The business of firming, or forming?

Consider academics who affirm their identities, and who also confirm their biases. Next, consider academics who inform others in order to conform with them. While both firming and forming are intellectuals’ business, I’ve come down on the side of forming. A good poet innovates in form, while helping us conform to higher ideals. In other words, my ideal of language use privileges creative acts of (con)formation over replicative acts of confirmation.

This identifies me with a kind of poetics shared by A. N. Whitehead and Richard Rorty. On one hand, I’m exasperated by fleeting arguments about metaphysics (Rorty), but on the other, metaphysical talk about enduring creations (Whitehead), such as rights, is self-evidently useful. Rorty’s critique[1] is still apt: The assertion that “there are rights,” could be redescribed as “under certain conditions we are disposed to say ‘there are rights,’ and that means…” The residue of Whitehead’s intuition after Rorty’s critique is an idea that it is in the business of times to change. So, we should make ourselves busy by changing things.

David L. Hall helpfully clarified that Rorty and Whitehead began with different problematics.[2] Rorty wanted to solve an epistemological problem that results from having access to competing descriptive vocabularies. Hall wrote that “Whitehead’s problematic was how to characterize an intuition that, for a variety of reasons, had been marginalized in traditional philosophical discussion – namely, the intuition of flux and change.”[3]

That "all things flow" is the first vague generalization which the unsystematized, barely analyzed, intuition of men has produced... If we are able to go back to that ultimate, integral experience, unwarped by the sophistications of theory, that experience whose elucidation is the sole aim of philosophy, the flux of things is the one ultimate generalization around which we must weave our philosophic theory.

Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality – an Essay in Cosmology (The Free Press: 1978), 208.

The poet (dichter) and the philosopher (denker) do similar things. Rorty, for his “laissez-faire nominalism – his attempt to leave everything (except language) as it is – [was] forced to remain at the ‘meta’ level.”[4] He made everything of the poet and philosopher’s shared ability to change vocabularies and exchange metaphors. Whitehead was similarly disposed, but stricter in definition:

Philosophy is either self-evident or it is not philosophy... The aim of philosophy is sheer disclosure... (49)
... to find a conventional phraseology for the vivid suggestiveness of the poet... and thereby to produce a verbal symbolism manageable in other connections of thought (50).

Philosophy is akin to poetry... In each case there is reference to form beyond the direct meanings of words. Poetry allies itself to metre, philosophy to mathematical pattern. (174)

A. N. Whitehead, Modes of Thought (Macmillan 1938).

The difference between poetry and philosophy here is a matter of understanding, according to Hall’s interpretation of Whitehead. Poetry aids aesthetic understanding of the unrepeatable rhythms at a given time or place, while philosophy aids logical understanding of repeating, relational patterns. The distinction functions well enough.

Rorty said that he attempted to “free Whitehead’s Category of the Ultimate (i.e., ‘Creativity’), not just from the theory of eternal objects, but from the fetters of a correspondence theory of truth, and from the idea that we need a super-science called metaphysics.”[5] His critics called him an anti-intellectual, regardless of their political leanings, because he reduced their shibboleths to favored words. This was due to his progressive, democratic philosophy. Poetry of the people, by the people, for the people – even if coincidence would determine what was actually read – would result in “a society that recognizes it is what it is… because certain poets and revolutionaries of the past spoke as they did.”[6] Human history is therefore “a long swelling, increasingly polyphonic poem that leads up to nothing save itself.”[7]

I see here a similarity to Latour’s (1996) attempt to disabuse us of belief, to get us to stop believing in believing instead of doing. Rorty wrote: “If there really is an eternal fellow-sufferer who understands… so much the better, (but)… we can carry on perfectly well even if we suspect there is not.”[8] Hall wrote: “Socrates first advertised for our tradition that virtue is its own reward… But what if, as in the case of Socrates, one who believes that virtue is its own reward also has intimations of immortality? There’s the problem.”[9] We end up back near where I started – Rights are an example of the persistence of achieved value, and our metaphysical pretensions about rights are useful. Believing in rights does not maintain them, though. Action does. And verbal action, or poetry, does as well.

Dewey gets the final word:

Peace in action not after it is the contribution of the ideal to conduct.

John Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct (Random House: 1957), 264.

[1] Richard Rorty, “The Subjectivist Principle and the Linguistic Turn,” in Alfred North Whitehead – Essays on His Philosophy, ed. George Kline (Prentice-Hall, 1963).

[2] David L. Hall, “Whitehead, Rorty, and the Return of the Exiled Poets,” in Whitehead’s Philosophy: Points of Connection, ed. Janusz A. Polanowski and Donald W. Sherburne (SUNY Press, 2004).

[3] Ibid., 88.

[4] Ibid., 96.

[5] Herman Saatkamp ed., Rorty and Pragmatism – The Philosopher Responds to His Critics, (Vanderbilt University Press: 1995), 34-35.

[6] Rorty, Contingency, Irony, Solidarity (Cambridge University Press: 1989), 61.

[7] Saatkamp ed., Rorty and Pragmatism (1995), 33.

[8] Ibid., 34.

[9] Hall, “Whitehead, Rorty, and the Return of the Exiled Poets,” 99.