Philosophers became preoccupied with images of the future only after they gave up hope of gaining knowledge of the eternal. Philosophy began as an attempt to escape into a world in which nothing would ever change. The first philosophers assumed that the difference between the flux of the past and the flux of the future would be negligible. Only as they began to take time seriously did their hopes for the future of this world gradually replace their desire for knowledge of another world.

Hans Blumenberg has suggested that philosophers began to lose interest in the eternal toward the end of the Middle Ages, and that the sixteenth century, the century of Bruno and Bacon, was the period in which philosophers began trying to take time seriously. Blumenberg is probably right, but this loss of interest only became fully self-conscious in the nineteenth century. This was the period in which Western philosophy, under the aegis of Hegel, developed detailed and explicit doubts not only about Platonic attempts to escape from time but about Kantian projects of discovering ahistorical conditions for the possibility of temporal phenomena. It was also the period in which it became possible, thanks to Darwin, for human beings to see themselves as continuous with the rest of nature - as temporal and contingent through and through, but none the worse for that. The combined influence of Hegel and Darwin moved philosophy away from the question "What are we?" to the question "What might we try to become?".

This shift has had consequences for the philosophers’ image of themselves. Whereas Plato, and even Kant, hoped to survey the society and the culture within which they lived from an outside standpoint, the standpoint of ineluctable and changeless truth, later philosophers have gradually abandoned such hopes. Just insofar as we take time seriously, we philosophers have to give up the priority of contemplation over action. We have to agree with Marx that our job is to help make the future different from the past, rather than claiming to know what the future must necessarily have in common with the past. We have to shift from the kind of role which philosophers have shared with priests and sages to a social role which has more in common with the engineer or the lawyer. Whereas priests and sages can set their own agendas, contemporary philosophers, like engineers and lawyers, must find out what their clients need.

Since Plato invented philosophy precisely in order to escape from transitory needs, and to rise above politics, taking time, Hegel and Darwin seriously has often been described as "giving up on" or "ending" philosophy. But giving up on Plato and Kant is not the same as giving up on philosophy. For we can give better descriptions of what Plato and Kant were doing than these men were able to give of themselves. We can describe them as responding to the need to replace a human self-image which had been obsolete by social and cultural change with a new self-image, a self-image better adapted to the results of those changes. We can add that philosophy cannot possibly end until social and cultural change ends.

For such changes gradually render large-scale descriptions of ourselves and our situation obsolete, and create the need for new language in which to formulate new descriptions. Only a society without politics - that is to say, a society run by tyrants who prevent social and cultural change from occurring - would no longer require philosophers. In such societies, where there is no politics, philosophers can only be priests in the service of a state religion. In free societies, there will always be a need for their services, for such societies never stop changing, and hence never stop making old vocabularies obsolete.

John Dewey - a philosopher who, like Marx, admired Hegel and Darwin equally - suggested that we will, in the course of dropping the self-image common to Plato and Kant, the image of a knower of the unconditional ahistorical necessities, come to see philosophy as springing "from a conflict of inherited institutions with incompatible contemporary tendencies". "That which may be pretentiously unreal when it is formulated in metaphysical distinctions", Dewey said, "becomes intensely significant when connected with the struggle of social beliefs and ideals".

Dewey took seriously Hegel’s famous remark that philosophy paints its grey on grey only when a form of life has grown old. For Dewey, this meant that philosophy is always parasitic on, always a reaction to, developments elsewhere in culture and society. Dewey construed Hegel’s insistence on historicity as the claim that philosophers should not try to be the avant-garde of society and culture, but should be content to mediate between the past and the future. Their job is to weave together old beliefs and new beliefs, so that these beliefs can cooperate rather than interfering with one another. Like the engineer and the lawyer, the philosopher is useful in solving particular problems that arise in particular situations - situations in which the language of the past is in conflict with the needs of the future.

Let me offer three examples of such conflict. The first is the need to reconcile the moral intuitions clothed in the language of Christian theology with the new scientific world-picture which emerged in the seventeenth century. In that century and the next, philosophers tried to find a way of seeing moral intuitions as something other than the commands of an atemporal, yet anthropomorphic divinity - a divinity whose existence was hard to reconcile with the mechanized world-picture offered by Galileo and Newton. Seen from this angle, Leibniz’s, Kant’s and Hegel’s systems are so many suggestions about how to reconcile Christian ethics and Copernican-Galillean science - how to keep these two good things from interfering with each other.

My second example is the Darwinian suggestion that we think of human beings as more complex animals, rather than as animals with an extra added ingredient called "intellect" or "the rational soul". This suggestion casts doubt not only on the hope to escape from time but on the distinction between adapting to reality and knowing reality. Darwin made philosophers realize that they would have to redescribe human activities in a way that required no sudden discontinuities in evolutionary development. This meant redescribing the relation between biological and cultural evolution in ways which blurred the distinction between Nature and Spirit - a distinction which everyone from Plato through Hegel, except for occasional eccentrics like Hobbes and Hume, had taken for granted.

The new demands on philosophers created by Darwin’s successful explanation of the origin of humanity were interwoven with those created by my third example of extra-philosophical novelty: the emergence of mass democracy. Unlike the first two, this third novelty came from political experience rather than scientific ingenuity. Mass democracy - the successful working-out in practice of the suggestion that all those affected by political decisions should have the power to influence those decisions - endangers the Platonistic distinction between the rational pursuit of truth by the wise and the flux of passion characteristic of the many. When taken together with Darwin’s blurring of the human-animal distinction, the practice of mass democracy casts doubt on a whole range of further philosophical distinctions: those between cognitive and the non-cognitive, reason and passion, logic and rhetoric, truth and utility, philosophy and sophistry. One of the assignments which the success of mass democracy gave to philosophers was to restate these distinctions in terms of the political difference between free and forced consensus rather than in terms of the metaphysical distinction between the unconditioned and the conditional.

Dewey’s, Bergson’s, and Whitehead’s systems were attempts to reach an accommodation with Darwin, to keep what was useful in the old dualisms while restating them in, so to speak, thoroughly temporalized language. Russell’s and Husserl’s attempts to partition culture by drawing a line between a priori philosophical questions and a posteriori empirical questions was another such attempt: they attempted to make a democratic culture safe for transcendental philosophy by partitioning it, thus making Darwin irrelevant to Kant.

Seen in this way, the contrast between Dewey and Russell, or between Bergson and Husserl, is not a contrast between two attempts to represent our ahistorical nature and situation accurately, but rather between two attempts to mediate between historical epochs, to reconcile old and new truth. Dewey and Russell were equally devoted to Newton mechanics, Darwinian biology, and mass democracy. Further, neither thought that philosophy can provide foundations for any of these three. Both thought that the question was how to change familiar ways of speaking so as not to presuppose a metaphysics, or a metaphysical psychology, which conflicted with these three cultural developments. Their differences were about means rather than ends - about how radically one had to change the descriptions which Plato and Kant had given of themselves in order to preserve the useful elements in their work while discarding what had become obsolete.

If we adopt Dewey’s image of the philosopher’s task, however, we have to drop both the Marxist distinction between science and ideology and the distinction, deployed by both Russell and Husserl, between the a priori and the a posteriori. More generally, we have to drop all attempts to make philosophy as autonomous an activity as it was thought to be before philosophers began taking time seriously. Dewey, but not Russell, can adopt Locke’s suggestion that the role of the philosopher is that of an under-laborer, clearing away the rubbish of the past in order to make room for the constructions of the future. But Dewey would have admitted, I think, that the philosopher is occasionally able to combine this janitorial role with the role of prophet. Such a combination is found in Bacon and Descartes. Both combined the attempt to clear away Aristotelian rubbish with visions of an utopian future. Similarly, Dewey’s attempt to get philosophy out from under Kant, Habermas’ attempt to untangle it from what he calls "the philosophy of consciousness", and Derrida’s to liberate it from what he calls "the metaphysics of presence" are intertwined with prophecies of the fully democratic society whose coming such extrication will hasten.

Ceasing to worry about the autonomy of philosophers means, among other things, no longer wanting to draw nice clear lines between philosophical questions and political, religious, aesthetic, or economic questions. Philosophy will not play the modest but essential role which Dewey assigned it, and so will not succeed in taking time seriously, unless we philosophers are willing to accept a certain deprofessionalization, and to acquire a certain insouciance about the question of when we are doing philosophy and when not. We shall have to stop worrying about the purity of our discipline, and stop dramatizing ourselves, not only in the grandiose way in which Hegel and Marx dramatized themselves, but even in the less spectacular way in which Russell and Husserl dramatized themselves.

If we stop preening ourselves on our position at the top of the hierarchy of disciplines, stop identifying our professional practices with "rational thought" or "clear thought", we shall be in a better position to grant Dewey’s point that our discipline is no more able to set its own agenda than is engineering or jurisprudence. Such an admission would help us dispense with the idea that scientific or political development require "philosophical foundations" - the idea that judgment must remain suspended on the legitimacy of cultural novelties until we philosophers have pronounced them authentically rational.

Philosophers who specialize in antifoundationalism, however, often see themselves as revolutionaries rather than as either rubbish-sweepers or visionaries. Then, alas, they become avantgardist. They start saying that our language and our culture need radical change before our utopian hopes can be realized, and that the philosophers are just the people to initiate such changes. This insistence on radicality is foundationalism turned on its head. In this insistence that nothing can change unless our philosophical beliefs change. The philosophical avantgardism common to Marx, Nietzsche and Heidegger - the urge to make all things new all at once, to insist that nothing can change unless everything changes - seems to me one of two contemporary tendencies within philosophy which should be discouraged.

The other tendency is, as I have already suggested, the urge toward professionalization: the urge to keep our discipline intact and autonomous by narrowing its scope. This defensive maneuver is apparent whenever one finds a philosopher saying that he intends to confine himself to "the problems of philosophy", as if there were a well-known list of such problems, a list handed down from Heaven and kept intact from generation to generation. Such an attempt to escape from time and change, to forget Hegel and affiliate oneself to Kant, is currently widespread in the Anglophone philosophical community, the community which describes itself as practicing "analytic" philosophy.

Hilary Putnam seems to me right in saying that much analytic philosophy has degenerated into quarrels between philosophy professors’ differing "intuitions" - intuitions about questions which are, as Putnam says, "far from having either practical or spiritual significance". The desire to harmonize pre-existent intuitions has replaced the task of asking whether the vocabulary in which these intuitions are stated is a useful one. This refusal reinforces the conviction that philosophical problems are eternal, and thereby suited to be studied by a discipline which works independently of social and cultural change. Such a refusal, and such a conviction, were characteristic of the period in the history of philosophy which we now refer to as "decadent scholasticism". Whenever philosophers begin to pride themselves on the autonomy of their discipline, the danger of such scholasticism recurs.

Just as much Anglophone philosophy has become over-professionalized, non-Anglophone philosophy is frequently over-ambitious and avantgardist. It attempts the sort of radical critique which Marx offered of the so-called "bourgeois" culture of the nineteenth century - a critique offered in the same tones of high disdain which Marxists have made so familiar. Disgust with both the scholastic character of analytic philosophy and the impossibly high pretensions of avantgatdist non-analytic philosophy, however, has led to a third danger: that of chauvinism. Occasionally one finds philosophers saying that their own country, or their own region, requires a distinctive philosophy: that each nation needs a philosophy of its own, to express its own unique experience, just as it needs its own national anthem and its own flag. But whereas novelists and poets can usefully create a national literature, a literature in which the youth can find embedded a narrative of the emergence and development of the nation of which they are citizens, I doubt that there is any analogous task to be performed by philosophers. We philosophers are good at building bridges between nations, at cosmopolitan initiatives, but not at telling stories. When we do tell stories, they tend to be bad ones, like the stories which Hegel and Heidegger told the Germans about themselves - stories about the superior relation in which a certain country stands to some supernatural power.

I hope that we philosophy professors can find a way to avoid all three temptations: the revolutionary urge to see philosophy as an agent of change rather than of reconciliation, the scholastic urge to retreat within disciplinary boundaries, and the chauvinistic urge. It seems to me that we might do so if we adopt Dewey’s notion of our job as one of reconciliation of the old with the new, and our professional function as that of being honest brokers between generations, between areas of cultural activity, and between traditions. This sort of reconciliatory activity cannot, however, be carried out in the manner of what Levi-Strauss once disdainfully called "UNESCO cosmopolitanism", the sort of cosmopolitanism which is content with the status quo, and defends it in the name of cultural diversity. Such cosmopolitanism was, when UNESCO was founded in the 1940’s, prudently and respectfully silent about Stalinism; nowadays it remains prudently and respectfully silent about religious fundamentalism and about the blood-stained autocrats who still rule much of the world. The most contemptible form of such cosmopolitanism is the sort which explains that "human rights" are all very well for Eurocentric cultures, but that an efficient secret police, with subservient judges, professors and journalists, at its disposal, in addition to prison guards and torturers, is better suited to the needs of other cultures.

The alternative to this spurious and self-deceptive kind of cosmopolitanism is one with a clear image of a specific kind of cosmopolitan human future: the image of a planet-wide democracy, a society in which torture, or the closing down of a university or a newspaper, on the other side of the world is as much a cause for outrage as when it happens at home. This cosmopolis may be, in non-political matters, as multicultural and heterogenous as ever. But in this utopian future cultural traditions will have ceased to have an influence on political decisions. In politics there will be only one tradition: that of constant vigilance against the predictable attempts by the rich and strong to take advantage of the poor and weak. Cultural tradition will never be permitted to override Rawl’s Difference Principle, never permitted to excuse inequality of opportunity.

If such a utopia ever comes into being, we philosophers will probably have had a marginal, minor, but nevertheless helpful role in creating it. For, just as Aquinas had to mediate between the Old Testament and Aristotle, as Kant had to mediate between the New Testament and Newton, as Bergson and Dewey had to mediate between Plato and Darwin, as Ghandi and Nehru had to mediate between the language of Locke and Mill and that of the Bhagavadgita, so somebody will have had to mediate between the egalitarian language of this kind of politics and the explicitly inegalitarian languages of many different cultural traditions. Somebody will have had to gently and patiently weave egalitarian politics into the language of traditions which insist on a distinction between the rational or inspired wise, and the disorderly, confused many. Somebody will have had to persuade us to modify our habit of basing political decisions on the difference between people like us, the paradigm human beings, and such dubious cases of humanity as foreigners, infields, untouchables, women, homosexuals, halfbreeds, and deformed or crippled people. Such distinctions are built into our cultural traditions, and thus into our vocabularies of moral deliberation, but utopia will not arrive until the peoples of the world become persuaded that these distinctions do not much matter.

This persuasion is going to be gradual and gentle and piecemeal, not revolutionary and wholesale. But such gentle and gradual persuasion is possible. For even though mass democracy may be a specifically European invention, the idea of a democratic utopia finds resonance everywhere. Within each cultural tradition there are stories of the many seeing farther than the wise, of the tradition-sanctioned cruelty of the high yielding to the sense of injustice felt by the low. Within every such tradition there are stories of successful intermarriage with members of despised groups, of ancient hatreds overcome by patience and civility. Every culture, no matter how parochial, contains material which can be woven into utopian images of a planet-wide democratic political community.

It is self-contradictory to think of imposing democracy by force rather than persuasion, of forcing men and women to be free. But it is not self-contradictory to think of persuading them to be free. If we philosophers still have a function, it is just that sort of persuasion. Once upon a time, when we thought more about eternity and less about the future than we do now, we philosophers defined ourselves as servants of truth. But recently we have spoken less about truth and more about truthfulness, less about bringing truth to power than about keeping power honest. I think that this is a healthy shift. Truth is eternal and enduring, but it is hard to be sure when you have it. Truthfulness, like freedom, is temporal, contingent, and fragile. But we can recognize both when we have them. Indeed, the freedom we prize most is the freedom to be honest with one another and not to be punished for it. In a thoroughly temporalized intellectual world, one in which hopes for certainty and changelessness had dissapeared altogether, we philosophers would define ourselves as servants of that sort of freedom, as servants of democracy.

To think of ourselves in that way would be to avoid the dangers of scholasticism, or avantgardism, and of chauvinism. It would be to agree with Dewey that "philosophy can proffer only hypotheses, and that these hypotheses are of value only as they render men’s minds more sensitive to the life about them". In a fully temporalized intellectual world, contributing to such sensitivity would be just as respectable a goal for an academic discipline as contributing to knowledge.

[ Text of the lecture deliverd by Prof. Richard Rorty at the Belgrade Circle session, 20 August 1994. ]

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