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are two kinds of academic philosophers in Britian and the United
States today: those who worry if a bundle of twigs remains the same
bundle if one of the twigs is removed, and those who are doing ther–
apy for people who would take such questions seriously. Rorty is the
prototypical therapist, trying-almost obsessively-to relieve his pa–
tients of what someone else has called "Cartesian anxiety." How, he
wonders, did philosophy become sundered from the rest of Western
culture, turn into a "profession," and start appropriating to itself the
authority to adjudicate claims to knowledge, in morals, science,
religion, literature, and the arts? Much of his work is an attempt to
answer this question by reciting the history of modern university
philosophy . In this historical narrative, Rorty praises his heroes–
Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Dewey-who are more unified in their re–
action to foundationalism than in a shared program of what philoso–
phy should be.
As a work of intellectual criticism, Rorty's
Philosophy and the
Mirror of Nature
(1980) has already had an impact on academic phi–
losophy - especially among young graduate students - and is one of
the few serious books by a philosophy professor to be widely read
recently by literary critics and other intellectuals. (He has already
been misread by Harold Bloom and Richard Poirier.) His collection
of essays,
Consequences of Pragmatism
(1982), covers much the same
historical ground but also puts forward a fuller account of his con–
ception of "philosophy's future" after it gives up the quest for cer–
tainty.
It
is in this latter task that Rorty's vision becomes clearer and
its shortcomings more apparent.
Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature
begins at the dawn of modern
philosophy and asks how "the invention of the mind" took place in
the work of Descartes. Rorty suggests that the rather unintuitive
Cartesian claim - that there is an ontological gap between mind and
body - came to have power over Western philosophy through an
oc–
ular
metaphor: the "Eye of the Mind," which served as a mirror of ex–
ternal nature. To the ancients, the mind was our "glassy essence,"
but with Descartes reason became separated from mind, as, even–
tually, did knowledge. This ocular metaphor is now so firmly rooted
in Western culture, Rorty suggests, that the only way to question it
is to step outside our own world into a world of science fiction. He
does this by inventing the planet of "the Antipodeans." The Antipo–
deans, it turns out, never had a Descartes, so instead of saying
things like, "I think my tooth aches," they report, "My C-fibers are fir-
