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Rorty on Whitehead

By ck ⋅ May 7, 2008 ⋅ Post a comment

Since I’m back to my near-daily commute to the suburbs of Chicago, at least for the next three months, I’ve been scouting the Internet for substantial philosophy podcasts that I can listen to in my car. (Nothing personal, Krista Tippett, but I want a little more meat!)

I found a recording of a seminar on A.N. Whitehead that Richard Rorty participated in! The seminar information doesn’t seem available online any longer, but you can obtain the podcast through iTunes. My exclamation point above is because Rorty is notorious for his philosophical poo-pooing of metaphysics.* So why would he agree to be part of this panel?

Well, to poo-poo A.N. Whitehead’s metaphysics, of course! I had only read Rorty, never heard him speak, so I was very excited to get the opportunity to listen to his dry, slightly bored intonations on Whitehead, Deleuze and philosophy back to Plato. It’s really worth the listen, even if you disagree with Rorty’s pragmatism, to hear his summation of several thousand years of philosophy in a nutshell, concluding with Wittgenstein.

As well, if you (like me) struggled to listen to Isabelle Stenger’s thick French accent and verbose employement of every Whiteheadian jargon term possible, Rorty’s follow-up is refreshing. It’s a relief, actually, to have him step the microphone and proclaim that we don’t have to try to compare Whitehead’s technical terms (”actual entities”, “propositions”, “disclosure”, “experience”) to our conscious experience. Why? Because we simply can’t compare discourse to some bare given of experience. Experience does not “outrun” our language, he proclaims. If we can’t talk about it it, we can’t understand it. This, of course, is a considerable claim, one of which I’m suspicious, though whose motivations I understand and am sympathetic with.

Rorty does like Whitehead for one thing, however–the thing which Stenger and her French cohorts apparently aren’t concerned with too much–his reworking of God and freedom. It’s simply a more pragmatic way of viewing God, thinks Rorty, and for that, he’s grateful to Whitehead’s dense jargon, even if it doesn’t get us closer to “reality” outside of discourse.

*Of course, Rorty is a fan of William James’ pragmatism, if not his empiricism, and Whitehead took many cues from James’ work. So I’m not surprised that Rorty knows his Whitehead. Still, I found it pretty funny to see him listed as a speaker.