i think i picked up the idea of "conversation" from a b3n w4tson backlash argt against de saussure!

[dubdobdee]

geuss on rorty on "conversation" (and some discontents)

have only skimmed this: am totally back-achey and mentally fuzzy today and not getting my ideas in order on ANYTHING, least of all chumpdom left right or elsewhere

am tryin to do a (small) bit of spring cleaning -- or at least its pintsize cousin "putting stuff away"

Comments

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

'conversation' is an interesting idea/l because it's so slippery - certainly idealist in the sense that Marx denounced in the Young Hegelians, I think, but beyond that sliding from an almost utopian sense of progressive human history (even if only as increasing refinement of discussion) to a kind of nihilist denunciation of certain forms of social thinking as unable to see that they are 'only' talk. Certainly it seems to have this kind of ambiguity in Rorty - Geuss brings this out well, I feel. Interesting to see he gets the term from Gadamer rather than Oakeshott who is the key English-speaking source on this side of the Atlantic. But I'd argue that the logic of history as conversation is hardwired into the 'modern' conception of philosophy as analysis of language about the world, and history as the creation of the world in language, so its frequency in discussion is unsurprising. Of course the hint towards 'polite' conversation, or conversation governed by 'manners', might point us towards Burke / Austen, and tradition reconfigured as the virtues of the propertied, educated and leisured (but not too much) classes. I also jumped when I realised that I must have made the same misreading of Geuss's book as Rorty, but I read it when I was much more dogmatic, and tended to dismiss things half-read.

[koganbot]

Actually, Rorty cites Oakeshott in Philosophy And The Mirror Of Nature:

In this conception, "philosophy" is not a name for a discipline which confronts permanent issues, and unfortunately keeps misstating them, or attacking them with clumsy dialectical instruments. Rather, it is a cultural genre, a "voice in the conversation of mankind" (to use Michael Oakeshott's phrase), which centers on one topic rather than another at some given time not by dialectical necessity but as a result of various things happening elsewhere in the conversation (the New Science, the French Revolution, the modern novel) or of individual men of genius who think of something new (Hegel, Marx, Frege, Freud, Wittgenstein, Heidegger) or perhaps of the resultant of several such forces.

I don't see where Geuss in his essay is saying anything to counter or explore this notion. His saying that primate politics and flying planes into buildings is wordless is really trivial. Rorty actually seems close to Darwin here; species don't evolve in relation to timeless issues but in relation to how they're impinged on by other species and events and by the way individuals within the species impinge on each other. So Geuss is making to much of the connotation of "words" in Rorty's use of the metaphor "conversation." What Rorty means is social interplay, which surely apes and terrorists are engaging in, and beyond "social interplay," simply events, whatever their source. Hurricane Katrina certainly had an impact on the U.S. political conversation, even if Katrina wasn't specifically saying anything.

[koganbot]

to much = too much

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

"The only point on which I would insist is that philosophers' moral concern should be with continuing the conversation of the West, rather than with insisting upon a place for the traditional problems of modern philosophy within that conversation". [394]

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

or another way of looking at it: what makes a conversation a conversation (e.g. as distinct from babble) is that it carries a self-awareness of its continuity through time. Certainly this is essential to Oakeshott: the conversation of mankind is kind of a tautological expression since conversation and mankind become equivalent - man is only man to the extent that he participates in the conversation, i.e. can be aware of himself as belonging to a species with a history, as opposed to a species.

[koganbot]

Rorty would not have liked "man is only man to the extent" type sentences. (Such sentences sure seem essentialist to me, and he was adamantly antiessentialist.) He very much did not want to be saying "because man - or language - is like this, then philosophy should be like this." And I'm not saying that you or Geuss would disagree; I'm just not figuring out how Geuss would fill in the blank that goes "Because Rorty overemphasized words at the expense of music and ape politics and terrorists ramming planes into buildings, he __________." I don't see where Rorty's ideas overlook or fail to take into account what music and ape politics and wordless acts of terrorism have to teach us. And maybe this is because I use the terms "conversation" and "social dance" as virtually synonyms in my own prose, but as far as the particular point that Rorty is making, which is that philosophy responds to events rather than exploring timeless issues, and needs to stop pretending otherwise, I don't see what the difference is in which metaphor I use, or Rorty uses.

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

Well my argument is that Oakeshott is explicitly a kind of idealist, at least in valuing the conversation of man as more than a happy accident, or at least as a happy accident worth defending, and that Rorty had better be careful about how he takes on the idea of 'a conversation of mankind' since it seems hard to use that image without bringing in presumptions about what 'mankind' is.

But I'm at the limit of my familiarity with Rorty here, and it's a long time since I read Geuss!