Sunday 14 August 2011

Richard Rorty and Conversational Philosophy

According to Richard Rorty's definition, doing 'conversational philosophy' requires us "to give up the goal of getting things right, and substitute that of enlarging our repertoire of individual and cultural self-descriptions". This fits in with his pragmatist view that the point of philosophy "is not to find out what anything is 'really' like, but to help us grow up - to make us happier, freer, and more flexible".

Rorty does not seem to want us to read too much into his use of the term 'conversational', but it strikes me that there is indeed a close connection term between the goal of enlarging a repertoire of descriptions and the art of conversation. Among other things, a good conversationalist ought to be able to engage and impress a wide range of potential interlocutors, which could be said to require a sympathetic grasp of the wide range of life-stances these interlocutors might hold.

Following this train of thought, we might say the conversational thinker ought to be interdisciplinary, as it would be a poor conversationalist who only felt comfortable talking to those working in her own discipline. In particular she ought to have a grasp of literary as well as scientific culture, in order to be able to converse skillfully with members of each.

An implication for literature and the arts - which Rorty sees as important voices in the 'conversation of mankind' - might be that the best art is that which attracts the interest and admiration of people with a wide range of different intellectual positions; and that the best artists will have the breadth of intellectual sympathy required to do this (even if this remains at a relatively intuitive level - Shakespeare?).

Reading Rorty, one sometimes has the feeling that his ideal 'liberal ironist' is a little too happy, too untroubled by doubts and fears in her intellectual life, to be a flesh and blood human being. After all, when one has given up trying to get anything right, what is there left to worry about, intellectually? But, again, the term 'conversational' suggests a way of putting flesh on the bones. The would-be conversational thinker will naturally worry whether she is really as good a conversationalist as she takes herself to be - there is always the possibility that the next person she meets (or the next book she reads) will say something that blows her mind or shakes her foundations, converting her to a radically new outlook. Indeed the next person she talks to might even convince her to give up conversational philosophy and return to classical epistemology.

Not that what fundamentally worries the conversational thinker is the shame of meeting a superior conversationalist. For the underlying worry is that one's current outlook is not sufficiently flexible and open-minded, that it has not been informed by a wide enough range of perspectives, and that consequently, one is not as happy or as free as one would like to be. Despite avoiding the anxieties associated with the traditional ideals of truth, it is quite possible for a conversational thinker to be driven, in his quest for an ever wider range of intellectual sympathies, by the kind of anxious, unsatisfied desire for fulfilment most of us recognize.