The History of Philosophy as Philosophy: (3). Diagnosing Past Errors

In the past two decades, the
most ambitious attempt to use contextually oriented
history for philosophical ends is Richard Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, which
attempts to diagnose the central error of Western
philosophy (as regards metaphysics and epistemology)
from Plato onwards, focusing on Descartes, Locke, and
Kant. According to Rorty, these philosophers developed a notion
of knowledge as a mental ‘mirroring’ of reality. Philosophy’s task was to assess the ‘accuracy of
representation’ of this mirroring, both in
general and in the various domains of knowledge. Locke allegedly
rendered this task as a natural-scientific project, while Kant
helped set up philosophy as a ‘tribunal of pure reason’ before
which other disciplines were to submit their credentials in order to receive their licences.

The accuracy of Rorty’s
picture of the history of ancient and early modern
philosophy has frequently been challenged. His rendering of the
philosophers named is at best an outdated caricature, at worst a
‘just so’ story fabricated to portray the ‘authority’ of past philosophy as resting on a rhetorical
ploy that would fail in the sophisticated
present. The moral of his tale is that philosophy today can make
no direct contribution to intellectual discussion. Its role can
only be to ‘edify’, by describing the results of one (nonphilosophical) area of discourse to the participants of
another (non-philosophical) area.

Here is an example of Rorty’s
history. In a section on ‘Epistemology and
Philosophy’s Self-Image’, he uses Descartes and Hobbes
to exemplify the aims of early modern epistemology. According
to Rorty, Descartes and Hobbes were out to ‘make the intellectual
world safe for Copernicus and Galileo’. When these philosophers
rejected the (Aristotelian) philosophy of the schools, ‘they
did not think of themselves as substituting a new and better kind of philosophy—a better theory of
knowledge, or a better metaphysics, or a better
ethics’; nor did they think of themselves as offering
‘ ‘‘philosophical systems’’, but as contributing to the efflorescence
of research in mathematics and mechanics’. In Rorty’s view,
neither Descartes nor Hobbes distinguished ‘philosophy’ from
‘science’; they aimed mainly at effecting a separation between ‘ecclesiastical institutions’, on the
one hand, and ‘science and scholarship’,
on the other.

Rorty’s statements reveal his
awareness that seventeenth-century philosophers
were deeply involved in developing a new science, and that
both Descartes and Hobbes addressed ecclesiastical authority. But his general characterization of
their work badly misses the mark.
Hobbes wrote works on optics, but made no significant contributions
to science and was not much of a mathematician; he was
complimentary toward Galileo, but offered his own arguments for a corpuscular conception of matter.
Although Descartes was an original
mathematician and did some work in mechanics, he did not think
much of Galileo’s law for falling bodies, and had already formulated
his own laws of motion when Galileo’s work was published.
Moreover, each of their approaches is nothing if not systematic.
It is true that they used the term ‘philosophy’ to mean systematic
knowledge in general, as indeed the word was then commonly
defined. But it is not true that they, or their century, did not recognize distinctions among
‘philosophical’ disciplines—that is,
among the various theoretical bodies of knowledge. Descartes explicitly differentiated the disciplines
listed in his famous tree of knowledge:
metaphysics as the roots, physics as the trunk, and medicine,
mechanics, and morals as the branches. Although he held that
metaphysics could provide principles for physics, he distinguished the two subject areas. Metaphysics was
more general,

encompassing the ‘first elements’ of everything,
including questions about the essences and
existence of God and the soul. Descartes explicitly
sought to place the new science on a new and better metaphysical
foundation, in order (as he revealed in correspondence) to
replace the Aristotelian scheme.

Examples could be multiplied
of Rorty’s lack of immersion in the work of
the philosophers about whom he writes. Instead, I want to highlight
two ironies concerning his work.

First, he intends to divert
philosophy from its alleged role of imperious
judge to that of conversational participant. Had he examined
the work of early modern philosophy more fully, he would
have found that the specifically philosophical portions of their
work did engage their times.
Descartes’s metaphysics was aimed
toward founding a new science of nature—not by engaging in
rhetorical battle with the Roman Church, but by establishing, in a systematic philosophical manner, the
fundamental principles of the new
physics. Today we may doubt that Descartes accomplished his aim
in the intended manner; for instance, we might question whether
he actually could derive his specific laws of motion from metaphysical
principles, as he said. But we should not doubt that Descartes
provides (as do Locke, Kant, and others) a model of the philosopher
as an intellectually engaged participant, not an aloof certifier
of mirrors seeking to dupe the rest of culture into buying a mirror metaphor. A deeper pursuit of
contextual history might have revealed
a model from the past to aid Rorty in his effort to encourage
philosophers to engage the intellectual and cultural work of their
own times.

Second, although Rorty’s
historiography is avowedly historicist, his
historical narrative portrays a near perennial task for philosophy in its first 2,500 years: the assessment of
knower as mirrorer. Rorty reports
that he found teachers as diverse as Richard McKeon, Rudolf
Carnap, and Charles Hartshorne to be ‘saying the same thing:
that a ‘‘philosophical problem’’ was a product of the unconscious adoption of the assumptions built into
the vocabulary in which the problem was stated—assumptions
which were to be questioned before the problem itself was
taken seriously’. Accordingly, ‘philosophical
problems’ appear or disappear, and change their
shapes ‘as a result of new assumptions or vocabularies’. Rorty endorses a conception of philosophy’s
history ‘as a series, not of alternative
solutions to the same problems, but of quite different sets of problems’. He adopts the
‘historicism’ I described in section 1.

Yet Rorty’s book seeks to
trace the single image or idea of the ‘glassy
essence’ of the mind from Plato through Descartes, Locke, and
Kant, into its linguistic transformation in the twentieth century. In this
story, the vocabulary changes, but the problems (and many of
the solutions) remain the same: the problems pertain to the epistemology of mirroring. In the name
of historicism, Rorty has flattened
out the history of philosophy. He has failed to see how it could be
true both that philosophy had been concerned since the time of
Plato with questions about the knower’s relation to the known,
and also that the theories and purposes of philosophers had
changed from epoch to epoch, or even from writer to writer. Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, and Kant each
had a relationship to the new
science, but the relationships differed. Descartes, for instance, thought that metaphysics could provide a
priori foundations for the new
science, discernible through pure intellect. Locke, by contrast, cast philosophy as an ‘under-laborer’ to
the sciences, and he denied that the
source of knowledge allegedly used by Descartes, the pure intellect
operating independently of the senses, even exists. But he shared
with Descartes an interest in the implications of a corpuscular view of matter—which he introduced as
the best hypothesis available for the description
of sensory perception.

Rorty’s failure to capture
the aims or diagnose the ills of Western philosophy
does not show that history cannot provide diagnostic results,
or that works of ambitious historical sweep should be avoided.
But it does suggest that such efforts should draw on the extant
work in history of philosophy. That type of work was in a comparative
slump during the late 1960s to mid-1970s, when Rorty wrote his book, and in any case he chose
to wave off its recent results. A final irony is
that Rorty’s image of the philosophy of the past is
remarkably similar to the actual practice of the detached and imperious analytic philosophers of the 1960s, the
very time when he framed his project.

Source : Sorell, Tom and
G. A. J. Rogers.(2005), Analytic Philosophy
and History of Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon
Press).