Mark Lilla
ON GOODMAN, PUTNAM, AND RORTY:
THE RETURN TO THE "GIVEN"
Yes, stick to words at arry rate;
There never was a surer gate
into the temple, Certainty.
- Mephisto,
Faust
The "quest for certainty," as Dewey called it, has been the
central aim of philosophy since the Greeks. Yet it is only in the past
century that language came to be seen as the gate through which en–
trance to the temple could be gained. Beginning in the Anglo–
American tradition with the logical atomism of Russell and the early
Wittgenstein - and, on the continent, with the rise in linguistic
structuralism and the hermeneutics movement - the study of
language became central to modern philosophy, not to mention the
broader realms of modernism in literature, criticism, and an–
thropology .
In many ways Anglo-American philosophy has been a
remarkable barometer of modernism . Through that linguistic gate
analytic philosophers were, to their minds, only extending the ten–
dencies in Western philosophy evident since Descartes; yet in an–
other sense, they were also joining their cultural contemporaries who
sought to enter the same temple through different gates. But gates
lead in and gates lead out. And just as modernists in art, architec–
ture, and literature have come to find the ark in the temple of Cer–
tainty empty, so too have many philosophers in the modern analytic
tradition come to feel the quest mistaken. More striking still, each
group, in its search for the yet-undefined "postmodern," has, like
Mephisto, felt constrained to leave by the very door which it entered:
"neoexpressionist" painters are reviving the styles of the early 1900s;
postmodern architects are reintegrating ornamentation and decora–
tion into their work; and through the study of language many analy–
tic philosophers are finding themselves returning to the perennial
questions which occupied philosophy before Russell and followers
such as Ayer ruled them "meaningless."
Of course, there always has been a current within twentieth
century analytic philosophy - and certainly outside it - that denied
that logic and language were the certain foundations on which the
eternal truth of scientific or moral statements would be established .
