A RESPONSE TO RORTY

Daryl Koehn

In his SBE address, Richard Rorty argues against any attempt to validate objec-tive truths or norms. He makes no claim that his account of the nature and scope

of the discipline of philosophical business ethics is true. From his perspective, noaccount is objectively true because the world we experience is always mediated bynarratives contingently shaped by culture and history. The standard for assessingan account should not be whether it is true but whether it efficaciously enables usto achieve social justice and to ameliorate suffering. Like Michel Foucault, Rortysees himself as undermining institutions and controlling narratives in order to freeus to imagine new ways to reduce the injustice and human pain resulting from thespread of global capitahsm.

Rorty makes three major claims:1. Philosophy has played an important historical role in curtailing the power

of religion and allowing science to advance. Now that science has triumphed overreligion, that role (along with its attendant truth claims) ought to be abandoned. Lan-guage—^be it ordinary, literary, poetic, historical, or philosophical—only providesus with a description of an ever-changing world. Every description is irreduciblyhistorical and contingent in nature. Therefore, we should give up the illusion thatthere is some Archimedean point we can use to ground our theories.

2. Since philosophy has no special or unique access to the truth, we shouldnot think of it as the universal arbiter of values or norms and should not look tophilosophers to discover or to build a foundation for ethics. But if ethical theorycatmot provide us with an objective, solid foundation for norms, what should busi-ness ethicists be doing? Must they settle for critiquing the work of foundationalists?Rorty denies us even this option because he insists there is no non-historical, non-contingent language for adjudicating among competing claims or theories. We haveno objective place on which to stand when making the case that our critique is moregrounded or correct than someone else's.

To understand what Rorty is arguing, it is helpful to situate these claims in thecontext of his larger body of work. Elsewhere Rorty argues that philosophy, likepoetry, is a language game, and the proper function of human linguistic activity isto articulate imagined worlds, not to reflect an unmediated reality, which does notexist in any case. The lover of wisdom must settle for re-describing human activityand the world. The appeal of any such re-description is, ultimately, not rational, forRorty denies reason an adjudicating role. Instead, we embrace values because theyappeal to us. ff we philosophers succeed in re-describing a host of things, events, and

© 2006. Business Ethics Quarterly, Volume 16, Issue 3. ISSN 1052-150X. pp. 391-399

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issues, then perhaps others will begin to see the world as we do and will embraceit. If a paradigm shift does occur, it will not be because we have reasoned thingsthrough but because we have started seeing them afresh:

The method is to re-describe lots and lots of things in new ways, until you havecreated a pattern of linguistic behavior which will tempt the rising generationto adopt i t . . . . This sort of philosophy does not work piece by piece, analyzingconcept after concept, or testing thesis after thesis. Rather it works holisti-cally and pragmatically. It says things like "try thinking of it this way"—ormore specifically, "try to ignore the apparently futile traditional questions bysubstituting the following new and possibly interesting questions." It doesnot pretend to have a better candidate for doing the same old things whichwe did when we spoke in the old way . . . . Conforming to my own precepts,I am not going to offer arguments against the vocabulary I want to replace.Instead, I am going to try to make the vocabulary I favor look more attractiveby showing how it may be used to describe a variety of topics.'

3. What kind of world does Rorty think is especially "attractive"? In other writ-ings, he has devoted his considerable linguistic skills to portraying an ideal world,a tolerant place where we all, as the British say, "rub along and muddle through":

What is needed is a sort of intellectual analogue of civic virtue—tolerance,irony, and a willingness to let spheres of culture flourish without worrying toomuch about their "common ground," their unification, the "intrinsic ideals"they suggest, or what picture of man they "presuppose."^

We business ethicists should be telling stories of exemplary figures with a viewto inspiring our students to act. From Rorty's pragmatic point of view, there is nopoint in trying to articulate and justify moral principles since there can be no objec-tive foundation for any morality. As he confided in an interview:

It's hard to keep moral philosophy as an academic sub-discipline going ifyou're a pragmatist. The name of the game in moral philosophy is fmdingprinciples and then fmding counter-examples to the other guy's principles.Pragmatists aren't very big on principles. There isn't much to do in moralphilosophy if you're a pragmatist.^

As Other commentators have noted, Rorty is not a relativist if one takes a relativ-ist to be someone who believes all values are equally good. Rorty unequivocallycommits himself to hberal values of sohdarity and autonomy. Moreover, he favorsdescriptions emphasizing (or even celebrating) irony and the contingency of everynarrative, all the while conceding that his own ironic portrayals of the world lackobjectivity and cannot be proven. The most we can hope for is that our fellow hu-man beings try on Rorty's way of viewing the world and find that doing so opensup new vistas. Having once imagined a better world, we will be in a position to setabout realizing that world.

Much of Rorty's analysis takes the negative form of arguing against other peo-ples' foundational morahties or interpretations. Such negativity has prompted criticsto charge that "Rorty is only one step away from Baudrillard, the self-proclaimed

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'intellectual terrorist' who prefers simply to blow up ideas with unsubstantiatedclaims and outrageous exaggerations rather than attending to matters of evaluatingtmth or falsehood, or patient empirical demonstration of his claims.'"* This chargemay have some merit, but for purposes of this discussion, I will assume that Rorty'sagenda is a positive one: by focusing on the importance of creating ourselves anewthrough the imagination, he seeks to liberate us from an unnecessary obsession withfoundations and ever more convoluted refinements of moral principles and maxims.Once freed, we will perhaps be able to think more imaginatively and to leave behindstultifying inherited worldviews. To paraphrase Shakespeare: there are more thingsin heaven and earth that are dreamt of in ethicists' philosophy.

Rorty's three claims are interdependent and, by his own admission, stand orfall as a whole picture or description. Either we see the world as mediated viacontingent, historical narratives, or we don't. If we don't find this portrayal to beemotionally compelling, we won't be persuaded to show solidarity with Rorty andto join forces with him in reforming the world. Separating Rorty's portrayal intothree strands ("claims" may be too strong, given that we are supposedly dealingonly with "re-descriptions") may somewhat misrepresent his project, but one has tobegin somewhere. Eurthermore, for all of his talk about literature and fiction, Rortyis not writing novels or lyric poetry. He is advancing reasoned considerations forhis position and, to that extent, his position can be rationally dissected.

This last observation leads me to my first concem. Rorty is not merely commit-ted to certain values: he is equally devoted to presenting his portrayal in a coherentway. He takes pains to ensure that what he says at the opening of his address is notcontradicted by what he says in middle or at the end. Why, though, does he botherwith coherence? Why not, say, along with the poet Wah Whitman, "Do I contradictmyself? Very well, then, I contradict myself? Why behave in a way that reveals heis committed to the law of non-contradiction? Kant and Plato have an answer: we areessentially the sort of beings who do not wish to assert both A and not-A. For Kant,we are rational beings who (if our consciences are not utterly cormpted) experienceself-respect rooted in regard for the moral law. To put the point slightly differently:reason has its own interests and, consequently, has motivating force in our lives. ForPlato, our souls are constituted in such a way as to be more satisfyingly ordered whenreason gives orders to desire rather than the reverse. It seems to me that Rorty alsoshows himself to be the kind of being for whom reason has motivating interests—ifhis self-respect did not demand coherence, he would not be so concemed to maintainit in his writings. So, although Rorty explicitly rejects essences, he certainly actsand speaks as if he believes we are essentially rational beings.'

In his SBE address, Rorty speaks about coherence in general. In other works, hehas argued that we must settle for "local" coherence: what we say and do shouldaccord with a limited subset of beliefs because we cannot hope to bring all of ourbeliefs into harmony with each other. Thus, Rorty would likely argue that the Sul-livan Principles played a useful role in weakening apartheid, even though we mightnot be able to show that these principles were part of some globally coherent system

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of moral principles.^ Two points need to be made about this idea of local coherence:first, what gives Rorty's recommendation its normative force? That is, why shouldwe settle for local coherence? Since settling for local coherence is equivalent tosaying that we are perfectly content to live in contradiction with ourselves; andsince the latter course is exactly what rational beings reject, it could be arguedthat Rorty's recommendation does not have any normative force. Thrasymachus'sposition has a kind of local coherence. Yet, when Socrates shows that the positionis not coherent with a host of other beliefs, Thrasymachus has the good grace toblush. Plato and Kant can account for why Thrasymachus blushes—he feels shameat being caught in contradiction. As far as I can see, Rorty has no way to explainThrasymachus's blush.

Nor does the example of the Sullivan Principles support Rorty's notion of amerely local coherence. Leon Sullivan was a Christian minister who understoodthese principles to be grounded in the objective nature of God's creation. Hemaintained, "There is no greater moral issue in the world today than apartheid.. . . Apartheid is against the will of God and humanity."^ The Sullivan Principlesgarnered widespread support among other clergy who also believed in a complex,elaborated moral system of objective rights, duties, and principles that generations ofJudeo-Christian theologians have taken care to make as consistent and persuasive aspossible. Without sustained pressure from church leaders who believed in the globalcoherence of the underlying moral system, the Sullivan Principles, I would argue,would never have gained widespread acceptance among Western executives.

Second, to aim at even a local coherence means granting reason's rule in thisnarrower domain. Consequently, this refinement does not deny the force of theabove objection. In fact, talk of local coherence raises another set of issues: justhow small could this set of local beliefs be? One or two beliefs? If a speaker wereto present a position with miniscule local coherence, we would accuse him or herof sloppy thinking and suspect the speaker of trying to pull the wool over our eyes.Why is the speaker focusing on only these beliefs and not other aspects and facts?Catching a whiff of the arbitrary, we would be on our guard against sophistry. Else-where Rorty concedes that any account will have to be able to encompass manythings if it is to have any hope of producing a paradigm shift. Thinkers like Kantand Plato have an explanation of this drive toward comprehensiveness. Since weare constituted such that we do not want to live in contradiction with ourselves,every belief in which we are invested needs, in principle, to be reconciled with theother claims in which we have put our trust. Our essence or psychological makeupprevents us from being persuaded by half-baked theories that fail to harmonize withthe whole of our experience. And it is, as Plato would say, the reasoning part of ourpsyche, not emotions or feelings, that imposes this harmonizing demand and pointsthe way to ordering our beliefs accordingly. (Neither Plato nor I would deny that afelt unease and/or inspiration also play a part in driving this process of integrationforward. So this process does have a subjective component. But it is reason that

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sorts through the contradictions and comes up with better formulations intended toovercome identified inconsistencies).

I come now to my second objection to Rorty's position. Part of what reasonconsiders when deciding whether to alter previously held positions is "the fact ofthe matter." According to Rorty, though, there are no facts that do not depend oncontingent historical narratives. Everything we see and do is mediated by our beliefsor worldview, which may be more or less rational. As Anais Nin writes, "We seethe world not as it is, but as we are." I readily concede that many of our beliefs,and even our perceptions, are, to some extent, a function of other things we've en-countered or been taught. Several years ago I heard an interview on National PublicRadio with children from a "primitive" part of the world who, upon arriving in amodem city, saw their first bus. They thought it must be large animal of some sortwith large white eyes. Familiar with animals, they assimilated this machine to thatwhich they already knew—with what fit into their framing narrative, a narrativecontingent upon their previous experiences in the jungle.

At first glance, this example would seem to support Rorty's position. However,I think we must be exceedingly careful. This example equally suggests that theprocess of assimilation is not arbitrary. These children thought of animals in a mat-ter akin to that of Aristotle. In De Anima, Aristotle defines animals as organismsable to initiate self-motion. The children did not think the bus was a huge coconuttree or a star or the number three. They saw that it moved and so they reasonablytheorized that the bus was a huge, lumbering animal. The division between plantsand animals itself seems to be a non-arbitrary division, given that peoples all overthe world distinguish between self-moving and stationary organisms. In his fasci-nating essay "A Quahog Is a Quahog," the biologist Stephen Jay Gould argues thatpeoples from around the world characterize birds into roughly the same species.*Grouping birds using characteristics we employ (color, form, beak type), they arriveat divisions almost identical to those we make:

The literature on non-Western taxonomies is not extensive, but it is persua-sive. We usually find a remarkable correspondence between Linnaean speciesand non-Western plant and animal names. In short, the same packages arerecognized by independent cultures. . . . Several biologists have noted theseremarkable correspondences.... Ernst Mayr himself describes his experiencein New Guinea: "Forty years ago, I lived all alone with a tribe of Papuans inthe mountains of new Guinea. These superb woodsmen had 136 names forthe 137 species of birds I distinguished. . . . That Stone Age man recognizesthe same entities of nature as Western university-trained scientists refutesrather decisively the claim that species are nothing but a product of the hu-man imagination." (italics mine)'

Working with other populations, Jared Diamond, Ralph Bulmer, Brent Berlin, DennisBreedlove, Peter Raven, and other biologists have confirmed Mayr's finding.'"

Here, then, is some evidence that Rorty is wrong. Human beings do not imagi-natively generate distinctions willy-nilly. Our divisions are non-arbitrary: "We livein a world of structure and legitimate distinctions" (italics mine)." Gould argues

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that this striking empirical similarity of division implies either 1) that human beingspossess similar hardwired species-distinguishing frameworks and, consequently, ourdivisions reflect this natural human essence; 2) that there are natural kinds in theworld and we are, in Socratic language, all cutting at the same natural joints; or 3)that both possibilities hold true. I take no position here on which of these possibili-ties is the correct one. I simply note that each option represents a kind of fact—anobjective feature of the natural self and/or the natural world that controls how weorganize our experience. Under all three scenarios sketched by Gould, objectivenature produces the distinctions; distinctions do not contingently produce nature.Indeed, Gould relates how three biological anthropologists who initially contendedthat how various peoples organize the world depends contingently upon their localsocial narratives subsequently repudiated their findings. When the anthropologistsreturned and interviewed the tribes more carefully with a more competent transla-tor, they discovered significant convergence or overlap between how Westernersand non-Westerners divvy up bird and plant species.

To summarize: Although we assimilate new things we encounter to those thatwe already know; and although our experiences (or, at least, some of them) havea contingent dimension, it does not follow that our narratives, distinctions, andtheories merely reflect a particular historical outlook. If, as Gould, Aristotle, Platoand others argue, our past experiences have been organized objectively (or, at aminimum, admit of being so organized), then the assimilated present will also havean objective foundation.

A related point: yes, reason interprets what we experience—it gives meaningto that which we experience. However, reason is always interpreting something.This something is the experienced facts, which possess an integrity all their own.Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans and flooded much ofthe city. The space shuttlesChallenger and Columbia blew up. What these events mean is open to debate; thatthey occurred is not. As Hannah Arendt has argued, it will always be true thatGermany invaded Belgium, not the reverse. Holocaust deniers may try to re-writehistory, but that does not alter the fact that they are deniers. Those who experiencedHurricane Katrina or who witnessed mass murder know a truth that cannot be gain-said, even though this experiential truth cannot be proven by reason.

In my view, Rorty makes two inter-related mistakes. Eirst, he treats existenceas a predicative quality. Yet, as Richard McKeon has argued, there are four sensesof the verb "to be": there is 1) that which is or the "is" of entities; 2) what is or the"is" of being/nature/essence; 3) the set of conditions under which an entity is whatit is or the "is" of existence; and 4) the question of whether these conditions obtainfor us personally or the "is" of experience.^^ Existence is not a predicate. It is adetermination ofthe conditions under which an entity is what it is. Do unicorns ex-ist? The unicorn exists as an animal to be encountered in certain types of narrativesknown as myths or fairy tales. This same unicorn does not exist as an animal in thewild or in zoos. To say that something "exists" means to make a determination ofthe conditions under which that which is is what it is. It is not to perceive a quality

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of a thing. Existence properly understood is necessarily mediated by reason speci-fying conditions. If so, then Rorty's claim that what exists is relative to a situatedlanguage user is true but almost trivially so.

His second mistake consists in conflating the existential "is" with the experiential"is." Determining the existential conditions under which a substance is what it issays nothing about whether those conditions have actually obtained in the past orare applying in the present. Just as essence does not determine existence, so exis-tence does not determine experience. Concrete or particular facts are given to us bypersonal experience, not by reason or theories. The victims of Hurricane Katrinafelt the lash of the wind and knew the terror of rising waters. The storm came uponthem with a character that Charles Sanders Peirce terms "secondness"—a brutequality of one subject or substance acting upon another." When a passing work-man hits us in the back of the head with a ladder, we stagger and wonder what hashappened. Interpretation or narratives do not give us that startling experience. Onthe contrary, it is our experience that sets the interpretive machinery going: whatstruck us? Something organic or inorganic? Was a human being responsible? If so,was the blow intentional, accidental, or the result of negligence?

Having treated existence as a predicate and then mistaken the existential "is"for the experiential "is," Rorty tends to overlook facts given by experience.'" Thisneglect of experience means, in turn, that Rorty cannot ground ethics. Foundationalethicists ground ethics in some objective fact(s) of immediate experience—e.g.,our awareness that we are free (Kant; Hegel); that we can and do originate actions(Aristotle); that we are frequently conflicted and so the soul (understood as theorganizing and organized energy of a purposeful life) must have two or more parts(Plato). We do not choose to be free or conflicted. On the contrary, human choicepresupposes these experiences. These experiences function as objective bases forethics, enabling philosophers to argue for the superiority of a particular way of life.Plato, Aristotle, and Kant are not just painting pretty pictures of the world. As Iargued above, whether we find their analyses to be persuasive depends, in part, onthe general coherence of their reasoning. But it also depends ultimately and cruciallyupon whether we have had the experiences presupposed by their accounts. Thosewho have never felt pulled in one direction by reason and in another by desire cannotknow the peace, satisfaction and joy that arise when the soul has harmonized itself.Those who have never experienced the pain of living in self-contradiction will neverknow what true self-respect is. If these human experiences are, indeed, universal,then the foundational projects of these philosophers become more promising, whileRorty's anti-foundational stance becomes less plausible.

I want to end by returning to Rorty's positive agenda and exploring a bit howhis approach will translate into teaching. If he is right, then most of our studentsare condemned to live in the cave. All they can and will ever see and "know" areshadows cast by an inherited worldview transmitted to them by their famihes and thelarger culture. The teacher merely functions as yet another figure holding up variousimages (in this case, constructed narratives) that cast moving shadows thrown upon

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the wall of the cave. A few bright students might succeed in becoming politicians,artists, or members of the chattering class. Still, this success does not mean much.The only difference between those chained to the wall gazing at images and thoseproducing the images (e.g., philosophers like Rorty) is that the latter understandthat opinion-makers are responsible for fostering and sustaining the beliefs held bythose chained in the cave. Education reduces to indoctrination.

Even if we inspire/indoctrinate our students to seek solidarity, in what sense istheir new, committed life "better" than before? Unless there is some objectivelygood life, they can hardly be said to have progressed. Even if they feel they arebetter off, perhaps this feeling is an illusion engendered by some spin doctor'simage. The liberal arts have traditionally been thought of as an initiation into afreer life; the truly educated are liberated not only from illusion and but also frominstrumental activities:

Now the original conception of the Liberal Arts was a way—one way—ofestablishing a space apart from immediately pragmatic and political concerns,insofar as the Liberal Arts initiated studies that were pure ends in themselves,not means to anything else. These arts were activities of reason in its variousguises (arithmetic, geometry, music, logic, grammar, etc.)."

If I understand Rorty correctly, then this promise of liberation is false. Teachingthe liberal arts loses its nobility and becomes just another politically instmmentalgame. If that is all that teaching is, I find it hard to conceive why one would botherto get up in the moming and prepare for class.

Notes

1. Richard Rorty, quoted in Stephen Best and Douglas Kellner, "Richard Rorty and Postmod-ern Theory," at www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/essays/dchardrortypostmodemtheory.pdf.

2. Ibid.

3. Joshua Knobe, "A Talent for Bricolage: An Interview with Richard Rorty," The Dualist2 (1995): 56-71.

4. Best and Kellner, "Rorty and Postmodern Theory."

5. It might be objected that, while reason is essential to us in some sense, reason plays norole in effecting the paradigm shift. However, Rorty himself insists that the shift occurs becausea new way of looking at things makes global or holistic sense. It would seem to be reason, notthe emotions or feelings, that requires us to come up with a new picture "hangs together" as awhole.

6. I am indebted to an anonymous reviewer for the example of the Sullivan principles.

7. Leon Sullivan, quoted in Chris Herlinger, "Leon Sullivan Dies," Christianity Today(April 30, 2001).

8. Stephen Jay Gould, "A Quahog Is a Quahog," in The Panda's Thumb (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1980), 204-13.

9. Ibid., 207-08.

10. Ibid., 208-13.

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11. Ibid., 213.

12. Richard McKeon, "Being, Existence, and That Which Is," Review of Metaphysics 13(June 1960): 537-54.

13. Charles Sanders Peirce, Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, vols. 1 and 2(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960), passim.

14. Rorty does recognize one fact, "the fact that our sense of possibilities open for humanbeings has changed as history has rolled along, and will go right on changing in unpredictableways." But this "fact" is simply another way of stating his theory of subjective pragmatism, andit is this theory that, I contend, leads him to neglect the reality of facts given in and by personalexperiences.

15. John Cornell, Commencement Address for St. John's Graduate Institute, Santa Fe, NewMexico, August 2005.