
Weak Criticism: Epistemological concern, that if language cannot correspond to reality, then a sort of crass relativism will take over. Why weak? Using philosophical vocabulary to address what is essentially a post-philosophical issue. "Epistemology still looks classy to weak textualists" (156).
Strong Criticism: Moral concern, that the critic buys private intellectual and imaginative stimulus through "strong misreadings" at the price of a break from the rest of humankind (cf. Baudrillard on 9/11).
Consequence of Strong Criticism
Taking the moral criticism of textualism, we might ask: What sort of textualist/pragmatist are we to be? Like Bloom and James, do we identify with humankind's common predicament, or do we condemn this predicament as Nietzsche and Foucault do? Do we do away with "man" as Foucault suggests? How might we reconcile private fulfillment and self-realization with public morality and a concern for justice?
