Bulletin of the Santayana Society, No. 13 Fall 1995

              Rorty has no Physics
Richard Rorty admits no physics into his philosophy. Had he permitted the
concrete material world to be one of the determiners of his conversation, he
would surely not have made some of the audacious statements he is noted for.
He would not have insisted that there is no such thing as human nature, if he had
allowed his philosophical position to reflect the enormous commonality found in the
genetic makeup of all humans, and the similarity of the challenges faced by all living
organisms. This would also have deterred him from making his historicist claim "that
socialization, and thus historical circumstance, goes all the way down — that there is
nothing "beneath" socialization or prior to history which is defmatory of the human." l
If his philosophical position were centred about the material cosmos, he would be less
likely to dismiss truth as an outmoded concept, where truth is seen as the unwritten
record of events past and future within that cosmos. If he had been in a position to
treat contingency in the classical manner as a cosmological concept, he would hardly
have converted it into an unfocused all-purpose sceptical notion.
The effect of having a physics would not so much reverse his position on the above
and other subjects; rather, it would introduce some measure into Rorty's sweeping
statements. It is not necessary to insist that socialization "goes all the way down," in
order to recognize the powerful impact of environment and social conditions upon
behaviour and opinion. One might agree that there is no fully determinate concept of
what is human nature; nevertheless, this does not entitle one to deny flatly any common
characters and conditions shared by humans. Rorty approves of modem efforts to
achieve freedom in place of the old philosophical goal of seeking the truth. But the
frank acknowledgement of our setting in the recalcitrant world helps show that the
freedom open to us is sharply limited, and requires for its realization the recognition
of and reconciliation with the truth.
For traditional philosophy, the predicate * contingent* assigns to the assertion that
an event has occurred the specific meaning that It need not have happened. For one
who has no physics, the predicate might well be dispensed with altogether, but in the
case of Rorty (and many who follow his lead), the term is retained and utilised in a
vastly broadened, inexact manner, so that one speaks perhaps of the contingency of
language, of selfhood, and of community. To the original concept are appended the
epistemic notion of uncertainty and the moral notion of malaise, among other things.
Now it could be maintained that if there is contingency of events, then there must be
uncertainty and unpredictability about what happens. And it could equally be
maintained that where there is uncertainty, there will inevitably be a certain intellectual
disquiet. Thus both uncertainty and malaise could reasonably be associated with
contingency. In the first paper above, it is noted that Santayana finds contingency in
events taking place in the world, believes that we are uncertain in our knowledge, and
affirms that society suffers from a modern malaise; Ludwig Wittgenstein, one of the
1     See page xiii of Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge
University Press: Cambridge 1989). References to this book will consist of page numbers only.