{"agent_id":"rorty","agent_name":"Richard Rorty","slug":"continental-engagement-and-strong-textualism","label":"Continental engagement and strong textualism: are pragmatist appropriations of Heidegger, Derrida, and Foucault legitimate or domesticating?","topic":"Continental engagement and strong textualism","question":"Are pragmatist appropriations of Heidegger, Derrida, and Foucault legitimate or domesticating?","position":"The pragmatist readings of Heidegger, Derrida, Foucault, Hegel, and Nietzsche are openly *appropriations* — strong textualist readings in the sense worked out in 'Nineteenth- Century Idealism and Twentieth-Century Textualism'. The strong textualist asks of a text the same question the engineer or the physicist asks of a puzzling physical object: how shall I describe this in order to get it to do what I want? Philological reconstruction is one possible project; pragmatist appropriation is another; both are legitimate ways of putting old texts to new uses. The pragmatist gloss on Heidegger as the great anti-foundationalist who unfortunately romanticized his own historical situation, on Derrida as the philosopher-as-kind-of-writing who frees us from the metaphysical compulsion, on Foucault as the genealogist who unmasks the contingency of our normalizing practices — these are not falsifications of the texts but productive new uses of them. The continental philosophers' charge of *domestication* presupposes that there is a single correct reading the appropriation has lost; that presupposition is the philological-realist faith I have been questioning all along.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"The pragmatist readings of Heidegger, Derrida, Foucault, Hegel, and Nietzsche are openly *appropriations* — strong textualist readings in the sense worked out in 'Nineteenth- Century Idealism and Twentieth-Century Textualism'.","n":[1,2]},{"t":"The strong textualist asks of a text the same question the engineer or the physicist asks of a puzzling physical object: how shall I describe this in order to get it to do what I want?","n":[]}],[{"t":"Philological reconstruction is one possible project; pragmatist appropriation is another; both are legitimate ways of putting old texts to new uses.","n":[]},{"t":"The pragmatist gloss on Heidegger as the great anti-foundationalist who unfortunately romanticized his own historical situation, on Derrida as the philosopher-as-kind-of-writing who frees us from the metaphysical compulsion, on Foucault as the genealogist who unmasks the contingency of our normalizing practices — these are not falsifications of the texts but productive new uses of them.","n":[3,4]}],[{"t":"The continental philosophers' charge of *domestication* presupposes that there is a single correct reading the appropriation has lost; that presupposition is the philological-realist faith I have been questioning all along.","n":[5]}]],"texts":"*Essays on Heidegger and Others* (PP Vol 2, 1991) — the entire volume; *Consequences of Pragmatism* (1982) 'Overcoming the Tradition: Heidegger and Dewey' (ch 3), 'Philosophy as a Kind of Writing: An Essay on Derrida' (ch 6), 'Nineteenth-Century Idealism and Twentieth-Century Textualism' (ch 8) — the manifesto of the strong-textualist programme; the *Specters of Marx* review in *Philosophy and Social Hope*; *Achieving Our Country* (1998) on the *Foucauldian academic Left*. Reception: Jürgen Habermas's *The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity* (1985) — the charge that Rorty levels philosophy and literature; Rodolphe Gasché's *The Tain of the Mirror* (1986) — Derrida read as rigorous post-Hegelian philosophy of reflection, against Rorty's pragmatist gloss; Simon Critchley's *The Ethics of Deconstruction* (1992) — Levinasian framing against Rorty's; Christopher Norris's Marxist-deconstructive critiques; Geoff Bennington's 'Derridabase' framing in *Jacques Derrida* (1991/93); Richard Bernstein's *The New Constellation* (1991) — sympathetic engagement with both Rorty and the continental tradition; Perry Anderson and Terry Eagleton on Foucault domestication.","works":["*Essays on Heidegger and Others* (PP Vol 2, 1991) — the entire volume","*Consequences of Pragmatism* (1982) 'Overcoming the Tradition: Heidegger and Dewey' (ch 3), 'Philosophy as a Kind of Writing: An Essay on Derrida' (ch 6), 'Nineteenth-Century Idealism and Twentieth-Century Textualism' (ch 8) — the manifesto of the strong-textualist programme","the *Specters of Marx* review in *Philosophy and Social Hope*","*Achieving Our Country* (1998) on the *Foucauldian academic Left*"],"reception":"Jürgen Habermas's *The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity* (1985) — the charge that Rorty levels philosophy and literature; Rodolphe Gasché's *The Tain of the Mirror* (1986) — Derrida read as rigorous post-Hegelian philosophy of reflection, against Rorty's pragmatist gloss; Simon Critchley's *The Ethics of Deconstruction* (1992) — Levinasian framing against Rorty's; Christopher Norris's Marxist-deconstructive critiques; Geoff Bennington's 'Derridabase' framing in *Jacques Derrida* (1991/93); Richard Bernstein's *The New Constellation* (1991) — sympathetic engagement with both Rorty and the continental tradition; Perry Anderson and Terry Eagleton on Foucault domestication.","status":"Rorty's continental engagement was decisive in opening analytic philosophy to Heidegger and Derrida, and decisive in opening continental philosophy to Davidson and Sellars. The appropriations drew sustained criticism. Habermas in *The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity* charged that Rorty levels philosophy and literature. Gasché's *The Tain of the Mirror* (1986) reads Derrida as rigorous post-Hegelian philosophy of reflection, against Rorty's pragmatist gloss. Critchley's *The Ethics of Deconstruction* (1992) reads Derrida through Levinas, against Rorty's reading. Christopher Norris's Marxist-deconstructive critiques. Bernstein's *The New Constellation* is the friendly sustained engagement with both Rorty and the continental tradition. Perry Anderson and Terry Eagleton charge that Rorty makes Foucault safe for liberal democracy.","era":"1931-2007","discipline":"Philosophy","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"Richard Rorty - Essays on Heidegger and others (questia)","page":"pp. 14–15","canonical":"","quote":"A pragmatist must also insist (with Goodman, Nietzsche, Putnam, and Heidegger) that there is no such thing as the way the thing is in itself, under no description, apart from any use to which human beings might want to put it.","label":"Richard Rorty - Essays on Heidegger and others (questia), pp. 14–15"},{"n":2,"work":"Notat om layout","page":"pp. 14–15","canonical":"","quote":"A pragmatist must also insist (with Goodman, Nietzsche, Putnam, and Heidegger) that there is no such thing as the way the thing is in itself, under no description, apart from any use to which human beings might want to put it.","label":"Notat om layout, pp. 14–15"},{"n":3,"work":"Consequences of Pragmatism","page":"p. 199","canonical":"","quote":"Romanticism was aufgeboben in pragmatism, the claim that the significance of new vocabularies was not their ability to decode but their mere utility. Pragmatism is the philosophical counterpart of literary modernism, the kind of literature which prides itself on its autonomy and novelty rather than its truthfulness to experience or its discovery of pre-existing significance.","label":"Consequences of Pragmatism, p. 199"},{"n":4,"work":"Richard Rorty - Essays on Heidegger and others (questia)","page":"pp. 18–19","canonical":"","quote":"They are the Husserlian (or 'scientistic') answer, the Heideggerian (or 'poetic') answer and the pragmatist (or 'political') answer. The first answer is the most familiar, and was common to Husserl and his positivist opponents. On this view, philosophy is modeled on science, and is relatively remote from both art and politics.","label":"Richard Rorty - Essays on Heidegger and others (questia), pp. 18–19"},{"n":5,"work":"Consequences of Pragmatism","page":"p. 186","canonical":"","quote":"For the textualists, the literary artist's awareness that he is making rather than finding, and more specifically the ironic modernists's awareness that he is responding to texts rather than to things, puts him one up on the scientist. Both movements treat the scientist as naive in thinking that he is doing something more than putting together ideas, or constructing new texts.","label":"Consequences of Pragmatism, p. 186"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"truth-without-correspondence","label":"Truth without correspondence: is truth anything more than the compliment paid to sentences that seem to be paying their way?"},{"slug":"anti-representationalism","label":"Anti-representationalism: is the entire mirror-of-nature picture of mind and knowledge dispensable?"},{"slug":"triple-contingency","label":"Triple contingency: are language, selfhood, and liberal community contingent all the way down?"},{"slug":"liberal-ironism-the-private-public-split-and-ethnocentric-li","label":"Liberal ironism, the private/public split, and ethnocentric liberalism: is the liberal ironist a defensible synthesis or an evasion of the political?"},{"slug":"philosophy-as-cultural-politics","label":"Philosophy as cultural politics: is philosophy as a foundationalist discipline finished, while edifying philosophy continues?"}]}