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writing’s "desire for openness" with "desire for completeness" of the philosophically-
minded. In the end, it comes down to what might be called one’s temperament: those
who lack this kind of openness tend to be resistant to self-enlarging change because they
believe they already possess all the requisite criteria they will ever need for judging any
new books or people they encounter. As a result, they are quite adept at "tucking each of
them into some familiar pigeonhole." To avoid this, Rorty argues, "you must give up one
of the dreams of philosophy – the dream of completeness, of the imperturbability
attributed by the wise, of the mastery supposedly possessed by those who have, once and
for all, achieved completion by achieving enlightenment." The temperamental desire to
"go straight to the way things are" is what in Rorty's view accounts for the way "religion
and philosophy have often served as shields for fanaticism and intolerance."
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The problem is that Rorty tends to retreat from such claims, in part because of his
own view, rooted in the anti-Philosophical bent behind his public-private split, that it is
epistemologically misguided to attempt to unify one’s philosophy and politics. The idea
that there is a linkage between our idiosyncratic, personal attachments – our temperament
– and our philosophical beliefs is one of the things Rorty set out to dispel in his critique
of philosophy's metaphysical presuppositions. He believes that there is seldom a relation
between the philosophical views one professes and one's political beliefs, and that it is
wrongheaded to think there should be. This was Plato's mistake: he attempted, in Yeats'
phrase, "to hold reality and justice in a single vision" (PSH 5, 12-3).
Even greater resistance to the notion that a pragmatic “attitude of orientation,” in
James’s phrase, has particular moral and political consequences has come from Stanley
Fish. The upshot of Fish's argument is that "if pragmatism is true, it has nothing to say to
Convention