Of course I know you'll never look at Rorty on my recommendation so here's a
portion of a review by Ian Johnson entitled: "Losing One's Cherry: Reactions
to Rorty's _Contingency, irony, and solidarity"
http://www.mala.bc.ca/~johnstoi/introser/rorty.htm
"On the basis of this view of language, Rorty then, in some of the most
interesting sections of the book, especially for those unfamiliar with his
earlier writings, goes on to describe the modern intellectual, the "liberal
ironist," someone who accepts the contingency of language, the contingency
of selfhood, and the contingency of community. For the liberal ironist, a
sense of one's individual identity comes through a re-creation which
emancipates one from the tyranny of one's ancestors, through the creation of
a "final language," a process which, though it inevitably starts with what
tradition provides, develops one's own unique tool and "somehow makes
tangible the blind impress all one's behavings bear" (29). Following Harold
Bloom, whose image of the Strong Poet, "the person who uses words as they
have never before been used, [and who] is best able to appreciate her own
contingency" (28) Rorty warmly endorses, he sees the liberal ironist as
horrified by the prospect of having to surrender to someone else's system
and thus driven to seek the means to the Nietzschean affirmation: "Thus I
willed it." Such self-creation is a private affair and takes place in a
realm hermetically sealed from one's public life. On this point Rorty is
repetitively emphatic:
Ironists should reconcile themselves to a private-public split within their
final vocabularies, to the fact that resolution of doubts about one's final
vocabulary has nothing to do with attempts to save other people from pain
and humiliation. . . . We should stop trying to combine self-creation and
politics, especially if we are liberals. The part of a liberal ironist's
final vocabulary which has to do with public action is never going to get
subsumed under, or subsume, the rest of her final vocabulary. (120)
Finding new descriptions of the truth of oneself may, moreover, have odd
results. Only luck will determine whether or not the new private language
will indicate genius, perversity, or eccentricity, will, that is, "also
strike the next generation as inevitable" so that "Their behavings will bear
that impress" (29) or suffer rejection and pass into instant oblivion.
"The commitment to self-creation is not, however, confined to intellectual
types. Thanks to Freud, we now understand that no matter how dull,
unimaginative, or merely decent we may appear on the surface, on the couch
"every human life . . . [is] a poem--or, more exactly, every human life not
so racked by pain as to be unable to learn a language nor so immersed in
toil as to have no leisure in which to generate a self-description" (35). No
particular self-definition, no matter how private, fantastic, or
idiosyncratic, has any special privilege. In a view that at times comes
close to the sort of essentialism Rorty emphatically repudiates, he insists
that all methods of self-creation are equally expressive of human nature,
and all are part of the innate human desire to poeticize life anew and thus
represent the "final victory of poetry in its ancient quarrel with
philosophy--the final victory of metaphors of self-creation over metaphors
of discovery" (40). For, as Rorty has pointed out in his earlier writings
and as he stresses here, the proper role of philosophy in the world of the
liberal ironist is to assist in the creation of private self-definitions.
Philosophy cannot edify us about the state of our knowledge of external
reality or our moral responsibilities; it can however, in some cases assist
our therapeutic fantasies: "within our increasingly ironist culture,
philosophy has become more important for the pursuit of private perfection
rather than for any social task" (94). This is the case because "the
relation between the intellectual and moral virtues [is] . . . contingent"
(111), although elsewhere Rorty does seem to allow for a more public role
for philosophy: "philosophy is one of the techniques for reweaving our
vocabulary of moral deliberation in order to accommodate new beliefs, (e.g.,
that women and blacks are capable of more than white males had thought, that
property is not sacred, that sexual matters are of merely private concern)"
(196).
So much for the self. What, then, for society? In a world of contingency and
private self-creation, what does the modern liberal ironist hope for her
community? Rorty begins by appropriating Judith Shklar's definition of
liberals as "people who think that cruelty is the worst thing we do."
Liberal ironists, therefore, are those who "have abandoned the idea that
[their] central beliefs and desires refer back to something beyond the reach
of time and chance" and "who include among these ungroundable desires their
own hope that suffering will be diminished, that the humiliation of human
beings by other human beings may cease" (xv). And that is essentially all
that one requires in the way of a social theory: Rorty urges that "liberal
political discourse would do well to remain . . . untheoretical and
simpleminded" (121). Given the imperative human need (the "blind impress")
for private self-creation, Rorty urges a redescription of liberalism which
will substitute "the hope that chances for fulfilment of idiosyncratic
fantasies will be equalized for the hope that everyone will replace
'passion' or fantasy with 'reason'" (53). Such a substitution is
appropriate, in Rorty's view, because Horkheimer and Adorno, among others,
have exposed the Enlightenment project as just "one more vocabulary, one
more description, one more way of speaking" (57). Consequently, since we are
left with no means to justify our beliefs which is not circular, we should
simply give up trying to defend liberalism by an appeal to ahistorical
criteria and "regard the justification of liberal society simply as a matter
of historical comparison with other attempts at social organization--those
of the past and those envisaged by utopians" (53).
"Defining his moral position in this manner brings Rorty inevitably up
against Foucault and Habermas, and Rorty's attempt to tread a clear path
between the two is, as usual, particularly stimulating and revealing. For
what emerges most clearly from the discussion is Rorty's unflagging
cheerfulness, his optimistic American faith (some will call it naiveté or
timidity, others something more sinister) that "contemporary liberal society
already contains the institutions for its own improvement" (63). Thus, for
Rorty, Foucault worries too much about the constraints liberal societies
impose upon their members, and Habermas is too concerned about the effects
of removing metaphysics from political life, too "afraid of the sort of
'romantic' overthrow of establish institutions exemplified by Hitler and
Mao" (66). In any case, Foucault's desire to escape constraints is "not the
sort of thing that could ever be embodied in social institutions" (65). That
desire, for Rorty, belongs firmly in the private realm, "in order to prevent
yourself from slipping into a political attitude which will lead you to
think that there is some social goal more important than avoiding cruelty"
(65). Habermas's problem is that he is not ironist enough to appreciate that
the political implications are not central to a philosophical view and that
liberal political freedoms do not "require some consensus about what is
universally human" (84). Rorty sees himself and Habermas as sharing common
social goals and the disagreement between them as "merely philosophical"
(67). Others, however, may well see significant political implications in
the difference.
"More than anything else in Contingency, irony, and solidarity, the
discussion of Foucault and Habermas calls into question the adequacy of
Rorty's social vision. The attempt to deal with Foucault's suspicion of
liberal institutions and Habermas's fear of irrationalism in politics makes
one wonder about the extent to which Rorty is willing ever to qualify his
cheerful sense of contingency and his optimistic faith in our ability to
work through existing institutions with hard evidence. Is it, for example,
enough to say that "one's hopes for one's grandchildren" will act as a
sufficient guide, will provide, that is, a significant amount of social glue
(85)? At a time when, even in Virginia, the disintegration of family life is
central to the major problems of many communities, such a claim comes close
to Abbie Hoffman's satirical gibe at liberal rhetoric: "God is dead, honey.
We did it for the kids." Rorty invokes the traditional liberal's hope for a
society in which "the press, the judiciary, the elections, and the
universities are free, social mobility is frequent and rapid, literacy is
universal, higher education is common, and peace and wealth have made
possible the leisure necessary to listen to lots of different people and
think about what they say" (84). Furthermore, he insists that "There are
practical measures to be taken to accomplish this practical goal" (xiv). But
there is a singular lack of practical suggestions in the book. Nor, for all
his protests against evils in the world, does Rorty direct any close
attention to particular examples of precisely those issues which Foucault
and Habermas, with, one must admit, considerable historical justification,
see all around them. Indeed, in lumping Foucault with Nietzsche and Derrida,
placing him in the world of private self-creation, and judging his work
"pretty much useless when it comes to politics" (83), Rorty overlooks the
vital centre of Foucault's whole endeavour: his political activism, which
Foucault describes as "the most crucial subject to our existence, that is to
say the society in which we live, the economic relations within which it
functions, and the system of power which defines the regular forms and
regular permissions and prohibitions of our conduct. The essence of our life
consists, after all, of the political functioning of the society in which we
find ourselves" (168).
"Inevitably, then, the question arises about the extent to which Rorty's
argument may be a case of special pleading. After all, if the ironic power
of history goes all the way down, far enough to dissolve Habermas's desire
for intersubjective communicative reason, then why make a stand on, say,
self-creation and the avoidance of cruelty as the twin pillars of a liberal
ironist culture? To what extent, in other words, is Rorty's case essentially
an endorsement of an existing situation which provides, among other things,
plenty of affluent leisure time for professors of philosophy or humanities?
Rorty happily admits that he can find no non-circular arguments in defense
of his views, but the fact that he takes a stand where he does invites the
common accusation that his position is little more than an enthusiastic
endorsement of the status quo, a polemic which decertifies both traditional
accounts of a universal basis for a thoroughgoing social critique and modern
attempts by critical theorists or political anarchists to explore the extent
to which the life of private self-creation is itself a product of forces
which oppress. Rorty points out that there is an inherent tension between
the demands of our private lives and our public obligation to minimize
cruelty and that we may often face competing claims from different groups to
which we belong, but he insists that there is no final vocabulary which will
assist us in adjudicating such claims nor any point in seeking to create
one. Nevertheless, with contingency in one hand and pragmatism in the other,
he is determined to hang onto the private life of self-creation and the
simplest possible formulation of liberal ideology in the face of all
opposition. The tactic does encourage one to question why we should assign
such importance that particular view of human priorities, itself a product
of contingent historical forces and by no means as universally acceptable as
Rorty implies. As Hutchinson observes, there is considerable irony in the
fact that "the philosopher of contingency should throw his theoretical
weight behind a particular and contested form of politics. . . ."
All to which I agree. : ) Mike Geary
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