Rorty (1994) - A World Without Substances or Essences

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ability to ascribe it accurately to the believer (thereby permitting dogs,

amoebae for that matrer, to have, for ail we know, views about cosmology,
or $
transubstantiation. etc.).

3. A World without
or Essences
Substances
(I994)

Philosophersin the English-speaking world usually do not take the


work of philosophersin the non-English-speakingworld very seriously,
and conversely.The gap between so-called'analytic' ancl so-called
'Continental'philosophyshowsno signsof being bridged.This seems
to me a pity, becauseI think that the best work being done in these
two traditionsoverlapsto an important extent.In this essayI shalltry
A
to sketcha way oflookingat thingswhich iscommonto thephilosophers
t I most admire on both sidesof the gap.
The quickestway of expressingthis commonality is to say that
philosophersas diverse as William James and F'riedrichNietzsche,
Donald Davidson and Jacques Derrida, Hi-tary Putnam and Bruno
Latour,John Dewey and Michel Foucault,are antidualists.This does
not mean that they are againstbinary oppositions;it is not clear that
thought is possiblewithout using such oppositions.It meansrather
that they are trying to shake off the influencesof the peculiarly
rnetaphysicaldualisms which the Western philosophicaltradition
inherited from the Greeks:thosebetweenessenceand accident,sub-
stanceand property, and appearanceand reality. 'fhey are trying to
replacethe world pictures constructedwith the aid of these Greek
oppositionswith a picture of a flux of continuallychaneingrelations.
One effect of this panrelationalismis that it lets us put aside the
and object,betweenthe elementsin human
distinctionbetlveensr-rbject
knowledgecontributed by the mind and those contributed by the
world, and thereby helps us put asidethe correspondence theory of
truth.
Various labelsand slogansare associated with this antiessentialistic,
antimetaphysical movement in various Western traditions. Among
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them are pragmatism, existentialism, deconstructionism, holism, distinction goes. For once you have said that all our awarenessis under
process philosophy, poststructuralism, postmodernism, Wittgen- a description, and that descriptions are functions of social needs, then
stcinianism, antirealism, and hermcneutics. Perhaps for mcrely patri- 'nature' and 'reality' can only, be namcs of something unknowablc
otic reasons,my own preferred term is pragmatism; amone the slogans - something like Kant's "I'hing-in-Itself.' The whole movement of
are 'Everythimg is a social construction' and 'All awarenessis a linguistic Western philosophical thought since Hegel has been an attempt to
affair'. The former is a charactcristically European slogan, and those avoid such an unknor.l'able.
rvho use it often take their point of departure from Foucault. The Kant u,as a turnine point in the history of Western philosophy
latter slogan was coined by the great American thinker Wil{i'id Sellars, because he was a reductioad absurdumof the attempt to distinguish
and the epithet he chose for the systenl of thought which embodied between the role ofthe subject and the role ofthe object in constituting
this slogan was 'psychological nominalism'. knowledge. Hegel realized this, and realized that the distinctions
As a first illustration of the convergence between analytic and between the subjective and the objective have to be transcended.
Continental philosophy, I r,vantto show how these two siogans come Unfortunately, Hegel himselfused the terms 'subjective' and 'objective'
to much the same thing. Both are ways of saying that we shall to describe the sequence of successivedescriptions which successive
never be able to step outside oflanguage, never be able grasp reality social needs made necessary as moral and intellectual progress con-
unmediated by a linguistic description. So both are ways of saying tinued, and used the term 'union of subject and object' to describe
that rve should be suspicious of the Greek distinction betrvecn appear- the end of history. This was a mistake, because it took an outdated
ance and reality, and that we should try to rcplace it with something dualism too seriously. It would have been better if Hegel had done
like the distinction between 'less useful description of the rvorld' and what Dervey did later: describe intellectual and moral progress simply
'more uselul description o1-the rvorld'. To say that everything is a
as the growth of freedom, as leading to democracy rather than to
social construction is to say that our linguistic practices are so bound Absolute Knowledse. Dcwey was the philosopher who most clearly
up with our other social practices that our descriptions of nature, as and explicitly set aside the goal common to the Greeks and the German
well as of ourselves, u'ill ahvays be a lunction of oursocial needs.tTo Idealists (accurate repre sentation of the intrinsic nature of reality) in
say that all awareness is a linguistic affair is to say that we have no favour ofthe political goal ofincrcasinely free societiesand increasingl,v
knowledge of the kindwhich Bcrtrand Russell, working in the tradition diverse individuals within them. That is why he seemsto me the most
of British empiricism, called 'knorvledge by acquaintance'. All our useful and most significant figure in twentieth-century philosophy.
knowledge is of the sort which Russell called 'knowledge bv descrip- Before one can take Dewev and pragmatism seriously, however,
tion'. If vou put the two slogans together, you gct the claim that one must be convinced that the Platonic quest, the attempt to get
all our knowledge is under descriptions suited to our current social behind appearance to the intrinsic nature of reality, is hopeless. So
purposes. now I want to recapitulate the dialectic which leads up to Sellars's
This elaim is antimetaphysical in thc large senseof the term'meta- psychological nominalism, and thus, indirectlv, to the social construc-
physics'in which Heidcgger said that all Platonism is metaphysics and tionism common to Foucault and Dewey.
all metaphysics is Platonism. Platonism, in this large sense,attempts Ever since the seventeenth century, philosophers have been sug-
to get free of society, of nomos,convention, and to turn to phlsis, to gesting that we may never know reality, because there is a barrier
nature. But if the two slogans I have just cited arc right, there is no between us and it - a veil ofappearances produced by the interaction
such thing as p@rsar
to be known. The nomos physis, convention nature between subject and object, befiveen the constitution ofour own sense
distinction goes for the same reason that the appearance,reality organs or our minds and the way things are in themselves. Since the
nineteenth century, philosophers have been suggesting that language relation to intrinsic features ofobjects but rather by reference to relative
i
may'form such a barricr that our language imposes categorics on case of attaining consensusamong inquirers.Just as the appearance'-
objects which may not be intrinsic to thcm. Prasmatists reply to reality distinction is replaced by distinctions between relative utility of
1
seventeenth-century areuments about the veil ofappearances by saying descriptions, so the objective subjective distinction is replaced bv I
that we need not model knorvledge on vision. So there is no need to distinctions between relative ease in getting agreement. To say that
think of the senseorgans or our ideas as inten'ening betwcen a mental
eye and its object. Instead, pragmatists say, we can think of both as
values are more subjective than facts is just to say that it is harder to
get agreement about which things are ugly or which actions evil than
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tools for manipulating the object. They reply to nineteenth-century about which things are rectanzular. To say that X is reall2 blue even
arguments about the distorting effect of language by saying that though it appears yellow from a certain angle and under a certain
lanzuage is not a medium of representation. Rather, it is an exchange light, is to say that the sentence 'X is blue' is more useful - that is,
of marks and noises, carried out in order to achierrespecific purposes. can be employed more frequently - than the sentence 'X is yellow.'
It cannot fail to represent accurately, for it never represents at all.
Pragmatists insist on nonocular, nonrepresentational ways of
The latter sentence is useful only for occasional, evanescentpurposes.
A qpical first reaction to antiessentialism is that it is too anthropo- l
describing sensory perception, thought and language, because they
wotrld like to break dou'n the distinction between knowing thinss and
using them. Starting from Bacon's claim that knowledge is power,
thev proceed to the claim that power is all there is to knowledge -
centric, too much inclined to treat humanity as the measure of all
things. To many people, antiessentialism seems to lack humility, a
senseofmystery, a senseofhuman finitude. It seemsto lack a common-
l
sensical appreciation of the obdurate otherness of the things of this
that a claim to know X is a claim to be able to do something rvith or world. The antiessentialist reply to this common-sensical reaction is
i
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to X, to put X into relation r'r'ith somethinp; else. To make this claim that common sense is itself no more than the habit of using a certain
plausible, however, thcy have to attack thc notion that knowing X is set of descriptions. In the case at hand, what is called common sense
a matte r of being related to somethir.rgintinsic to X, whereas using X is simply the habit of using lanzuage inherited from the Greeks, and
is a matter of standing in an extinsic.accidental, relation to X. especially{rom Plato and Aristotle . The ir descriptions ofour relatiott to
In order to attack that notion, they need to bre ak down the distinction
betn'een intrinsic and extrinsic betrveen the inncr core of X and a
peripheral area of X which is constituted by the fact that X stands in
the rest of the universe - de scriptions which incorporate the intrinsic
extrinsic distinction - are no longer good enough for us. We can do
better.
r
certain relations to the other items which make up the ur.riverse.The
attempt to break down this distinction is rvhat I shall call antiessen-
tialism. For pragmatists, there is no such thing irs a nonrelational
Plato, Aristotle and orthodox monotheism all insist on a sense of
mystery and wonder in regard to anthropomorphic but nonhuman i
il
powers. On a pragmatist view, this undesirable senseofwonder should
{bature of X, any more than there is such a thine as the intrinsic not be confused with a desirable awarenessthat there are some things
nature, the essence,of X. So there can be no such thing as a description which human beings cannot control. Nor should it be confused with
which rnatches the n'ay X rcally is, apart from its relation to human the desirable awe which we feel in the presence of the great works of
needs or consciousness or language. Once the distinction between the human imagination - redescriptions of the universe which make
intrinsic and extrinsic goes, so does the distinction between realiry and all things seem new and wonderful. The big difference between an
appearance, and so do worries about whether there are barriers undesirable sense of humility and a desirable sense of finitude is that
between us and the world.
The term 'oblective' is defined by antiessentialistsnot in terms of a
the former presupposes that there is, already in existence, something
better and greater than the human. The latter presupposes only i
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that there are lots of things which are different from the human. A descriptions: lessthan 22,more than 8, the sum of 6 and tr, the square
Greek sense of wonder requires us to think that there is some- root of 289, the square of 4.Iz3ro5, the difference betwcen r,(t79,gzz
thing sufficiently like us to be e nviable but so superior to us as to be and r,678,9o5. The tircsome thing about all thesedescriptions is that
barely intelligible. A praematic sense of limits requires us only to none of them seemsto get closer to the number 17 than do any of the
think that there are some projects for which our tools are presently
inadequate, and to hope that the future may be better than the past
others. Equally tiresomely, there are obviously an infinite number of
other descriptions which you could offer of r7, all of which would be
i
in this respect.
Another differe nce is that Greek descriptions ofour situation presup-
equally 'accidental' and 'extrinsic'. None of these descriptions seems
to give you a clue to the intrinsic seventeennessof t7 the unique
i
pose that humaniry itself has an intrinsic nature - that there is some- fcature which makes it the very number that it is. For your choice
thing unchangeable called 'the human'which can be contrasted with among these descriptions is obviously a matter of what purpose you
the rest ofthe universe. Prasmatism setsthat presupposition aside and have in mind the particular situation which caused you to think of
urges that humanity is an open-ended notion, that the word 'human' the number I7 in the first place.
names a fuzzy but promising project rather than an essence. So, If we want to be essentialistabout the number 17, we have to say,
pragmatists transfer to the human future the sense of awe and mystery
which the Greeks attached to the non-human; it is transformed into
a sense that the humanity of the future will be, although linked with
us by a continuous narrative, superior to present-day humanity in as
in philosophical jargon, that alL its infinitely many different relations
to infinitely many other numbers are intemal relations that is, that
none of these relations could be different without the number 17being
different. So there seems to be no way to define the essence of
i
yet barely imasinable ways. It coalesceswith the awe we leel before seventeenhood short of finding some mechanism for generating all the
works of imagination, and becomes a senseof awe before humanity's true descriptions of 17, specifying all its relations to all the other
ability to become what it once merely imagined, before its capacity numbers. lVlathematicians can in fact produce such a mechanism
for self-creation. by axiomatizing arithematic, or by reducing numbers to sets and
axiomatizing set theory. But if the mathematician then points to his
In the rest of this essav I shall be trying to sketch how things look neat little batch of axioms and says,'Behold the essenceo{'r7!' we feel
when described in antiessentialist terms. I hope to show that such glpped. 'Ihere is nothing very seventeenish about those axioms, for
terms are more useful than terminologies which presuppose what they are equally the essenceof r, or z, of z8g, and of r,678,9zz.
Dewey called 'the whole brood and nest ofdualisms'which rve inherit I conclude that, whatever sorts of things may have intrinsic natures,
from the Greeks. 'Ihe panrelationalism I advocate is summed up in numbers do not - that it simply does not pay to be an essentialist
the suggestion that we think of everything as if it were a number. about numbers. We antiessentialistswould like to convince you that
The nice thing about numbers, from my point of view, is simply it also does not pay to be essentialist about tables, stars, electrons,

i
that it is very hard to think of them as having intrinsic natures, as human beings, academic disciplines, social institutions, or anything
having an essential corc surrounded by a penumbra of accidental else. We suggest that you think of all such objects as resembling
relationships. Numbers are an admirable example of somethingwhich numbers in the following respect: there is nothing to be known about
it is difficult to describe in essentialist language. them except an initially large , and forever expandable, web ofrelations
To see my point, ask what the essenceof the number 17 is - what to other objects. Everything that can serve as the term of a relation
it is in ifef, apart from its relationships to other numbers. What is can be dissolved into another set of relations, and so on for ever. There
wanted is a description of r7 which is different in kindfrom the following are, so to speak, relations all the way down, all the way up, and all
_F

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When numbers are analysed away into relations to other numbers,


the way out in every direction: you never reach something which is
nobody mourns thc lossof their substantial, independcnt, autonomous
not just one more nexus of relations. The system of natural numbers
rcality. But things are diffcrent with tables and stars and electrons.
is a good model of the universe because in that system it is obvious,
Here common sense is inclined to stick in its toes and say that you
and oll'iously harmless, that there are no terms of relations which are
cannot have relations without things to be related. If the re were not
not simply clusters of further relations.
a hard, substantial autonomous table to stand in relation to, c.g., you
To say that relations go all the way down is a corollary ofpsychologi-
and me and the chair, or to be constituted out of hard, substantial,
cal nominalism: of the doctrine that there is nothing to be known
elementary particles, there would be nothing to get relatecl and so no
about anything savewhat is stated in sentencesdescribing it. For every
re lations. There is, common sense insists,a difference between relations
sentence about an object is an explicit or implicit description of its
and the things that get related> and philosophy cannor break that
relation to one or morc other objects. So if there is no knowledge by
distinction down.
acquaintance, no knou4edge rvhich does not take the form ofa senten-
The antiessentialistreply to this bit of common senseis pretty much
tial attitude, then there is nothing to be known about anything save
the one Berkeley made to Locke's attempr to distinguish primary from
its relations to other things. To insist that there is a difference between
secondary qualities - the reply which Peirce called the firsr invocation
a nonrelation al ordoessendiand a relational ordocognoscenli
is, inevitably,
of the pragmatist principle. The contemporary, linguistified form of
to recreate the Kantian Thing-in-Itself. To make that move is to
Berkeley's reply is: All that we know about this hard, substantial table
substitute a nostalgia for immediacy, and a longing for a salvatory
about the thine that gets rclated as opposed to its relations is that
relation to a norrhuman power, for the utopian hope which pragmatism
certain sentences are true of it. It is that of which the following
recommends. It is to reinvent rvhat Heidegger called 'the onto-
statements are true: It is rectaneular, it is brown, it is ugly, made out
theological tradition'.
For psvchologicai nominalists, no description of an object is more of a tree, smaller than a house, largcr than a mouse, lcss luminous
than a star, and so on and on. There is nothing to be known about
a description of the 'real', as opposed to the 'apparent', object than
an object except what sentences are true of it. The antie.ssentialist's
any other, nor are any ofthem descriptions of, so to speak, the object's
argument thus comes down to saying that since all sentencescan do
relation to itself - of its identity with its own essence.Some of them
is relate objects to one another, every sentence which describes an
are, to be sure, better descriptions than others. But this betterness is
object will, irnplicitly or explicitly, attribure a relational property to
a matter of being more useful tools - tools which accomplish some
it.2 We antie ssentialiststry to substitute the picture of languaee as a
human purpose better than do competing descriptions. All these
way ofhooking objects up to one another for the picture oflanguaec
purposes are, from a philosophical as opposed to a practical point of
as a veil interposed between us and objects.
vieu', on a par. There is no over-riding purpose called 'discovering
Essentialiststypically rejoin, at this point, that psychological nomin-
the truth' which takes precedence. As I have said before, pragmatists
do not think that truth is the aim of inquiry. The aim of inquiry is alism is a mistake, that we should retrieve what was true in cmpiricism,

utility, and there are as many different useful tools as there are purposes and not admit that language pro',,ides our oniy cognitive access to

to be sened. objects. They suggest that we must have some prelinguistic knowledge

Common sense- or at least Western common sense has trouble ofobjects, knowledge that cannot be caught in language."fhis know-
ledge, they say, is what prevents the table or the number or the human
with the claim that numbers are good rnodels for objects in general
because it seems counterintuitive to say that physical, spatiotemporal being from being what they call a 'mere linguistic construct'. To
illustrate what he means by nonlinguistic knowledge, the essentialist,
objects dissolve into webs of relations in the way that numbers do.
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meaning. But that means that there is no way of getting behind


at this point in the argument, usually bangs his hand on the table and
language to some more immediate nonlinguistic form ofacquaintance
flinches. He thereby hopes to demonstrate that he has acquired a bit
with what we are talking about. Only when linked up with some other
of knowleclse, and a kind of intimacy with the table, which escapes
parts of speech does a noun have a use, and only as the term of a
the reach o{'language. He claims that that knowledge of the table's
relation is an object an object of knowledge. There is no knowledge
intrinsic ruusalpowers, its sheer brute tlrcreness,keeps him in touch with
of the subject without knowledge of what sentencesreferring to it are
reality in a way in which the antiesscntialist is not.
true, just as there is no knowledge of a number without knowledge of
Unfazed by this suggestionthat he is out of touch, the antiessentialist
its relations to other numbers.
reiterates that if you want to know what the table rcally, intrinsically,
is, the best answer you are going to get is'that of lvhich the following
Our sensc that we can know a thing without knowing its relations rl
r
to other things is explained away by antiessentialistphilosophers as a
statementsare true: it is brown, ugly, painful to banging heads, capable
reflection of the difference between being certain about some familiar,
of being stumbled over, made of atoms, and so on and on'. The rl
taken-for-granted, obvious relations in which the thing stands and
painfulness. the solidity, and the causal powers of the table are on all
being uncertain about its other relations. Seventeen, for example, I
fours rvith its brorvnness and its ugliness.Just as you do not get on
starts out by being the sum of I7 ones, the number between 16
more intimate terms with the number I7 by discovering its square
and rB, and so on. Enough such familiar statements, and we begin to
root, you do not get on more intimate terms with the table, closer to
think of I7 as a thing waiting to get related to other things. When we
its intrinsic nature, by hitting it than by looking at it or talking about
are told that 17 is also the difference between t,678,gzz and r,678,9o5
it. All that hitting it, or decomposing it into atoms, docs is to enable
you to relate it to a few more things. It does not take you out of'
we feel that we ha'n'e learned about a rather remote. inessential,
connection between it and somethine else, rather than more about 17
r
language into fact, or out of appearance into reality, or out of a
itself. Btrt when pressed we have to admit that the relation betwcen r7
remote and disinterestedrelationship into more immediate and intense I
and r,678,922 is no more or less intrinsic than that between 16 and
relationship.
17. For, in the case of numbers, there is no clear senseto be given to
The point of this little exchange is, once again, that the anti-
term 'intrinsic'. We do not really want to say that r7, in the secret
essentialistdenies that there is a way to pick out an object from the
depths of its heart,feels closer to r 6 than to numbers further down the
rest ofthe univ erseexceptas the object ofwhich a certain set ofsentences
line.
are true. With Wittgenstein, he saysthat ostention only works against
Antiessentialists suggest that we also brush aside the question of
the backdrop of a linguistic practice, and that the self-identirv of the
whether the hardness of the table is more intrinsic to the table than
thing picked out is itself description-relative .3 Anti-essentialists think
its colour, or whether the atomic constitution of the star Polaris is
that the distinction between things related and relations is just an
more intrinsic to it than its location in a constellation. The question
alternative way of making the distinction between what we are talking
of whether there really are such things as constellations, or whether
about and what we say about it. The latter distinction is, as Whitchead
they are mcrely illusions produced by the fact that we cannot visually
said, just a hypostatization of the relation between linguistic subject
distinguish the distance of stars, strikes antiessentialistsas being as bad
and linguistic predicate.a
as the question of whether there really are such things as moral values,
Just as the utterance of a noun conveys no information to people
or whether they are merely projections of human wishes.They suggest
who are unfamiliar with adjectives and verbs, so there is no way to
we brush aside all questions about where the thing stops and its
convey information except by relating something to something else.
relations begin, all questions about where its intrinsic nature starts
Only in the context of a sentence, as Frege told us, does a word have
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and its external relations begin, all questions about where its essential encounter in language, however, we are frustrated by the fact that the
core ends and its accidental periphery begins. Antiessentialists likc to sentences of our language merely relate things to other things. The
ask, with Wittgcnstein, whether a chessboard is reall2one thing or 64 sentences, 'This is brown', or 'This is square', or 'This is hard,,
things. To ask that question, they think, is to expose its foolishness teii us something about how our nen/ous system deals with stimuli
its lack of any interesting point. Questions which have a point are emanating from the neighbourhood of the object. Sentences like, ,It
those which mect William James's requirement that any difference is Iocated at the following space-time coordinates' are, even more
must nakr a difference. Other questions such as those about the obviously, sentences which tell us about what the essentialistmournfully
ontological status of constellations or of moral values - are 'merely calls'merely relational, merely accidental, properties'.
verbal' or, worse yet, 'merely philosophical'. Confronted with this impasse, the essentialistis tempted to turn lor
The residual essentialism of common sense may rejoin to all this help to natural science. He is tempted to say that a sentence like, ,It
that antiessentialismis a sort of linzuistic idealism: a way of suggesting is made up of the flollowing sorts of elementary particles arranged in
that there rvas really nothing there to be talked about before people
began talking - that objects are artefbcts oflanguage. But this rejoinder
the following ways' gets us inside the object as it truly is. The last
line of defence for essentialist philosophers is the belief that physical
I
is a conlusion between the question, 'How do rve pick out objects?' science gets us outside ourselves, outside our langr-rage and our
and, 'Do objects antedate being picked out by us?' The antiessentialist needs and our purposes to something splendidty nonhuman and
has no doubt that there were trees and stars long before there were nonrelational. Essentialists who retreat to this line argue that
statements about trees and stars. But the fact of antecedent existcnce seventeeltth-century corpuscularians like Hobbes and Boyle were right
is of no use in giving sense to the question, 'What are trees and stars to distinguish between the features of things which are really .in' them
apart from their relations to other things - apart from our statements and those which it is useful, for human purposes, to describe them as
about them?'Nor is it of any help in giving senseto thc sceptic's claim having.
that trees and stars have non-relational, intrinsic, essenceswhich may, To us antiessentialists,descriptions of objects in terms o{'elementary
alas, be beyond our ken. If that claim is to har.'ea clear meaning, n'e particles are useful in many different ways as many lr'ays as particle
have to be able to say something more about what is beyond our physics can contribute to either technological advances or imaginative,
ken, what we are deprived of. Otherwise, we are stuck rvith Kant's astrophysical, redescriptions of the universe as a whole. But that sort
unknowable Thing-in-Itself. From the antiessentialist'spoint of view, of utility is their only virtue. To the essentialist philosophers, and to
the Kantian lament that we are for ever trapped behind the veil of many natural scientists who do not otherwise concern themselves with
subjectivity' is rncrely the pointless, becausc tautologous, claim that philosophy, this pragmatic vier,r, of physics as the handmaiden of
something we define as being beyond our knowledge is, alas, beyond technology and of the poetic imagination is offensive. These people
our knowledge. share a sense that particle physics - and more generally, whatever
The essentialist'spicture ofthe relation betrveen language and world scientific vocabulary could, in principle, serve to redescribe any
drives him back on the claim that the world is identifiable independently phenomenon whatever - is an example of a kind of truth which
of language. This is why he has to insist that the world is initially pragmatism does not recognize. This kind of truth is not a matrer of
known to us through a kind of nonlinguistic encounter through the utility of a description for a human pu{pose, but rather of a
banging into it, or letting it bounce some photons offour retinas. This transcendence of the merely human. Particle physics has, so to speak,
initial encounter is an encounter with the very world itself the world become the last refuge of the Greek senseof wonder - the senseof an
as it intrinsically is. When we try to recapture what we learned in this encounter with the almost Whollv Other.s
6r

Why does particle physics seem to give the notion of intrinsic in an infinity ofwavs, and none ofthese ways is the'inside'way. Seeing
nature' a new lease on lifc? I think the answer is that the vocabulary oursclvesasparticipating in the divine life by dcscribing ourseI'n'esunde r
the aspect of eternity is not an illusion or a confusion; it is just one
of this branch of physics seems to offer a special kind of mastery and
self-assurance,in that it can ('in principle') explain the utility o1'all more attempt to satisfy one more human need. Seeing ourself as at
other descriptions, as well as its own. An ideal psychophysics would last in touch, through physical science, n,ith the ultimate nature of
treat human be ings as themse lves swirls ofparticles, and would provide reality, is also not an illusion or a confusion; it is one more human
explanations ofwhy these organisms have developed certain linguistic project which mav, like all human projects, eclipse the possibility of
habits - why they have described the world as they have. So it seems other, more desirable but incompatible projects.
as if such an ideal physics could treat utility to human beings as itself Nor can we antiessentialistslet ourselves get away with saying that
something explicablc, subsumable, capable of being distanced and our essentialist opponents mistakenly think that they have 'eluded
being put in perspective. When we think of the universe in terms of human finitude'. It is not as if human finitude is the ultimate truth of
the dispersion and interaction of particles, we seem to rise above the matter, as if human beings are intrinsicalQ finite. On our view,
human needs and look down upon them. We seem to have become human beings are u,hat they make themselves, and one of the things
slightly more than human, to have distanced ourselves from our own they have wanted to make themselves is a divinity- what Sartre calls
humanity and seen ourselves from nowhere. a 'being in and for itself'. We antiessentialistscannot say, with Sartre,
For us antiessentialists,this temptation to think that we have eluded that this attempt is a 'futile passion'. The metaphysical systems of
our human finitude by seeing ourselvesunder the aspect of elementary Aristotle and Spinoza are not exercises in fr-rtility, anv more than are
particles is just one more attempt to create a divinity and then claim the antimetaphysical systemsof WilliamJames, Nietzsche and Sartre
a share in the divine life. The trouble with all such attempts is that himself. There is no inescapable truth which either metaphvsicians or
the need to be God is just one morc human need. Or, to put the point pragmatists are trying to evade or capture, for any candidate for
less invidiously, the project of seeing all our needs from the point of truth can be escaped by a suitable choice of description and can be
view of someone without any such needs is just one more humau underwritten by another such choice.
project. Stoic absence of passion, Zen absence of will, Heideggerian What about the Sartrean proposition that 'human beings are what
Gelassmheit, and physics-as-the-absolute-conception-of-reality are, thcy make themselvcs', which I have just put forward as antiessentialist
from this angle, just so many variations on a singie project - the project doctrine? ls that proposition true? Well, it is true in the same way that
of escaping from time and chance.6 Peano's axioms for arithmetic are true. These axioms sum up the
We antiessentialists,however, cannot afford to sneer at this project. implications of the use of a certain vocabulary, the vocabulary of
For we cannot afford to sneer at an))human project, anv chosen form numbers. But suppose you have no interest in using that vocabulary.
of human life. In particular, we should not allow ourselves to say what Suppose that you are willing to forgo the advantaees of counting and
I have just said: that by taking this view of physical science we seemto calculating, and, perhaps because ofa morbid fear oftechnolo[v, are
see ourselves as more than human. For an antiessentialist cannot willing and eager to speak a language in which no mention of the
invoke the appearance-reality distinction. We cannot say that our number 17 occurs. For you, those axioms are not candidates for truth
opponents' way of looking at physics gets physics wrong, mistakes its - they have no relevance to your projects.
intrinsic nature, substitutes an accidental and inessential use of it for So it is for the Sartrean proposition. This proposition sums up a
what it is in itself. In our view, physical science no more has an intrinsic certain view about what sorts ofprojects it is be st to pursue . If, however,
nature than does the number r7. Like 17,it is capable ofbe ing described your own projects are religious or metaphysical, and ifyou are therefore
63

willing to forgo the advantages of the kinds of egalitarian politics and it seems to neglect the fact that people change their central projects,
Romantic art whose implications Sartre sums up, Sartre 's proposition changc those parts of the ir self-image which they had previously found
is not even a candidate for truth. You may call it falsc il'you like, but most prccious. The question is, however, whether this ever happens
the falsiry is not like the falsity of a candidate for truth which has been Perhaps sometimes it does, but this is surely the
as a result of argument.
tested and found u,anting. It is rather a matter of obvious irreleuance - exception. Such conversions are typically as much a surprise to the
obvious inability to be of usc for your purposes. Putting a Sartrean person herself as to her friends. The phrase 'she has become a new
description before a Spinozist is like putting a bicycle pump in the person you would not recognize her'qpically means'she no longer
hands ofa ditch digger, or a yardstick in the hands ofa brain surgeon sees the point or relevance or interest of the arguments which she
- it is not even a candidate for utility.t once deployed on the other side'.
Is there then no argiument possible bctween Sartre and Spinoza. Common sense,however, Iike Greekphilosophy, thinks that conver-
no communication between Peano and the antitechnologist? It makes sions shouldcome about by argument. Common sense hopes that these
all the diffe rence here whethe r we are talkins about 'argument' or about conversions will not be like suddenly falling in love with an utterly
'communication'. We can have communication and disagreement different sort of person but rather like gradually coming to recognize
without an arsument ever having been joined. Indeed, we often do. the shape of one's own mind. The Socratic assumption that desirable
That is what happens whenever we find ourselves unable to find conversions are a matter of self-discovery rather than self-
common prernises, u4ren we hat'e to agree to differ, when we begin transficrmation nccessitatesthe Platonic doctrine that every human
to talk about'diffcrences of taste'. Communication requires no morc mind has, in broad outlines, the same shape: the shape given by
than agreement to use the same tools to pursue shared needs.Argument memory of the Forms. In later philosophers, this becomes the belief
requires a€Feement about which needs take priority over others. 'Ihe in 'reason', either as a faculty for penetrating through appearances to
language, and the common sense, which the Spinozist and the Sartrean reality or as a set of elementary truths which lie deep within each of
share reflects the fact that both need food, sex, shelter', books and us, waiting for argument to bring them to light. To believe in reason,
quite a lot of other thinss and that thev go about getting those in either sense, is to believe not only that there is such a thing as
tlrings in rnuch the same ways. Their inability to arguefruitfully on human nature, but that this nature is unique and not a matter olwhat
philosophical questions reflects the fact that neither gives much weight we share with the other animals. This unique ingredient in human
to the particular needs which led the other to philosophize. Similarly, beings makes us knowers rather than simply users, and thus makes us
the inability of two painters to agr:ee on how to paint reflects the f,act capable of being converted by argr,rment rather than bowled over by
that neithcr gives much weight to the needs which led the other to irrational forces.
the easel. To say that such disagreements are 'merely philosophical' We antiessentialists,of course, do not believe that there is such a
or 'merely artistic' is to say that, when they agree to put philosophy faculty. Since nothing has an intrinsic nature, neither do human
or painting aside, the participants can agree to collaborate on common beings. But we are happy to admit that human beings are unique in
projects.s To say that their phiiosophical or artistic disagreements are a certain respect: that normal, adult, properly socialized and trained
neverthelessprofound and important is to say that neither considers human beings stand in a unique set of relations. For these human
those othtr projects central to their lives. beings are able to use language,and so are able to describe things. As
This way of putting things may seem to neglect the fact that far as we know, nothing else is able to describe things. Numbers and
Sartreans sometimes turn Spinozist, atheists Catholic, antiessentialists physical forces can be greater than each other, but they do not describe
essentialist,metaphysicians pragmatist, and vice versa. More generally, each other as greater. tr?'eso describe them. Plants and the other
64 65

animals can interact, but their successin these interactions is not a ol putting wordsin intensionalcontexts.More plainly: it only becomes
matter of their finding increasingly more profitable redescriptions properly linguisticwhen we can saythingslike, 'It is also called "Y",
of each other. Our success ai largely a matter of finding such but lbr your purposesyou shoulddescribeit asX'or, 'You haveevery
redescriptions. reasonto call it an X, but nevertheless it is not an X.' For only at that
Darwin made it hard for essentialists to think of the higher point do we need to use specfficallylinguisticnotionslike 'meaning',
anthropoids as having suddenly acquired an extra added ingredient 'truth', 'reference' and 'description'.Only now does it become not
called 'reason' or 'intelligence', rather than simply more of the sort of only useful,but almost indispensable, to describethe anthropoidsas
cunning which the lower anthropoids had already manifested. This 'meaninsA by X' or 'believingfalselythat all As are Bs'.
is why, since Darwin, essentialist philosophers have tcnded to talk Looking at languagein this Darwinian way, as providing tools for
less about 'mind' and more about 'language'. Words like 'sign', coping with objects rather than representationsof objects,and as
's1'rnbol', 'language' and 'discourse' have become philosophical providing different setsof tools for different purposes,obviouslymakes
buzzwords in our century in the way in which 'reason'. 'science' and it hard to be an essentialist.For it becomeshard to take seriouslythe
'mind' were buzzwords in the previous century. The development of idea that one descriptionof A can be more 'objective'or 'closerto
synbolizing abilities is, indeed, susceptible to an evolutionary account the intrinsic nature of A' than another. The relation of tools to what
in terms of increasing cunning. But essentialist philosophers have they manipulateis simply a matter of utility for a particularpurpose,
tended to lbrget that they substituted 'language' for 'mind' in order not of 'correspondence'. A stomachpump is no closerto human nature
to accommodate Darwin, and have gone on to raise exactly the same than a stethoscope, and a voltagetesteris no closerto the essenceof
problems about the former as their predecessors raised about the an electricalappliancethan a screwdriver.Unlessone believes,with
Iatter. Aristotle,that there is a differencebetweenknowir.rgand using,that
As I said earlier, these problems arise fiom thinking of language as there is a purpose called 'knowing the truth' distinct from all other
a third thing, intruding between subject and object and forming a purposes,one will not think of one descriptionofA as'more accurate'
barrier to human knon4edge of hor.r'things are in themselves.To keep than another sanspltrase.For accuracy, like utility, is a matter of
faith with Darwin, however, we should think of the word 'language' adjustingthe relation betweenan object and olher objects,a matter
not as naming a thing with an intrinsic nature of its own, but as a way of putting an object in a profitable context. It is not a matter of getting
of abbreviating the kinds of complicated interactions r.r'iththe rest of the objer:tright, in the Aristoteliansenseof seeingit asit is apart from
the universe which are unique to the higher anthropoids. These all relations.
interactions are marked by the usr: of strings of noises and marks to An evolutionary description of the developmentof linguistic ability
facilitate group activities, as tools for coordinating the activities of givesessentialistthinking no foothold,just as an Aristotelianaccount
individuals. of human knowledgeleavesno room for a Darwinian understanding
The new relations in which these anthropoids stand to other objects of the growth of such knowledge.But, once again, you should notice
are signalized not simply by the use of the mark X to direct the that it would be inconsistentwith my own antiessentialismto try to
attention of the rest of the group to the object A, but by the use oi' convinceyou that the Darwinian way of thinking of language- and,
several different marks to direct attention to A, corresponding to the by extension,the Deweyan, pragmatist way of thinking of truth - is
several different purposes which A may serve. In philosophicaljargon, thc objectively true way. All I am entitled to say is that it is a useful
one can say that behaviour becomes properly linguistic only when r.vay,usefulfor particular purposes.All I can claim to have done here
organisms start using a semantical metalanguaee and become capable is to offer you a redescription of the relation between human beings
67

and the rest of the universe.Like every other redescription,this one they have done with what Hume and Kant did. The latter philosophers
has to be judged on the basisof its utility for a purpose' faced the task of assimilating the New Science of the seventeenth
So it seemsappropriate to end now by turning to the following century with the moral vocabulary which Europe inherited from,
question:For what purPosedoes the antiessentialist think that his arnons other sources, the Stoics and the Christians. Hume's solution
description of knowledge and inquiry, of human culture, is a better to the problem consisted of assimilating human reason to that of
tool than the Arist&elian, essentialistdescription?My answer has animals and assimilating human morality to the kind of benevolent
alreadybeen suggested severaltimes,.butit may be aswell to make it interest in fellow members of the species which animals also display.
explicit. Pragmatiststhink that there are two advantagesto antiessen- Hume was a protopragmatist, in the sensethat, when he has finished
tialism. The first is that adopting it makes it impossibleto formulate with it, the distinction between knowing reality and copingwith reality
a lot of the traditional philosophicalproblems. The secondis that lras become very fuzzy indeed. But, notoriously, Hume's solution
adopting it makesit easierto come to terms with Darwin. Since I have struck most readers - especially German readers as a cure worse
in previous books (particularly PhilosophlandtheMinor oftYature)said a than the disease. They thought that human knowledge - and in
lot about the sort of philosophical therapy which an antiessentialist particular claims to universal and necessary truth - had to be saved
descriptionof things makespossible,I shall concentratehere on the from Hume.
secondadvantage. Kant offered an alternative solution, one which Hegel considered
I agree with Dewey that the function of philosophy is to mediate still far too sceptical and defeatist far too Humean and proto-
betweenold ways of speaking,developedto accomplishearlier tasks, pragmatic. But philosophers lessambitious than Hegel have been, for
with new ways of speaking,developedin responseto new demands. the most part, willing to settle for some form of Kant's solution. Kant
As he put it: saved the claim to unconditionality, in the form of universality and
necessity,by distinguishing between the transcendental phenomenal-
When it is acknowledgedthat under disguiseof dealing with
world-creating scheme, and the empirical and merely phenomenal
ultimatereality,philosophyhasbeenoccupiedwith the precious
content which fills up that scheme. He immunized our traditional moral
valuesembeddedin socialtraditions,that it has sprung from a
vocabulary, and in particular our claim to be under unconditional
clash of social ends and from a conflict of inherited institutions
moral obligations, by sheltering it behind the wall which separatesthe
with incompatiblecontemporarytendencies,it will be seenthat
moral and noumenal from the phenomenal and empirical. By creating
the task of future philosophy is to clarify men's ideas as to the
this system, he earned the wholehearted thanks of people who, like
social and moral strifesof their own day.s
the protagonist of Fichte's The Vocationof Man, had been afraid that
The socialand morai strifeincited by the publicationof Darwin's Ihe their self-image as moral agents could not survive corpuscularian
Descentof Man has been largely forgotten. But it seemsto me that mechanics.
philosophy has still not caught up with Darwin - still not faced up to Kant thus helped us hang on to the idea of something nonrelational
the challengewhich he presents.There is still, I think, a lot of work because unconditional. Universal and necessary a priori synthetic
to be donein reconcilingthepreciousvaluesembeddedin our traditions truths and unconditional moral commands were safe because the
with what Darwin had to say about our relation to other animals. world of corpuscularian mechanics was not the real world. The real
Dewey and Davidson seem to me the philosopherswho have done world was the world in which we, behind our empirical backs, so to
most to help us accomplishthis reconciliation. speak, had constituted the phenomenal world the same world in
To seethe work of thesemen in this light, it helps to compare what which we were nonempirical, nonpragmatic, moral agents. Kant
69

therebyhelpedushangon to the ideathat thereisa greatbig difference time and history. Antiessentialismis one expressionof that shift. The
betweenus and the other animals.For them, poor phenomenalthings willingness to see philosophy as an aid to creating ourselvesrather
that they are, everything is relative and pragmatic. But we have a than to knowing ourselvesis another.
noumenaland transcendental side,a sidewhich escapesrelationality.
So we may hope to know the truth, in a non-Baconian senseof + *,1.*
knowing,a sensein which knowing is not reducibleto using.We may
hope to do right, in a senseof right which is not reducible to the
pursuit ofpleasureor to the gratificationofbenevolentinstincts. N OTE S
Darwin, however, made it much harder to be a Kantian than it
had previouslybeen.Oncepeoplestartedexperimentingwith a picture r lhis point can be put in Foucault's languageby saying that trurh will never
of themselvesas what Darwin's apt pupil, Nietzsche,called 'clever be separatedfrom power, but that power is not something bad in itself, The
animals',they found it very hard to think of themselvesas having a power of a utopian egalitarian community to creategood citizensvia biopower
transcendentalor a noumenal side. Further, when Darwinian evol- is a good thing. Officially, Foucault doesnot believe in a good Rousseauvian
utionary theory was brought together with the suggestion,mooted by subject,unshapedby discoursesofpower. But his tendencytowards distrust
Fregeand Peirceand anticipatedby Herder and Humboldt, that it is of all forms of authority occasionallyled him to toy with this pleasingfiction.
Language,to rather than consciousness or mind, which is the distin- e The propertiesusuallycalled 'nonrelational'(e.g.,,red', as opposedto .on
guishing feature of our species,Darwinian evolutionary theory made the left-hand side') are treated by psychological nominalists as properties
it possibleto seeall of human behaviour- includingthat 'higher' sort signifiedby predicates^whichare, for some purpose or another, being treated
of behaviour previously interpreted as fulfilment of the desire to asprimitive. But the primitivenessof apre dicate is not intrinsic to the predicate;
know the unconditionallytrue and do the unconditionallyright - as it is relative to a way ofteaching, or otherwiseexhibiting, a useofthe predicate.
continuous with animal behaviour. For the origin of language,unlike The putative nonrelationality of a property signifiedby a predicate is relative
the origin ofconsciousness, or ofa faculty called 'reason'capableof to a certain way ofdescribing a certain range ofobjects having the predicate.
grasping the intrinsic nature of things, is intelligible in naturalistic One way of putting the lessonstaught by both Saussureand Wittgenstein is
terms. We can give what Locke called a 'plain historical account' of to say that no predicate is intrinsically primitive.
how animals came to talk. However, we cannot give a plain historical For a firm statement, of the contrasting, antinominalist, antipragmatist
account of how they stopped coping with reality and began rep- view, seeJohn Searle, 77z Rediscoany of ke Mind (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
resentingit, much lessof how they stoppedbeing merelyphenomenal Press,rggz),p. zrr. The contrastwhich Searledraws there betweenintrinsic
beingsand beganto constitutethe phenomenalworld. featuresof the world, such as molecules,and observer-relative features,such
We can, of course,stick with Kant and insist that Darwin, like as it being a nice day for a picnic, is, for pragmatists,an arbitrary preference
Newton, is merely a storyabout phenomena,and that transcendental for the human pulposes servedby physicistsover those servedby picnickers.
storieshave precedenceover empirical stories,But the hundred-odd 3 On the fundamental importance of this latter Wittgensteinian point, see
years spent absorbing and improving on Darwin's empirical story (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University press,
Barry Allen, Truk in Philosop@
have, I suspectand hope, unfitted us for listening to transcendental r993).
stories. In the course of those years we have graduaily substituted 4 It is useful to think of this Whiteheadian criticism of Aristotle (a criticism
the making of a better future for ourselves,constructing a utopian, lound in other early twentieth-century philosophers- e.g., Peirce and Russell
democratic society, for the attempt to see ourselvesfrom outside of who tried to formulate a non subject-predicatelogic) asparalleling Derrida's
7o 7r

criticism of logocentrism. Derrida's picture of a u'ord as a node in an infinitely Humboldt's eighteenth-century view of language and the view common to
flexible web of relationships with other words is obviously reminiscent of Derrida and Wittgenstein. In particular, his comparison on p. r2g of Herder's
Whitehead's account, in Processand Realitl, of every actual occasion as consti- claim that 'our reason is formed onlv throughfctionl with Nietzsche's more
tuted by relations to all other actual occasions. My hunch is that the twentieth lamous claim that language is 'a mobile army of metaphors, metonl,rnies,
century will be seen by historians olphilosophy as the period in which a kind anthropomorphisrns' makes one realize that antiessentialism is at least as old
of neo-Leibnizian panrelationalism was developed in various different idioms as the suggestion that there is noAdamiclanguage, and thatdifferentlanguages,
- a panrelationism rvhich restates Leibniz's point that each monad is nothing including our own, serve different social needs. Reading Frank leads one to
but all the other monads seen fron: a certain perspective, each substance wonder whether, if Hegel had followed Herder's lead, and thus had be en led
nothing but its relations to all the other substances. to talli more about social needs and less about Absolute Knowledge , Western
5 l-or examples of the sort of glorification of elementary particles which I philosophy might not have saved itself a century of nervous shuffies.
have in mind, see the passage fromJohn Searle referred to in note z, and also
David Lewis, 'Putnam's Paradox', Australnsian Joumal of Philosoplyt, rg93. I
discuss this article briefly at pp. 7.f. of my Objecliuitr, Relatirism and Truth.
6 As I have said elsewhere, I think that Derrida is importantly right in seeing
Heideggerian renunciation as just one more attempt to affiIiate oneself with
power.
'fhe best account of the contrast between propositions which are truth
7
candidates and those which are not is William James's discussion of the
difference between 'live' and 'dead' intellectual options in his famous essay
'The Will to Believe'.
8 This analogy should not be construed as an 'aesthetic' theory ofthe nature
of philosophy, an)' rnore than as a 'philosophical' theory of the nature of
painting. Pragmatists do not have much use for Kant's distinctions between
the cognitive, the moral and the aesthetic. I am not trying to say that philosophy
is less 'cognitive' than has been thought, but merely to point to the diference
between situations in which there is sufficient agreement about ends to make
possible fruitful argument about alternative means, and situations in which
there is not. But this difference is ofcourse not sharp. There is a continuum
between unquestioning devotion to the same ends and inability to understand
how one's interlocutor could be so crazy as not to share one's own ends.
g John Dewey, Reconstmction in Philosoplgy, The Middlz ll/orb of John Deu'qt
(Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, rg8z), vol. XII, p. 94.
ro See Manfred Frank, Wat is Neostructuralism?(Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, I9B4), p. zI7: 'the linguistic turn consists in the transferral
ofthe philosophical paradigm ofconsciousness onto that ofthe sign'. Frank's
book is very valuable in giving a sense of the continuity betwe en Herder and

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