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Solidarity or Objectivity?
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;V OT!G£ D4W1f: Pte.c SS ) 1<19 Cf ) There are two principal ways in which reflective human beings try,
by placing their lives in a larger context, to give sense to those lives.
The first is by telling the story of their contribution to a community.
This community may be the actual historical one in which they live,
or another actual one, distant in time or place, or a quite imaginary
one, consisting perhaps of a dozen heroes and heroines selected from
history or fiction or both. The second way is to describe themselves
as standing in immediate relation to a nonhuman reality. This relation
is immediate in the sense that it does not derive from a relation
between such a reality and their tribe, or their nation, or their
imagined band of comrades. I shall say that stories of the former
kind exemplify the desire for solidarity, and that stories of the latter
kind exemplify the desire for objectivity. Insofar as a person is seeking
solidarity, he or she does not ask about the relation between the
practices of the chosen community and something outside that com­
munity. Insofar as he seeks objectivity, he distances himself from
the actual persons around him not by thinking of himself as a
member of some other real or imaginary group, but rather by attaching
himself to something that can be described without reference to any
particular human beings.
The tradition in Western culture that centers on the notion of
the search for Truth, a tradition that runs from the Greek philosophers
through the Enlightenment, is the clearest example of the attempt
to find a sense in one's existence by turning away from solidarity
to objectivity. The idea of Truth as something to be pursued for its
own sake, not because it will be good for oneself, or for one's real
or imaginary community, is the central theme of this tradition. It
was perhaps the growing awareness by the Greeks of the sheer
diversity of human communities that stimulated the emergence of

This paper is a revised version of a Howison Lecture given at the University of

California at Berkeley in January 1983, A somewhat different version appeared in
Nallzall Review of Americall Sllidies, vol. 6, 1984, and (in French translation) in Critique.
168 / Richa rd Rorty
Solidarity or Objectivity? / 169

this ideal. A fear of parochialism, of being confined within the

horizons of the group into which one happens to be born, a need beliefs. They also must argue that there are procedures of justification
to see it with the eyes of a stranger, helps produce the skeptical of belief which are natural and not merely local. So they must
and ironic tone characteristic of Euripides and Socrates. Herodotus' construct an epistemology that has room for a kind of justification
willingness to take the barbarians seriously enough to describe their that is not merely social but natural, springing from human nature
customs in detail may have been a necessary prelude to Plato's claim itself, and made possible by a link between that part of nature and
that the way to transcend skepticism is to envisage a common goal the rest of nature. On their view, the various procedures thought of
of humanity-a goal set by human nature rather than by Greek as providing rational justification by one or another culture mayor
culture. The combination of Socratic alienation and Platonic hope may not really be rational. For to be truly rational, procedures of
gives rise to the idea of the intellectual as someone who is in touch justification must lead to the truth, to correspondence to reality, to
with the nature of things, not by way of the opinions of his com­ the intrinsic nature of things.
munity, but in a more immediate way. By contrast, those who wish to reduce objectivity to solidarity­
Plato developed the idea of such an intellectual by means of call them "pragmatists"-do not require either a metaphysics or an
distinctions between knowledge' and opinion, and between appear­ epistemology. They view truth as, in William James' phrase, what it
ance and reality. Such distinctions conspire to produce the idea that is good for us to believe. So they do not need an account of a
rational inquiry should make visible a realm to which nonintellectuals relation between beliefs and objects called "correspondence," nor an
have little access, and of whose very existence they may be doubtful. account of human cognitive abilities that ensures our species is capable
In the Enlightenment, this notion became concrete in the adoption of entering into that relation. They see the gap between truth and
of the Newtonian phYSical scientist as a model of the intellectual. justification not as something to be bridged by isolating a natural
To most thinkers of the eighteenth century, it seemed clear that the and transcultural sort of rationality that can be used to criticize certain
access to Nature which physical science had provided should now cultures and praise others, but simply as the gap between the actual
be followed by the establishment of social, political, and economic good and the possible better. From a pragmatist point of view, to
institutions that were in accordance with Nature. Ever since, liberal say that what is rational for us now to believe may not be true, is
social thought has centered upon social reform as made possible by simply to say that somebody may come up with a better idea . It is
objective knowledge of what human beings are like-not knowledge to say there is always room for improved belief, since new evidence,
of what Greeks or Frenchmen or Chinese are like, but of humanity or new hypotheses, or a whole new vocabulary, may come along.!
as such. We are the heirs of this objectivist tradition, which centers For pragmatists, the desire for objectivity is not the desire to escape
on the assumption that we must step outside our community long the limitations of one's community, but simply the desire for as
enough to examine it in the light of something that transcends it, much intersubjective agreement as possible, the desire to extend the
namely that which it has in common with every other actual and reference of "us" as far as we can. Insofar as pragmatists make a
possible human community. This tradition dreams of an ultimate distinction between knowledge and opinion, it is simply the dis­
community which will have transcended the distinction between the tinction between topics on which such agreement is relatively easy
natural and the social, which will exhibit a solidarity that is not to get and topics on which agreement is relatively hard to get.
parochial because it is the expression of an ahistorical human nature. "Relativism" is the traditional epithet applied to pragmatism by
Much of the rhetoric of contemporary intellectual life takes for granted realists. Three different views are commonly referred to by this name.
that the goal of scientific inquiry into man is to understand "un­ The first is the view that every belief is as good as every other. The
derlying structures," or, "culturally invariant factors," or, "biologically second is the view that "true" is an equivocal term, having as many
determined patterns." meanings as there are procedures of justification. The third is the
Those who wish to ground solidarity in objectivity-call them view that there is nothing to be said about either truth or rationality
"realists"-have to construe truth as correspondence to reality. So apart from descriptions of the familiar procedures of justification that
they must construct a metaphysics that has room for a special relation a given society-ours-uses in one or another area of inquiry. The
between beliefs and objects which will differentiate true from false pragmatist holds the ethnocentric third view. But he does not hold
the self-refuting first view, nor the eccentric second view. He thinks
170 / Richard Rorty
Solidarity or Objectivity? / 171

his views are better than the realists, but he does not think that his
for it presupposes that knowledge, man, and nature have real essences
views correspond to the nature of things. He thinks the very flexibility
which are relevant to the problem at hand. For the pragmatist, by
of the word "true"-the fact that it is merely an expression of
contrast, knowledge is, like truth, simply a compliment paid to the
commendation-insures its univocity. The term "true," on his ac­
beliefs we think so well justified that, for the moment, further
count, means the same in all cultures, just as equally flexible terms
justification is not needed. An inquiry into the nature of knowledge
like "here," "there," "good," "bad," "you," and "me" mean the
can, on his view, only be a socio-historical account of how various
same in all cultures. But the identity of meaning is, of course,
people have tried to reach agreement on what to believe.
compatible with diversity of reference, and with diversity of proce­
dures for assigning the terms. So he feels free to use the term "true" This view, which I am calling "pragmatism," is almost, but not
quite, the, same as what Hilary Putnam, in his recent Reason, Truth
as a general term of commendation in the same way as his realist
and History, calls "the internalist conception of philosophy. "2 Putnam
opponent does-and in particular to use it to commend his own
defines such a conception as one which gives up the attempt at a
view.
God's eye view of things, the attempt at contact with the nonhuman
However, it is not clear why "relativist" should be thought an
appropriate term for the ethnocentric third view, the one which the which I have been calling "the desire for objectivity." Unfortunately,
he accompanies his defense of the antirealist views I am recom­
pragmatist does hold. For the pragmatist is not holding a positive
mending with a polemic against a lot of the other people who hold
theory that says that something is relative to something else. He is,
these views-e.g., Kuhn, Feyerabend, Foucault, and myself. We are
instead, making the purely negative point that we should drop the
criticized as "relativists." Putnam presents internalism as a happy
traditional distinction between knowledge and opinion, construed as
the distinction between truth as correspondence to reality and truth
via media between realism and relativism. He speaks of "the plethora
of relativisitic doctrines being marketed today"3 and in particular of
as a commendatory term for well-justified beliefs. The reason the
realist calls this negative claim "relativistic" is that he cannot believe "the French philosophers" as holding "some fancy mixtUre of cultural
relativism and structuralism."4 But when it comes to criticizing these
that anybody would seriously deny that truth has an intrinsic nature.
doctrines all that Putnam finds to attack is the so-called "incom­
So when the pragmatist says there is nothing to be said about truth
mensurability thesis": vis., "terms used in another culture cannot be
save that each of us will commend as true those beliefs he or she
equated in meaning or reference with any terms or expressions we
finds good to believe, the realist is inclined to interpret this as one
possess."s He senSibly agrees with Donald Davidson in remarking
more positive theory about the nature of truth: a theory according
that this thesis is self-refuting. Criticism of this thesis, however, is
to which truth is simply the contemporary opinion of a chosen
destructive of, at most, some incautious passages in some early
individual or group. Such a theory would, of course, be self-refuting.
writings by Feyerabend. Once this thesis is brushed aside, it is hard
But the pragmatist does not have a theory of truth, much less a
to see how Putnam himself differs from most of those he criticizes.
relativistic one. As a partisan of solidarity, his account of the value
of cooperative human inquiry has only an ethical base, not an Putnam accepts the Davidsonian point that, as he puts it, "the
whole justification of an interpretative scheme . . . is that it renders
epistemological or metaphysical one. Not having any epistemology,
the behavior of others at least minimally reasonable by our Iights."6
a fortiori he does not have a relativistic one.
It would seem natural to go on from this to say that we cannot get
The question of whether truth or rationality has an intrinsic
outside the range of those lights, that we cannot stand on neutral
nature, of whether we ought to have a positive theory about either
ground illuminated only by the natural light of reason. But Putnam
topic, is just the question of whether our self-description ought to
draws back from this conclusion. He does so because he construes
be constructed around a relation to human nature or around a relation
the claim that we cannot do so as the claim that the range of our
to a particular collection of human beings, whether we should desire
thought is restricted by what he calls "institutionalized norms,"
objectivity or solidarity. It is hard to see how one could choose
publicly available criteria for settling all arguments, including philo­
between these alternatives by looking more deeply into the nature
sophical arguments. He rightly says that there are no such criteria,
of knowledge, or of man, or of nature. Indeed, the proposal that
arguing that the suggestion that there are is as self-refuting as the
this issue might be so settled begs the question in favor of the realist,
"incommensurability thesis." He is, I think, entirely right in saying
 Solidarity or Objectivity? / 173
J 72 / Richard Rorty

knowledge is never separable from power-that one is likely to suffer

that the notion that philosophy is or should become such an ap­
if one does not hold certain beliefs at certain times and places. But
plication of explicit criteria contradicts the very idea of philosophy.?
such institutional backups for beliefs take the form of bureaucrats
One can gloss Putnam's point by saying that "philosophy" is precisely
and policemen, not of "rules of language" and "criteria of rationality."
what a culture becomes capable of when it ceases to define itself in
terms of explicit rules, and becomes sufficiently leisured and civilized To think otherwise is the Cartesian fallacy of seeing axioms where
to rely on inarticulate know-how, to substitute phronesis for codifi­ there are only shared habits, of viewing statements that summarize
cation, and conversation with foreigners for conquest of them. such practices as if they reported constraints enforcing such practices.
But to say that we cannot refer every question to explicit criteria Part of the force of Quine's and Davidson's attack on the distinction
institutionalized by our society does not speak to the point the people between the conceptual and the empirical is that the distinction
whom Putnam calls "relativists" are making. One reason these people between different cultures does not differ in kind from the distinction
are pragmatists is precisely that they share Putnam's distrust of the between different theories held by members of a single culture. The
positivistic idea that rationality is a matter of applying criteria. Tasmanian aborigines and the British colonists had trouble com­
Such a distrust is common, for example, to Kuhn, Mary Hesse, municating, but this trouble was different only in extent from the
Wittgenstein, Michael Polanyi and Michael Oakeshott. Only someone difficulties in communication experienced by Gladstone and Disraeli.
who did think of rationality in this way would dream of suggesting The trouble in all such cases is just the difficulty of explaining why
that "true" means something different in different societies. For only other people disagree with us, of reweaving our beliefs to fit the
such a person could imagine that there was anything to pick out to fact of disagreement together with the other beliefs we hold. The
which one might make "true" relative. Only if one shares the logical same Quinean arguments that dispose of the positivists' distinction
positivists' idea that we all carry around things called "rules of between analytic and synthetic truth dispose of the anthropologists'
language" that regulate what we say when, will one suggest that distinction between the intercultural and the intracultural.
there is no way to break out of one's culture. On this holistic account of cultural norms, however, we do not
In the most original and powerful section of his book, Putnam need the notion of a universal transcultural rationality that Putnam
argues that the notion that "rationality . .. is defined by the local invokes against those whom he calls "relativists." Just before the
cultural norms" is merely the demonic counterpart of positivism. It end of his book, Putnam says that once we drop the notion of a
is, as he says, "a scientistic theory inspired by anthropology as God's-eye point of view we realize that:
positivism was a scientistic theory inspired by the exact sciences."
By "scientism" Putnam means the notion that rationality consists in We can only hope to produce a more rational collceptioll of rationality
the application of critera. 8 Suppose we drop this notion, and accept or a better conception of morality if we operate from withill our
Putnam's own Quinean picture of inquiry as the continual reweaving tradition (with its echoes of the Greek agora, of Newton , and so
of a web of beliefs rather than as the applica tion of criteria to cases. o n, in the case of rationality, and with its echoes of scripture, of
Then the notion of "local cultural norms" will lose its offensively the philosophers, of the democratic revolutions, and so on .. . in
parochial overtones. For now to say that we must work by our own the case of morality). We are invited to engage in a truly human
lights, that we must be ethnocentric, is merely to say that beliefs dialogue.9
suggested by another culture must be tested by trying to weave them
together with beliefs we already have. It is a consequence of this With this I entirely agree, and so, I take it, would Kuhn, Hesse, and
holistic view of knowledge, a view shared by Putnam and those he most of the other so-called "relativists" -perhaps even Foucault. But
criticizes as "relativists," that alternative cultures are not to be thought Putnam then goes on to pose a further question:
of on the model of alternative geometries. Alternative geometries are
irreconcilable because they have axiomatic structures, and contradic­
tory axioms. They are designed to be irreconcilable. Cultures are not Does this dialogue have an ideal terminus? Is there a true conception
so designed, and do not have axiomatic structures. To say that they of rationality, an ideal morality, even if all we ever have are our
cOI/ceptiolls of these?
have "institutionalized norms" is only to say, with Foucault, that
174 I Richard Rorty Solidarity or Objectivity? I 175

I do not see the point of this question. Putnam suggests that a Those who follow Feyerabend in this direction are often thought
negative answer-the view that "there is only the dialogue" -is just of as necessarily enemies of the Enlightenment, as joining in the
another form of self-refuting relativism. But, once again, I do not chorus that claims the traditional sell-descriptions of the Western
see how a claim that something does not exist can be construed as democracies are bankrupt, that they somehow have been shown to
a claim that something is relative to something else. In the final be "inadequate" or "self-deceptive." Part of the instinctive resistance
sentence of his book, Putnam says that, " The very fact that we speak to attempts by Marxists, Sartreans, Oakeshottians, Gadamerians and
of our different conceptions as different conceptions of rationality Foucauldians to reduce objectivity to solidarity is the fear that our
posits a Grellzbegriff, a limited-concept of ideal truth ." But what is traditional liberal habits and hopes will not survive the reduction.
such a posit supposed to do, except to sa y that from God's point of Such feelings are evident, for example, in Habermas' criticism of
view the human race is heading in the right direction? Surely Put­ Gadamer's position as relativistic and potentially repressive, in the
nam's " internalism" should forbid him to say anything like that. To suspicion that Heidegger's attacks on realism are somehow linked
say that we think we're heading in the right direction is just to say, to his Nazism, in the hunch that Marxist attempts to interpret values
as class interests are usually just apologies for Leninist takeovers,
with Kuhn, that we can, by hindsight, tell the story of the past as
and in the suggestion that Oakeshott's skepticism about rationalism
a story of progress. To say that we still have a long way to go, that
in politics is merely an apology for the status quo.
our present views should not be cast in bronze, is too platitudinous
I think that putting the issue in such moral and political terms,
to require support by positing limit-concepts. So it is hard to see
rather than in epistemological or metaphilosophi cal terms, makes
what difference is made by the difference between saying "there is
clearer what is at stake. For now the question is not about how to
only the dialogue" and saying "there is also that to which the
define words like " truth" or " rationality" or " knowledge" or " phi­
dialogue converges." losophy," but about what self-image our society should have of itself.
I would suggest that Putnam here, at the end of the day, slides
The ritual invocation of the "need to avoid relativism" is most
back into the scientism he rightly condemns in others. For the root comprehensible as an expression of the need to preserve certain
of scientism, defined as the view that rationality is a matter of habits of contemporary European life. These are the habits nurtured
applying criteria, is the desire for objectivity, the hope that what by the Enlightenment, and justified by it in terms of an appeal of
Putnam calls "human flourishing" has a transhistorical nature. I think Reason, conceived as a transcultural human ability to correspond to
that Feyerabend is right in suggesting that until we discard the reality, a faculty whose possession and use is demonstrated by
metaphor of inquiry, and human activity generally, as converging obedience to explicit criteria . So the real question about relativism
rather than proliferating, as becoming more unified rather than more is whether these same habits of intellectual, social, and political life
diverse, we shall never be free of the motives that once led us to can be justified by a conception of rationality as criterionless muddling
posit gods. Positing Grenzbegriffe seems merely a way of telling through, and by a pragmatist conception of truth.
oursel ves that a nonexistent God would, if he did exist, be pleased I think the answer to this question is that the .pragmatist cannot
with us. If we could ever be moved solely by the desire for solidarity, justify these habits without circularity, but then neither can the realist.
setting aside the desire for objectivity altogether, then we should The pragmatists' justification of toleration, free inquiry, and the quest
think of human progress as making it possible for human beings to for undistorted communication can only take the form of a comparison
do more interesting things and be more interesting people, not as between societies that exemplify these habits and those that do not,
heading toward a place that has somehow been prepared for humanity leading up to the suggestion that nobody who has experienced both
in advance. Our self-image would employ images of making rather would prefer the latter. It is exemplified by Winston Churchill's
than finding, the images used by the Romantics to praise poets rather defense of democracy as the worst form of government imaginable,
than the images used by the Greeks to praise mathematicians. Fey­ except for all the others that have been tried so far. Such justification
erabend seems to me right in trying to develop such a self-image is not by reference to a criterion, but by reference to various detailed
for us, but his project seems misdescribed, by himself as well as by practical advantages. It is circular only in that the terms of praise
his critics, as "relativism."lo used to describe liberal societies will be drawn from the vocabulary
 Solidarity or Objectivity? / 177
176 / Richard Rorty

of the liberal societies themselves. Such praise has to be in some from a more universal standpoint. When he hears the pragmatist
vocabulary, after all, and the terms of praise current in primitive or repudiating the desire for such a standpoint he cannot quite believe
theocratic or totalitarian societies will not produce the desired result. it. He thinks that everyone, deep down inside, must want such
So the pragmatist admits that he has no ahistorical standpoint from detachment. So he attributes to the pragmatist a perverse form of
which to endorse the habits of modern democracies he wishes to his own attempted detachment, and sees him as an ironic, sneering
praise. These consequences are just what partisans of solidarity expect. aesthete who refuses to take the choice between communities seri­
But among partisans of objectivity they give rise, once again, to fears ously, a mere "relativist." But the pragmatist, dominated by the
of the dilemma formed by ethnocentrism on the one hand and desire for solidarity, can only be criticized for taking his own com­
relativism on the other. Either we attach a special privilege to our munity too seriously. He can only be criticized for ethnocentrism,
own community, or we pretend an impossible tolerance for every not for relativism. To be ethnocentric is to divide the human race
into the people to whom one must justify one's beliefs and the
other group.
I have been arguing that we pragmatists should grasp the eth­ others. The first group-one's etlinos-comprises those who share
nocentric horn of this dilemma. We should say that we must, in enough of one's beliefs to make fruitful conversation possible. In
practice, privilege our own group, even though there can be no this sense, everybody is ethnocentric when engaged in actual debate,
noncircular justification for doing so. We must insist that the fact no matter how much realist rhetoric about objectivity he produces
that nothing is immune from criticism does not mean that we have in his study.13
a duty to justify everything. We Western liberal intellectuals should What is disturbing about the pragmatist's picture is not that it
accept the fact that we have to start from where we are, and that is relativistic but that it takes away two sorts of metaphysical comfort
this means there are lots of views we simply cannot take seriously. to which our intellectual tradition has become accustomed. One is
To use Neurath's familiar analogy, we can understand the revolu­ the thought that membership in our biological species carries with
tionary's suggestion that a sailable boat can't be made out of the it certain "rights," a notion that does not seem to make sense unless
planks which make up ours, and that we must simply abandon ship. the biological similarities entail the possession of something non­
But we cannot take his suggestion seriously. We cannot take it as a biological, something that links our species to a nonhuman reality
rule for action, so it is not a live option. For some people, to be and thus gives the species moral dignity. This picture of rights as
sure, the option is live. These are the people who have always hoped biologically transmitted is so basic to the political discourse of the
to become a New Being, who have hoped to be converted rather Western democracies that we are troubled by any suggestion that
than persuaded. But we-the liberal Rawlsian search~rs for consensus, "human nature" is not a useful moral concept. The second comfort
the heirs of Socrates, the people who wish to link their days dia­ is provided by the thought that our community cannot wholly die.
lectically each to each-cannot do so. Our community-the com­ The picture of a common human nature oriented toward correspon­
munity of the liberal intellectuals of the secular modem West-wants dence to reality as it is in itself comforts us with the thought that
to be able to give a post factum account of any change of view. We even if our civilization is destroyed, even if all memory of our
want to be able, so to speak, to justify ourselves to our earlier selves . political or intellectual or artistic community is erased, the race is
This preference is not built into us by human nature. It is just the fa ted to recapture the virtues and the insights and the achievements
way we live now.1I that were the glory of that community. The notion of human nature
This lonely provincialism, this admission that we are just the as an inner structure that leads all members of the species to converge
historical moment that we are, not the representatives of something to the same point, to recognize the same theories, virtues, and works
ahistorical, is what makes traditional Kantian liberals like Rawls draw of art as worthy of honor, assures us that even if the Persians had
back from pragmatism. 12 "Relativism," by contrast, is merely a red won, the arts and sciences of the Greeks would sooner or later have
herring. The realist is, once again, projecting his own habits of thought appeared elsewhere. It assures us that even if the Orwellian bu­
upon the pragmatist when he charges him with relativism. For the reaucrats of terror rule for a thousand years the achievements of the
realist thinks that the whole point of philosophical thought is to Western democracies will someday be duplicated by our remote
detach oneself from any particular community and look down at it descendents. It assures us that "man will prevail," that something
178 / Richard Rorty
Solidarity or Objectivity? / 179

reasonably like our world-view, our virtues, our art, will bob up again
whenever human beings are left alone to cultivate their inner natures. to say, despite Putnam, that "there is only the dialogue," only us,
The comfort of the realist picture is the comfort of saying not simply and to throw out the last residues of the notion of "trans-cultural
that there is a place prepared for our race in our advance, but also rationality." But this should not lead us to repudiate, as Nietzsche
that we now know quite a bit about what that place looks like. The sometimes did, the elements in our movable host which embody the
inevitable ethnocentrism to which we are all condemned is thus as ideas of Socratic conversation, Christian fellowship, and Enlighten­
much a part of the realist's comfortable view as of the pragmatists' ment science. Nietzsche ran together his diagnosis of philosophical
uncomfortable one. realism as an expression of fear and resentment with his own resentful
The pragmatist gives up the first sort of comfort because he idiosyncratic idealizations of silence, solitude, and violence. Post­
thinks that to say that certain people have certain rights is merely Nietzschean thinkers like Adorno and Heidegger and Foucault have
to say that we should treat them in certain ways. It is not to give run together Nietzsche's criticisms of the metaphYSical tradition on
a reason for treating them in those ways. As to the second sort of the one hand with his criticisms of bourgeois civility, of Christian
comfort, he suspects that the hope that something resembling us will love, and of the nineteenth century's hope that science would make
inherit the earth is impossible to eradicate, as impossible as eradicating the world a better place to live, on the other. I do not think there
the hope of surviving our individual deaths through some satisfying is any interesting connection between these two sets of criticisms.
transfiguration. But he does not want to turn this hope into a theory Pragmatism seems to me, as I have said, a philosophy of solidarity
of the nature of man. He wants solidarity to be our only comfort, rather than of despair. From this point of view, Socrates's turn away
and to be seen not to require metaphysical support. from the gods, Christianity's turn from an Omnipotent Creator to
My suggestion that the desire for objectivity is in part a disguised the man who suffered on the Cross, and the Baconian turn from
form of the fear of the death of our community echoes Nietzsche's science as contemplation of eternal truth to science as instrument of
charge that the philosophical tradition that stems from Plato is an social progress, can be seen as so many preparations for the act of
attempt to avoid facing up to contingency, to escape from time and social faith that is suggested by a Nietzschean view of truth .16
chance. Nietzsche thought that realism was to be condemned not The best argument we partisans of solidarity have against the
only by arguments from its theoretical incoherence, the sort of ar­ realistic partisans of objectivity is Nietzsche'S argument that the
gument we find in Putnam and Davidson, but also on practical, traditional Western metaphysico-epistemological way of firming up
pragmatic, grounds. Nietzsche thought that the test of human char­ our habits simply isn't working anymore. It isn't doing its job. It
acter was the ability to live with the thought that there was no has become as transparent a device as the postulation of deities who
convergence. He wanted us to be able to think of truth as: tum out, by a happy coincidence, to have chosen us as their people.
So the pragmatist suggestion that we substitute a "merely" ethical
a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthromorphisms­ foundation for Our sense of community-or, better, that we think of
in short a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced,
our sense of community as having no foundation except shared hope
transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically and which
after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people. 14 and the trust created by such sharing-is put forward on practical
grounds. It is not put forward as a corollary of a metaphysical claim
that the objects in the world contain no intrinSically action-gUiding
Nietzsche hoped that eventually there might be human beings who
properties, nor of an epistemological claim that we lack a faculty of
could and did think of truth in this way, but who still liked them­
moral sense, nor of a semantical claim that truth is reducible to
selves, who saw themselves as good people for whom solidarity was
ellough.IS justification. It is a suggestion about how we might think of ourselves
in order to avoid the kind of resentful belatedness-characteristic of
I think that pragmatism's attack on the various structure-content
distinctions that buttress the realist's notion of objectivity can best the bad side of Nietzsche-which now characterizes much of high
be seen as an attempt to let us think of truth in this Nietzschean culture. This resentment arises from the realization, which I referred
way, as entirely a matter of solidarity. That is why I think we need to at the beginning of this essay, that the Enlightenment's search
for objectivity has often gone Sour.
 Solidarity or Objectivity? / 181
180 / Richard Rorty

4. Ibid., x.
The rhetoric of scientific objectivity, pressed too hard and taken
too seriously, has led us to people like B. F. Skinner on the one 5. Ibid ., 114 .
hand and people like Althusser on the other-two equally pointless
6. Ibid ., 119. See Davidson's "On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme, "
fantasies, both produced by the attempt to be "scientific" about our in his Inquiries into Trllth and Interpretation (Oxford : Oxford University Press,
moral and political lives. Reaction against scientism led to attacks 1984) for a more complete and systematic presentation of this point.
on natural science as a sort of false god. But there is nothing wrong
with science, there is only something wrong with the attempt to 7. Putnam, 113.
divinize it, the attempt characteristic of realistic philosophy. This 8. Ibid., 126.
reaction has also led to attacks on liberal social thought of the type
common to Mill and Dewey and Rawls as a mere ideological su­ 9. Ibid., 216.
perstructure, one which obscures the realities of our situation and 10. See, e.g., Paul Feyerabend, Science ill a Free Society (London: New
represses attempts to change that situation. But there is nothing Left Books, 1978), 9, where Feyerabend identifies his own view with "rel­
wrong with liberal democracy, nor with the philosophers who have ativism (in the old and simple sense of Protagoras)." This identification is
tried to enlarge its scope. There is only something wrong with the accompanied by the claim that" 'Objectively' there is not much to choose
attempt to see their efforts as failures to achieve something they between anti-semitism and humanitarianism." I think Feyerabend would
were not trying to achieve-a demonstration of the "objective" have served himself better by saying that the scare-quoted word "objectively
superiority of our way of life over all other alternatives. There is, should simply be dropped from use, together with the traditional philo­
sophical distinctions between scheme and content (see the Davidson essa y
in short, nothing wrong with the hopes of the Enlightenment, the
cited in note 6 above) which buttress the subjective-objective distinction,
hopes that created the Western democracies. The value of the ideals
than by saying that we may keep the word and use it to say the sort of
of the Enlightenment is, for us pragmatists, just the value of some thing Protagoras said. What Feyerabend is really against is the correspondence
of the institutions and practices they have created. In this essay 1 theory of truth , not the idea that some views cohere better than others.
have sought to distinguish these institutions and practices from the
philosophical justifications for them provided by partisans of objec­ 11. This quest for consensus is opposed to the sort of quest for au­
thenticity that wishes to free itself from the opinion of our community . See,
tivity, and to suggest an alternative justification.
for example, Vincent Descombes' account of Deleuze in Modem Frellcil
Philosophy (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1980), 153: " Even if
NOTES philosophy is essentially demystificatory, philosophers often fail to produce
authentic critiques; they defend order, authority, institutions, 'decency,' every­
1. This attitude toward truth, in which the consensus of a community thing in which the ordinary person believes." On the pragmatist or eth­
rather than a relation to a nonhuman reality is taken as centra\, is associated nocentric view I am suggesting, all that critique can or should do is play
not only with the American pragmatic tradition but with the work of Popper off elements in "what the ordinary person believes" against other elements.
and Habermas . Habermas' criticisms of lingering positivist elements in popper To attempt to do more than this is to fantasize rather than to converse.
parallel those made by Deweyan holists of the early logical empiricists. It Fantasy may, to be sure, be an incentive to more fruitful conversation, but
is important to see, however, that the pragmatist notion of truth common when it no longer fulfills this function it does not deserve the name of
to James and Dewey is not dependent upon either Peirce's notion of an "critique."
"ideal end of inquiry" nor on Habermas' notion of an "ideally free com­
munity ." For criticism of these notions, which in my view are insufficiently 12. In A TIleory of Justice Rawls seemed to be trying to retain the
ethnocentric, see my "Pragmatism, Davidson, and Truth," Ernest LePore, authority of Kantian "practical reason" by imagining a social contract devised
ed., Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), and "Habermas and by choosers "behind a veil of ignorance" -using the "rational self-interest"
Lyotard on Postmodernity" in Praxis International, 4 (1984). of such choosers as a touchstone for the ahistorical validity of certain social
institutions. Much of the criticism to which that book was subjected, e.g.,
2. Hilary Putnam, Reason, Trutll, and History (Cambridge: Cambridge by Micheal Sandel in his Liberalism alld the Limits of Jus/ice (Cambridge :
University Press, 1981), 49-50. Cambridge University Press, 1982), has centered on the claim that one cannot
escape history in this way. In the meantime, however, Rawls has put forward
3. Ibid., 119.
182 / Ric/lard Rorty
Solidarity or Objectivity? / 183

a meta-ethical view which drops the claim to ahistorical validity. (See his
problem about "untranslatability," but simply a practical problem about the
"Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory," Joumal of Philosophy, Volume
limitations of argument; it is not that we live in different worlds than the
77, 1980, and his "Justice as Fairness-Political not Metaphysical," Philosophy
Nazis or the Amazonians, but that conversion from or to their point of view,
alld Public Affairs, Volume 14, No.3, 1985). Concurrently, T. M. Scanlon
though possible, will not be a matter of inference from previously shared
has urged that the essence of a "contractualist" account of moral motivation premises .)
is better understood as the desire to justify one's action to others than in
terms of " rational self-interest." See Scanlon, "Contractualism and Utilitar­ 14 . Nietzsche, "On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense," in The
ianism" in A. Sen and B. Williams, eds., Utilitariallislll and Beyond (Cambridge: Vikillg Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans., Walter Kaufmann, 46-47.
Cambridge University Press, 1982). Scanlon's emendation of Rawls leads in
15. See Sabina Lovibond, Realism and Imagil1atioll ill Ethics (Minneapolis:
the same direction as Rawls' later work, since Scanlon's use of the notion
University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 158: "An adherent of Wittgenstein's
of " justification to others on grounds they could not reasonably reject"
view of language should equate that goal with the establishment of a
chimes with the "constructivist" view that what counts for social philosophy
language-game in which we could participate ingenuously, while retaining
is what can be justified to a particular historical community, not to "humanity
Our awareness of it as a specific historical formation. A community in which
in general." On my view, the frequent remark that Rawls' rational choosers
such a language-game was played would be one . . . whose members
look remarkably like twentieth-century American liberals is perfectly just,
understood their own form of life and yet were not embarrassed by it."
but not a criticism of Rawls. It is merely a frank recognition of the ethno­
centrism which is essential to serious, nonfantastical, thought. I defend this 16. See Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimation of Modemity (Cambridge,
view in "Postmodernist Bourgeois Liberalism," Journal of Philosophy, Volume Mass.: MIT Press, 1982), for a story about the history of European thought
80, 1983. which, unlike the stories told by Nietzsche and Heidegger, sees the Enlight­
enment as a definitive step forward. For l3lumenberg, the attitude of "seJ(­
13. In an important paper called "The Truth in Relativism," included
assertion," the kind of attitude that stems from a Baconian view of the
in his Moral Luck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), Bernard
nature and purpose of science, needs to be distinguished from " self-foun­
Williams makes a similar point in terms of a distinction between " genuine
dation," the Cartesian project of grounding such inquiry upon ahistorical
confrontation" and "notional confrontation ." The latter is the sort of con­
criteria of rationality. Blumenberg remarks, pregnantly, that the "historicist"
frontation that occurs, asymmetrically, between us and primitive tribes people.
criticism of the optimism of the Enlightenment, criticism which began with
The belief-systems of such people do not present, as Williams puts it, "real
the Romantics' turn back to the Middle Ages, undermines self-foundation
options" for us, for we cannot imagine going over to their view without bu t not self-assertion.
"self-deception or paranoia." These are the people whose beliefs on certain
topics overlap so little with ours that their inability to agree with us raises
no doubt in our minds about the correctness of our own beliefs. Williams'
use of "real option" and "notional confrontation" seems to me very en­
lightening, but I think he turns these notions to purposes they will not
serve . Williams wants to defend ethical relativism, defined as the claim that
when ethical confrontations are merely notional "questions of appraisal do
not genuinely arise." He thinks they do arise in connection with notional
confrontations between, e.g., Einsteinian and Amazonian cosmologies. (See
Williams, 142.) This distinction between ethics and physics seems to me an
awkward result to which Williams is driven by his unfortunate attempt to
find sOllletiJillg true in relativism, an attempt that is a corollary of his attempt
to be "realistic" about physics. On my (Davidsonian) view, there is no point
in distinguishing between true sentences that are "made true by reality" and
true sentences that are "made true by us," because the whole idea of "truth­
makers " needs to be dropped. So I would hold that there is 110 truth in
relativism, but this much truth in ethnocentrism: we cannot justify our beliefs
(in physics, ethics, or any other area) to everybody, but only to those whose
beliefs overlap ours to some appropriate extent. (This is not a theoretical