Richard Rorty: A Short Introduction (essentials) 3658388374, 9783658388379

Citation preview

Martin Müller

Richard Rorty: A Short Introduction

essentials Springer essentials

Springer essentials provide up-to-date knowledge in a concentrated form. They aim to deliver the essence of what counts as “state-of-the-art” in the current academic discussion or in practice. With their quick, uncomplicated and comprehensible information, essentials provide: • an introduction to a current issue within your field of expertise • an introduction to a new topic of interest • an insight, in order to be able to join in the discussion on a particular topic Available in electronic and printed format, the books present expert knowledge from Springer specialist authors in a compact form. They are particularly suitable for use as eBooks on tablet PCs, eBook readers and smartphones. Springer essentials form modules of knowledge from the areas economics, social sciences and humanities, technology and natural sciences, as well as from medicine, psychology and health professions, written by renowned Springer-authors across many disciplines.

Martin Müller

Richard Rorty: A Short Introduction

Martin Müller München, Germany

ISSN 2197-6708     ISSN 2197-6716 (electronic) essentials ISSN 2731-3107     ISSN 2731-3115 (electronic) Springer essentials ISBN 978-3-658-38837-9    ISBN 978-3-658-38838-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-38838-6 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, ­reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature. The registered company address is: Abraham-Lincoln-Str. 46, 65189 Wiesbaden, Germany

What You Can Find in This essential

• The main features of Rorty’s neopragmatism – explained in an understandable way • A systematic approach to reading his work as a combination of private romanticism and public pragmatism • A sketch of Rorty’s utopia of an ideal liberal society in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity • Rorty’s anti-authoritarian ideal of citizenship is presented: the liberal ironist

v

Contents

1 Introduction:  Reading Rorty’s Work as a Balance of Romanticism and Pragmatism����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 1 2 Revolutionary  Language-Game Pragmatism After the Linguistic Turn���� 7 2.1 Anti-representationalism as a Critique of the Entanglement of Representationalism, Essentialism and Foundationalism������������������� 8 2.2 A Linguistic Renewal of Instrumentalism and the Strong Naturalistic Dimension of Rorty’s Thought���������������������������������������10 2.3 Holism and Pluralism of Justification: Rorty’s Socialization of Epistemology �������������������������������������������������������������������������������������13 2.4 The Transformative Character of Rorty’s Philosophy of Conversation: Justification instead of Truth���������������������������������������16 3 The  Strong Romantic Dimension of Rorty’s Thinking as a Combination of Romanticism and Pragmatism �������������������������������������19 3.1 The Human Being as a Creator of Languages and the “Apotheosis of the Future”�����������������������������������������������������������������20 3.2 Imagination as the Engine of Cultural Progress and the Poetization of Culture�������������������������������������������������������������������������22 3.3 Cultural History as a Contingent History of “Literalized” Metaphors����������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 23 3.4 Strong Poets as Ingenious Inventors of Metaphors�����������������������������25 3.5 The Goal of a Peaceful Coexistence of Romanticism and Pragmatism ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ 27

vii

viii

Contents

4 The  Transformative Character of Rorty’s Neopragmatism Exemplified by His Liberal Utopia in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 29 4.1 Pragmatism as Cultural Politics with Transformative Aspirations���������29 4.2 The Liberal Utopia of a Post-metaphysical Culture in Contingency, Irony and, Solidarity�����������������������������������������������������30 4.3 The Practical Key Distinction Between the Private and the Public��������33 5 The  Liberal Ironist as Embodiment of the Vision of a Practical Life Balance of Private Romanticism and Public Pragmatism �������������37 5.1 Irony as Contingency Consciousness and Linguistic Self-creation �������37 5.2 Ironism and Liberal Ethnocentrism: The Vision of a Practical Life Balance ���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������39 6 Continue  Reading Rorty: Does His Democratic Anti-authoritarianism Itself Pass the Pragmatic Test?���������������������������45

Appendix A. What You Learned from This Essential�������������������������������������������49 References�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������51

1

Introduction: Reading Rorty’s Work as a Balance of Romanticism and Pragmatism

Richard Rorty has contributed significantly to the renaissance of the American philosophy of pragmatism, especially with his first major work, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Rorty is the best-known representative of neopragmatism after the linguistic turn in philosophy.1 At the same time, however, he is also the most controversial. This short introduction aims to break down prejudices and misunderstandings. Moreover, it is intended as a guide to a systematic interpretation of Rorty’s work.2 Reading Rorty is easy. He is among the finest essayists in American philosophy since William James. He has a clear and rhetorically brilliant style, even in the estimation of his harshest critics (Bacon 2007, p. xvi). Among the examples of Rorty’s stylistic skills is the introduction to Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (PMN, pp. 3–13). It provides an eloquent and clear overview of the content and purpose of the work. The autobiographical essay Trotsky and the Wild Orchids (PSH, pp. 3–20) offers another example. In this intimate self portrait, Rorty describes with his characteristic irony the existential background of his abandonment of the philosophical project of foundationalism. My special thanks go to W. P. Malecki and John P. Anderson for their careful proof reading of this English version of the Rorty essential.  In neopragmatism, the focus is on language or linguistic practice and no longer, as with the classics of pragmatism, on experimental experience. On the renaissance of pragmatism, see especially Bernstein 2010. 2  This introduction is based on my detailed study Private Romanticism, Public Pragmatism? Richard Rorty’s transformative redescription of liberalism (Müller 2014a). For those readers who want to delve deeper into Rorty interpretation, I also recommend the Handbuch Richard Rorty (Müller ed. Forthcoming). 1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2022 M. Müller, Richard Rorty: A Short Introduction, essentials, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-38838-6_1

1

2

1  Introduction: Reading Rorty’s Work as a Balance of Romanticism…

Who Was Richard Rorty (1931–2007)?

Rorty grew up in a socialist home and came into contact with the American philosophy of pragmatism at an early age. He enjoyed an excellent education in the history of philosophy. From the beginning he was interested in questions of metaphilosophy (What is philosophy and what can it do?). Among other things, he taught as a philosophy professor at Princeton for about 20 years (1961–1982). Initially, he was considered a pioneer of linguistic analytic philosophy, according to which the analysis of language should be at the center of philosophizing. Rorty became known worldwide with the publication of his first major work, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979). In it he criticizes representationalism, according to which knowledge is accurate representation of reality, and reckons with linguisticanalytic philosophy as a reissue of foundationalist epistemology. A philosophy of conversation should take its place. He lived out the implications of this critique. He abandoned institutional analytic philosophy and went to Virginia as a professor of humanities (1983–1998). During this time, he published Contingency, Irony and, Solidarity (1989), his second major work. In this book Rorty draws the ethical-political consequences of his anti-­ representationalism and outlines the utopia of a post-metaphysical society of liberal ironists. After his retirement, he taught comparative literature at Stanford (1998–2007). Until his death, Rorty promoted his renewal of pragmatism as an anti-authoritarian philosophy. As his career progressed, he increasingly turned to practical, cultural issues. In the political polemic Achieving Our Country (1998), as a leftist patriot with a cosmopolitan perspective, he encouraged the academic left to abandon its theory-loving and pseudo-radical spectator role. Instead of confining itself to identity politics, he argues, the left should commit itself as a “party of hope,” and to a social democratic policy of reform against growing social inequality. Early on, he warned of the danger of right-wing populism.

Reading Rorty is also difficult. The most important reason for possible misinterpretations is that there are at least “two Rortys”. On the one hand, there is the analytically trained philosopher with a profound knowledge of the history of philosophy. This Rorty formulates well-considered theses and engages in constructive and highly specialized debates with his fellow philosophers.3 But there is also the  This Rorty can be seen at work in Brandom 2000 in particular.

3

1  Introduction: Reading Rorty’s Work as a Balance of Romanticism…

3

provocateur. As an ingenious simplifier with an apparent lack of depth, this Rorty repeatedly fuels discussion with shocking theses, even if he regularly has to tone them down or revise them (Habermas 2008, pp. 33–36).4 Even behind his catchy style lurk traps of interpretation. In his texts, for example, Rorty constantly switches between philosophical argumentation and rhetorical redescription. In this context, the alternative commonly used in literature, “argumentation or redescription”, is misleading. Throughout Rorty’s oeuvre, both techniques are found, but without any marking of when the transition between them occurs.5 His rhetorical techniques of redescription are also a source of misunderstanding, such as his frequent invocation of we-groups, such as we “followers of Dewey” (ORT, p. 211), we “good Darwinians” (TP, p. 40), and “we Davidsonians” (ORT, p. 52). Rorty thus “borrows” the authority of famous authors while practicing a “strong misreading” (Harold Bloom) of their texts (e.g., CP, p. 151). He reformulates them in an instrumentalist attitude according to his own purposes; among other things, through the one-sided selection of quotations. Even Rorty’s harshest critics, for example, acknowledge his contribution to the renaissance of classical pragmatism. At the same time, they criticize his distortion of John Dewey’s philosophy. Rorty’s response to this common charge is that he is not concerned with being faithful to Dewey. He wants to bring his thinking up to date. What is important, he says, is what Dewey and also William James should have said on some issues, not what they actually said. Rorty thus defends an instrumentalist and creative as opposed to archival approach to tradition (ORT, pp. 16–17; EHO, p. 9; PSH, p. xiii). Again and again, Rorty also makes use of the rhetorical device of dramatically emphasizing exclusive alternatives. The most prominent of these is: either we ­become radical pragmatists in his sense or we remain Platonic metaphysicians. This all-or-nothing rhetoric is actually at odds with the anti-dualist attitude of all pragmatists, to which Rorty also subscribes. This is, among other things, why even other neo-pragmatists criticize him. By excluding any third possibility between Platonism and radical pragmatism, he draws exaggerated consequences from the correct critique of traditional philosophy. His all-or-nothing thinking, they argue, is  A notorious example of this is the infamous phrase in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, according to which truth is no “more than what our peers will, ceteris paribus, let us get away with saying” (PMN, p. 176). For the place of this quotation in Rorty’s transformative project, see Sect. 2.4. 5  The thesis of a narrative turn in Rorty’s work since CIS is therefore also unconvincing. The systematic reason for Rorty’s methodological distinction between argumentation and redescription is his language-game pragmatism following the late Wittgenstein. See on this below Sect. 2.3. 4

4

1  Introduction: Reading Rorty’s Work as a Balance of Romanticism…

false and due solely to rhetorical constraints. When reading Rorty’s texts, this criticism should always be kept in mind. However, it is not only in his treatment of the question of truth (justification instead of truth) that it becomes apparent that the alternatives he propagates have a philosophical justification. This essential emphasizes the hitherto little considered, serious motivation behind Rorty’s attempts to dismiss traditional discourses and their notions through redescription. A transformative aspiration is characteristic of his variant of neopragmatism. He wants to change our linguistic practice and thus our self-image. The defining ethico-political motive for this transformative project is a democratic anti-authoritarianism. This humanist motif is still underappreciated, but it is central to understanding Rorty’s work. This introduction also aims to provide an impetus for advancing the reception of Rorty. Against Rorty’s own self-image, the following proposal for a systematic interpretation is made: his work represents an attempt at an instrumentalist balance of private romanticism and public pragmatism. This is fraught with tension, but viable. And for a fruitful reading of Rorty, it is crucial to take his attempt to link his romantic impulse with his pragmatic impulse as a starting point. Following this introductory chapter, the second chapter introduces Rorty’s critique of representationalism and his revolutionary version of (neo-)pragmatism. In his version, the exclusive focus on the contextualist practice of justification is especially characteristic. Its transformative character is demonstrated by means of Rorty’s treatment of the question of truth and the contextualist practice of justification. The third chapter first reconstructs the central elements of the strong romantic dimension of Rorty’s thought. Then the systematic interpretation proposal of this introduction is presented: Rorty’s thought is best read as an instrumentalist combination of romanticism and pragmatism. The fourth chapter enlarges upon the transformative claim characteristic of Rorty’s neopragmatism. Rorty aims at changing our linguistic practice and thus our self-image in the service of liberal democracy. This claim is particularly evident in the utopia of a post-metaphysical liberal culture in Contingency, Irony, and ­Solidarity. By means of a more detailed interpretation of the liberal ironist in the fifth chapter, the fruitfulness of the reading of Rorty’s thought offered here is made even more plausible. This central figure of Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity is an embodiment of his vision of a practical life balance of private romanticism and public pragmatism.

1  Introduction: Reading Rorty’s Work as a Balance of Romanticism…

5

The conclusion contains a summary of the results of this essential. In addition, Rorty’s democratic anti-authoritarianism is emphasized as the ethico-political motivation of his transformative project. This short introduction ends with a suggestion for further reading: We should apply the pragmatic criterion to Rorty’s pragmatism itself. What would be its practical consequences for our liberal culture?

2

Revolutionary Language-Game Pragmatism After the Linguistic Turn

This chapter introduces Rorty’s anti-representationalist critique of traditional (linguistic) philosophy as epistemology. It introduces the main features of his neopragmatist alternative as summarized in the following list: Main features of the (neo-)pragmatist dimension:

• anti-representationalist critique of the notions of “mind” or “language” as vehicles of representation • farewell to traditional (linguistic) philosophy as an inconsistent entanglement of representationalism, essentialism and foundationalism • language as a tool – radical linguistic pragmatism with the instrumentalist general motto “use instead of mirroring” • “just a species doing its best” – naturalistic neopragmatism as a consistent acknowledgement of Darwinism • embedding instrumentalism in a communitarian language-game pragmatism: holism and pluralism of justification • not a naturalization, but a socialization of epistemology with a philosophy of conversation: focus on the practice of justification • transformative aspiration: not only critique of correspondence theory and linguistic-pragmatistic reconstruction of the concept of truth, but abandonment of truth theory: justification instead of truth

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2022 M. Müller, Richard Rorty: A Short Introduction, essentials, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-38838-6_2

7

8

2  Revolutionary Language-Game Pragmatism After the Linguistic Turn

2.1 Anti-representationalism as a Critique of the Entanglement of Representationalism, Essentialism and Foundationalism The American philosophy of pragmatism is anything but a unified school. However, a common basic feature of pragmatist thought is the critique of Cartesian skepticism and foundationalism. René Descartes’ radical skepticism and dualism of subject and world are seen as resulting from an illusory detachment of thought from practice. In unison, all pragmatists criticize the principle of radical methodological doubt and the program of gaining the foundation of knowledge from the self-­ certainty of the thinking self. Instead, they advocate to take real, justified doubt as the starting point. For them, knowing remains anchored in real problematic situations. Pragmatists criticize the idea of a detached theoretical reason and argue for the primacy of practice. For them, the idea of a disinterested thinking that hovers above all the lowlands of practice is illusionary. Cognition and knowledge are not considered ends in themselves, but are linked to action. The primacy of praxis is concretized in the primacy of the finite actor perspective over the unattainable idea of a “Gods-Eye View” (Putnam 1992, pp. 17, 113–115, among others). Rorty’s variant of the pragmatist critique of traditional philosophy as a “spectator theory of knowledge” (Dewey 1984, p. 19) goes by the self-designation of anti-­ representationalism. He never tires of criticizing the entanglement of representationalism, essentialism and foundationalism. The central starting point for him is the critique of the idea of representation. According to this idea, cognition is the correct representation or conception of reality in consciousness. Rorty’s now famous metaphor for this is that of the mirror of nature (PMN, p. 12). Philosophy as epistemology, according to Rorty, is still held captive by this idea today. His first major work, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, contains a polemical history of philosophy on the invention of representationalism primarily by Descartes, Locke, and Kant.1 The provocative aspect of this book, however, lies above all in its diagnosis that even the linguistic turn has not changed anything. After the turn from the philosophy of consciousness to the philosophy of language in the twentieth century, philosophy is still under the spell of the mirror metaphor. Language has only replaced consciousness as the medium of representation to be investigated. But this has only slightly varied the picture of “epistemology-and-metaphysics” as the

 On the history of ideas and systematic argumentation in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, see Tartaglia 2007. 1

2.1  Anti-representationalism as a Critique of the Entanglement… 

9

c­ enter of philosophy (PMN, p.  134). That is why contemporary philosophy remains stuck in the dead ends of modern philosophy as epistemology.2 Moreover, according to Rorty, representationalist philosophy remains under the spell of Plato’s dualism of essence and appearance. As essentialism, it claims to show the right method of discovering the real being of things. For the idea of the “mirror of nature” is an outgrowth of the essentialist image of man as the knower of entities. And the epistemological core of this image consists in realism, that is, in the idea of an interpretation-free reference to reality itself (PMN, pp. 157–158, 357, 364; TP, pp. 1–2). This idea is not only debunked by Rorty in terms of the history of ideas, but also refuted internally. He draws on arguments from classics of analytic philosophy such as Wilfrid Sellars, Willard Van Orman Quine, and Donald Davidson. The main argument is that of the ubiquity of language: it is not possible to make a clear cut between language and reality. Even our talk of reality itself is only talk of a “reality-under-a-certain-description” (PMN, p.  378). The realist model of cognition is therefore based on a conceptual error. And with its inconsistent basic idea of representation, it inevitably produces epistemological skepticism (PMN, p. 38; ORT, p. 155; TP, p. 127). According to Rorty, traditional philosophy as epistemology is characterized and motivated by a philosophical foundationalism. It claims to methodically uncover the timeless and uncorrectable structures of human knowledge. Through this discovery of the foundations of cognition and also of morality, philosophy rises to the status of a foundational discipline. Its completion is the image of philosophy as a discipline that sits in judgment over all areas of culture and assigns them an appropriate place. Rorty attributes the invention and consolidation of this image to Kant and to Neo-Kantianism. He therefore speaks of the “Kantian conception of philosophy as foundational” (PMN, p. 5, cf. pp. 159, 163–164). In his eyes, however, epistemological foundationalism is merely apologetics. It is an attempt to absolutize certain contemporary language games – first and foremost the natural sciences. According to Rorty’s deconstructive intellectual history, this attempt of Enlightenment rationalism was once useful in the struggle to establish the empirical natural sciences against the power of the Church. But it has since outlived its usefulness (PMN, pp. 9–10, 329–333; CIS, pp. 44–45). Rorty’s pragmatist alternative for philosophical foundationalism is fallibilism. All knowledge is provisional and fallible. Any of our beliefs that prove true at a given moment may turn out to be false in the further course of inquiry – though not all at once. The Cartesian dualism of absolute/relative is subverted by the pragmatic interplay of holding true  This criticism is shared by other neo-pragmatists, see among others Habermas 1999, pp. 17, 36. 2

10

2  Revolutionary Language-Game Pragmatism After the Linguistic Turn

beliefs, entertaining concrete doubts and acquiring new true beliefs. Thus, the complex basic idea of a fallibilism without relativism succeeds. According to the well-­ known neopragmatist Hilary Putnam, this idea is perhaps the fundamental insight of the pragmatists (Putnam 1995, p. 21; on this Nagl 1998, pp. 10–13). This avoids both foundationalism, with its belief in an absolute basis of knowledge, and relativism, which sees itself as a logical consequence of the insight into the untenability of foundationalism, but is itself still stuck in the framework of representationalism.3

2.2 A Linguistic Renewal of Instrumentalism and the Strong Naturalistic Dimension of Rorty’s Thought As a radical alternative to representationalism, Rorty renews John Dewey’s instrumentalism (et al. 1984, pp. 156–177) in terms of linguistic philosophy. Beliefs are no longer understood as representations of reality, but as tools of dealing with it. Thought and knowledge are complex instruments of adaptation. According to Rorty, the instrumentalist motto is “substituting coping for representing” (Rorty in Brandom 2000, p. 89). The core of his linguistic renewal of instrumentalism is the image of language as a tool. Language is no longer conceived as a medium of representation, but as a tool for acting in the world (EHO, p. 3). With instrumentalism, Rorty transfers utilitarianism from morality to epistemology. Not the representation of reality, but the usefulness demonstrated in problem-solving becomes the sole standard and goal of cognition. In typical pragmatist fashion, questions are no longer asked about the origin of beliefs, but about their consequences for (life) practice: “For Pragmatists the question should always be ‘What use is it?’ rather than ‘Is it real? ’ ” (TP, p. 66). For Rorty, this means that questions of ontology are replaced by questions of “cultural politics” in the service of one’s liberal language community. These are questions about what language games should be played in order to promote its values.4 Rorty’s linguistic instrumentalism simultaneously

 Nevertheless, the reproach of relativism against Rorty has not died down; see, for example, Putnam 1992, pp. 18–29. 4  A prominent example of this for Rorty is the question of the social damage caused by religion or religious institutions: “[W]e should substitute the question of the cultural desirability of God-talk for the ontological question of the existence of God.” (PCP, pp. 24–25) Regarding the criticism of religion, Rorty has consistently revised his position accordingly: From Atheism to Anticlericalism. On this, see Müller 2017. 3

2.2  A Linguistic Renewal of Instrumentalism and the Strong...

11

radicalizes William James’s pragmatic theory of truth (1977, pp. 382–384, 429– 443). Because he drops the distinction between the search for truth and the search for happiness. The sole aim of his radical epistemological utilitarianism is utility: “The aim of inquiry is utility.” (PSH, p. 54). Rorty’s linguistic neopragmatism, like the theories of all classical pragmatists, is a form of naturalism. It is embedded in the view of man as one organism among others, in the process of causal interaction with his environment. Language is thereby only the tool of adaptation specific to the human species. “As [a] good Darwinian” (TP, p. 40), Rorty repeatedly refers to the Darwinian theory of evolution. His motto is Darwin rather than epistemology. His key theoretical distinction here is that between causality and justification. Its naturalistic aspect consists in the following thesis: “[T]he relation between our truth claims and the rest of the world is causal rather than representational. It causes us to hold beliefs.” (PSH, p. 33). Rorty speaks of “causal pressures” (PSH, p. 33) by the world. He even declares that most things are independent of us, but in causal and not in representational terms. Everything that is necessary to do justice to the realistic intuition is provided by common sense and the natural sciences within the framework of a naturalistic world view. Philosophical realism is to supplanted by a naturalistic view of human interaction with the environment. Rorty derives the view that we are only causally connected to the world from the thesis of the ubiquity of language, already explained above: There is no way to dissect the complex web of causal links between human organisms and the rest of the universe and determine their objective content. “[T]he same causal-relationship-­ under-a-description” (TP, p. 88) can be explained according to the particular purpose of a vocabulary in as many ways as there are ways of describing interrelated things. For this reason, objects and their causal powers fall out as useless for explaining knowledge claims (et al. TP, pp. 88–89). Our environment can cause us to have opinions, but it cannot justify them: “For, although there are causes of the acquisition of beliefs, and reasons for the retention or change of beliefs, there are not causes of the truth of beliefs.” (ORT, p. 121, cf. p. 60). Rorty’s radical linguistic pragmatism generally claims to draw the ultimate consequences from (non-teleological) Darwinism. With Darwin, Rorty assumes a smooth transition between animals and humans as a random product of evolution. The latter’s specific feature is merely the ability to cooperate through the use of language, not the ability to represent. Rorty wants to propose a new self-­description of man that is in accordance with Darwinism and its thesis that the difference between the other animals and us lies only in the complexity of our behavior. For him, man is simply a slightly more complicated animal. Naturalization, for Rorty, means seeing human beings consistently on a continuum with the rest of nature, with the

12

2  Revolutionary Language-Game Pragmatism After the Linguistic Turn

capacities of lower animals – and thus as thoroughly temporal and contingent. The distinguishing feature of human beings according to this naturalistic continuity thesis is solely their ability to use language (TP, pp. 47–48; PF, p. 197).5 Yet this development of linguistic behavior is easily explained in naturalistic terms. Because “language”, in contrast to “consciousness” or “mind”, represents a social behavior whose gradual development can be traced back, at least speculatively. Despite its (meta-)linguistic ability, the human species has no privileged position vis-à-vis the other animals. Man is regarded by Rorty as a clever animal, without the possession of a “mind” or the like as an extra substance. Human thought is accordingly seen only as the ability to have and attribute propositional attitudes. On Rorty’s naturalistic view, “thinking” is conceived as the use of propositions for a dual purpose: to organize cooperative projects and to ascribe internal states such as beliefs and desires to our fellow human beings (et al. TP, pp. 297–298; PSH, p. 268). Rorty’s naturalistic view of language seeks to avoid its essentialist exaltation. “Language” is only one way of abbreviating the kinds of complicated interactions with the rest of the universe which are unique to the higher anthropoids. These interactions are marked by the use of strings of noises and marks to facilitate group activities, as tools for coordinating the activities of individuals. (PSH, p. 64; cf. EHO, pp. 3, 68; CP, p. xxi)

“Language,” then, for Rorty is simply the specific tool of the human species. This brings us full circle. We are back to the instrumentalism discussed at the beginning of this chapter as the crucial dimension of his anti-representationalist neopragmatism. Like his mentors James and Dewey, Rorty rigorously attempts to think through the consequences, devastating to traditional epistemology and metaphysics, of evolutionary theory, or more precisely of a naturalistic view of human beings (PSH, pp. 66, 72). His naturalistic “pushing out” of epistemological realism from philosophy has provoked the accusation that Rorty represents a reductionist physicalism and Darwinism. He counters this charge by saying that, of course, even the vocabulary of Darwinism is no more than a useful description. For him, the Darwinian conception of man is a useful tool for undermining the representationalist conception of man as the only knowing being. In particular, he argues, the philosophical utility of Darwinism is to be able to put an end to the epistemological debate on skepticism.  According to Rorty, the specific difference of the human species is more precisely the capacity for metalinguistic behavior. The human organism is not only able to communicate by means of signs. It is also able to communicate in signs about their use of signs and thus to make social norms explicit in the coordination of its actions (PSH, p. 64–65). 5

2.3  Holism and Pluralism of Justification: Rorty’s Socialization of Epistemology

13

This, then, is a tactical Darwinism on Rorty’s part. He is concerned with the utility, not the truth, of evolutionary biology.6 Instrumentalism is not integrated into Darwinism. It is also applied to Darwinism in a circular structure of thought, while avoiding self-contradiction.

2.3 Holism and Pluralism of Justification: Rorty’s Socialization of Epistemology Rorty’s instrumentalism must also provide an answer to the central problem of determining utility. According to him, however, it is not possible to answer the question “Useful for what?” in isolation. Rather, it must be answered pragmatically on a case-by-case basis, with reference to the context of a communal linguistic practice. Rorty’s linguistic instrumentalism does not assume the language as reference, but a pluralism of language games. His instrumentalism is embedded in a communitarian language-game pragmatism.7 The central concept here is that of vocabulary. This is a continuation of Wittgenstein’s concept of language-game. For Rorty, vocabularies are common platforms of social justificatory practice. Justification is always related to the context of the vocabulary of a concrete linguistic community. As an ironically provocative self-designation for his contextualist discourse theory, Rorty chooses the term “ethnocentrism”. This is an ethnocentrism of justification (ORT, pp. 29–32, 30–31, fn. 13). Part of Rorty’s openly admitted ethnocentrism is his commitment to human finitude. Neither the respective criteria of justification within vocabularies nor the shared vocabularies as platforms of justification themselves are firm foundations of knowledge. According to his linguistic-pragmatic variant of fallibilism, they are only “temporary resting places” (CP, p. xliii). As our criteria and purposes constantly change, so do vocabularies throughout history. Rorty advocates a historicism of language: language too has no essence, but only a contingent history. This involves an interplay between man, language and the world that is hardly transparent. The history of language, or rather of a culture’s vocabularies, is also not purposeful, since the idea of an ever-better representation of nature is discarded (CIS, p.  16). Rorty sums up his historicism with the thesis of the contingency of language: “The account of language as a historical contingency rather than as a medium which is gradually taking on the true shape of the true world or the true self.” (CIS, p. 50) No vocabulary can claim to be the language of nature. All vocabular Tartaglia (2007, p. 207) therefore speaks of a tactical naturalism or physicalism in Rorty.  For more on the communitarian dimension of Rorty’s (political) thought, see Müller 2019.

6 7

14

2  Revolutionary Language-Game Pragmatism After the Linguistic Turn

ies, understood as tools for humans and their purposes, are, like any tool, contingent and mortal. Contingency is Rorty’s anti-metaphysical fighting word against all attempts by religion and philosophy to escape finitude. He promotes the experiment of learning to live without necessity. For him, the virtue required for this experiment is irony.8 Rorty also advocates a discourse pluralism that celebrates the diversity of vocabularies. On the one hand, in it the thesis of the incommensurability of vocabularies is central. Vocabularies serve a wide variety of purposes. Having abandoned the idea of representation as the supreme purpose, an overarching criterion of judgment no longer applies. There is no longer a meta-vocabulary against which they can be measured. Vocabularies as a whole are therefore regarded as incommensurable and equal (inter alia PMN, pp. 315–316, 321–322; TP, p. 6).9 At the same time, Rorty distinguishes between “normal” and “abnormal” discourse.10 The former involves discourse within vocabularies. Only here is argumentation on the basis of shared criteria possible. Abnormal discourse is discourse across vocabularies where this is not the case. Here, narrative redescription and the use of metaphors are necessary, for example, to motivate switching between incommensurable vocabularies (PMN, pp. 21, 320–321; CIS, pp. 8–9). As an alternative to essentialism, Rorty advocates a linguistic nominalism and holism, according to which, all supposed essences and necessities result only from the practical context of discourses: “All essences are nominal” (ORT, p. 86). Rorty outlines a radical pragmatics according to which meaning is determined solely by its use in a language game. A concept acquires its meaning only within a network of linguistic relations, not through the impossible, direct reference to extra-­ linguistic reality. Even the so-called objects are redescribed as webs of description relations (e.g., PMN, p. 368; PSH, pp. 53–57, 85; PZ, pp. 124–125; EHO, p. 103). The whole of these relations is in each case a vocabulary. This is the basic thesis of Rorty’s holism of vocabularies. Here, the goal of research can only be contextual coherence within vocabularies, since an independent test criterion beyond the coherence of our assertions is unattainable: “We cannot find a skyhook which lifts us out of mere coherence.” (ORT, p. 38).

 See Sect. 4.3 below for more information.  Especially in his discussion with Jean-Francois Lyotard, however, Rorty insists that incommensurability does not mean untranslatability (ORT, pp. 215–218; see already PMN, pp. 302, fn. 35, 355, fn. 35). 10  With this distinction, Rorty generalizes that of Thomas Kuhn between normal and revolutionary science. On Rorty and Kuhn see, among others, Tartaglia 2007, pp. 178–185. 8 9

2.3  Holism and Pluralism of Justification: Rorty’s Socialization of Epistemology

15

The key theoretical distinction of Rorty’s holism, already mentioned above, is that between causality and justification. Following Wilfried Sellars in particular, Rorty strictly separates the causal process of acquiring our beliefs from the question of justifying them. He insists on the “gap between explaining ourselves and justifying ourselves” (PMN, p. 249). For him, our relations to our environment are only causal, not representational. They may cause us to have opinions, but they cannot justify them. Even what counts as accurate experience, he argues, is a matter of a particular justificatory community. With Sellars and Davidson, Rorty insists that cognition is always located in the “logical space of reasons” (PMN, p. 157), since one belief can only be justified by another belief. The key idea is that epistemic authority is solely a function of social linguistic practice (PMN, pp.  254, 389–390; TP, pp. 109, 129). Justification of beliefs is understood as a social phenomenon, rather than as an interaction between cognizing subject and reality. Rorty’s radical linguistic pragmatism therefore ultimately represents not a naturalization but a socialization of epistemology: “Once conversation replaces confrontation, the notion of the mind as Mirror of Nature can be discarded.” (PMN, p. 170, cf. also pp. 177–178, 186) He radicalizes the recognition “of the ontological priority of the social” (PCP, p. 15) also demanded by other neopragmatists. For him, “truth and reality exist for the sake of social practices, rather than vice versa.” (PCP, p. 7) Accordingly, Rorty early on defined pragmatism as the doctrine that there are no constraints on inquiry save conversational ones—no wholesale constraints derived from the nature of the objects, or of the mind, or of language, but only those retail constraints provided by the remarks of our fellow inquirers. (CP, p. 165)

This (idiosyncratic) definition emphasizes the distinctive feature of his version of neopragmatism as a philosophy of conversation: the exclusive focus on shared linguistic practice. Rorty’s holism of justification may tempt one to classify his theory as linguistic idealism, which cannot reconstruct the realist intuition of the existence of a description-­independent external world. This interpretation, however, fails to recognize the naturalistic dimension of Rorty’s thought outlined above and his attempt to use his anti-representationalism to get beyond the epistemological distinction between realism and idealism. For the consistent recognition of the primacy of linguistic practice that he seeks, however, he is prepared to accept the charge of contradicting common sense. Rorty does not deny the realist intuition of a world independent of us that prevails in it. Instead, he problematizes its status. For him, intuitions are also only “residua of linguistic practices” (PMN, p. 28, fn. 4) and the

16

2  Revolutionary Language-Game Pragmatism After the Linguistic Turn

respective prevailing common sense only “a collection of dead metaphors” (CIS, p. 152). The goal should therefore not be a reconstruction of the realistic common sense, but its long-term change.

2.4 The Transformative Character of Rorty’s Philosophy of Conversation: Justification instead of Truth The radical nature of Rorty’s attempt to transform our linguistic practice is particularly evident in the debate over the concept of objective truth. Rorty rejects the representationalist correspondence theory of truth: “At the heart of pragmatism is the refusal to accept the correspondence theory of truth and the idea that true beliefs are accurate representations of reality.” (PCP, p. 105) Again, his refutation of this classical theory is based on the aforementioned argument of the ubiquity of language. Accordingly, the reference of (metaphysical) realism to a description-­ independent reality is inconsistent. It follows for Rorty that the intuitively catchy notion of a correspondence theory of truth is irredeemable and unable to explain anything. Rorty’s critique of correspondence theory is shared by all (neo)pragmatists. What is distinctive about his position is that he does not formulate an alternative theory of truth. Rather, he wants to bid farewell to the philosophical theory of truth and argues for a kind of metaphysical quietism: “[T]he pragmatist does not have a theory of truth.” (ORT, p. 24; cf. inter alia TP, p. 29) Pragmatists should not formulate a constructive, pragmatist theory of truth. Rather, it is necessary, in a therapeutic attitude, to discard the traditional problem of truth. The philosophical concept of truth should be dropped, he argues, because it leads into theoretical dead ends, has no practical use whatsoever, and can even become dangerous in terms of cultural politics (TP, pp. 1–6, 11; CIS, p. 8). Rorty recommends as an alternative the linguistic-pragmatic restriction to the concept of justification. Importantly, he does not propose to reduce truth to justification. Rather, the motto of his radical variant of neopragmatism is: justification instead of truth. Rorty also states that the traditional idea of truth is absolute, whereas justification is always relative to a particular audience. Many pragmatists (e.g., Peirce, Putnam, and Habermas) conclude from this the need for a consensus theory that operates on the idea of idealized justification. For Rorty, this path leads back to a

2.4  The Transformative Character of Rorty’s Philosophy of Conversation…

17

metaphysical dead end.11 For him, the absoluteness of the concept of truth is not a spur to linguistic-pragmatic reconstruction, but precisely the reason for its abandonment: “The very absoluteness of truth is a good reason for thinking” true “indefinable and for thinking that no theory of the nature of truth is possible” (TP, p. 3). Truth could also not be a goal of research for the same reason, since: “the only criterion we have for applying the word ‘true’ is justification, and justification is always relative to an audience [...] This means that the question ‘Do our practices of justification lead to truth?” is as unanswerable as it is unpragmatic.’ (TP, p. 4, cf. pp. 3–4, 26, 39–40) According to Rorty, we have no criterion for the truth of our beliefs detached from our justificatory practices. Truth, of course, is not to be identified with justification, but for linguistic practice the philosophical distinction between the two is irrelevant. Justification does all the work anyway. The pragmatic maxim is therefore applied to the concept of truth itself: Pragmatists think that if something makes no difference to practice, it should make no difference to philosophy. This conviction makes them suspicious of the distinction between justification and truth, for that difference makes no difference to my decisions about what to do [...] I cannot bypass justification. (TP, p.  19; cf. e.g., PSH, p. 82)12

Rorty has clarified his position on the truth question over the years, most notably in discussion with Donald Davidson. The goal of a dissolution of the traditional problem of truth remains. The expression “is true” continues to have no explanatory function for him in the sense of correspondence theory. Part of his focus on justificatory practice, however, becomes a more detailed instrumentalist analysis of the use of this expression. In doing so, Rorty focuses on two indispensable, normative uses: the commending and the cautionary (RR, pp. 153–154; TP, pp. 21–22, 60– 61).13 In line with his instrumentalism outlined above, he thereby emphasizes the commending mode of use, in which the usefulness of a belief is asserted. In doing so, he refers several times to William James’s analogy between the true and the good: “William James said, […] ‘[t]he true’ is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief, and good, too, for definite, assignable reasons” (TP,  On the “family dispute” with the Kantian neopragmatist Jürgen Habermas over the necessity of the linguistic-pragmatist reconstruction of the aspect of unconditional validity and of regulative ideas such as “truth” and “reality” see esp. Habermas 1999, pp. 246–270. 12  It is precisely in this sense that the provocative quotation in PMN, p. 176, mentioned in the introduction, is to be understood, according to which what our peers accept as true is true. 13  A third, according to Rorty, is the disquotational mode of use. But this is relevant only for semantics and should not be used to explain the other two. 11

18

2  Revolutionary Language-Game Pragmatism After the Linguistic Turn

p. 21; cf. TP, p. 127) The important cautionary use of “true” against a belief generally accepted in its usefulness is evident in sentences like “this belief may be justified to us, but it may not be true.” This fallibilist caveat, however, is interpreted by Rorty simply as the gap between what is truly good and what is possibly better: “From a pragmatist point of view, to say that what it is rational for us now to believe may not be true, is simply to say that someone may come up with a better idea.” (ORT, p. 23). Also, to preserve the important cautionary use of “true,” the assumption of an explanatory function of this expression was not necessary. Contrasting present and future audiences and hoping for better forms of justification in the future would suffice: “[T]he only point in contrasting the true with the merely justified is to contrast a possible future with the actual present.” (PSH, p. 39) The cautionary use of “true” does not exhort us to strive for objective truth as opposed to merely contextualized justification. It simply requires a willingness to defend our views to any other audience as well. The goal, he argues, must therefore be to extend the reach of the communicative “we” ever further. Rorty’s motto here is: (communicative) solidarity instead of objectivity. He sees his theory as an articulation (not a justification) of the open ethnocentrism of our Western culture. The latter has learned from the mistakes of its past to distrust its own ethnocentrism self-critically and to keep the conversation open to other voices. This learned openness does not need an orientation to “the truth” as a normative, context-transcending reference point (ORT, pp. 2, 204; TP, pp. 51–54; ORT, pp. 21–23). Rorty proposes as the functional equivalent of this the requirement to keep the conversation of culture open. For him, free discourse is not a means to truth, but it becomes a goal in itself. Therefore, he wants to redescribe “the love of Truth as simply conversability. ” (SL, p. 26; see already PMN, pp. 377–378).

3

The Strong Romantic Dimension of Rorty’s Thinking as a Combination of Romanticism and Pragmatism

Rorty’s instrumentalist and holistic linguistic pragmatism is combined with a strong romantic dimension. Its main aspects are presented in this chapter and are listed here in summary form:

Main motifs of the romantic dimension:

• general approval of Romanticism as an epochal countermovement to the rationalism of the Enlightenment. • image of the human being not as a knower of entities, but as a creator of languages. • progress not as an ascent to the indubitable (Plato), but as a growing plurality of our (self)descriptions (Emerson). • apotheosis of the future: hope for a better common future instead of ever more precise knowledge of reality. • celebration of imagination as the engine of cultural progress and its cognitive primacy over reason. • cultural history as a contingent history of (“literalized”) metaphors. • concept of private autonomy through poetic self-creation. • propagation of the aesthetic existence of the strong poet as the ideal of man. • demand for a poetization instead of a scientification of culture.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2022 M. Müller, Richard Rorty: A Short Introduction, essentials, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-38838-6_3

19

20

3  The Strong Romantic Dimension of Rorty’s Thinking as a Combination…

Settling on the definition of the term “Romanticism” is even more difficult than settling on a single definition of the term “pragmatism”. Rorty’s references to ­romantic thought are primarily to Anglo-American authors such as Percy B. Shelley or even Ralph Waldo Emerson. His picture of Romanticism is at the same time influenced by Isaiah Berlin’s view of Romanticism as an epochal counter-movement to the rationalism of the Enlightenment (pp.  46–49). According to Berlin, the Romantics thereby advocate a metaphysics of depth and inexhaustibility. This move is, however, rejected by Rorty as an inversion of Platonism. He wants to “cleanse Romanticism of the last traces of German idealism” (CIS, p. 123, fn. 4). At the same time, however, he follows up on the Romantic critique of Enlightenment rationalism.

3.1 The Human Being as a Creator of Languages and the “Apotheosis of the Future” In Rorty’s idiosyncratic combination of naturalism and romanticism, human beings as part of nature are (linguistically) creative animals. The invention of languages not only enables us to increase our happiness, it endows us with the quasi-­divine ability to “give birth” to ourselves through linguistic innovation (HSE, p. 33). Our crucial quality as producers of descriptions, according to the romantic self-image that Rorty proposes to us, is not the capacity for cognition but the talent for self-creation. Humans are poets of themselves. We are the particular animals that can and must create ourselves by describing ourselves in our own terms. The liberating moral lesson to be learned from Darwin, according to Rorty, is that the difference between us and the reptiles is not that they merely adapt to reality, while we recognize reality, but that we have adapted to reality much better than they have, and better in the sense that we have far more “variety and freedom” at our disposal. (HSE, p. 34, own translation).

As already mentioned in the introduction, Rorty is concerned with establishing a new self-image of us members of liberal society. The rationalist image of the human being as a “knower of essences” (PMN, p. 367) is to be replaced by a new, romantic self-image of “human beings as generators of new descriptions” (PMN, p.  378). We are to understand ourselves  as creative, not as  knowing, beings and to trust in our capacity for linguistic self-creation. From the abandonment of the image of the cognizing, knowing being follows not a look into the abyss of nothingness, but a creative liberation of the sense for the infinite

3.1  The Human Being as a Creator of Languages and the “Apotheosis…

21

possibilities of (self-)description in the future. The talent for self-creation could mitigate our finitude (EHO, pp. 132, 186; ORT, p. 17). Rorty contrasts the classical quest for order, which seeks to give language closure, with the romantic insistence on human freedom to break out of situations of closure through linguistic creativity. He advocates a willingness to leap into a process of unpredictable change and a confidence in the human capacity to create a future world in which more plurality and freedom are realized than we could currently imagine. The invention of new possibilities of being human should take precedence over the need for stability, security and order. The space of possibility expands each time a new world-opening vocabulary is invented. Rorty therefore also argues vehemently for a change of metaphor in our self-description. Instead of metaphors of approaching something that is not ourselves, we should use metaphors of expanding ourselves (PZ, p. 7). Rorty wants to replace Plato’s image of ascending to the indubitable with Ralph Waldo Emerson’s image of endlessly expanding circles. Intellectual progress, then, is not progress toward better and better representations of what is out there, but toward the greatest possible variety of vocabularies, distinguished only in their usefulness for human happiness (PCP, pp. 108–109, 118). A central moment of Emerson’s metaphor of infinite expansion, and thus of Rorty’s romantic impulse as a whole, is represented by the future motif: “One may say to pragmatism what Novalis said of Romanticism, that it is ‘the apotheosis of the future’” (PSH, p. 27). Rorty follows the romantic apotheosis of the unknown, of the difficult to imagine and hardly sayable. His goal, however, is the “romantic temporalization of the unconditioned” (SE, pp. 36–37, own translation). In demarcation from platonic and romantic metaphysicians at the same time, it is no longer necessary to think vertically, but horizontally (PCP, p. 88). For Rorty, an essential element of pragmatism is the willingness to leave all questions of justification to the future. This makes it possible, he argues, to displace all Platonic and Kantian distinctions. The seemingly simple distinction between the past and the future can and should take the place of the traditional philosophical dualisms such as the unconditioned and the conditioned, the absolute and the relative, and especially that between reality and appearance. While the metaphysician asks about eternity, the pragmatist instead looks to the future: “If there is anything distinctive about pragmatism it is that substitutes the notion of a better future for the notions of ‘reality’, ‘reason’, and ‘nature’” (PSH, p. 27, see pp. 24–28, 32; TP, p. 174). This temporal change of perspective, specific to pragmatic thought as a whole, is radicalized by Rorty, who replaces the question “What can I know?” with a pragmatist variation on “What can I hope?” He promotes the motto “hope in place of knowledge” (PSH, p. 21). The action-guiding virtue of hope can and should take the place of knowl-

22

3  The Strong Romantic Dimension of Rorty’s Thinking as a Combination…

edge, which promises certainty. Rorty proposes replacing the Platonist attempt to escape time with the hope that we can produce a better future by inventing new vocabularies. This shared social hope would take the place of the claim to grasp the inner nature of reality in a pragmatist utopia. To be open to the future, to have hope, that is, to believe in amelioration, is at the heart of Rorty’s melioristic thought (HSE, pp. 33–34, 39; AOC, pp. 36–40).

3.2 Imagination as the Engine of Cultural Progress and the Poetization of Culture Rorty follows Romanticism unreservedly in its critique of the Enlightenment fixation on reason as the essential faculty of the human being. In this sense, he also sees his pragmatism as a continuation of the romantic reaction to the Enlightenment’s glorification of natural science (ORT, pp. 61–62; EHO, p. 18). For him, the debate between rationalism and romanticism revolves around the question of whether human beings optimally realize their being by using their reason to know how things really are, or by using their imagination and creativity to transform their language and thus themselves. Consistent with literary Romanticism and against Enlightenment rationalism, Rorty assumes a cognitive primacy of imagination: “At the heart of romanticism is the thesis of the priority of imagination over reason – the claim that reason can only follow paths that the imagination has broken.” (PCP, p. 105) Imagination is regarded by him as the capacity to create new metaphors and thus new vocabularies. It is the origin of language and thus of freedom (PSH, p. 34; CIS, pp. 19, 65–66; pp. 6–15). While reason is a matter of recognized moves within language games, imagination creates these language games. In this respect, reason can only follow the path paved by imagination, and only rearrange the elements created by the latter. It cannot break out of the circle that the imagination has last drawn. In this specific sense, imagination has priority over reason for Rorty. And it is in this sense that Rorty understands romance as a thesis about the nature of human progress. With the above-mentioned Percy B. Shelley, he regards imagination as the most important tool of the good. For cultural progress, he argues, the achievements of the creative imagination are more important than the reflections of discerning and arguing reason: What the Romantics expressed as the claim that imagination, rather than reason, is the central human faculty was the realization that a talent for speaking differently, rather than for arguing well, is the chief instrument of cultural change. (CIS, p. 7; see PCP, pp. 74–75; ORT, p. 62; EHO, p. 14)

3.3  Cultural History as a Contingent History of “Literalized” Metaphors

23

While joining the romantic celebration of imagination, however, Rorty distances himself from the attempts by “the other-to-reason romantics” to exalt imagination as a link with something outside ourselves (PCP, p. 86). He separates the high esteem of imagination from the representationalist idea that it is attuned as an expressive faculty to the nature of reality within us. Poetry, for him, does not grasp any kind of truth, that would not be grasped by philosophy. The human capacity to create metaphors, he argues, is not proof that the human being is, as it were, of another world. The imagination, according to Rorty’s anti-representationalist understanding, is not to be regarded as a capacity for creating mental images, but as a capacity for creating new signs and sounds that are socially useful (CIS, pp. 19, 36; PCP, pp. 87, 107–109; pp. 14–15, 21). In the debate between Enlightenment and Romanticism, Rorty also takes sides with Romanticism because he hopes for a poetization of culture. This hope replaces Enlightenment rationalism’s hope for scientification. Poetization of culture, for Rorty, means that poetry and imagination have won the victory over (scientific) reason. Poetry, not science, would become the paradigm of human action. In the romantic and democratic cultures of the West, he argues, it is now possible to make communal self-creation into a guiding motto instead of representing. Referring to John Dewey, Rorty advocates a vision of a society dominated by the ideal of aesthetic enhancement rather than that of objective cognition (PMN, p.  13; HSE, p. 34; CIS, pp. 52–53, 65–66). For the tangible possibility of such a society, the romantic movement has been central, according to Rorty. Together with the French Revolution in the sphere of politics, it would have taught people that “truth” is made, not found. Since then, art has no longer been understood as imitation, but as the self-creation of the artist. For “[t]he Romantic poets attempted to achieve blessedness through self-creation – by making themselves lamps rather than mirrors” (SL, p. 17).

3.3 Cultural History as a Contingent History of “Literalized” Metaphors The romantic view of language and cultural progress is concretized by Rorty through a theory of metaphor. For him, the cultural progress of humanity, understood as a continuous revolutionary change of vocabularies, is driven by replacing metaphors. The notion of metaphor, along with that of vocabulary, is central to Rorty’s thinking about language. The creativity and imagination of the metaphor-­ producing human being, he argues, “are merely special cases of the ability of the human organism to utter meaningless sentences – that is, sentences which do not fit

24

3  The Strong Romantic Dimension of Rorty’s Thinking as a Combination…

into old language games, and serve as occasions for modifying those language games and creating new ones” (ORT, p. 125). Part of the thesis of the contingency of language discussed above, according to which language has no overarching purpose and is not a medium of representation, is the idea that new vocabularies are made rather than found; they are created through the invention of metaphors. Cultural history thus becomes a history of metaphors. Only with the revolutionary invention of new metaphors is it possible to break out of previous vocabularies (CIS, pp. 9, 15–16). Cultural progress takes place concretely through the adoption of selected metaphors into common language use, whereby new vocabularies become established in linguistic practice and are transformed into tools of social progress. The history of culture as the history of metaphor is thereby viewed as a non-­teleological process, by analogy with biological evolution. Rorty illustrates this with a comparison to the history of a coral reef: “Old metaphors are constantly dying off into literalness, and then serving as a platform and foil for new metaphors.” (CIS, p. 16) Intellectual change occurs through the death of old metaphors and the emergence of new metaphors and their renewed death through “being literalized” (ORT, p. 124). The emergence of new linguistic images is contingent. At the same time, however, it is dependent on the breeding ground of the old, now familiar metaphors, and to that extent parasitic: Metaphors are unfamiliar uses of old words, but such uses are possible only against the background of other old words being used in old familiar ways. A language which was “all metaphor” would be a language which had no use, hence not a language but just babble. (CIS, p. 41)

If the use of the once unfamiliar metaphor gradually becomes habitual, it occupies a fixed place in a language game and loses its metaphorical character. It becomes a dead metaphor. It is of central importance here that for Rorty the difference between the literal and the metaphorical is not a distinction between two varieties of meaning. For a metaphor to become a concept, he argues, nothing more is required than its habitual use in a language-game. That is, the “place” of a metaphor is the abnormal discourse in which no argumentation is possible, whereas the “place” of “literalness” is the normal, argumentative discourse within a vocabulary. Through its literalization, however, metaphor has then again extended this logical space of justification and argumentation (ORT, p. 124; CIS, pp. 17–19). With his theory of metaphor, Rorty wants to renounce the artificial juxtaposition between the literal truth of science and the metaphorical of art. Instead, he argues, one should imagine cultural history as a constant alternation between these two realms. The cultural development of all cultural spheres is characterized “by the

3.4  Strong Poets as Ingenious Inventors of Metaphors

25

usual alternation [...] between ‘revolutionary’, ‘literary’, ‘poetic’ moments and normal, banal, constructive interludes” (EHO, p. 98, see ORT, pp. 124–125). What is decisive, he says, are the situations in which everything is up for debate at the same time. The motifs as well as the terms in which the discussion is conducted, in turn, form a main theme of the argument. A new generation is so dissatisfied with an old vocabulary due to a large number of anomalies that it feels the need for a fresh start. This is the moment when, according to Rorty, a “‘poetic’ moment” (EHO, p. 88) occurs, and the previously accepted vocabulary is cast aside. Through a revolutionary movement, a new way of speaking is introduced and a new normal discourse is established. But this is only true until the next dissatisfied generation problematizes it again (EHO, pp. 88, 98–99). According to Rorty, the oppositions between the scientific and the literary, and between order and freedom, are to be understood as poles of an ongoing pendulum movement between the classic and the romantic. It is a kind of cultural division of labor in which poets expand our vocabularies and perspectives in unforeseen ways, while others subsequently restore order. This division of labor arises from an internal rhythm that permeates every subject and subfield of culture: “We are never going to stop swinging back and forth between that [classical, M.M.] moment and the Romantic one.” (EHO, p. 105; see PZ, pp. 168–169). Rorty thus distances himself from passionate romanticism, which does not allow the classic to be valid at all. He emphasizes the necessity and inevitability of both poles of this cultural pendulum movement. Nevertheless, his romantic impulse is primarily concerned with the poetic moments of cultural history. Against what he sees as a nostalgic tendency to use the language of our ancestors and to venerate the mortar shells of their metaphors, his theory of metaphor focuses on the central importance of the creative production of new metaphors (ORT, 124; CIS, p. 21–22).1

3.4 Strong Poets as Ingenious Inventors of Metaphors The central figure of Rorty’s romanticism is the avant-garde strong poet. By virtue of her imagination, a strong poet is the creator of new words and thus the shaper of new language games. By succeeding in inventing new vocabularies, these exceptional individuals change the way we look at the world and thus at ourselves. Therefore, strong poets, such as Luther, Copernicus, Galileo, Darwin, and Freud,

 For his (controversial) account of the operation and meaning of metaphors, Rorty refers to Mary Hesse and Donald Davidson, see ORT, pp. 162–172. 1

26

3  The Strong Romantic Dimension of Rorty’s Thinking as a Combination…

are, according to Rorty, the “vanguard of the species” (CIS, p. 20).2 Strong poets introduce strange new meanings of old familiar expressions by playing recklessly with words and breaking the previous rules. In this way they succeed in creating for themselves the taste by which they are judged. Their sphere is rhetoric or poetry, not logic. They use metaphors instead of arguments and let literary imagination play break out of the realm of the cognitive. This creative ability makes the strong poet the real engine of intellectual progress as the adoption of new metaphors into common usage. To be sure, Rorty is not concerned with the replacement of the philosopher by the poet. Nevertheless, he is following up on the exaltation of poetry and the glorification of the creative artist by Romanticism. The philosophers as metaphysicians are for Rorty only footnotes to the poets. Several times he quotes Hölderlin’s verse in this context: “Yet what remains, the poets found.” (SE, p. 39, own translation) One can say that the figure of the strong poet embodies the romantic side of the new self-image of the human being he proposes (ORT, p. 169; EHO, p. 98–99; SE, p. 39). Rorty advocates the vision of the artist as a creator of meaning and a moral exemplar. Strong poets, socially successful metaphor-makers, are for him, following Percy B. Shelley, “the unacknowledged legislators of world-historical epochs” (TP, p. 95, fn. 27). It is important to note, however, that the powerful poet remains, first, dependent on the normal discourse of his time for his ability to reinvent metaphors. Linguistic self-creation can only ever be marginal and parasitic. This insight into the dependence of even the strongest poet on the interlocutors of his own culture is understood as the corrective to the romantic self-deification of the aesthetic subject. The strong poet, as an ironist, is aware that every self-creator, without exception, will always remain herself a creature of time and chance. In this way, Rorty’s romanticism of self-creation also seeks to distance itself from Nietzsche’s inversion of Platonism in the form of the ideal of complete autonomy through self-­ creation (CIS, pp. 40–43; PZ, p. 170).3 Strong poets are driven by the fear of being only a replica or an actor in a role in a previously written script. But as exceptional geniuses, they manage to create unprecedented descriptions of their own lives and culture. Their ingenious metaphors are about

 Rorty adapts the expression “strong poet” from the literary scholar Harold Bloom and expands the meaning of this expression (CIS, pp. 12–13, 24–26, 53). 3  Rorty’s ideal of the creative genius closely follows Ralph Waldo Emerson and Friedrich Nietzsche. At the same time, it is decisively “democratized” and contingency theoretical “weakened” by reference to Sigmund Freud and Harold Bloom. 2

3.5  The Goal of a Peaceful Coexistence of Romanticism and Pragmatism

27

idiosyncrasies which just happen to catch on with other people – happen because of the contingencies of some historical situation, some particular need which a given community happens to have at a given time. – To sum up … progress results from the accidental coincidence of a private obsession with a public need. (CIS, p.  37, see pp. 53–57)

What is characteristic of Rorty’s linking of romanticism and pragmatism is that, second, he distinguishes between the person who has imagination and the person who is a mere fantasist. The crucial difference between the two, he argues, lies in whether the invented metaphor is accepted and used by his fellow citizens. Authenticity must be combined with usefulness. Poets become founders and transformers of their culture only when their metaphor gives expression to a vaguely felt need of their linguistic community (CIS, p. 61; PCP, pp. 86, 107). Despite these two limitations, with his figure of the strong poet Rorty proves to be a representative of romantic individualism. He renews “the romantic notion of man as selfcreative” (PMN, p. 358). With his aesthetic understanding of autonomy as ongoing poetic self-creation, he connects to the romantic ideal of self-creation (Habermas 2008, p. 16).

3.5 The Goal of a Peaceful Coexistence of Romanticism and Pragmatism This chapter has made clear that Rorty’s version of neopragmatism is characterized by two dimensions at once: a pragmatist and a romantic one. The proposal of this introduction for a fruitful reading of Rorty is therefore as follows: his thought can best be understood as an attempt to bring about a peaceful coexistence of romanticism and pragmatism. Rorty’s strong romantic impulse4 finds its limiting counterweight in his pragmatist impulse, and vice versa. Rorty himself speaks of “tying pragmatism together with romanticism in his work” (PCP, p.  76, see p.  105; pp. 61–62). Part of Rorty’s attempt at linkage, however, is that, as shown above, he does not align himself to Romanticism as an idealist counter-movement to the disenchantment of the world in modernity. Rather, Rorty relies on the pragmatic serviceability of the idea of originality as a means of increasing human happiness. He even speaks early on of a Hegelian “Aufhebung” of Romanticism in pragmatism: “Romanticism was aufgehoben in pragmatism, the claim that the significance of  Rorty himself agrees with the diagnosis that the romantic dimension has become more pronounced over the years (RR, p. 473). See also The Fire of Life (RR, pp. 520–521). In this moving text, written shortly before his death, he stresses the importance of poetry. 4

28

3  The Strong Romantic Dimension of Rorty’s Thinking as a Combination…

new vocabularies was not their ability to decode but their mere utility.” (CP, p. 153) The goal of this sublation in the service of democratic society is to “balance the need for consensus and the need for novelty” (PCP, p. 85). His version of pragmatism as a “successor movement to romanticism” (ORT, p. 61) seeks to satisfy both the latter need and that for intersubjective agreement within the framework of democratic politics. It combines a critique of reason and a celebration of the imagination with utilitarian thinking and communicative solidarity. The reading suggestion of this essential also proves its worth in the critique of Rorty’s thought. For his “collage” (ORT, p. 210) of romanticism and pragmatism is rife with tensions. The trouble spots of his thought are boundary conflicts between the two. At these points, modified demarcations are in part necessary for pacification, but also possible. This is true with respect to Rorty’s theoretical and practical thinking.5 Rorty himself is well aware of the tension that exists between his romantic and his pragmatist impulses. He counters the tendential preponderance of the former primarily with a strategy of privatization. The fragility of the balance Rorty seeks between private perfection and public utility, and also the strength of his romantic impulse, can best be demonstrated by a brief consideration of Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, as will be conducted in the following chapter. For it is precisely the utopia of a truly liberal society outlined therein that is informed by the vision of a coexistence – not synthesis! – of romanticism and pragmatism, of aesthetic enhancement and solidarity (among others, PSH, pp. 13–20; p. 58; on this also Curtis 2015, pp. 3, 129).

 See Müller 2014a.

5

4

The Transformative Character of Rorty’s Neopragmatism Exemplified by His Liberal Utopia in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity

Rorty’s transformative claim to change our self-image and the basic thesis of this essential “Private Romanticism and Public Pragmatism” is made plausible in this chapter by a sketch of the utopia of a post-metaphysical liberal culture in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity.

4.1 Pragmatism as Cultural Politics with Transformative Aspirations It is also in Rorty’s second major work that the transformative claim of his neopragmatism mentioned above is laid out in the clearest and most concrete terms. On the basis of his treatment of realist intuitions and the notion of objective truth, it has become clear that Rorty does not want to reconstruct our linguistic practice, but to change it. The standard criticism that Rorty’s slogan of “justification rather than truth” cannot reconstruct our linguistic practice fails to recognize the following: Instead of a fallible reconstruction of representationalism and the linguistic practices it shapes, his goal is the ethically and politically motivated transformation of our language habits through redescription. With Mike Sandbothe, it should be noted: Rorty’s transformative claim also involves a redefinition of philosophical activity. He no longer focuses on the traditional basic problems of the discipline, but redefines the task of philosophical thought itself. Philosophy is given a “transformative task” (PP, p.  29). Its goal is “changing the way we talk, and thereby changing what we want to do and what we think we are” (CIS, p. 20; see PSH,

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2022 M. Müller, Richard Rorty: A Short Introduction, essentials, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-38838-6_4

29

30

4  The Transformative Character of Rorty’s Neopragmatism Exemplified…

p. 72; PP, p. 29).1 This ambitious goal also distinguishes Rorty from his neopragmatist counterparts such as Hilary Putnam and Jürgen Habermas (Sandbothe 2000, pp. 108–109, 116, 122–126). For his transformative understanding of pragmatism, Rorty has chosen the term “cultural politics” after a long search. For him, it is not a form of knowledge but a matter of practice. The pragmatist as cultural politician proposes vocabulary changes in order to overcome impasses in the cultural conversation. In doing so, he is explicitly in the service of his democratic culture (PCP, pp. ix–x, 26). The radical redescription of old notions serves the cultural-political project of a metaphysics-­critical reeducation of our linguistic practice. Pragmatism, for Rorty, is not merely a means of avoiding the theoretical impasses of traditional philosophy, but an attempt at a radical change in our self-image. It represents for him the offer of a world-historical change in humanity’s self-image (TP, p.  132). The offer of a new, anti-representationalist vocabulary serves the project of an experimental change in common sense. The longterm goal is to change the self-image of citizens in liberal democracies by adopting his romantic and at the same time pragmatist vocabulary. As shown above, the image of the human being as a seeker of truth, which is harmful to democratic culture, is to be bidden farewell by a new description as a (linguistically) creative being and as a solidary being. According to Rorty, this new description corresponds to a truly democratic culture. Early on, he understood classical pragmatism in this sense not as a theory of truth but as a transformative vision of a post-metaphysical, truly democratic culture (CP, pp.  160, 174–175). In Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, he only hinted at his own romantic yet pragmatist variation on this vision in the form of a culture of “aesthetic enhancement” (PMN, p. 13) and free conversation. It was concretized by him only in Contingency, Irony and, Solidarity.

4.2 The Liberal Utopia of a Post-metaphysical Culture in Contingency, Irony and, Solidarity Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity outlines the anti-foundationalist utopia of an ideal liberal society in which romanticism and pragmatic liberalism are combined. Its original contribution is at the level of justification, for Rorty does not aim with it to justify liberalism. Rather, he proposes a redescription motivated by cultural  Alluding to Karl Marx’s 11th Feuerbach thesis, Rorty emphasizes the primacy of action over contemplation. With Marx, Rorty is concerned with changing the social world, but unlike Marx, he believes that this can be achieved through transformative redescription (of concepts) (PF, p. 198). 1

4.2  The Liberal Utopia of a Post-metaphysical Culture in Contingency…

31

politics that better fits the values of liberal society. His stated aim is to “retain Enlightenment liberalism while dropping Enlightenment rationalism” (CIS, pp. 57, see pp. 54–55, 189–190, 197).2 Rorty outlines the utopia of a democratic anti-foundationalism with the motto “substitute Freedom for Truth” (CIS, p. xiii, see also p. 176 and the title of TCF). He has thus drawn the consequences of his anti-representationalism and ethnocentrism for morality and politics. For from the recognition of the contingency of language (see above para. 2.3) follows, according to Rorty, not only an awareness of the contingency of the self, but also of the respective political community. Even the values and institutions of the liberal community of justification are “only” a contingent result of its cultural history as a history of literalized metaphors. The awareness of this (triple) contingency is what Rorty calls irony. He thereby redefines the concept of irony in an idiosyncratic way. Irony is understood as the virtue of a serene awareness of contingency (CIS, pp. xv, 9, 46, 61, 73).3 Ironism understood in this way has prevailed in Rorty’s post-metaphysical utopia. At the same time, however, the liberal sense of solidarity remains intact in it: My picture of a liberal utopia [...] [is] the sketch of a society in which the charge of “relativism” has lost its force, one in which the notion of “something that stands behind history” has become unintelligible, but a sense of human solidarity remains intact. (CIS, p. 190)

Liberal values are pragmatically justified in Rorty’s deliberately ethnocentric community of justification. They have proven themselves in the eyes of their members in political practice. Therefore, they do not need a philosophical justification to espouse them. For them, an awareness of contingency heightens the recognition of their fragility and the need to defend them: The fundamental premise of the book is that a belief can still regulate action, can still be thought worth dying for, among people who are aware that this belief is caused by nothing deeper than contingent historical circumstance. (CIS, p. 306; see pp. xv, 9, 73)

On the level of content, Rorty’s utopia initially appears conventional, since he refers to John Stuart Mill’s classical liberal conception of politics. Its goal is the

 By combining utopian thinking and irony, Rorty performs a (contextualist) self-correction of the classical concept of utopia, see Müller 2014b. 3  For more on the triple contingency experience of Rorty’s ironism, see Reese-Schäfer (2006, pp. 85–101). 2

32

4  The Transformative Character of Rorty’s Neopragmatism Exemplified…

balance of freedom and equality (of opportunity), which must always be re-­ established. The primary task of the state is to guarantee maximum (negative) freedom for its citizens. As with Mill’s romantic liberalism, this is to enable creativity and diversity in private (CIS, p. 63).4 This focus on ensuring as much “space” as possible for an aestheticism of the private constitutes the strong romantic pluralist dimension of Rorty’s liberal utopia. The primary task of the state is to secure and maximize private autonomy. To this, however, is added a politics of solidarity aimed at a real equality of opportunity for self-creation and a minimization of unnecessary suffering.5 Rorty sees himself as a supporter of “old-fashioned social democratic politics” (PZ, p. 189, own translation) and pleads for reform politics in the face of the foreseeable lack of alternatives to capitalism. Original here is his (controversial) call for a banalization of the political vocabulary of the left as the party of social hope. He calls for the academic left’s departure from its pseudo-­ radical, theory-fixated spectator role and support for a renewed piecemeal politics of redistribution aimed at a classless and casteless society (AOC, pp. 8–14, 89– 103; PSH, pp. 246–249).6 It is characteristic of the egalitarian dimension of Rorty’s liberalism that he chooses the particularistic concept of solidarity rather than the universalistic concept of justice as his basic concept. This theoretical-strategic decision is a consequence of his ethnocentrism of justification and the motto (communicative) “solidarity instead of objectivity” (see above Sect. 2.3). It is true that the principle of solidarity is also placed in a universalistic goal perspective in Rorty. He hopes for a global democratic and egalitarian society without classes and castes (PSH, p. xii). However, for him as an anti-foundationalist, this goal is not a fact of reason that only needs to be discovered. Rather, the demand for human solidarity remains justification-logically related to a concrete community. It sees itself as an articulation of the contingent, open concept of solidarity of its own liberal community of justification: In my utopia, solidarity would be seen not as a fact [...] but, rather, as a goal to be achieved. It is to be achieved not by inquiry but by imagination, the imaginative ability to see strange people as fellow sufferers. Solidarity is not discovered  Rorty also provokes there with the thesis that Mill’s theory is the “appropriate conclusion” to political theory. 5  One can argue that the vagueness of his definition of liberalism serves to avoid distracting from the justificatory thrust of his utopia. 6  As early as 1997, Rorty warned against neglecting increasing social inequality by limiting leftist politics to identity politics. This would make the rise of right-wing populism and the election of a “strong man” increasingly likely (AOC, pp. 89–91)! 4

4.3  The Practical Key Distinction Between the Private and the Public

33

by reflection, but created. It is created by increasing our sensitivity to the particular details of the pain and humiliation of other, unfamiliar sorts of people. (CIS, pp. xvi, see pp. 189–196)

Rorty determines the liberal concept of solidarity “negatively” as the avoidance of (institutional) cruelty. To this end, he draws on Judith Shklar’s liberalism of fear. According to this, liberalism has no summum bonum, but feeds on the struggle against a summum malum called cruelty: “I borrow my definition of ‘liberal’ from Judith Shklar, who says that liberals are people who think that cruelty is the worst thing we do.” (CIS, p. xv) According to Rorty, liberal politics must focus on combating a type of cruelty typical of human beings: the humiliation of persons by destroying their particular language and beliefs. The only social bond in his utopia is a sense of shared vulnerability to humiliation, not a recognition of a shared rational nature (CIS, pp. 89–91, 177). In this, for Rorty, a more precise theoretical definition of cruelty and humiliation is impossible, but also unnecessary: “Discoveries about who is being made to suffer can be left to the workings of a free press, free universities, and enlightened public opinion.” (CIS, P. 63).

4.3 The Practical Key Distinction Between the Private and the Public Rorty’s political utopia is a typically liberal, anti-perfectionist conception of difference. It is based on the “firm distinction between the private and the public” (CIS, p. 83). What is provocative about the use of this common liberal key distinction in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity is, first, the radicality with which Rorty separates the private from the public. The demands for private self-creation and for public solidarity, he argues, are not compatible in a theoretical synthesis, but are “forever incommensurable” (CIS, p. xv). In response to massive criticism of formulations such as this, Rorty felt compelled to subsequently soften his “firm distinction.” Descriptively, he readily admits that there are influences in both directions. For example, he himself vehemently emphasizes the importance of respective socializations (et al. CIS, p. 299). In response to criticisms from major feminist thinkers such as Nancy Fraser, Rorty has also stated that he does not ignore the women’s movement’s insight that the private is the political: The core of my book is a distinction between private concerns, in the sense of idiosyncratic projects of self-overcoming, and public concerns, which have to do with the suffering of other human beings. This distinction is emphatically not [...] the distinc

34

4  The Transformative Character of Rorty’s Neopragmatism Exemplified…

Table 4.1  The practical key distinction between the private and the public sphere Private: Romanticism Irony Linguistic Self-creation (Ironist) Theory Abnormal Discourse Sublimity Redescription Revolution

Public: Pragmatism Solidarity Reduction of Suffering Literature Normal Discourse Beauty Argumentation Reform

tion between the domestic hearth and the public forum, between oikos and polis. (ORT, p. 307–308, fn. 2)7

Despite all modifications, Rorty always held on to the private/public distinction,8 namely, because of its normative function. Against all attempts at a theoretical synthesis of individual self-creation and public responsibility, he is concerned to ensure a sphere of life in which there is no obligation to justify oneself to others. With this “negative” function, the distinction between private and public, “between duty to self and duty to others” (CIS, p. 120), remains of great political utility. This was true even if it was a fuzzy political distinction. For not only what is cruelty to be avoided, but all political distinctions must be determined pragmatically on a case-by-case basis in democratic discourse. As a liberal, he advocates maximizing the scope for private self-improvement and limiting it only in accordance with the liberal harm principle, i.e., on the basis of the negative consequences of action for others (e.g., TCF, pp. 31, 50–51; PCP, p. 31; ORT, p. 208).9 The second provocation for political philosophy in connection with Rorty’s use of the distinction between private and public consists in the following division of tasks: philosophy is assigned to the realm of the private. Its moral function in the public sphere is assumed by literature: “The Metaphysician’s association of theory with social hope and of literature with private perfection is, in an ironist liberal culture,

 For more on this, see especially Janack (2010). This volume also documents that Rorty is the only known representative of the liberal “malestream” to have sought dialogue with feminist thinkers himself. 8  For the overall significance of this practical key distinction of his thought, see the overview in Table 4.1. 9  The debate over Rorty’s use of the private/public distinction has remained a major point of contention in Rorty interpretation to this day. For an initial overview of this, see Curtis (2015, pp. 100–112). 7

4.3  The Practical Key Distinction Between the Private and the Public

35

reversed.” (CIS, p. 94) Rorty’s privatization of philosophy is primarily aimed at political anthropology. As a representative of an offensive democratic anti-­ foundationalism, he rejects any philosophical theory of the self or of (communicative) reason as a propaedeutic of politics. His guiding methodological thesis is that of “[t]he priority of democracy to philosophy” (ORT, p. 175). A philosophical justification of liberalism is neither possible nor necessary, only its articulation “in the service of democratic politics” (CIS, p. 196; see ORT, pp. 175–196). Essentialist theories of justification could not settle social discourses, but were, on the contrary, a source of conflict. In Rorty’s utopia, the images of the human being they formulate are therefore seen solely as important inspirations for the private project of self-perfection. This privatization strategy, however, is also aimed at ironist theories of contingency in the wake of Nietzsche and Heidegger, which still strive for sublimity, purity, and authenticity. This rejects the political claims of post-­structuralist thinkers such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida (CIS, pp. 65, 83, 122–137). In the public sphere, then, philosophy is replaced in Rorty’s utopia as a means of moral progress, above all by literature. The latter takes on the task of a constant expansion of solidarity. Rorty advocates a sentimental concept of solidarity. Morality is thus not a matter of rationality and self-legislation, but of feeling and sensibility. For him, as an anti-Kantian, the motto is: Hume instead of Kant. Moral progress is consequently redescribed as the extension of moral compassion through a “manipulation of sentiment”. The most important vehicle for the “sentimental education” required for this is the novel (TP, pp. 167–185): The process of coming to see other human beings as “one of us” rather than as “them” is a matter of detailed description of what unfamiliar people are like and of redescription of what we ourselves are like. This is a task not for theory but for such genres as ethnography, the journalist’s report, the comic book, the docudrama, and, especially, the novel. (CIS, p. xvi)

For Rorty, the narrative, and in particular the novel, is the central means of moral education today. Good novelists succeed in directing their readers’ attention to hitherto overlooked, concrete cases of suffering and in putting into words the mostly speechless suffering of the victims of cruelty (CIS, pp. 94–95; also EHO, pp. 80–81; PSH, p. 86–87).10 In addition to books that help us become less cruel by addressing institutional forms of cruelty, there is a second kind for Rorty. These sensitize us to the poten Literature, for Rorty, does not merge into this public role. It also serves the private ethic of self-improvement. The general distinction between ethics and aesthetics is replaced by the pragmatic distinction between public and private purpose of literature (CIS, pp. 141–143). 10

36

4  The Transformative Character of Rorty’s Neopragmatism Exemplified…

tially cruel effects of our private projects of self-creation on others. In Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Vladimir Nabokov and George Orwell are interpreted as liberal writers whose work contributes to the awareness of the seductions of individual cruelty inherent in the pursuit of autonomy. The main thesis of his original interpretation of the two novelists is that “Both of them warn the liberal ironist intellectual against temptations to be cruel. Both of them dramatize the tension between private irony and liberal hope.” (CIS, p. 144; see pp. 141–144, 173).11

 Rorty’s strong misreading of Nabokov’s aestheticism and Orwell’s realism is found in CIS, chs. 7 and 8. 11

5

The Liberal Ironist as Embodiment of the Vision of a Practical Life Balance of Private Romanticism and Public Pragmatism

The central figure of the utopia in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity is the liberal ironist. She is the embodiment of Rorty’s vision of an instrumentalist combination of private romanticism and public pragmatism. Therefore, this figure is presented in more detail in this chapter.

5.1 Irony as Contingency Consciousness and Linguistic Self-creation The liberal ironist has accepted the contingency of the self and represents the embodiment of Rorty’s democratic anti-fundamentalism: I use ‘ironist’ to name the sort of person who faces up to the contingency of his or her own most central beliefs and desires [...] 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. (CIS, p. xv)

From the insight into the contingency of language follows, according to Rorty, also the insight in the contingency of the self. Ironists have abandoned the essentialist conception of the human being with an ahistorical (rational) core. For them, a person is no more than an idiosyncratic tissue of contingent linguistic beliefs and desires without a center (CIS, pp.  32–33, 41, 189; ORT, pp.  118–123). Thus, the ironist is the personification of Rorty’s nominalist language-game pragmatism. As an anti-essentialist and historicist, nothing has an immanent nature for her. Aware of the historical conditionality of her socialization, she also understands her central beliefs and needs – Rorty speaks here of her “final vocabulary” (CIS, p. 73) – as © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2022 M. Müller, Richard Rorty: A Short Introduction, essentials, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-38838-6_5

37

38

5  The Liberal Ironist as Embodiment of the Vision of a Practical Life Balance…

contingent poetic achievements of strong poets in her culture. Rorty’s idiosyncratic recasting of the concept of irony thus defines irony as knowledge of the contingency of one’s final vocabulary with which a person tells and justifies his or her life story. Since a self is determined by its final vocabulary, irony for Rorty is thus self-­ irony (CIS, pp. 73–75, 97; PZ, p. 170). Irony is redescribed by Rorty as a serene awareness of contingency. It is the basic virtue in Rorty’s utopian, post-metaphysical society. In this, the prevailing definition of freedom is also no longer insight into (rational) necessity, but “freedom as recognition of contingency” (CIS, p. 26) – for this recognition is also the prerequisite for a creative approach to the question of one’s own identity. Ironists, according to Rorty, are able to experiment playfully with the plurality of their network of beliefs and desires. The decentering and contingency of the self is thus not a reason for despair, but an opportunity for creativity, or for testing out ever new self-descriptions (CIS, pp.  39–40). Rorty’s transformative redescription of the “self” includes not only an emphasis on decentering and contingency. The active component of the self is the ability of the “heroine” of his book to distance herself from her own socialization and recreate herself through self-description. By the virtue of irony, Rorty refers to the consciousness of one’s own contingency and, at the same time, the capacity for autonomy through linguistic self-creation.1 Criticism of one’s own local final vocabulary cannot take place for ironists on the basis of an ahistorical standard, but only by comparison with other final vocabularies. Therefore, their self-doubt can only be assuaged by breaking out of their own “tribal language.” This, according to Rorty, is possible primarily through book reading. The aim of their reading journey is not to find “the-one-true description” of man. In line with the romantic notion of “edification” already developed in the concluding section of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, the goal is rather to accumulate an ever-growing repertoire of alternative human self-descriptions (CIS, pp. 26–28, 74–75, 80–81). Rorty outlines an intellectualist variant of the aesthetic life with this image of the ironist as a “bookworm.” The traditional goals of self-­ examination and self-knowledge are replaced by that of expanding the self. The ideal of life, advocated by Rorty, is a life lived at the present limits of the human imagination. In this way, the ironist is the embodiment of the “aesthetic life [...] of unending curiosity, the life that seeks to extend its own bounds rather than to find its center” (EHO, p. 154; see PP, p. 31).  In her project of linguistic self-creation, the ironist is dependent on others. Taking this as a starting point, renowned Rorty interpreters attempt to derive the ethical character of irony in Rorty, see Bacon 2007; Ramberg 2014; Voparil 2010. These three texts simultaneously offer an excellent introduction to Rorty and to CIS. 1

5.2 Ironism and Liberal Ethnocentrism: The Vision of a Practical Life Balance

39

The freedom of Rorty’s aesthetic self in the guise of the ironist is not exhausted merely in the recognition of contingency and the sense of the unrealized possibilities of being human. Her pursuit of self-expansion through literary “edification” serves above all her own capacity to create radically new descriptions of herself. Autonomy, according to Rorty, is ultimately realized through the private project of poetic self-creation: “Autonomy is not something which all human beings have within them and which society can release by ceasing to repress them. It is something which certain particular human beings hope to attain by self-creation, and which a few actually do.” (CIS, p. 117)2 The anti-essentialist conception of the self as a network of contingencies is thus linked by Rorty to the romantic theological notion, outlined above, that human beings are creators of themselves. The core thesis of the romantic dimension of Rorty’s conception of the ironic self is: self-­ creation rather than self-knowledge (CIS, pp. 25–29; ORT, p. 322; already PMN, p. 358). The paradigmatic figure of the realization of autonomy as ongoing self-creation is, accordingly, for ironists, the strong poet: “In my view, an ideally liberal polity would be one whose culture hero is Bloom’s ‘strong poet’ rather than the warrior, the priest, the sage, or the [...] scientist.” (CIS, p. 53) The powerfully creative poet who uses words as none before him embodies Rorty’s romantic ideal of self-­ creation. He is even declared to be the “archetypal human being” (CIS, p. 34). For Rorty, the aesthetic mode of existence of the productive artist is the paradigm of individuality. His conception of irony therefore connects to the romantic demand that one should live poetically. His strong romantic impulse is most evident in this vision of an authentic life through poetic self-creation.

5.2 Ironism and Liberal Ethnocentrism: The Vision of a Practical Life Balance The ideal citizens of Rorty’s utopia are at the same time liberal ironists. They have internalized the liberal distinction between the private and the public and are ironists only in the private. Irony as a consciousness of contingency and as a sense of the romantic project of self-creation constitutes only their private identity. Irony is also a serious matter for Rorty as the most important thinker on irony in contemporary philosophy. And his answer to the problem, unsolved since Romanticism, of  On the existential dimension of the private project of self-creation, and more generally on its important relation to Sartre’s existentialism, see esp. CIS, pp.  99 and already PMN, pp. 361–362, 373–378. 2

40

5  The Liberal Ironist as Embodiment of the Vision of a Practical Life Balance…

how far it may go is to privatize it. Originality and radicalism are important in art but dangerous in politics, so irony is declared a private virtue in order to protect democracy: “Irony seems inherently a private matter.” (CIS, p. 87). Rorty does emphasize the connection of irony with flexibility and tolerance. Irony as an awareness of contingency protects – under favorable (economic and social) conditions  – against all forms of fanaticism and fundamentalism (PZ, p.  180; EHO, pp.  151–152, 158). Irony, however, does not, according to Rorty, ground solidarity. Rather, he addresses at length its “dark side.” This consists primarily in the danger of cruelty through humiliation that emanates from the project of linguistic self-creation through redescription: “Redescription often humiliates.” (CIS, p. 90) According to Rorty, the ironist’s pursuit of autonomy through narrative self-creation not only inheres a tendency toward elitism and indifference to the suffering of non-poets. Rather, it even makes her susceptible to the seduction to cruelty. There is always the possibility of “cruel aesthetes” (CIS, p. 157, see pp. 89– 91, 144, 167–168). In Rorty’s utopia, therefore, the limit of irony is the principle of avoiding cruelty in order to protect the public from the ironists. The figure of the strong poet is also thus virtually domesticated. This “domestication” is to allow the combination of private romanticism and public solidarity. Rortys defends romantic aestheticism by privatizing it: “Privatize the Nietzsche-Sartre-Foucault attempt at authenticity and purity.” (CIS, p. 117; see EHO, p. 194). The liberal ironist is the “embodiment” of Rorty’s liberal conception of difference in politics. The precondition of her combination of private irony and public solidarity is that her concluding vocabulary is split into a (large) private and a public part. Rorty’s ideal citizens have reconciled themselves to the fact that their final vocabulary is not an organic structure, but a patchwork of these two parts. The two together constitute their identity-without having any particular relationship to each other (CIS, pp. 92, 100, 120). Liberal ironists possess: the ability to distinguish the question of whether you and I share the same final vocabulary from the question of whether you are in pain. Distinguishing these questions make it possible to distinguish public from private questions, questions about pain from questions about the point of human life, the domain of the liberal from the domain of the ironist. It thus makes it possible for a single person to be both. (CIS, p. 198, see p. 73; ORT, p. 322, SL, pp. 31–32).

Rorty’s ideal citizens regard their project of linguistic self-creation, and a fortiori the pursuit of sublimity, as irrelevant to the sphere of politics. In the latter, they are concerned only with the expansion of (communicative) solidarity and with a democratic experimentalism within the existing liberal institutions. This is characterized by pragmatic compromises and short-term reforms. Democratic politics for them

5.2 Ironism and Liberal Ethnocentrism: The Vision of a Practical Life Balance

41

consists in the search for consensus within their own community of justification on the balancing of the “needs for peace, wealth, and freedom” and on concrete institutional arrangements “on how to equalize opportunities for self-creation ” (CIS, p. 85, see pp. 63, 173–175; PCP, pp. 102–103, PA, p. xxvii). But why should potentially cruel irony stop at the boundary of private and public? Rorty’s answer to this question is the liberal enclosure of irony through a kind of marriage of ironism and ethnocentrism. The liberal ironist’s solidarity is a matter of her practical identity, acquired as a loyal member of her liberal identification community. Her loyalty to the contingent prohibition of cruelty is a result of her being embedded in liberal culture. She identifies with the ethical justification community to which she feels she belongs. Even if she knows that her liberal sense of moral obligation is historically contingent, this does not change the fact that this sense determines her public identity and thus her actions. Rorty conceives the ideal citizen of his ironic liberalism as both an ironist and a liberal ethnocentrist. She is distinguished by the fact that she has said goodbye to the immature and dangerous need for absolute validity and no longer seeks to escape the inescapable ethnocentrism of justification. Insight into the contingency of the moral vocabulary of her liberal “ethnicity,” and thus of her conscience, are linked in the liberal ironist to commitment to the goals of that vocabulary: “[T]he citizens of my liberal utopia would be people [...] who combined commitment with a sense of the contingency of their own commitment.” (CIS, p. 61, see p. 46). The liberal ironist keeps her desire for autonomy qua narrative self-creation separate from her desire to diminish cruelty. For her, the two parts of her final vocabulary are incommensurable. She has accepted that the search for a more comprehensive metavocabulary that would succeed in synthesizing the two parts through a theory of human nature or rationality is futile: “[T]here is no way to bring self-creation together with justice together at the level of theory.” (CIS, p. xiv, emphasis added, see CIS, pp. xiv–xvi, 120–121; PSH, p. 13) Foundationalist theory’s search for this synthesis in a metavocabulary is not only potentially politically dangerous, but also unnecessary for Rorty as an instrumentalist. His pragmatist proposal for a solution consists in a peaceful coexistence of the two incommensurable vocabularies through their “compartmentalization” (Rorty in Brandom 2000, p. 79; also, PSH, p. 270).3 Their possible compatibility is plausibilized by the tool metaphor. If, in an anti-representationalist vein, vocabularies are no longer seen as descriptions of things as they really are, then incommensurable vocabularies can simply be seen, in a relaxed pragmatic attitude, as different tools for different  Already in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Rorty insisted that the incommensurability of vocabularies does not imply their incompatibility, see PMN, p. 388. 3

42

5  The Liberal Ironist as Embodiment of the Vision of a Practical Life Balance…

p­ urposes (CIS, pp. xiv, 8, 12; also EHO, p. 158). The central practical significance of the instrumentalism outlined above, then, is that, according to Rorty, it enables the idea of pragmatic co-existence to be applied to the vocabularies of self-creation and solidarity, which are in supposed opposition. Combined with the distinction between private and public, it enables the pragmatic coexistence of irony and solidarity, of romanticism and pragmatism (PCP, pp. 34–35, 150–151). The liberal ironist possesses the ability to move back and forth between the two incommensurable parts of her final vocabulary. With this ability, she embodies Rorty’s pragmatist redefinition of wisdom. The virtue of wisdom is detached from the love of (the one) truth. He proposes to reconceive it as finding the right balance between the different spheres of human life. A wise human being, he argues, is not one that seeks to resolve contradictions by correctly representing the natural order, but one that learns to deal with them and to master the difficult balance between the conflicting demands of life. Practical wisdom, Rorty suggests, is achieved by those who succeed in the feat of the ongoing balancing act between them: I have been suggesting that the most important distinction between parts of a human life is between its private and its public parts. To be wise, I would suggest, is to find a balance between our idiosyncratic fantasies and our dealings with other people, between the language in which we talk to ourselves about ourselves and the language which we use in talking to others about our shared concerns. (SL, p. 31; see CIS, pp. xiv–xv; EHO, p. 74)

Following Isaiah Berlin’s pluralism, Rorty recommends a new, pragmatist ideal of wisdom for the (intellectual) citizens of liberal societies. It involves the thesis that the successful balance between responsibility for oneself and responsibility for others cannot be a result of theoretical insight. Only hopeless metaphysicians still expected a general theoretical answer to questions of this kind.4 According to Rorty, the realization of the utopia of a balance between the private and the public part of one’s final vocabulary is not a question of insight, but one of practical knowledge: “On my account of ironist culture, such opposites can be combined in a life, but not synthesized in a theory.” (CIS, p. 120, see pp. xiv–xv, 93) Practical measures alone could be taken to support this. These include, in addition to government concern for general education, security, and prosperity as social conditions of

 For the dramaturgically pointed juxtaposition of the liberal ironist with the liberal metaphysician, see CIS, pp. 74–78. Irony is, however, also contrasted there with the prevailing common sense in each case. Therefore, it would not be superfluous even in his anti-­fundamentalist utopia. 4

5.2 Ironism and Liberal Ethnocentrism: The Vision of a Practical Life Balance

43

liberal irony, the granting of maximum freedom for private autonomy as the primary goal of liberal politics (CIS, pp. xiv, 83–85). The liberal ironist in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity represents Rorty’s cultural-­political proposal of a new virtue for our pluralistic, liberal societies.5 His utopian vision of the good citizen radicalizes the art of separation already practiced daily in these societies. Despite all the justified individual criticisms of Rorty’s pragmatist coexistence conception of the self, it is a plausible proposal for a new self-image for the citizens of liberal societies – and they are the sole addressees of his contextualist utopia of justification.6 This proposal is not without tensions, but viable. It represents a “living option” (James 1977, p. 718) for philosophically interested liberals who are disillusioned with the efforts of foundationalist theory to date.

 For a persuasive interpretation of Rorty as a virtue liberal, see Curtis 2015.  The critique of the figure of the liberal ironist has to take into account that Rorty uses her to outline his ideal of virtue for the citizens of liberal democracies. She is a product of contextualist utopian thinking or “cultural politics”, see Müller 2014b. 5 6

6

Continue Reading Rorty: Does His Democratic Anti-authoritarianism Itself Pass the Pragmatic Test?

The utopian figure of the liberal ironist just reconstructed demonstrates the fruitfulness of the central thesis of this essential: Rorty’s thinking can be read as a combination of private romanticism and public pragmatism. In the process, the constitutive tension between these two dimensions of his neopragmatism becomes virulent again and again. Nevertheless, the attempt to establish a pragmatic coexistence between the two is convincing. The second chapter elaborated the main features of his version of neopragmatism: Anti-representationalism, naturalistic instrumentalism, holism and pluralism of justification with the motto (communicative) solidarity instead of objectivity. Rorty seeks to replace philosophy as epistemology with a philosophy of conversation that focuses solely on the practice of justification. In doing so, his transformative claim was most evident in his abandonment theory of truth. The third chapter introduced the strong romantic dimension of Rorty’s neopragmatism. Its key points are: the human being as a creator of language and imagination as a motor of cultural progress, the apotheosis of the future and the central motif of hope, the image of cultural history as a history of metaphors, and the ideal of the strong poet. Accordingly, the proposed interpretation of this essential is: Rorty’s thought is a fragile combination of pragmatism and romanticism. This guiding thesis and the transformative claim characteristic of Rorty’s neopragmatism as cultural politics were explored in greater depth in the fourth chapter. It was made plausible by means of a sketch of his liberal utopia in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. In this anti-fundamentalist utopia with the motto “freedom instead of truth”, irony and solidarity are combined. This is based on Rorty’s key practical distinction between private and public.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2022 M. Müller, Richard Rorty: A Short Introduction, essentials, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-38838-6_6

45

46

6  Continue Reading Rorty: Does His Democratic Anti-authoritarianism Itself…

The main figure of this utopia, the liberal ironist was the subject of chapter five. She embodies Rorty’s difference conception of ethics and politics. Her (self-)irony stands for contingency consciousness and autonomy through linguistic self-­ creation. As an ironist and liberal ethnocentrist, her ideal is a practical life balance between a private, romantic ethic of linguistic self-creation and a public, pragmatic ethic of solidarity. In this introduction, the transformative aspiration characteristic of Rorty’s neopragmatism has been emphasized. It has already become clear in his treatment of the question of truth. Rorty does not want to reconstruct our linguistic practice, but to change it. His long-term goal is as follows: the potentially politically dangerous image of the human being as a recognizer of entities and as a seeker of truth is to be bidden farewell by the romantic and at the same time pragmatist redescription as a (linguistically) creative being and as a cooperating being that aims at solidarity. Rorty’s main argument for this is that this new self-image fits better with the values and institutions of democracy (CIS, pp. 44–45, 197). With this change of level of argumentation away from philosophy and towards (cultural) politics, he also avoids self-contradiction. For Rorty draws the consequence of his recommended shift towards an instrumentalist vocabulary. His consistent response to the charge of self-contradiction consists in a pragmatic justification of his neopragmatism. He does not assert the truth of his redescription, but its theoretical and, above all, practical usefulness (TP, p. 58; see PSH, p. 66).1 Behind this assertion is the driving impulse for Rorty’s transformative redescription. His pragmatism is a democratic anti-authoritarianism (PA, pp. xxxiii, 1–2). It is a “militant anti-authoritarianism” (Rorty in Brandom 2000, p. 376) that fights against any idea of non-human authority. For Rorty, the representationalist philosophy he criticizes is a form of authoritarianism because it is directed toward an authority beyond discourse: “I regard the need for world-directedness as a relic of the need for authoritative guidance.” (TP, p.  208) “Truth,” “objectivity,” “nature,” and “reality” are only philosophical surrogates of God, he argues. Rorty’s point is to leave all these “obsequious Names of God” (PCP, p. 134) behind and to stop feeling responsible to a non-human authority (among others PA, p. 1; CIS, pp. 21–22, 189; TP, p. 54). Rorty understands his linguistic pragmatism, with its focus on the common practice of justification, as an emancipatory alternative. The strong ethico-political motive for his transformative project is a “deep humanism”  The theoretical benefit of his neopragmatism, according to Rorty, lies in ending the endless and sterile debates of representationalism, especially in the rejection of skepticism that it makes possible. Moreover, he argues, it makes it possible to finally reconcile our moral self-­ image with Darwinism (et al. PSH, pp. 65–66). 1

6  Continue Reading Rorty: Does His Democratic Anti-authoritarianism Itself…

47

(Bernstein 2010, p. 201). His cultural-political goal is a radical secularization or “de-divinization” of our democratic culture (CIS, pp. 45; see PA, p. xxvii). In it, no non-human authority beyond the human consensus is sought and recognized any more. Human consensus alone is authority in all public affairs (among others PA, pp. xxxii–xxxiii, PAK, p.  62). Rorty’s humanist philosophy of conversation has communicative solidarity as its supreme ideal, and its ultimate goal is to keep the conversation of culture going (already PMN, p. 377–379). And his utopia is a culture in which conversation has replaced truth as the normative guiding idea. Rorty understands his anti-authoritarian pragmatism as a continuation of the Reformation and the Enlightenment. He aims at a world-historical change of self-­ image for the citizens of the Western democracies (TP, p.  132). This startlingly ambitious claim as “a doctor of the modern soul” must first be taken seriously (Putnam 1992, p. 20; see Habermas 1999, p. 235; 2008, pp. 17–18). It is central to an understanding of Rorty’s work. But is his transformative redescription of language, of man, and of liberal democracy really better for its values? What does it mean for the political practice and for the self-understanding of its citizens if we were to engage in his proposed experiment with a new self-image in the guise of a combination of romantic self-reliance and pragmatist solidarity? This essential concludes with a suggestion for further reading of Rorty. Provided one finds his pragmatist combination of romanticism and pragmatism plausible, one should tentatively apply the pragmatic criterion to his transformative redescription itself. Beyond all legitimate criticisms of the coherence of his position, one should examine whether the most cogent objections to Rorty do not arise from an immanent test. In this way, the criterion of pragmatic proving emphasized by him as a neopragmatist himself is taken seriously. According to the pragmatic method, ideas and theories are to be judged by their consequences for practice. By looking at the “cash value” of theories for practice, endless philosophical disputes are to be settled. The central meaning-critical question here is: what practical difference would our theories make (James 1977, pp. 377–378). To take the Rorty debate a step further, then, the proposal is to ask, with the classics of pragmatism, about the consequences or the “fruits” (Dewey 1984, p. 176; James 1977, p. 380) of Rorty’s redescription of liberalism: does his vision of democratic anti-authoritarianism pass the pragmatic test? Is it really conducive

48

6  Continue Reading Rorty: Does His Democratic Anti-authoritarianism Itself…

to the values and institutions of liberal democracy?2 Rorty himself would welcome a pragmatic political turn in the conversation about his work. That in the process his redescription of liberalism itself would be transformed is, from Rorty’s point of view, only to be welcomed: The ironist [...] will not be bothered by the thought that his own redescriptions of the past will be grist for his successors’ redescriptions; his attitude toward his successors is simply “good luck to them.” (CIS, p. 101–102).

 For a pragmatic test proposed here, based on the expected consequences of its redescription for the political practice of our liberal democracies, see the third part of Müller 2014a. The result there is: corrections are necessary both for reasons of theory strategy and from the standpoint of liberal practice. But these are also possible, while retaining the basic conception and anti-authoritarian intention of Rorty’s transformative thinking. 2

 ppendix A. What You Learned from This A Essential

• Rorty’s version of neopragmatism is characterized by two dimensions: a radical pragmatist dimension and a strong romantic dimension. • His alternative to representationalism is a philosophy of conversation with a focus on the practice of justification and communicative solidarity. • Rorty’s transformative claim is evident in his abandonment of truth theory with the motto: justification instead of truth. • Rorty wants to transform our linguistic practices in the service of democracy. His humanistic motive is a democratic anti-authoritarianism. • The utopia of a post-metaphysical liberal society in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity is the political concretization of Rorty’s cultural-political project. • The civic ideal of the liberal ironist embodies a practical balance of private romanticism and public pragmatism.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2022 M. Müller, Richard Rorty: A Short Introduction, essentials, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-38838-6

49

References

Quoted Writings of Richard Rorty AOC Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-century America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. CIS Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989. CP Consequences of Pragmatism. Essays: 1972–1980. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982. EHO Essays on Heidegger and Others. Philosophical Papers. Vol. 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. HSE Hoffnung statt Erkenntnis. Eine Einführung in die pragmatische Philosophie. Übers. v. Joachim Schulte. Wien: Passagen, 1994. ORT Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth. Philosophical Papers. Vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. PA Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism. Ed. Eduardo Mendieta. Foreword by Robert B. Brandom. Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press. PCP Philosophy as Cultural Politics: Philosophical Papers, Vol. 4. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. PF Philosophy & the Future. In Rorty and Pragmatism: The Philosopher Responds to his Critics, ed. Hermann J. Saatkamp, Jr., 197–205, 230. Nashville, TN/London: Vanderbilt University Press, 1995. PMN Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979. PP Philosophy as Poetry. Introduction by Michael Bérubé. Afterword by Mary V.  Rorty. Charlottesville und London: University of Virginia Press, 2016. PSH Philosophy and Social Hope. New York: Penguin, 1999. PZ Philosophie & die Zukunft. Essays. Übers. v. Matthias Grässlin et. al. Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 2000. RR The Rorty Reader. Eds. Christopher J. Voparil and Richard J. Bernstein. Oxford: WileyBlackwell, 2010. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2022 M. Müller, Richard Rorty: A Short Introduction, essentials, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-38838-6

51

52

References

SE Die Schönheit, die Erhabenheit und die Gemeinschaft der Philosophen. Mit einem Kommentar von Albrecht Wellmer. Übers. v. Christa Krüger und Jürgen Blasius, Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 2000. SL Truth, Politics, and “Post-Modernism”. Spinoza Lecture 1: Is it Desirable to Love Truth? Spinoza Lecture 2: Is “Post-Modernism” Relevant to Politics? Assen: Van Gorcum Press, 1997. TCF Take Care of Freedom and Truth Will Take Care of Itself: Interviews with Richard Rorty, ed. Eduardo Mendieta. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005. TP Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, Vol. 3. New York: Cambridge, 1998.

Further Literature Cited Bacon, Michael. 2007. Richard Rorty. Pragmatism and Political Liberalism. Lanham, MD: Lexington. Bernstein, Richard J. 2010. The Pragmatic Turn. Cambridge: Polity. Brandom, Robert. Ed. 2000. Rorty and His Critics. Oxford: Blackwell. Curtis, William M. 2015. Defending Rorty. Pragmatism and Liberal Virtue. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Dewey, John. 1984. The Quest for Certainty. In The Later Works, 1925-1953: Volume 4: 1929, ed. Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Habermas, Jürgen. 1999. Wahrheit und Rechtfertigung. Philosophische Aufsätze. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp. Habermas, Jürgen. 2008. Ach, Europa. Kleine politische Schriften XI. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp. James, William. 1977. The Writings of William James: A Comprehensive Edition, ed. John J. McDermott. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Janack, Marianne. Ed. 2010. Feminist Interpretations of Richard Rorty. University Park, PA: Penn State University Press. Müller, Martin. 2014a. Private Romantik, öffentlicher Pragmatismus? Richard Rortys transformative Neubeschreibung des Liberalismus. Bielefeld: Transcript. Müller, Martin. 2014b. Richard Rortys Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989). Die begründungstheoretische Verbindung von Utopie und Ironie. In Idealstaat oder Gedankenexperiment? Zum Staatsverständnis in den klassischen Utopien, ed. Thomas Schölderle, 287–304. Baden-Baden: Nomos. Müller, Martin. 2017. From Irony to Robust Serenity – Pragmatic Politics of Religion after Rorty. Contemporary Pragmatism 14 (3): 334–349. Müller, Martin. 2019. Richard Rorty und das kommunitarische Denken. In Handbuch Kommunitarismus, ed. Walter Reese-Schäfer, 301–318. Wiesbaden: Springer VS. Müller, Martin. Ed. Forthcoming. Handbuch Richard Rorty. Wiesbaden: Springer VS. Nagl, Ludwig. 1998. Pragmatismus. Frankfurt a. M./New York: Campus. Putnam, Hilary. 1992. Realism with a Human Face, ed. James Conant. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Putnam, Hilary. 1995. Pragmatism: An Open Question. Oxford: Blackwell.

References

53

Ramberg, Bjørn T. 2014. Irony’s Commitment: Rorty’s Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. The European Legacy. Toward New Paradigms 19 (2): 144–162. Reese-Schäfer, Walter. 2006. Richard Rorty zur Einführung. Hamburg: Junius. Sandbothe, Mike. 2000. Die pragmatische Wende des linguistic turn. In Die Renaissance des Pragmatismus. Aktuelle Verflechtungen zwischen analytischer und kontinentaler Philosophie, ed. Mike Sandbothe, 96–126. Weilerswist: Velbrück. Tartaglia, James. 2007. Rorty and the Mirror of Nature. London: Routledge. Voparil, Christopher J. 2010. General Introduction. In The Rorty Reader, eds. Christopher J. Voparil and Richard J. Bernstein, 1–52. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.