The challenge of studying philosophy: first, understand the philosopher. Then, try to understand his interpreters.

I heard a joke once, about French political scientists. They look at something happening, and wonder how it will work in theory.

[Rimshot]

The problem isn’t just a French one. For pragmatists in the social sciences- Burke, William James, Michael Oakeshott- developing a philosophical worldview out of the practical experience of life can look like a tatterdemalion business when the rock stars can make everything in their formulations slot into place just like a geometric proof.

And, then, as we see from this review of a book on philosophical realism, there’s the challenge of being written about, once you are gone:

...In 1979 Rorty published Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, a book with three heroes: Dewey, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein. If you read or quote Rorty, you will quickly run into Dewey. You will run into his name, anyway—there are some interpretive ironies here. Rorty praised Dewey to the skies, but as he did, he transformed Dewey into Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein (in his later period) thought that philosophical theorizing was a waste of energy. A clear-eyed inspection of ordinary social life removes any need for a theory of the sort philosophers want to give. Wittgenstein’s goal was to develop an anti-theory, an antidote to philosophy, a getting-over of the whole business. Rorty believed those things, too—in an alarmingly perfect image, he compared epistemology to a “collapsed circus tent” under which people are still thrashing about. Dewey did not believe those things; he saw a need for philosophical theories and wrote up a quite complicated one in Experience and Nature. 

Why, then, did Rorty put Dewey in such a central place? I think it is partly because Rorty found Wittgenstein such an inappropriate model in other ways. Dewey was a great American progressive, a humanistic liberal, a founding member of the NAACP and supporter of the ACLU. He was also a great advocate of conversation and exchange. Wittgenstein, on the other hand, was a misanthrope, inclined to mysticism, who scorned democratic progressive ideas. I think Rorty was philosophically quite close to Wittgenstein, but politically so much closer to Dewey that he massaged Dewey into an anti-theorist like himself. In any case, perhaps Dreyfus and Taylor thought that by dealing with Rorty—which they do well—they had dealt also with Dewey. That is not so, as I have argued. There is another interpretive irony here. Dreyfus and Taylor do something like the opposite of what Rorty did: they try to turn Wittgenstein into Dewey—into someone who does want to give philosophical theories but thinks philosophy needs to recognize the social and cultural context in which language operates. Wrangling the mighty dead!

Retrieving Realism

Hubert Dreyfus and Charles Taylor

Harvard University Press, $39.95 (cloth)