In 1979, Richard Rorty published his provocative and controversial book, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Prior to its publication, Rorty was known primarily as a philosophy professor who had made important contributions to the discussion of such technical professional issues as “the mind-body problem,” “incorrigibility,” and the epistemological status of “transcendental arguments.” But Philosophy and the Minor of Nature is a subversive and ambitious work. Employing his analytic and rhetorical skills, Rorty sought to undermine and deconstruct what he called “the Cartesian-Lockean-Kantian tradition” – a tradition that served as the basis for much of twentieth-century philosophy, including both Anglo-American analytic philosophy and Continental phenomenology. Rorty claims that the three most important philosophers of the twentieth century are Dewey, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein. According to Rorty, “each tried, in his early years, to find a new way of making philosophy ‘foundational’ – a new way of formulating an ultimate context of thought”:
Each of the three came to see his earlier effort as self-deceptive, as an attempt to retain a certain conception of philosophy after the notions needed to flesh out that conception (the seventeenth-century notions of knowledge and mind) had been discarded. Each of the three, in his later work, broke free of the Kantian conception of philosophy as foundational, and spent his time warning against those very temptations to which he himself once succumbed. Thus their later work is therapeutic rather than constructive, edifying rather than systematic, designed to make the reader question his own motives for philosophizing rather than to supply him with a new philosophical program.1
These remarks are self-referential because Rorty viewed his own earlier efforts as succumbing to the temptation of thinking that philosophy might still serve as a foundational discipline. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature is the type of book that could have been written only by an “insider” – someone thoroughly acquainted with the latest philosophic debates. With wit, irony, and analytic finesse, Rorty uses the argumentative techniques of analytic philosophers to question and deflate the pretensions of professional philosophy. The book has generated an enormous amount of discussion and controversy. Many analytic philosophers felt it was an act of betrayal. They accused Rorty of distorting the problems and the positions he discusses, of winning points by rhetorical tricks rather than by “rigorous” arguments, and of committing the worst philosophic “sin” – indulging in “sloppy thinking.” But many others (philosophers and non-philosophers) found the book exciting and liberating. Rorty had effectively exposed the artificiality, narrowness, and arrogant pretensions of analytic philosophy. Rorty had helped to break up the hegemony of the analytic establishment and opened the way for discussion of important cultural issues long neglected by professional philosophers. He had even provided a new legitimacy for taking seriously the writings of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, Foucault, Derrida, Gadamer, and Habermas – thinkers who had been neglected and marginalized by most analytic philosophers.
Rorty himself was much more ambiguous and ambivalent about what philosophers might do after the demise of epistemology and foundational philosophy. There were some catchy phrases like “therapy,” “edification,” and “the conversation of mankind,” but no clear sense of what a successor discipline to traditional philosophy might even look like. He disclaimed any attempt to come up with a new “constructive” philosophic program. He suggested opting for a deliberately amateurish cultural critique – which he ironically called “kibitzing.”
After Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Rorty turned to the essay as a literary genre. His essays range over a great variety of contemporary issues and thinkers that cut across traditional disciplines and philosophic schools. The first fruits of these efforts appear in his collection Consequences of Pragmatism.2 Although these essays were written as occasional pieces, they cluster around three themes. First, he continues his polemical attack on foundational claims and the very idea that philosophy is a well-defined discipline (Fach) that addresses perennial philosophic problems. Second, a theme that is barely anticipated in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature begins to come into the foreground – his championing of the virtues and moral achievements of bourgeois liberal democracy. The third theme concerns play, metaphor, and the figure of the poet, who creates herself out of the fabric of her own radical contingencies. These three themes are interrelated. Rorty thinks that once we get over the “hang-ups” of traditional philosophy with Rationality, Truth, Objectivity, and Argumentation, we can get on with the task of creating a postphilosophical liberal culture – where we foster the type of solidarity required to enhance liberal democracy and where we all emulate the poets, who are the new cultural heroes and heroines.
The antagonism, hostility, and polemical attacks that Rorty has generated during the past decade have increased dramatically. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature is still recognizable as a philosophic book filled with clever and ingenious arguments. But Rorty increasingly ridicules the philosophic obsession with argument. Argument, as he now sees it, is a rhetorical device employed to persuade people to adopt a new “vocabulary” by making it look attractive. By now Rorty has offended and antagonized just about everyone – the political left and right, traditional liberals, feminists, and both analytic and Continental philosophers. His “strong” readings of key figures strike many as idiosyncratic creations of his own fantasies. He has been accused of being “smug,” “shallow,” “elitist,” “priggish,” “voyeuristic,” “insensitive,” and “irresponsible.” “Rorty-bashing” is rapidly becoming a new culture industry.
Rorty, who is a master of rhetorical tropes, has sought to parry and blunt the barbs of his critics. He seems to enjoy his ability to josh, offend, and annoy. But there is one line of criticism that Rorty has taken more seriously than most – that he is insensitive to the real pain, suffering, and humiliation of human beings, that the other side of his ironical light-minded joshing is a cruel streak. His new book, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity,3 can be read as an “answer” to this charge. I place “answer” in scare quotes because it is by no means a straightforward reply.
Although there is plenty to criticize in this new book – and I will argue that Rorty’s main claims are not only unpersuasive but harbor all sorts of unresolved tensions – nevertheless, it is a disturbingly challenging book. It is all too easy to attack and dismiss it. But it can (and should) be read as raising hard, nasty questions – questions Rorty does not satisfactorily answer – that simply will not go away.
Precisely how is one to read and evaluate this book? We might begin by asking the standard philosophic question: what position(s) does Rorty advocate and what arguments does he present to support his claims? Rorty warns against this approach: “I am not going to offer arguments against the vocabulary I want to replace. Instead I am going to try to make the vocabulary I favor look attractive by showing how it may be used to describe a variety of topics” (p. 9). Rorty reiterates his skepticism about the role of argument in philosophy:
Any argument to the effect that our familiar use of a familiar term is incoherent, or empty, or confused, or vague, or “merely metaphorical” is bound to be inconclusive and question-begging. For such use is, after all, the paradigm of coherent, meaningful, literal speech. Such arguments are always parasitic upon, and abbreviations for, claims that a better vocabulary is available. Interesting philosophy is rarely an examination of the pros and cons of a thesis. Usually it is, implicitly or explicitly, a contest between an entrenched vocabulary which has become a nuisance and a half-formed new vocabulary which vaguely promises great things, (pp. 8–9)
Rorty does argue, but he uses argument for the purpose of redescribing, for trying to get us to see why entrenched vocabularies have become nuisances and why his “half-formed new vocabulary,” his new way of thinking, is “better” and “more attractive.”
Rorty urges us to replace argument and theory with narratives – narratives that enable us to redescribe our past vocabularies and that show us how we might relate the present to an imagined Utopian future. So we might read this book by paying attention to the details of Rorty’s narratives. But here too we can be stymied. The “characters” of Rorty’s narratives represent his “strong” readings of Hegel, Nietzsche, Foucault, Habermas, Derrida, Dewey, Rawls, Davidson, Freud, Proust, Nabokov, Orwell, and many others. Rorty himself self-ironically characterizes a “strong” reading as a “perverse, egocentric commentary” (p. 160). But many of these readings are so perverse that we can easily get bogged down in sorting out what is illuminating, incisive, and “on target” from what is distortive, misleading, or simply false.
To figure out what Rorty is up to I suggest that initially we take him at his word – that his “method” (his quotes) is to create a half-formed new vocabulary in which one redescribes “lots of things in new ways until you have created a pattern of linguistic behavior which will tempt the rising generation to adopt it, thereby causing them to look for appropriate new forms of non-linguistic behavior” (p. 9). This formulation is helpful for understanding what Rorty means by the deliberately vague term “vocabulary.” Rorty is freely appropriating Wittgenstein’s notion of a language game, or more accurately, a form of life. A vocabulary is a way of describing, evaluating, judging, and even acting. The “method” Rorty advocates
does not work piece by piece, analyzing concept after concept. Rather it works holistically and pragmatically. It says things like “try thinking of it this way” – or more specifically “try to ignore the apparently futile traditional questions by substituting the following new and possibly interesting questions”. (p. 9)
So let us try the imaginative experiment of entering into Rorty’s new vocabulary, of adopting his new way of thinking. Rorty begins with a description of the “figure” he wants to sketch and recommend – the “liberal ironist.” Borrowing his definition of a “liberal” from Judith Shklar – one that he repeats throughout the book – he tells us “liberals are the people who think that cruelty is the worst thing we do” (p. xv). An “ironist” is
the sort of person who faces up to the contingency of his or her own most central beliefs and desires – someone sufficiently historicist and nominalist to have abandoned the idea that those central beliefs and desires refer back to something beyond the reach of time and chance. Liberal ironists are people 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, (p. xv)
This characterization of the “liberal ironist” immediately raises the question, “Why not be cruel?” But Rorty responds (this is the point of joining “liberal” and “ironist”): “For liberal ironists, there is no answer to this question ‘Why not be cruel?’ – no noncircular theoretical backup for the belief that cruelty is horrible” (p. xv). Those liberals who think we can rationally answer this question are what Rorty calls “liberal metaphysicians.” The problem with liberal metaphysicians – that is, with most intellectuals and non-intellectuals who think of themselves as liberals – is that they believe it is, or ought to be, possible to give non-question-begging answers to questions like “Why not be cruel?” More generally, they believe that liberalism rests upon, or ought to rest upon, rational foundations.
When Rorty fleshes out what he means by an “ironist” he does so by introducing the notion of a “final vocabulary”:
All human beings carry about a set of words which they employ to justify their actions, their beliefs, and their lives. These are the words in which we formulate praise of our friends and contempt for our enemies, our long-term projects, our deepest self-doubts and our highest hopes. They are words in which we tell, sometimes prospectively and sometimes retrospectively, the story of our lives. I shall call those words a person’s “final vocabulary”, (p. 73)
He immediately adds:
It is “final” in the sense that if doubt is cast on the worth of these words, their user has no noncircular argumentative recourse. These words are as far as he can go with language; beyond them there is helpless passivity or resort to force, (p. 73)
With this stipulation of what constitutes a “final vocabulary” Rorty tells us that an “ironist” is someone who fulfills three conditions:
(1) She has radical and continuing doubts about the final vocabulary she correctly uses, because she has been impressed by other vocabularies, vocabularies taken as final by people or books she has encountered;
(2) She realizes that argument phrased in her present vocabulary can neither underwrite nor dissolve these doubts;
(3) Insofar as she philosophizes about her situation, she does not think her vocabulary is closer to reality than others, that it is in touch with a power not herself. Ironists who are inclined to philosophize see the choice between vocabularies as made neither within a neutral and universal metavocabulary nor by an attempt to fight one’s way past appearances to the real, but simply by playing the new off against the old. (p. 73)
Rorty knows that most liberals (past and present) have not been ironists. And those whom Rorty considers to be supreme ironists (e.g., Nietzsche and Heidegger) have been scornful of anything that smacks of liberal democracy. Irony and liberalism appear to be mutually antagonistic – at war with each other. So how can they be reconciled? Isn’t the very idea of a “liberal ironist” oxymoronic? If reconciliation means finding some theoretical perspective for joining and synthesizing liberalism and irony, then Rorty thinks this is a futile project. He thinks that the desire for reconciliation is part of a larger project that has haunted philosophy since the time of Plato – the attempt to “discover” some theoretical grounding for reconciling the competing and incommensurable claims of our private and public lives. Such a grounding is presumably to be achieved by “discovering” a common human nature or the true character of our “deep selves.” But there is no such thing to be “discovered.” His major claim – one might say that it is the central thesis of his book – is that the attempt to fuse, synthesize, and reconcile the private and the public is not only a futile project but that it is unnecessary. We should recognize that the private and public domains are incommensurable. Nevertheless, each has its own legitimacy and responsibilities. Neither has any priority. Sharply distinguishing public and private questions, “the domain of the liberal from the domain of the ironist … makes it possible for a single person to be both” (p. 198). We should privatize irony and realize that as public citizens our primary responsibility is to cultivate the type of solidarity required for the flourishing of liberal democracy. Rorty’s new vocabulary is intended to persuade us that this can and should be done.
In Rorty’s “liberal utopia” we would all recognize that solidarity is not grounded on something that we all share in common. Solidarity is not based upon Reason or Theory. Rather, it is a goal to be achieved by imagination where we become sensitive to the concrete details of the pain and humiliation of our fellow human beings. Journalists, ethnologists, and especially novelists are far more useful in achieving this goal than philosophers or social theorists. The culture of this liberal utopia would be one in which irony is universal. We would no longer even think that we can answer questions like “Why not be cruel?” We would stop searching for theoretical grounding for our “final vocabularies.” We would all be historicists and nominalists and look back on the search for essences or a common human nature as quaint. Our heroes and heroines would be poets, self-creators – those lucky enough to create something new out of the contingencies that constitute their lives. Such a liberal Utopian culture would no longer be obsessed with Truth, Objectivity, Reality, Rationality, and Argument. It would celebrate play and metaphor.
For all Rorty’s ironic playfulness, he is also a passionate moralist (indeed, he wants to show us how a single person can be both). His moral and political concern is in part motivated by what he takes to be “irresponsible” attacks on liberal institutions by both radicals and neo-conservatives. In order to make liberalism look attractive (not to ground it), Rorty thinks that “Liberal culture needs an improved self-description rather than a set of foundations” (p. 52):
We need a redescription of liberalism as the hope that culture as a whole can be “poeticized” rather than as the Enlightenment hope that it can be “rationalized” or “scienticized”. (p. 53)
We should “try not to want something which stands beyond history and institutions.” We should recognize that “a belief can still regulate action, can still be thought worth dying for, among people who are quite aware that this belief is caused by nothing deeper than contingent historical circumstance” (p. 189).
Rorty’s project can be seen from a different perspective – by sketching his narrative of what has been happening in the West during the past few centuries, a narrative of intellectual and moral progress. (Throughout his book, he speaks about “progess” but this too has an ironic shading. Progress has nothing to do with teleology. It is the achievement of luck, historical contingencies. It is progress in the sense of being what liberal ironists favor and approve in their “final vocabularies.”)
As Rorty sees it, ever since the eighteenth century there has been a growth and spread of liberal institutions and practices in the rich North Atlantic bourgeois countries. This has occurred not because of any philosophic justification or theoretical backing. We only pay ourselves an empty compliment if we think of this as a rational development. There is no necessity or rationale why liberal institutions should have prevailed. Liberal metaphysical rhetoric – appeals to “rights, “ “equality, “ “liberty” – did play a role in bringing about liberal democracy, but this rhetoric is no longer useful in making liberalism “look good.” This is why we now need a redescription of liberalism.
At the same time that liberal societies have made moral progress, Western culture – ever since Hegel – has become increasingly ironic. And when irony is pushed to the extreme it effectively undermines the “seriousness” of those discourses that pretend to provide a theoretical backing for our liberal convictions. So once again the problem for Rorty is how to enhance our liberal convictions, make them “look good, “ and learn the lesson that the culture of irony has taught us, that there is no non-circular argument for justifying our historically contingent beliefs.
Still another way of appreciating what Rorty is up to is to consider his own intellectual predilections, specifically the grouping of his “heroes.” On the one hand, he admires Mill, Dewey, Rawls, and Habermas. These are “good guys” as fellow citizens, champions of the type of liberalism that Rorty cherishes. He sharply criticizes them insofar as there are still metaphysical and rationalistic vestiges in their writings, that is, insofar as they tempt us to think that liberal beliefs and practices can be rationally grounded. On the other hand, Rorty also deeply admires Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, and Derrida. They are among the most creative ironists. But he is sharply critical of them insofar as they sometimes succumb to the illusion that they also have a “social mission, “ that their experiments in irony have relevance for questions of public, political life. Rorty wants us to read Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, and Derrida in the way in which we read Proust. They are all ironic poets (self-creators) who enhance our private lives but have nothing to tell us about our public responsibilities. There is no way of reconciling Heidegger and Habermas, Derrida and Rawls, Nietzsche and Dewey. Their vocabularies are incommensurable with each other. Rorty’s happy solution to the tension experienced by anyone who finds both sets of thinkers attractive is apartheid – a rigid separation between private irony and public hope. Although “the existence of these two sides” of our lives “generates dilemmas, “ neither side has any priority. “Such dilemmas we shall always have with us, but they are never going to be resolved by appeal to some further, higher set of obligations which a philosophical tribunal might discover and apply” (p. 197).
In order to give further specificity to what Rorty is attempting to show us, we need to explore and texture what he means by “contingency, “ “historicism, “ and “nominalism.” Contingency has always been problematic for philosophy. But typically philosophers, in what Rorty calls the “Plato-Kant” canon, have contrasted contingency with what is universal, necessary, and essential. This is what is behind the variations on the appearance/reality distinction where there has been an implicit or explicit valorization (divinization) of what is presumably essential, universal, and necessary. These concerns have always been the obsession of foundational philosophers. They have sought to discover the “really real, “ a “truth” that is “out there.” But for Rorty, contingency, historicism, and nominalism “go all the way down.” There is nothing that is necessary, nothing that escapes time and chance, no essential nature of what we really are. So-called “universal truths” turn out to be the platitudes of entrenched vocabularies. Rorty is acutely aware that in making such categorical assertions he sounds as if he himself is making truth claims and thereby still playing the old game of philosophy. He wants to avoid the trap set by those who will charge him with self-referential inconsistency or “performative contradiction.”
To say that there is no such thing as intrinsic nature is not to say that the intrinsic nature of reality has turned out, surprisingly enough, to be extrinsic. It is to say that the term “intrinsic nature” is one which it would pay us not to use, an expression which has caused more trouble than it has been worth. To say that we should drop the idea of truth as out there waiting to be discovered is not to say that we have discovered that, out there, there is no truth. It is to say that our purposes would be served best by ceasing to see truth as a deep matter, as a topic of philosophical interest, or “true” as a term which repays “analysis”, (p. 8)
If we ask what “purposes” are “served best” by this strategy, Rorty’s response is that it is “better” for redescribing the liberal utopia that “we” ironic liberals approve. If we ask again why should such a liberal utopia be approved, there is no non-contingent answer to this question. All we can do is to make our new vocabulary look as attractive as possible and play it off old entrenched vocabularies. This may strike many as a “cop-out” – as if Rorty is simply telling us that either one will or will not find such redescription of liberalism attractive, but not giving us any reasons for claiming it is “better, “ “more attractive, “ “more useful.” But Rorty’s point (and challenge) is that it is a self-deceptive illusion to think that anyone can do more than this. This is the “wisdom” of the ironist.
Rorty’s discussion of the contingency of language, selfhood and liberal community (Part I of his book) is packed with all sorts of controversial claims, but the gist of it is something like this: we should give up any belief that philosophers or scientists are the cultural heroes of our time. Rather, we should recognize that the domains of culture that have become important for us are Utopian politics and poetry. The poets – in Rorty’s broad sense of the term – are the inventors of new metaphors and vocabularies. Proust, Nabokov, Newton, Darwin, Hegel, and Heidegger are poets in this “large generic sense.” “Such people are also thought of as rebelling against ‘death’ – that is, against the failure to have created – more strongly than most of us” (p. 24). A Nietzschean motif runs through Rorty’s discussion of contingencies.4 Rorty sees the history of culture as replacing old gods with new gods. After the demise of theology and metaphysics, philosophers divinized rationality, science, and the moral self. Romantic poets divinized imagination, poetic genius, and the creative self. There is a deep metaphysical urge to claim that science, morality, or poetry put us in touch with something greater, more real and authentic, than the sheer contingencies that make up our lives. Even Nietzsche and Heidegger are tempted by this desire. But all these projects have failed, all have fallen victim to the ironist’s “radical and continuing doubts.” But these “failures” need not and should not be the cause for despair. They would lead to despair only if we had some reason for believing that there is something higher or more divine and sublime to be “discovered, “ something “out there” that redeems our all-too-human strivings. But there is nothing that satisfies this desire. We need not “be doomed to spend our conscious lives trying to escape from contingency” (p. 28). Rather, we should recognize that there is nothing more than contingencies and try to emulate those “strong poets” who seek to create something new out of those contingencies. This is what Harold Bloom (one of Rorty’s great heroes) calls “giving birth to oneself.”
We can get a more concrete sense of what Rorty means by contingency and self-creation by considering his reading of Freud. Rorty’s Freud is not the scientist, rationalist, or discoverer of new “truths” about the unconscious. It is the Freud who shows that “everything to do with our life is chance.” “What is new in Freud is the details he gives us about the sort of thing which goes into the formation of conscience, his explanation of why certain very concrete situations and persons excite unbearable guilt, intense anxiety, or smoldering rage” (p. 31). Freud helps us to see that there is no core self. We are tissues of contingencies where all distinctions of the higher and lower, the essential and the non-essential, break down. Each of us is engaged in an idiosyncratic moral struggle. Freud “thinks that only if we catch hold of some crucial idiosyncratic contingencies in our past shall we be able to make something worthwhile out of ourselves, to create present selves whom we can respect” (p. 33). Much of what is found in Freud can also be found in Nietzsche. But what makes Freud “more useful and more plausible” is that “Freud’s account of unconscious fantasy shows us how to see every human life as 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” (pp. 35–6). Summing up, Rorty tells us that Freud’s genius consists in showing us in concrete detail that “poetic, artistic, philosophical, scientific, or political progress results from the accidental coincidence of private obsession with public need” (p. 37).
What does Rorty’s celebration of contingency, self-creation, strong poetry, “giving birth to ourselves” have to do with liberal democracy, solidarity, and citizenship? The best short answer is – nothing. Nothing if we think that pursuing our idiosyncractic fantasies and “poeticizing” our lives entails anything about our public responsibilities. Self-creation is a private project. We may begin to feel uneasy and suspicious of this neat apartheid of the private and the public. Rorty, who employs the rhetorical device of anticipating and stating the sharpest objections himself, knows that anyone who denies that there is truth “out there, “ that there is any “common human nature” or “deep self, “ and who questions the usefulness of such distinctions as rationality/irrationality or morality/prudence will be suspected of immorality, irrationalism, aestheticism, and a “self-defeating” relativism. Rorty clearly looks like a relativist for he is constantly telling us there are no neutral criteria for evaluating competing incommensurable vocabularies.
Pursuing the way in which Rorty seeks to evade and outflank these charges, especially the accusation of self-defeating relativism, enables us to understand better what he means by playing off a new vocabulary against old entrenched vocabularies that have become nuisances. He tells us that his strategy in responding to the objections of his critics “will be to try to make the vocabulary in which these objections are phrased look bad, thereby changing the subject, rather than granting the objector his choice of weapons and terrain by meeting his criticism head-on” (p. 44). The charge of “relativism” should not be answered but evaded. Indeed, once a culture sloughs off the Enlightenment vocabulary in which such criticisms are formulated “it would no longer be haunted by spectres called ‘relativism’ and ‘irrationalism’” (p. 53). They lose their force. This is consonant with Rorty’s claim that once we are persuaded to adopt a new vocabulary, the questions and worries that arise in discarded vocabularies do not even arise. So his task is to make the vocabulary of his critics “look bad” and his redescription “look good.” But precisely how does he do this – how does he outflank those who accuse him of “bad” relativism? Although Rorty thinks one can use multiple strategies, I want to explore one of his tactics. He considers the standard objection to the views of Isaiah Berlin’s defense of negative liberty and Berlin’s endorsement of Joseph Schumpeter’s claim that “to realize the relative validity of one’s convictions and yet stand for them unflinchingly, is what distinguishes a civilized man from a barbarian” (p. 46). Rorty agrees with Berlin’s comment “to demand more than this is perhaps a deep incurable metaphysical need; but to allow it to determine one’s practice is a symptom of an equally deep, and more dangerous moral and political immaturity.”5 But to speak of “relative validity” opens the way for critics to pounce and ask why the liberal gives a morally privileged status to the value of freedom. This objection is formulated by Michael Sandel when he writes:
If one’s convictions are only relatively valid, why stand for them unflinchingly? In a tragically configured moral universe, such as Berlin assumes, is the ideal of freedom any less subject than competing ideals to the ultimate incommensurability of values? If so, in what can its privileged status consist? And if freedom has no morally privileged status, if it is just one value among many, then what can be said for liberalism?6
We can see why it is so important for Rorty to respond – or outflank – these objections. One of his most central claims is that “a belief can still regulate action, can still be thought worth dying for, among people who are quite aware that this belief is caused by nothing deeper than contingent historical circumstance” (p. 189).
Rorty claims that when Sandel poses the above question he is “taking the vocabulary of Enlightenment rationalism for granted” (p. 46). The very notion of “relative validity” only makes sense if it has contrastive force – if we think there are “statements capable of being justified to all those who are uncorrupted – that is, to all those in whom reason, viewed as a built-in truth-seeking faculty, or conscience, viewed as a built-in righteousness detector, is powerful enough to overcome evil passions, vulgar superstitions, and base prejudices” (p. 47). But Rorty calls into question just those Enlightenment distinctions between “relative validity” and “absolute validity, “ between “reason” and “passion, “ between “rational convictions” and “convictions caused by contingencies, “ that are required and presupposed in posing questions like those of Sandel. So Rorty proposes that we simply drop the talk of “relative validity”:
In the jargon I have been developing, Schumpeter’s claim that this is the mark of the civilized person translates into the claim that the liberal societies of our century have produced more and more people who are able to recognize the contingency of the vocabulary in which they state their highest hopes – the contingency of their own consciences – and yet have remained faithful to those consciences, (p. 54)
One may object that Rorty is being evasive. He is not meeting the objection: indeed, he is implicitly advocating the sort of ethnocentrism where one simply affirms one’s most cherished convictions. Why should we accept Rorty’s “final vocabulary” – no matter how passionately he affirms his “prejudices”? Rorty wants to take the sting out of this objection. Of course he is being evasive. But there is nothing wrong with this. The point is to give up the vocabulary of Enlightenment rationalism because it has become a nuisance. If the objector persists and maintains that all Rorty is doing is affirming his own idiosyncratic ethnocentric prejudices, Rorty does not deny this. His response is that, of course, he is being ethnocentric, but some forms of ethnocentrism are better than others, namely, the ethnocentrism of “we” liberal ironists “who have been brought up to distrust ethnocentrism” (p. 198). But why is it better? This is just like asking the question “Why not be cruel?” It is unanswerable if we think we can give any non-circular argument to justify our “final” vocabularies. It may begin to look as if Rorty is moving in a vicious circle – a circle which he breaks by declaring “Here I stand” (full stop). This is the way Rorty looks to someone who hankers after something more basic, more rational than playing off one vocabulary against another. From Rorty’s perspective these demands are those of someone who still has the metaphysical urge to expect some sort of non-contingent grounding for our final vocabularies, who fails to grasp the radical contingency of all vocabularies, who thinks that there can be a theoretical back-up which is not ethnocentric. But there isn’t any such back-up. So the charge of ethnocentrism loses its sting when we realize that it is an illusion to think we can ever “escape” from being ethnocentric. We can only play off good and bad forms of ethnocentrism.
I said earlier that the one accusation Rorty takes more “seriously” than any other is that, despite his protestations to the contrary, his joshing and debunking have cruel consequences. Rorty has been criticized for being an elitist virtuoso intellectual who is insensitive to the real pain, suffering, and humiliation of his fellow human beings. Rorty knows that ironic redescription often humiliates. “The redescribing ironist, by threatening one’s final vocabulary, and thus one’s ability to make sense of one’s own terms rather then hers, suggests that one’s self and one’s world are futile, obsolete, powerless. Redescription often humiliates” (p. 90). But redescription is no more closely connected with irony than with metaphysics. “Redescription is a generic trait of the intellectual, not a specific mark of the ironist, so why do ironists arouse special resentment?” (p. 90). Rorty thinks that this is because of the ironist’s inability to empower, his refusal to acknowledge that any final vocabulary can be rationally justified or grounded. Liberal metaphysicians, on the contrary, speak as if their redescriptions are educating their audiences rather than simply reprogramming them. They speak as if they are “uncovering the interlocutor’s true self or the real nature of a common public world which the speaker and the interlocutor share” (p. 90). But this is a self-deceptive illusion because there is no “true self” or “real nature” of a common public world.
Although the liberal ironist maintains that cruelty is the worst thing we do and that we should always try to avoid humiliation, Rorty realizes that such abstract pronouncements don’t get us very far. What we take to be cruelty and humiliation will itself be dependent on our historically contingent vocabularies. Even more important, we are frequently unaware of the manifold ways in which we are cruel. The thrust of Rorty’s thinking is to direct us away from abstractions, principles, theory, and general pronouncements toward concrete specific descriptions. We need to attend to the details of the springs of cruelty in ourselves and others. The public responsibility of the liberal ironist is to try to become aware of the specific pain and humiliation of others. We should try “to extend our sense of ‘we’ to people whom we previously thought of as ‘they’” (p. 192). It is by this type of imaginative empathy that we can foster solidarity. Who performs this task best? Not philosophers – not even ironic philosophers – or social theorists. Rather it is journalists, ethnologists, and novelists who have the gift for concrete “detailed empirical descriptions” that can be most helpful in performing this task.
Rorty seeks to show this in the last part of his book, “Cruelty and Solidarity, “ where he gives detailed analyses of two of his favorite novelists, Nabokov and Orwell. For all their differences (Nabokov condemns the sort of novels that Orwell wrote as “topical trash”), Rorty nevertheless tells us that they both wrote novels that help us see “how social practices which we have taken for granted have made us cruel” (p. 141). Nabokov and Orwell had different gifts and different self-images, but “their accomplishment was pretty much the same. Both of them warn the liberal ironist intellectual against the temptations to be cruel” (p. 144). Nabokov exposes what Rorty calls “cruel incuriosity, “ and “Orwell wanted to be of use to people who were suffering” (p. 170). Even if one agrees with Rorty’s claims about the importance of the novel as the medium in a liberal society for making us aware of the details of pain and humiliation, one may wonder just how helpful novels really are in fostering the solidarity that Rorty thinks is so important. At times Rorty himself is tempted to claim that novelists empower in ways in which philosophers and social theorists do not. We may begin to feel that Rorty is more concerned with the temptation to be cruel by a small group of intellectuals rather than the suffering of all those who are non-intellectuals. Indeed, we may feel increasingly uneasy with Rorty’s master strategy – to separate private irony and public hope. We may think that there is something a bit too facile and cheerful in all this talk of liberal hope, that Rorty is a glib optimist who doesn’t really face up to the intractable social and political problems that we confront in our everyday lives. But there is a dark side to what Rorty is saying. The full complexity of his stance comes out only when we pursue this.
Consider his central theme that anything can be made to look good or bad by redescription. Rorty doesn’t flinch from the consequences of this claim. It means that what we take to be cruelty and humiliation in one vocabulary may not be described and perceived as such in another vocabulary. For even though Rorty says that pain is non-linguistic, there is no “essence” of cruelty and humiliation. To suggest that the horrors and Holocausts of the twentieth century can be redescribed to “look good” might seem to count as a reductio ad absurdum of his position. For Rorty, it is contingently possible that we might some day live in a world of “double-think.” He says that this is what Orwell tried to show us in the last third of 1984 where O’Brien becomes the central character. He rejects the interpretation of 1984 by those who say that Orwell is reminding us of some plain moral truths whose obviousness is on a par with “two plus two is four.” There are no such moral truths. There aren’t any “plain moral facts out there in the world.” What Orwell does in the last part of 1984 is to present us with
an alternative scenario, one which led in the wrong direction. He convinced us that there was a perfectly good chance that the same developments which had made human equality technically possible might make endless slavery possible. He did so by convincing us that nothing in the nature of truth, or man, or history was going to block that scenario, any more than it was going to underwrite the scenario which liberals had been using between the wars. He convinced us that all the intellectual and poetic gifts which had made Greek philosophy, modern science, and Romantic poetry possible might someday find employment in the Ministry of Truth, (pp. 175–6)
Orwell did not invent O’Brien – the cool cosmopolitan torturer – as a dialectical foil for “sound” liberal convictions but rather “to warn us against him” (p. 176), to show us that he is both dangerous and possible. Rorty’s ironic historicist nominalism is double-edged. We have no reason for believing that one vocabulary is better than any other. Furthermore, there is no reason to think that liberal institutions will prevail rather than the scenario where the O’Briens rule the world. There is nothing deep down in us that we can rely on to resist such a scenario. Socialization “goes all the way down.” Consequently, we could be socialized so that we become “rational” torturers. Whatever happens in the future – like the rest of history – will be the result of contingencies. This is what gives such urgency to preserving and improving the liberal society Rorty cherishes. He too wants to warn us about the fragility of liberal institutions, and against the illusion that freedom will or must prevail. The scenario where our worst nightmares come to be is just as possible. So the dark side of Rorty’s liberal hope is the acute awareness that there is nothing we can rely on to determine which scenario will be our future.
The rhetorical flair, erudition, and scope of Rorty’s book are dazzling. His redescriptions and strong readings are always provocative. Yet when we step back and judge what Rorty is saying, then all sorts of unresolved tensions and doubts arise. Rorty hopes that the worries and questions that are rooted in vocabularies which have become a nuisance will disappear. But they don’t. They reappear in new forms. Many of these cluster about his logic of apartheid – his rigid separation of the public and the private.
Consider the claims that Rorty makes about the self. On the one hand he criticizes the very idea that there is a common human nature or any deep self to be “discovered.” The self, he tells us, is nothing but a contingent weaving and reweaving of desires and beliefs which are themselves the effects of historical contingencies. But on the other hand – despite his statements to the contrary – Rorty seems to be advocating a “theory” of the self. For he also says that we all have the capacity for self-creation even though it is only the strong poets who succeed in “giving birth to themselves.” Without the notion of self-creation where we can make our lives into works of art, where we can “see every human life as poem” (p. 35), Rorty’s redescription of our private lives would not even make sense. Rorty desperately wants to avoid the suggestion that he is playing the old game of philosophy, that his claims about the self should be read as “getting things right.” He even declares that “the only argument I could give for the views about language and about selfhood put forward … was that these views seemed to cohere better with the institutions of a liberal democracy than the available alternatives do” (p. 197). But this remark is disingenuous. For Rorty is not saying that there may well be a common human nature to be discovered but that it is no longer useful to think that there is insofar as we are committed to liberal democracy. This is belied by what he does. In a battery of arguments he shows why the reasons advanced to support the claim that there is a common human nature fail – why they do not justify the belief that there is a truth “out there” to be discovered. If one is to be persuaded that Rorty’s vocabulary is “attractive” and the alternatives “look bad, “ then this will in part depend on his success in arguing that these alternative vocabularies fail to accomplish what they claim to prove. This has nothing to do with whether or not we find his description of liberal democracy attractive. Rorty’s assertion about the contingency of all vocabularies would be reduced to absurdity if it entailed the consequence that we can believe anything we want to about language and selfhood as long as it coheres with the type of political institutions we find attractive. By his own insistence there is no reason why anyone should find one set of political institutions more attractive than another.
Rorty constantly slides from a strong sense of “rational justification” to a weaker and more reasonable sense of justification. When he criticizes our ability to give reasons in support of the central beliefs of our final vocabularies, he means we cannot give any definitive knock-down foundational justifications. But this should not be confused with giving historically contingent fallible reasons to support our beliefs. This is what Rorty himself is constantly doing. We don’t need strong foundations in order to assess whether reasons given in specific inquiries are good reasons. One of the major themes in philosophy during the past hundred years – from Peirce through Sellars and Quine to Rorty – has been that it is a mistake to think we can (or need to) give strong foundational justification in any area in human inquiry. But this doesn’t mean that we can’t distinguish better from worse reasons when we are evaluating a scientific hypothesis or the interpretation of a poem – even if what are to count as “good reasons” are themselves historically conditioned and contestable.
One may also question whether Rorty’s redescription of selfhood does “cohere better with the institutions of liberal democracy.” Even Rorty’s redescription presupposes a minimal sense of human agency. Rorty’s liberal ironists are able to do something to avoid or minimize cruelty and to enhance solidarity. Of course no one can know the full consequences of what one does. It is a platitude to say that there are always unexpected contingent consequences of our actions. But at times – in his hyperbolic manner – Rorty so radicalizes his claims about contingency, historicism, and nominalism that one wonders if it even makes sense (in his vocabulary) to speak about human actions, intentions, and projects. If the old idea of “intentional action” were completely abandoned in favor of a thoroughly contingent self, then we would never have any reason to suppose that anything we do would even be likely to have the results we intend. Projects formulated to eliminate cruelty might just as well have the opposite result. For whatever happens is presumably thoroughly contingent. If one really believed this, then what would be the motivation for acting one way rather than another? This also has consequences for Rorty’s rhetoric of liberal hope. When Rorty defends ungrounded liberal hope, the target of his polemical attack is the claim that liberalism is doomed, that there are historical tendencies (necessities) at work that prevent the realization of a liberal utopia. But if we accept Rorty’s contingency thesis there is no more reason for hope than despair. For there is no reason to expect that anything we do is more likely to bring us closer to this utopia than to its opposite.
Just as Rorty plays fast and loose with the concept of selfhood, he also does this with the concept of universality. His “official” position is to denigrate the search for universals (which he lumps together with essences, intrinsic natures, and necessities). But his vocabulary depends on all sorts of controversial universal claims – for example, we all have the capacity for self-creation, we should all try to avoid cruelty and humiliating others, we should all strive to strengthen liberal institutions and increase human solidarity. Rorty might reply that he is not against all forms of universality. Rather, he wants to make us aware of what we are doing when we make such claims. Universals are not “out there” to be discovered. They are only part of the rhetoric of our historically contingent vocabularies. The ironist knows that they cannot be rationally justified. So we should say that the partisan universal claims made within a given vocabulary will be accepted if we find the vocabulary attractive. But even if one goes this far with Rorty, we want to know what makes one vocabulary more attractive than another. If this is interpreted as looking for reasons why a given vocabulary is superior to its alternatives, this is just the move that Rorty wants to block. But is Rorty’s strategy here really persuasive? In the final analysis, Rorty has little more to say than that we will or will not find a vocabulary attractive. Whatever our response, it is itself a matter of historical contingencies. The “logic” of Rorty’s strategy comes down to making the adoption of a vocabulary a matter of taste about which there can be no rational debate. Rorty’s conviction concerning the contingency of all vocabularies begins to look like old-styled vulgar emotivism. For all questions concerning the adoption or rejection of a vocabulary boil down to whether we have a pro or anti attitude toward it. Whatever our attitude, it is itself the contingent effect of historical contingencies. Debates about our basic values and norms are not rational. They are only rhetorical strategies for getting others to adopt our attitudes.
For all of Rorty’s advocacy of liberal pluralistic openness, it begins to look as if what he is really recommending is a fideistic absolutism. If none of our central beliefs can be even minimally rationally warranted, if there is no (non-trivial) way of distinguishing relevant and irrelevant considerations for the beliefs we hold, then it looks as if Rorty is telling us that when doubts are raised about one’s final vocabulary the only response that is appropriate is “Here I stand (and I hope you will also stand here).”
But what if one doesn’t find a given vocabulary attractive, what if – even after Rorty’s redescriptions – one finds his portrait of liberal democracy repulsive? Then there is nothing more to be said. This is a strategy that works just as well for those who advocate a world in which cool cosmopolitan torturers should rule. Rorty has cleverly built an unassailable fortress and insulates himself from any criticism, for anyone can enshrine his central convictions in fancy rhetoric, anyone can (if he is imaginative) make his vocabulary “look good” and refuse to give any reasons for holding these beliefs.
This type of fideism makes one question just how successful Rorty is in outflanking and evading the charge of relativism. There are silly versions of relativism where one maintains that any belief is just as good or true as any other. It would be unfair to accuse Rorty of advocating such a vulgar relativism, for he does try to show why his vocabulary is more attractive by redescription. Nevertheless, it isn’t clear why in his liberal utopia one would no longer feel the force of the relativist objection. Presumably this is because the liberal ironist has abandoned the distinction between relative and absolute validity. She knows that no final vocabulary can be grounded in something more fundamental, that anything can be made to look good or bad by redescription, that there are no constraints on the invention of new vocabularies. The ironist wants to drop the term “relativism” but – contrary to what Rorty says – she doesn’t get rid of a nagging problem, she merely renames it “contingency.” For the ironist knows that there are alternative vocabularies which others find attractive – vocabularies that are incompatible and incommensurable with one’s final vocabulary. Furthermore she knows there are no rational criteria for adjudicating rival vocabularies. To say, for example, that the vocabulary of Orwell’s O’Brien is dangerous is only an elliptical way of saying that if one is a liberal then it is dangerous. But from the perspective of O’Brien’s world, liberalism is the “real” danger. It is hard to discern any difference that makes a difference between Rorty’s claims about the radical contingency of all vocabularies and what from our entrenched vocabularies is called “relativism.”
Suppose we follow Rorty and drop the term “relativism” and the distinction between relative and absolute validity. The same point can still be made. For it is Rorty who says that anything can be made to look good and bad by redescription. Any vocabulary can be made to look attractive if one is clever and imaginative enough. There is never a non-trivial reason for favoring one vocabulary rather than its incompatible alternatives. But the more Rorty insists upon this the more he shows that such claims can also be made by ironists who detest liberalism and find it repulsive.
Furthermore Rorty himself violates his own stipulative definition of the ironist. The ironist, we recall, “has radical and continuing doubts about the final vocabulary she currently uses.” In an abstract way Rorty does have doubts about his final vocabulary – at least insofar as he knows it cannot be justified and there are alternative final vocabularies. But such a theoretical skepticism is what Peirce calls “paper” doubt. There is no evidence that Rorty ever really doubts his commitment to liberal democracy. He never really questions it and asks himself whether there are alternatives that should be considered. He has, in effect, insulated his liberal convictions from any doubts. He even tells us “on the public side of our lives, nothing is less dubious than the worth of those freedoms [the democratic freedoms and relative social equality which some rich lucky societies have, quite recently, come to enjoy]” (p. 197). But why shouldn’t this also be subject to “radical and continuing doubts”? What kind of ironist says to herself “I will be ironical only about the private side of my life but not about the public side”?
The primary reason why Rorty never “seriously” questions his liberal convictions is that his entire project depends upon defending “the fundamental premise … that a belief can still regulate action, can still be thought worth dying for, among people who are quite aware that this belief is caused by nothing deeper than contingent historical circumstance” (p. 189). Without this “fundamental premise” his entire project falls apart.
As with so many of Rorty’s hyperbolic claims, one can give a weaker – indeed, a quite reasonable – reading of this “fundamental premise” and a much stronger dubious reading. The reasonable thesis is that once we give up foundationalism or claims to absolute validity, then we must recognize that all our beliefs are always open to criticism and revision. Nevertheless, aware of our own fallibility, we can be passionately committed to the beliefs that regulate our actions. But Rorty is not advocating fallibilism, he is rejecting it. For the fallibilist doesn’t give up the distinction between good and bad reasons, although she historicizes it. She knows that this distinction is context-dependent and always contestable. When challenged about her fundamental beliefs, she is open to considering why she should modify or abandon them. The fallibilist is open to what Habermas calls the “force of the better argument” and recognizes there can always be disputes about what counts as the better argument. But on the strong reading of what Rorty means by irony, there is no basis for making a distinction between rational persuasion and other forms of persuasion. This distinction is completely relative to the vocabulary we adopt. And since there is no reason for adopting a given vocabulary, we are licensed to count as “rational persuasion” whatever “looks good” to us.
One reason why Rorty denies that there is a distinction between rational persuasion and other forms of persuasion (unless we draw the distinction by fiat) is that he relies upon an excessively narrow conception of argument. He writes as if it is appropriate to speak of argument only when there is enough common agreement so that we can all agree on what counts as a better argument. Argument is appropriate when the rules of argumentation are commonly accepted. But it is never clear why we should restrict argument in this narrow way. Whether the domain is science, the interpretation of texts, or politics – when we do argue there is rarely (if ever) complete common agreement about the “rules” for clearly distinguishing better and worse substantive arguments. If there were algorithms for deciding among competing arguments than there would be no need for argument! A computer could “decide” which is the better argument.
Rorty’s ironist may in fact think that some beliefs are “worth dying for, “ but she has nothing to say about why her beliefs are worth dying for rather than the strongly held beliefs of the fanatic or the fundamentalist. In the background of Rorty’s liberal rhetoric is the cynical conviction that what is really crucial is who has the power to enforce his final vocabulary. Before Orwell, Dostoyevsky showed us that the Grand Inquisitor can also be a supreme ironist.
A systematic confusion runs through Rorty’s book. Rorty seems to think that the possibility that someday we may live in O’Brien’s world, or that when the secret police come knocking on our door to drag us away they are not going to be persuaded by arguments, indicates that there is nothing “out there” or “in ourselves” that we can rely on to prevent such catastrophes. But who denies that the power and sophistication of those who enforce a given vocabulary may be so great that no one is left to oppose them? Who denies that it is possible to live in a world of double-think where no one is left to call it double-think? Who affirms that rational persuasion can stand up against unbounded violence? But what do these all-too-real possibilities have to do with giving the strongest possible historically contingent reasons for the central beliefs we hold and being open to the criticism of those beliefs? The liberal democracy that Rorty so favors depends upon encouraging public debate in which we are open to rational persuasion. Rational persuasion itself requires the belief that we can give and discriminate better and worse arguments rather than simply digging in and declaring that my final vocabulary is immune to criticism.
One of Rorty’s most seductive and dubious strategies is the way he reduces complex issues to extreme either/or’s: either liberal ironists or liberal metaphysicians; either discoverers of truth or self-creative makers, etc. But this way of posing issues blocks and obscures nuanced discriminations that need to be made. At times Rorty suggests that we give up the attempt to “justify” our beliefs on the basis of unassailable foundations in favor of what Rawls calls “reflective equilibrium.” But if we follow this recommendation we still need to discriminate better and worse, more or less successful attempts to achieve a “reflective equilibrium.”
Rorty tells us that we have no reason to think that his liberal utopia will prevail rather than a world of double-think where nobody is left to realize that it is double-think. But he doesn’t seem to realize how easily his doctrine about the radical contingency of all vocabularies turns into the opposite of what he intends.
Commenting on “super-relativism” (or, in Rorty’s terms, the radical contingency of all vocabularies), Max Horkheimer wrote in 1936:
With disarming simplicity, the positivists blend relativism with democracy and pacifism, asserting that these have “a natural affinity” with the basic assumptions of relativism …. Mussolini has grasped the situation with more acumen. He has always prided himself on having maintained a relativistic attitude in contrast to socialism and all other political doctrines. His movement never had a straightforward program. As the situation demanded, it called itself aristocratic or democratic, revolutionary or reactionary, proletarian and anti-proletarian, pacifistic or antipacifistic. [In Rorty’s terms, any vocabulary can be made to look good by redescription, RJB] This, according to Mussolini, bears out its claim “to stem directly from the most up-to-date trend of the European mind, “ namely from the relativistic trend of philosophy. “From the circumstance that one ideology is as good as the next, that is, that all are mere fictions, the modern relativist infers that everybody has the right to create his own ideology [in Rorty’s terms, “final vocabulary, “ RJB] and to get the most out of it with all the energy at his disposal.” (Mussolini, “Relativismo e Fascismo, “ Diuturna, Milan, 1924, pp. 374- 377). Relativism, which is without philosophical justification, is an element of a social dynamic which moves toward authoritarian forms. Indifference to the idea in theory is the precursor of cynicism in practical life.7
I don’t want to engage in the rhetorical trick of guilt by association. I agree with Rorty that there is no philosophic position that is immune from being used for purposes that are the very opposite of what is intended. Nevertheless, it is hard to see any difference that makes a difference between Rorty’s irony and Mussolini’s cynicism. My main point is to challenge Rorty’s claim that he has given a more attractive redescription of liberalism. On the contrary, Rorty actually describes one of the most dangerous and virulent tendencies in liberalism – the conviction that anything can be made to look good by redescription. For this is just the mentality that possessed our political leaders during the Vietnam war and the sordid Watergate affair. What happens to liberal democracy when those who have the power to do so believe that they can make anything look good by redescription and have the power to enforce their vocabulary? Rorty never really faces up to the (contingent) slide from irony to ruthless cynicism – a cynicism which corrupts liberal democracy.
Thus far I have been focusing on tensions and unresolved conflicts that break out in Rorty’s own vocabulary. But there are further difficulties. For all Rorty’s manifest concern with liberal democracy, public responsibilities, and Utopian politics, it is curious how little politics one finds in this book. Indeed, despite his battle against abstractions and general principles, he tends to leave us with empty abstractions. We can see this by turning again to his definition of liberals as “people who think that cruelty is the worst thing we do” and “hope that suffering will be diminished, that the humiliation of human beings by other human beings may cease” (p. xv). Contrary to Rorty’s reflections on the contingency of all vocabularies, when he writes about pain, suffering, cruelty, and humiliation he comes close to saying that here we touch upon something that is really “out there, “ something which is non-linguistic and doesn’t disappear when we switch vocabularies. But Rorty also affirms that what counts as cruelty and humiliation from the perspective of one vocabulary may not be judged to be cruelty from the perspective of another vocabulary. Even what we now call cruel torture may be redescribed so it is no longer seen as cruelty. So the demand to diminish cruelty is an empty abstraction unless we give a concrete specification of what we take to be examples of cruelty. Not only is the question “Why not be cruel?” unanswerable, but so is the question “Why do you take this to be a concrete instance of cruelty rather than its opposite?” Suppose we accept what looks like Rorty’s categorical imperative “Do not be cruel, do not humiliate”: how far does this take us in understanding liberalism? It doesn’t take much imagination to redescribe many (perhaps most) political issues in a liberal society as conflicts about cruelty. Consider the question of abortion which is so controversial in our liberal society. Those who are “pro-choice” fervently argue that it is cruel to women to forbid them to have control over their bodies. “Pro-lifers” argue that abortion is unmitigated cruelty against the unborn child. So the injunction to diminish cruelty is an abstraction. Rorty might well agree. That’s why we need concrete empirical descriptions of cruelty and humiliation. But this move obscures the question of how anyone is to decide what counts as a concrete description of cruelty. Even if one shares Rorty’s liberal biases, there is little agreement about what counts as cruelty in liberal societies or what is to be done to diminish cruelty. Rorty also seems to think that there can be no rational argument about what one takes to be examples of cruelty and humiliation. But politics, especially liberal politics, must confront the question of what should be done to deal with serious conflicts about cruelty and humiliation. Rorty never thematizes this question. Rorty’s politics seems to be one in which there is no public space – the space in which human beings come together to debate and argue with each other. This is what Dewey (one of Rorty’s heroes) called the “eclipse of the public.” For public debate presupposes what Rorty seems to want to eliminate – that we can be locked in argument with each other.
Rorty hankers after something which can really have “force” in making us aware of cruelty and which can help in diminishing it. He doesn’t find this in philosophy or social theory. He thinks that in modern liberal societies, the novel has played such a role – at least for liberal intellectuals. He endorses Milan Kundera’s claim “that the precious essence of the European spirit is being held safe as in a treasure chest inside the history of the novel, the wisdom of the novel.” For novelists can do something that even ironic philosophers cannot do. They can by imagination make us profoundly aware of the ways in which we are cruel and humiliate others. This is Rorty’s rationale for his detailed interpretation of the novels of Nabokov and Orwell. It is the novelists who are the most effective moral educators in a liberal society, not philosophers or social theorists. But Rorty’s praise of novelists who educate not by didactism but by imaginative concrete description depends on a dubious presupposition which he never justifies and for which there seems to be little, if any, concrete empirical evidence. Rorty thinks that novels do have “force, “ they do make a difference in how we act in our everyday lives. This is certainly a cherished belief of many liberal intellectuals. But what is the evidence to support such a claim? No one need deny that sometimes some novels can also inspire one to act in different ways – as part of one’s moral education. But why privilege the novel rather than any other cultural artifact, especially when one appreciates the ambiguities of the moral stance of novels, and that there seems so little evidence for thinking that even careful readers of novels change the ways that they act in their everyday lives? Again, I don’t want to deny that sometimes novels have this effect, but if one is concerned with the type of moral education required for furthering liberal solidarity, then, in a society such as ours where there are fewer and fewer readers of novels, it seems little more than a false nostalgia to think that novels can play the role Rorty so desperately wants them to play. The ironic culture that Rorty finds so attractive undermines his hope for the novel as the vehicle of moral education. One consequence of this ironic culture has been to teach us to be skeptical of the moral “force” of novels.
There is another disturbing consequence of the weight that Rorty places on the novel as a vehicle of moral education in liberal culture. For Rorty seems to be far more concerned with the cruelties that intellectual liberal ironists may inadvertently commit than with the forms of cruelty and humiliation that pervade our liberal societies. One would think that someone who calls for “Deweyean requests for concrete alternatives and programs” might turn his attention to those scenarios that would diminish institutional forms of cruelty and humiliation that so deeply affect non-intellectuals. But Rorty never quite gets around to this.
I want to return to Rorty’s logic of apartheid – his rigid separation of the private and the public. For like all apartheid, it has violent consequences.8 It seems curious that Rorty, who shows us that most distinctions are fuzzy, vague, and subject to historical contingencies, should rely on such a fixed, rigid, ahistorical dichotomy. My objection is not to drawing sharp distinctions. Without doing so, no thinking would be possible. My objection is to the way Rorty uses this specific dichotomy, which leads to all sorts of violent consequences.
His readings of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, and Freud are not simply “strong”: they are ruthlessly violent. For he wants to excise all the passages in their works which do bear on our public lives. He would, for example, dismiss all those passages in Heidegger that suggest that we are now living in the age of Gestell (enframing) – the essence of technology. He imposes a false grid on Derrida so that the “later” Derrida becomes the supreme ironist who delights in telling “in” jokes. There is no place in Rorty’s scheme for the Derrida who is obsessively concerned with ethical and political responsibilities, and who understands deconstruction as intrinsically political. Rorty doesn’t even consider what Derrida says, he simply dismisses his ethical-political concerns as lapses of the ironist who thinks he ought to be able to say something important about the public side of our lives, who thinks he has (or ought to have) a “social mission.” Rorty fails to even mention how Freud can be interpreted as calling into question Rorty’s euphoric description of self-creation. Freud reveals in concrete detail the traps and self-deceptions that confront us in the attempt to create ourselves out of our own historical contingencies. Rorty never pays attention to all the ways in which Freud shows how contingencies undermine and threaten our projects of self-creation. What seems lacking in Rorty’s liberal culture of private irony and public liberal hope is any sense of social facticity, stubborn resistance – what Peirce called the brute force of Secondness that smashes our illusions of “giving birth to ourselves” and defeats our most imaginative redescriptions. Rorty’s liberal culture seems to be a world in which there is no place for tragedy.
There is another consequence of Rorty’s neglect of social facticity, that is, the cruel social realities and the human suffering of the affluent liberal bourgeois societies that Rorty celebrates. Appealing to Rorty’s own pragmatic convictions, his own understanding of what is useful, one may wonder whether his aesthetic redescription of liberal democracy is only another diversion leading us away from confronting and ameliorating the concrete social forms of cruelty. C. Wright Mills’ acute observations about liberalism are especially relevant to Rorty’s description of a liberal utopia. Mills wrote:
Liberalism, as a set of ideals, is still viable, and even compelling to Western man. That is one reason why it has become a common denominator of American political rhetoric; but there is another reason. The ideals of liberalism have been divorced from any realities of modern social structure that might serve as the means of their realization. Everybody can easily agree on general ends; it is more difficult to agree on means and the relevance of various means to the ends articulated. The detachment of liberalism from the facts of a going society make it an excellent mask for those who do not, cannot, or will not do what would have to be done to realize its ideals … if the moral force of liberalism is still stimulating, its sociological content is weak; it has no theory of society adequate to its moral aims.9
When we turn to Rorty’s attempt to privatize irony, to encourage the playing out of private fantasies, it is difficult to understand why anyone who becomes as narcissistic as Rorty advocates would be motivated to assume public responsibilities. This is not just an “abstract” problem. For there is plenty of evidence that a “culture of narcissism” does in fact lead to complete cynicism about public responsibilities. It is little solace to be told that there is no “necessary” connection between private narcissism and public cynicism when we constantly witness this “contingent” joining of attitudes. Sometimes Rorty writes as if the ills of our liberal societies are primarily due to unbridled greed that makes us insensitive to our fellow citizens. But he never “seriously” asks what it is about rich lucky liberal societies that enhances greed and makes us so cynical about political life.
I have argued that Rorty – even on his own turf – leaves us with all sorts of unresolved tensions, conflicts, and instabilities. I have also said that his book is extraordinarily challenging because it raises hard nasty questions that simply will not go away. So I would like to conclude by highlighting Rorty’s challenges.
Rorty relentlessly pursues the anti-foundationalist motif that has been gaining momentum during the past 150 years. Once one gives up the conviction that we can rationally ground our most central beliefs on something fixed, permanent, and solid, something that is more basic than contingencies that make up our lives, we cannot avoid asking what other forms of justification (if any) or reflective equilibrium are available to us. How are we to warrant those beliefs which we take to be fundamental and which we rely on to guide our actions? Rorty’s answer is sharp and disturbing. We cannot give any non-circular argumentative or theoretical back-up to our “final vocabularies.” We cannot avoid being ethnocentric. We should stop trying to answer futile “why” questions. All we can do is play off one vocabulary against another and try to make the vocabulary we favor look as attractive as possible by redescribing lots and lots of things and showing how alternative vocabularies look bad. Even if one rejects Rorty’s rigid dichotomy of the private and the public, we are still left with the challenge of showing in detail that there is an alternative to Rorty’s grand either/or: either strong rational justification or groundless liberal hope. It is Rorty’s merit to have put this challenge in such a sharp and inescapable manner. It is as if he is declaring: if you think there is an alternative to this either/or, if you think there is a non-circular way of justifying a final vocabulary, then the burden of proof is on the one who makes such a claim to show it – to indicate in detail what forms of justification escape the ironist’s “radical and continuing doubts.” Rorty has done more than this. He also argues that many of the attempts to show that there is a viable alternative – when we think them through – do not work.
Rorty not only challenges us on the central question of justifying our most central beliefs and desires, he also challenges our political convictions. Rorty believes that the critics of liberal democracy both from the political right and the political left have been guilty of a “failure of nerve.” They too frequently retreat into theory and abstractions that have little to do with everyday politics. He is especially hard on those “radicals” who indulge in global rage and fail to turn their attention to working out “concrete scenarios” for how we might do better, how we might improve and strengthen liberal institutions and alleviate human suffering. One may retort that Rorty himself doesn’t do much better, that for all his concern with solidarity and diminishing humiliation and cruelty, his own positive suggestions are feeble and abstract. But such a response should not obscure Rorty’s challenge. Rorty exposes the tendency of intellectuals who claim to be concerned with real politics but retreat into academic abstractions. Where are those intellectuals today who attempt to do what Dewey did in his historical context or what Gramsci did in his contingent situation?
One reason why Orwell is one of Rorty’s heroes is that although he did not answer the question “What is to be done?” he knew that a “useful political description suggests answers” to this question:
He convinced us that our previous political vocabulary had little relevance to our current political situation, but he did not give us a new one. He sent us back to the drawing board, and we are still there. Nobody has come up with a large framework for relating our large and vague hopes for human equality to the actual distribution of power in the world. The capitalists remain as greedy and shortsighted, and the Communist oligarchs as cynical and corrupt (unless Gorbachev surprises us), [recent events in Eastern Europe reveal contingencies that might even surprise Rorty! RJB] as Orwell said they were. No third force has emerged in the world, and neither neoconservatives nor the post-Marxist left has come up with more than exercises in nostalgia … nobody has come up with a plausible scenario for actualizing what Orwell called the “technical possibility of human equality.”
Rorty himself, despite his advocacy of a liberal utopia, is not sure that it is even possible to come up with such a “plausible scenario, “ though he poses the question forcefully. Rorty is right in declaring that a useful political description is one which “suggests answers to the question ‘What is to be done?’ “ His political challenge cannot be brushed aside.
Many of the troubling features of Rorty’s portrait of the liberal ironist come into sharp focus when we compare it with the figure of O’Brien invented by Orwell. For O’Brien is the double of the liberal ironist – a double that haunts Rorty’s redescription of liberalism. Rorty tells us “In the view of 1984 I am offering, Orwell has no answer to O’Brien, and is not interested in giving one” (p. 176). Rorty himself does not think O’Brien can be answered.
I take Orwell’s claim that there is no such thing as inner freedom, no such thing as an “autonomous individual, “ to be the one made by historicist, including Marxist, critics of “liberal individualism.” This is that there is nothing deep inside each of us, no common human nature, no built-in human solidarity, to use a moral reference point. There is nothing to people except what has been socialized into them – their ability to use language, and thereby to exchange beliefs and desires with other people, (p. 177)
Compare Rorty’s remarks with those of O’Brien when he is about to “break” Winston and thoroughly humiliate him. O’Brien declares, “You believe that reality is something objective, external, existing in its own right. You also believe that the nature of reality is self-evident. When you delude yourself into thinking that you see something, you assume that everyone else sees the same thing as you. But I tell you, Winston, that reality is not external.” Or again, “You are imagining that there is something called human nature which will be outraged by what we do and will turn against us. But we create human nature. Men are infinitely malleable.”
There is no important difference between Rorty and O’Brien concerning the infinite malleability of human beings and the possibility of socialization “all the way down.” O’Brien is the true “disciple” of Rorty who has diabolically mastered the lesson of the contingency of all vocabularies.
What then is the difference that makes a difference between Rorty and O’Brien? Simply put, it is a difference in the “final vocabularies.” Rorty is a liberal who thinks that “cruelty is the worst thing we do, “ O’Brien, the co-author of The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, thinks “the object of torture is torture, “ the point of humiliation is to humiliate.
O’Brien reminds us that human beings who have been socialized – socialized in any language, any culture – do share a capacity which other animals lack. They can all be given a special kind of pain: They can be humiliated by the forcible tearing down of the particular structures of language and belief in which they were socialized (or which they pride themselves on having formed for themselves, (p. 177)
But let us not forget that for Rorty it makes no sense to claim that one “final vocabulary” is more rational than another (except in a circular sense of “rationality”). It is futile to ask for a justification of a “final vocabulary, “ or to think there is some standard by which we can objectively judge one “final vocabulary” to be superior to its alternatives. O’Brien would entirely agree with Rorty, and perhaps even mock him for failing to emphasize that the only important issue, the only difference that really makes a difference is who has the intelligence, imagination, sophistication, and power to succeed in imposing his vocabulary, to completely socialize human beings in whatever manner he (or the Party) desires.
I have advanced a number of criticisms of Rorty’s redescription of liberal democracy and his claim about the radical contingency of all vocabularies. But these criticisms do not blunt Rorty’s challenges. Indeed, they may help to show just how provocative they are. In answering the question, “How should one read this book?”, I believe it should be read as posing hard nasty questions which cannot be brushed aside – questions that any responsible thinker must confront. There are many ways of evaluating the contribution of a thinker. One of the best is to ask whether he has found a way – invented a vocabulary – that cuts through clichés and the defenses we use to avoid facing sharp challenges. By this criterion, Rorty is eminently successful. Rorty helps to accomplish for our time what that other great ironist, Socrates, did in his historical context. Like Socrates, Rorty also has a knack for annoying, joshing, stinging – being a gadfly to his fellow citizens by forcing them to confront challenges about their polis and the “justification” of their basic beliefs. Ironically, Rorty has thereby helped to keep philosophical reflection alive and to fulfill what he once called the “philosophers’ moral concern” – “ continuing the conversation of the West.”
1 Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), p. 5. See my critical discussion of the book, “Philosophy in the Conversation of Mankind, “ in Richard J. Bernstein, Philosophical Profiles (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986).
2 Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982).
3 Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). All page references in this text refer to this book.
4 One can also see the continuity of Rorty with the American thinker that Nietzsche so admired, Emerson. For a provocative analysis of Emersonian motifs in the American pragmatic tradition, see Cornel West, The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989).
5 Isaiah Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 134.
6 Michael Sandel, Introduction to Liberalism and its Critics (New York: New York University Press, 1984), p. 8.
7 Max Horkheimer, “The Latest Attack on Metaphysics, “ in Critical Theory (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972), p. 165.
8 On the “logic” of apartheid, see Jacques Derrida, “Racism’s Last Word, “ trans. Peggy Kamuf, in Critical Inquiry 12 (Autumn 1985). See also Jacques Derrida, “But beyond … (Open Letter to Anne McClintock and Rob Nixon), “ Critical Inquiry 13 (Autumn 1986).
9 C. Wright Mills, “Liberal Values in the Modern World, “ in Power, Politics, and People: The Collected Essays of C. Wright Mills, ed. Irving Louis Horowitz (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963), p. 189.