MARK LILLA
complement to the "existentialist" claims that normal participa–
tion in normal discourse is merely one project, one way of being
in the world. The caution amounts to saying that abnormal and
"existential" discourse is always parasitic upon normal discourse ....
231
Regrettably, the end of
Philosophy and the Mirror oj Nature
is as
confused as the end of Putnam's
Reason, Truth and History,
though
over a different issue. While Putnam wants to conclude that his "ra–
tionality" will develop to some ideal terminus, Rorty faces the prob–
lem of placing philosophy within the conversation he describes .
Relying on Michael Oakeshott's essay, "The Voice of Poetry in the
Conversation of Mankind," Rorty sees culture as a discussion in
which voices are somewhat distinct ; but if that is the case, what is
philosophy's "voice"? Does it even have one?
In his essays he speaks with great respect of the highbrow critics
who have preserved the history of philosophy outside the academy,
because "developing attitudes toward the mighty dead and their
rivals ... is the whole point of highbrow culture." Later he writes
that "although philosophy has no essence, it does have a history." We
might conclude that Rorty wants philosophers to be guardians of the
history of the Western "conversation," though his rather careless use
of language makes the depth of his own commitment to that history
somewhat questionable . He would like to see philosophers become
"informed dilettantes" able to pass "rapidly from Hemingway to
Proust to Hitler to Marx to Foucault to Mary Douglas to the present
situation in Southeast Asia to Gandhi to Sophocles ." In a Goethe or
Hegel- even in a Trilling or Wilson - breadth is a virtue, but such
men were certainly
not
"dilettantes." Rorty is undoubtedly correct
that academic philosophy today is neither really deep nor broad, and
his efforts at broadening his colleagues by introducing them to im–
portant continental writers are indeed admirable, but his emphasis
on intellectual breadth has been so consistent to the exclusion of
other ends that many have understandably thought him a relativist
at heart. As Alasdair MacIntyre complained in an otherwise
favorable review of
Philosophy and the Mirror oj Nature
in the
London
Review oj Books,
"If
I am doomed to spending the rest of my life talk–
ing with literary critics and sociologists and historians and
phys icists, I am going to listen to a great deal of philosophy, much of
it inept."
The bind in which Rorty has placed himself is that, while he
