Edifying Philosophy

Systematic philosophers — Plato, Kant, Frege, Husserl — aim to construct a permanent framework: to identify the permanent categories of thought or the correct method for grounding knowledge. Their work aims at closure: finding the right vocabulary and establishing it as definitive. Edifying philosophers — Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Kierkegaard, Dewey in his therapeutic moods — aim instead at keeping the conversation open: undercutting pretensions to finality, introducing alternative perspectives, and reminding us that any current vocabulary is a tool rather than a discovery of how things really are.

Rorty proposes hermeneutics as the activity that replaces epistemology when we give up the mirror metaphor. Epistemology assumes that there is a common ground — shared criteria of rationality — by reference to which all cognitive claims can be adjudicated. Hermeneutics operates where such common ground is absent: it aims at understanding by finding ways to translate between different vocabularies, practices, and traditions, not at refutation by appeal to neutral criteria. This is not relativism — some translations succeed and others fail — but it is a recognition that there is no Algorithm of Reason that settles all disputes.

In the edifying mode, the philosopher is not the guardian of rationality but an intellectually adventurous conversationalist — one who reads widely, notices connections, challenges dominant self-images, and offers new ways of describing old situations. This is a humbler but no less important role. Philosophy that edifies does not produce Knowledge with a capital K, but it can change the way we think about ourselves and what we find possible — and that is enough.

The distinction between systematic and edifying philosophy appears in Chapter 8 of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979), and is developed further in the introduction to Consequences of Pragmatism (1982).