Profile: Nicholas Rescher

Usually the statement that you’ve read nine books by a single author is read as a boast. Not so if the author in question is philosopher Nicholas Rescher, whose list of published books exceeds one hundred and sixty. 

 

Allow me to repeat that in case you think it’s a typo. Nicholas Rescher, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh, approaching his eighty-ninth year, has written a hundred and sixty books (a conservative count that excludes his own translations of other work and compilations of collected works by others). In 2010 alone, when he was eighty-two years old, Rescher published thirteen books. In 2016 he let down the team by only publishing four books. Loser. 

This prodigious, perhaps insane, productivity is I think casually passed over by commentators as an interesting anecdote to inoculate them from tearing their hair out. His Wikipedia page contains the joke that is passed around about Rescher that he is not one person but a committee. Or maybe five committees. The blatant unnaturalness of his bibliography (including approximately four hundred articles) is best dealt with by downgrading it to the status of a quirk.

Pictures of the man show the object of benevolence itself with requisite bald head and accountant’s attire, plus a wry half-smile to let the photographer know that he would like to leave and write two more books before afternoon tea.

Comfortably installed at the University of Pittsburgh since 1961, Rescher’s range has been predictably large and multifaceted over the course of sixty years. His early work concerned Arabic philosophy, he's co-invented a particular method of forecasting, and as well as contributing to pretty much every major issue in contemporary philosophy has written popular works on issues such as luck, risk, prediction, altruism, welfare and, most recently how to compose intelligence reports(?).

There doesn’t seem to be anything that unifies Rescher’s work more aptly than a stunningly omnivorous curiosity about the world and the life of ideas. Calling himself both a pragmatist in the classic American tradition of Charles Sanders Peirce and my namesake, combined with a taste for the now-largely-discredited strain of philosophical idealism of Germany, Rescher opens the most revealing portal on what he truly cares about whenever he discusses the human striving for knowledge and the many complications and struggles that hinder this enterprise.

What I’ve read of Rescher’s work only provides me with a fraction of his many interests. Nonetheless this preoccupation with knowledge acquisition can be detected as occupying the central place in his oeuvre. Take my favourite book so far among Rescher’s: The Strife of Systems, an account of the bountiful diversity of philosophical systems throughout history.  Rescher sets the scene of investigation in an enticing manner when he notes that all major philosophical systems are constructed with the purpose of putting an end to philosophical activity (by finally providing the appropriate tools to root out ambiguity), while here we are two thousand years later, still philosophizing.

The answer to this paradox isn’t that philosophy is more complex than other intellectual endeavours. Rather it is to do with the nature of philosophizing itself, which is to say it is to do with the nature of argumentation in life generally. Homo sapiens argue about life and love, means and ends, but never to a conclusion that will objectively satisfy all. Rescher propounds an orientational pluralism, a type of pluralism that prevents the individual from succumbing to relativism by admitting the possibility of objective truth but without admitting of objective agreement. The possibilities and limitations of the human condition permit us to maintain the truth as we see it but remove the possibility of getting others on board. ‘Orientational pluralism is’, Rescher writes, ‘… a pluralism that fragments matters. But what it fragments is not reality or truth, but justification’.

While on the one hand Rescher’s task has been to inject a sense of realism into the philosophical enterprise, on the other he is a sincere and forceful defender of philosophy. Rescher’s most common line, repeated throughout his books, is that we have questions and need answers. This is the centre of his work. The love of wisdom starts with curiosity. A thinker like John Ralston Saul complained on the last page of Voltaire’s Bastards that Western civilization had become too preoccupied with answers at the expense of simply asking questions, and this had resulted in the development of technocracy and decline in humanistic values. But this would be taking it too far for Rescher. By definition inquiring humans need some of the symmetry afforded by concluding their inquiries, however provisionally and subject to modification they are.

The strategies we employ to satisfy our hunger for knowledge while admitting of the various limitations in our capacity to do so have been plentifully categorised by Rescher throughout his career. Suffice it to say that his rigorous approach does not allow for laziness, fuzzy thinking or half-hearted answers. Reading Rescher is a great introduction to how a philosopher approaches an issue: defining terms, making distinctions, presenting possible objections, looking from multiple angles, marshalling analogies and reaching the most plausible conclusion given the reasoning involved. It also helps that Rescher’s writing style is a model of clarity and lack of pretension, with the occasional striking aphoristic phrase.

But a question I certainly have in relation to Rescher’s output is whether the number of concerns and ideas is equal to the amount of books produced. The answer is probably no. Repetitions abound in Rescher’s books, not simply of themes and passages but of exact phrases. One of the reasons I could never get into Thorstein Veblen was precisely his tendency to consistently repeat phrases verbatim as if the reader hadn’t yet come across them. This despite him constantly being touted as an original and underappreciated writer.

Rescher’s concerns sure seem inexhaustible, but they are ultimately outnumbered by his publications. I can easily image a career where his output is cut in half and him still having the same impact. Having said this, repetition is often justified by the fact that as a philosopher your arguments must proceed by building one observation on top of another in linear fashion, which requires a recapitulation of key themes. And besides, if like me you appreciate the things being hammered home, then occasionally seeing them repeated isn’t such a big deal. So as I embark on my tenth, eleventh and twelfth Rescher books, the expectation that he’ll say something genuinely surprising will gradually recede, but none the worse for that. An interesting spin on a well-worn idea is better than forcing out half-baked concepts for the sake of novelty.

The title of one of Rescher’s books is Human Interests, and there is no better description of his life’s work. Philosophers are basically serious nerds, and he counts as one of the most notorious. In recent years Rescher has given explicit confirmation of his nerd status by building a replica of a ciphering machine first designed by the polymath Gottfried Leibniz in the 1670s, using Leibniz’s own notes and memos as a guide.

Thus our incomplete picture of this man can end with the observation that even if he were deprived of the opportunity to write more books, he could still find ways of remaining connected to his passion.