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similate Larkin to his own
theoretical
discourse. He is in effect prescribing
how Larkin should feel about the prospect of dying. The exercise of liter–
ary criticism hardly constitutes a threat to liberal culture, but it reflects a
habit of mind inconsistent with liberalism.
Rorty's defense of redescription comes down to the assertion that it is
unavoidable, everybody does it.
"It
is a generic trait of the intellectual" of
whatever persuasion. But it does not follow that it is his only trait or al–
ways an admirable one. In
Consequences of Pragmatism,
Rorty disputes the
view of Charles Taylor that "somebody's own vocabulary is always the
best vocabulary for understanding what he is doing, that his own expla–
nation of what he is doing is what we want," reducing it to absurdity by
offering the worst case scenario. "There are, after all, cases in which the
other person's, or culture's explanation of what it's up to is so primitive,
or so nutty that we brush it aside." There are also instances in which self–
descriptions are superior to descriptions by others. In determining what is
best, we would need something like the objective standards that Rorty
believes do not exist. Even if the standard is pragmatic usefulness, the
question would arise: for whom is the redescription useful, for the rede–
scriber or the described? And what would be the standards for
redescribing in either case? Without external standards, the redescriber
becomes a potential source of arbitrary and coercive verbal behavior.
I want to be fair to Rorty. He has caught hold of a feature of intel–
lectual life that we need to take seriously. He understands the risks of
redescription and wants to obviate them by confining it to the private
realm. But as his own practice shows, redescription has public and poten–
tially coercive implications. Rorty's problem grows out of his
identification
of redescription with intellectual life. Imagine a conversation between re–
describers: it would be a dialogue between the deaf, which of course is no
dialogue at all. As Jiirgen Habermas and other thinkers in the Enlighten–
ment tradition have argued, intellectuals also have the capacity to listen to
one another, to try to understand and learn from what the other is saying
in his or her own terms, even to be converted. Intellectual life is a tension
between understanding and appropriation. In Rorty's view, there is only
appropriation, that is, redescription.
One of the most remarkable instances of this tension can be found in
John Stuart Mill's essay on Coleridge in which the liberal Mill enters em–
pathetically into the mind of the conservative Coleridge. Mill follows
Coleridge's own procedure of asking not whether a received opinion is
true (as if the critic could automatically assume that he possessed the stan–
dard of truth), but what it means. In order to discover his meaning, Mill
must respect Coleridge's own understanding of it. The pursuit of the
meaning of Coleridge's text does not exclude the question of whether it
