For Foucault by Mark G. E. Kelly

Author:Mark G. E. Kelly
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2017-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

5

Rorty

Relativizing Normativity

Thus far, I’ve criticized a series of more or less Marxist thinkers for not going far enough in evading normativity. I’m now going to look at quite a different case, Richard Rorty, who in a sense goes too far in his anti-Marxism. Rorty rejects any kind of transcendental grounding for morality, accepting the mantle of moral relativism. For him, this relativism does not diminish the force of norms, however, but rather means that we are all tied to the normative framework of our society. A similar, albeit less extreme, move is made in contemporary Frankfurt School Critical Theory, which I will deal with in the next chapter. This similarity is no coincidence, inasmuch as the seminal figure of contemporary Critical Theory, Jürgen Habermas, was, like Rorty, significantly influenced by American pragmatism. Sometimes described as America’s only homegrown philosophical movement, pragmatism has for almost a century been overshadowed in American academic philosophy by the Anglo-American “analytical” tradition, in which Rorty himself was primarily educated, though he nevertheless in his lifetime came to be regarded as pragmatism’s major contemporary standard-bearer. Pragmatism has tended to have a greater degree of communication with continental philosophy than mainstream Anglo-American philosophy, and Rorty was certainly much more sympathetic to his continental contemporaries than were most American philosophers of the time.

The case of Rorty is interesting in relation to the Foucauldian project of demolishing normative political thought primarily because Rorty is close to Foucault’s position, but remains strongly committed to normativity. Rorty’s position that we are incapable of thinking our way outside of the mores of our time and place is sometimes mistakenly imputed to Foucault, particularly to The Order of Things, though in fact what he says there about the rules of formation of knowledges explicitly concerns the human sciences specifically, not culture in general—much of human culture occurs outside of such restricted knowledges, excluded from a scientific status, but nonetheless popularly believed—and in any case his claim is not that we cannot think outside an episteme but that discourse outside of it will not be accorded the status of science within it. Foucault and Rorty certainly share a certain historical relativism about knowledge and morality, holding that these change over time and between different places. However, for Foucault, critical attention to this fact inevitably destabilizes epistemic and moral certainties in a way or to an extent that it does not for Rorty. While for Rorty politics is about self-consciously assuming and pursuing the values of our society, Foucault wants to criticize and undermine these.

Rorty in his later years frequently engaged with Foucault’s thought. Rorty’s attitude to Foucault is ambivalent. Rorty sees Foucault, and a number of his French philosophical contemporaries, as fellow-thinkers, inasmuch as they too reject transcendental accounts of truth and morality.1 However, he also sees Foucault as a primary inspiration for a tendency in the American academy that he laments and wishes to attack, which he calls “Foucauldian leftism,” though he does not identify whom he considers to be part of this tendency.

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