Rorty has other objectives: very soon aware of the difficulties to realize the analitical program, Rorty became with Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature its most obstinate critic, at the same time, promoting (in Consequences of Pragmatism, published in 1982, and particularly, in Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, published in 1989), a neo-pragmatism that, on the one hand, advocates the substitution of scientific rhetoric for poetical rhetoric as an operator of philosophical intelligibility and, on the other hand, refuses the solipsism of traditions.
It is interesting to observe how, in the analyses that Rorty makes of Heidegger, Derrida of Foucault, the process of contact between the philosophical traditions rapidly transforms itself in another that, certainly, will be even more determinant in the coming years: that of its translation, a process to which the contingencies of history and imagination of men permanently subject these traditions, thus transforming them in unexpected metamorphoses that only some time ago, seemed to be solidly unchangeable.
1.3. The picture, thus outlined, already presents novel characteristics. But the abandoning of the foundationalistic pretensions and the almost ascetic contention of the universalist ambitions that have characterized the philosophical field these last few years, one has to add the movement of dissolution of the traditional disciplinary boundaries. Philosophy has always had, on account of its “nature”, problems with the determination of the specificity of its object. The critical program, from Kant to Husserl tried to solve these problems “scientifically”, as they also tried doing with logical positivism and analytical philosophy. The immense difficulties these programs led to, caused, in the meantime, enormous alterations to the philosophical field, and the early 80’s witnessed the “legitimation” of new themes and objects: some, as fashion or narcissism impose themselves despite all history of philosophy, others, as that of the individual or of human rights, stand up to the dominant thematics of the previous decades; others still, as those of the potentialities of the irony or the demands of interrogativity, try, above all, to open the way to future directions driving away from the cemetery of metaphors and of conceptual scraps that characterize the majority of contemporary thought.
No wonder, then, that a new form of philosophical essayism has started to express itself: it replaces the abandoned systematicities, giving more relevance to the creative potentialities of language than to the discriminating capacity of concept. Better saying, he simply thinks that a concept is nothing more than a mere word functioning in the sphere of a determined language game, this, therefore, enables the resuming of perspectivism pragmatically and rhetorically, that is, to admit the diversity of languages, of beliefs and wishes but, not necessarily containing any nihilist implication, leaving open the question of knowing whether it is a final, terminal form – that the postmodern metaphor of “impoverishment” so well characterizes – or, of the roots of something that is still imprecise and, maybe, without a name.
It is among these routes that some more determinant orientations of contemporary thinking are distributed. most likely, such a distribution will take place more often along a line of interferences than in a trench of boundaries; bearing this in mind, it might be interesting, today, to resume the perspectivist inspiration – more as a global metaphor than as a doctrine.
II
2. Despite some of the genealogies that might be outlined of some of its elements, perspectivism is in the radicalism of its proposal, an invention of Nietzsche. It points towards the abandoning of an essential element of the Eastern tradition, which links the vitality of thought to the search for truth, rendering, thus, undissociable an image of the thought and a pattern of thinking. As we know, Nietzsche diagnoses at the basis of all this the work of the ascetic ideal that, by entreating the dimension of truth as supreme, prevented one from questioning the root of its value.
2.1. When assuming this question, the outlines of perspectivism are already delineated in a very decisive way, and this is because it does not intend to justify truth but to question it; it does not have the intention of evaluating its importance but to dissolve the thematic itself in the sphere of which truth is instituted as, a somewhat, unquestionable value (cf. On Genealogy of Morals, II, § 24). What the Nietzschian approach clearly highlights is the fictional character of truth that is, the contextual character of any type of necessity that, when speaking of truth, one might invoke or consider. Always linked to the exercise of truth and to the dynamics of belief, truth appears here neither as the end of any process of knowledge, nor as the instancy of justification or evaluation of any of its moments, but as a vital operator immanent to men’s world.
That is what Nietzsche does when he introduces the idea of perspective: human intellect, says Nietzsche in The Gay Science, “cannot avoid seeing itself in its own perspectives, and only in these. We cannot look around our own corner, it is a hopeless curiosity that wants to know what other kinds of intellects and perspectives there might be; for example, whether some beings might be able to experience time backward, or alternatively, forward and backward (which would involve another direction of life and another concept of cause and effect). But I should think that today we are at least far from ridiculous immodesty that would be involved in decreeing from our corner that perspectives are permitted only from this corner. Rather has the world become “infinite” for all of us all over again, in as much as we cannot reject the possibility that it may include infinite interpretations”. (§ 374; see also § 12 of Genealogy of Morals).