Richard Rorty: Outgrowing Modern Nihilism [1st ed.] 9783030450571, 9783030450588

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Richard Rorty: Outgrowing Modern Nihilism Tracy Llanera

Richard Rorty: Outgrowing Modern Nihilism “Llanera discovers a unifying, utopian motive for Rorty’s criticisms of absolutism about truth, knowledge and morality. He was critical not because he was the perfect nihilist, but because he offered a path to redemption from egotism which circumvents the nihilism that afflicts absolutism, with absolutism itself portrayed as a product of egotism. This fresh and irreverently Rortian interpretation is one which Rorty himself – who rarely mentioned ‘nihilism’ – would have loved.” —James Tartaglia is Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy at Keele University, UK. He is the author of Philosophy in a Meaningless Life and Philosophy in a Technological World: Gods and Titans. “In this encouragingly ambitious and insightful book, Tracy Llanera offers an ingenious interpretation of Richard Rorty’s metaphilosophy along with his writings on egotism and redemption to show how he provides the resources for approaching nihilism as a phenomenon that need not now be overcome but can instead be outgrown. Highly recommended for anyone interested in the cultural problems of modernity.” —Alan Malachowski is a research fellow in the Centre for Applied Ethics at Stellenbosch University. He is the author of Richard Rorty, and The New Pragmatism. His edited works include Reading Rorty and The Cambridge Companion to Pragmatism. “That Rorty’s pragmatist philosophy speaks directly to questions of human meaning has taken a scholar of Llanera’s talents to discern. Llanera compellingly argues that Rorty’s conception of “pragmatist transcendence” radically reframes debates in ontotheology away from the bugbear of nihilism, and toward notions of the redemptive and the spiritual that are at home in a secular democratic culture. This book marks a tectonic shift in our understanding of Rorty’s relevance for religion and the sacred.” —Chris Voparil is on the Graduate Faculty of Union Institute & University. He is the author of Richard Rorty: Politics and Vision, the co-editor of The Rorty Reader (with Richard Bernstein) and Pragmatism and Justice (with David Rondel and Susan Dieleman). “Professor Llanera has done a great service to all of us who have worried that Rorty’s commitment to liberal versions of autonomy and self-cultivation cannot be squared with the liberatory projects he champions. The careful and deep reading she offers in this book helps us understand how Rorty’s work can contribute significantly to those projects, and is an important contribution to that discussion.” —Marianne Janack is the John Stewart Kennedy Professor of Philosophy at Hamilton College. She is the author of What We Mean By Experience (Stanford University Press) and editor of Re-reading the Canon: Feminist Interpretations of Richard Rorty (Penn State University Press).

“Rorty’s work is often approached with a focus on its metaphilosophical, epistemological, and political aspects, with the ethical-existential side of his thought neglected in the literature. Llanera’s extraordinary book offers a comprehensive reading of Rorty’s work based precisely on that plane. It values Rorty’s latest writings, identifying in them an existential turn that animates Rorty’s pragmatism. In this way, Llanera places the American philosopher in the great conversation about nihilism and spiritual transformation in the contemporary world.” —Federico Penelas is a researcher at Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET) and is professor of philosophy at Universidad de Buenos Aires and Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata. “Llanera’s book is a major contribution to understanding Rorty in a way that he himself would have endorsed. Instead of a Rorty as the enfant terrible of a version of American pragmatism that was too close to postmodern relativism, nihilism, cynicism, and narcissism, Llanera reconstructs for us a Rorty that is as much antiauthoritarian as he is a romantic polytheist who argues that our departure from the self-incurred tutelage of subordination to a god must be extended to our subordination to a view of the mind and truth that are equally totalitarian and unjustifiable, and which invariably result in nihilism. For Rorty nihilism results when our yearning for ultimate justifications shipwreck on the reefs of the contingency of our languages. All that we have is the narratives we tell ourselves about how our communities and views of the world can become more ecumenical and capacious. For Rorty, outgrowing nihilism can only come about from our sober realization that all we have is the power to persuade each other of the virtues of better stories of how we enlarged the reach of our ‘we,’ to those to whom we are now loyal.” —Eduardo Mendieta is Professor of Philosophy at Penn State University and Associate Director of the Rock Ethics Institute. He is editor of Take Care of Freedom and Truth Will Take Care of Itself: Interviews with Richard Rorty. “Tracy Llanera’s guiding idea is that we can read ‘Rorty’s philosophical project as undergirded by the theme of redemption.’ That turns out to be a surprisingly illuminating line to pursue. Articulating a Rortyan notion of redemption in response to the modern challenge of nihilism, Llanera offers a distinctive contribution to an important ongoing debate. Along the way, she shows us that the force and the urgency of famous Rortyan campaigns against representationalism and essentialism will elude us, unless we read them in the light of his enduring concern with questions of meaning and value. Llanera approaches Rorty’s oeuvre with the conversational solidarity that is the heart of hermeneutic virtue. As a result, Rorty is enriched and his readers have been done a great service” —Bjørn Torgrim Ramberg is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oslo. He is the author of Donald Davidson’s Philosophy of Language: An Introduction (Blackwell, 1989) and co-editor of Reflections and Replies: Essays on Tyler Burge (2003, The MIT Press).

Tracy Llanera

Richard Rorty: Outgrowing Modern Nihilism

Tracy Llanera University of Connecticut Storrs, CT, USA

ISBN 978-3-030-45057-1    ISBN 978-3-030-45058-8 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45058-8 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 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. Cover illustration: Jose Joya, Mountain Light, 1991, Acrylic and collage. Contributor: World History Archive / Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

To N. H. in Australia, D. C. in the Philippines, and D. K. in the United Kingdom

Acknowledgments

The ideas for the book were presented in a variety of workshops and colloquia. They include the Philosophy, Poetry, and Utopian Politics: The Relevance of Richard Rorty workshop at Cambridge University (2019), the American Philosophical Association Pacific Meeting at Vancouver (2019), the inaugural meeting of the Richard Rorty Society at Hamilton College (2016), the Australasian Society for Continental Philosophy conference at the University of New South Wales (2015), the Institute for Ethics and Society seminar at the University of Notre Dame, Australia (2015), the Conférence Mondiale des Institutions Universitaires Catholiques de Philosophie at the Australian Catholic University (2015), the Australasian Association of Philosophy conference at Macquarie University (2015), and the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy summer institute at University College Dublin (2015). I thank the audience in these venues for critically engaging my papers and for helping me shape them into a form I am proud to call my first book. Sections in Chaps. 1 and 4 have appeared in “Rethinking Nihilism: Rorty vs. Taylor, Dreyfus, Kelly,” published in Philosophy and Social Criticism, vol. 42 (2016). Parts of Chap. 2 are included in the entry “nihilism” in A Companion to Rorty, ed. Alan Malachowski (Wiley-­ Blackwell, 2020). Some sections of Chap. 4 have appeared in “Redeeming Rorty’s Private-Public Distinction,” published in Contemporary Pragmatism, vol. 13 (2016). Chapter 3 includes material from “Richard Rorty and the Concept of Redemption,” published in the International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, vol. 82 (2017). Chapter 5 is based on a vii

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co-authored article “Pragmatist Transcendence in Rorty’s Metaphilosophy” (with Nicholas Smith), which appeared in Analyse & Kritik, vol. 41 (2019). I am grateful to Marianne Janack, Alan Malachowski, Eduardo Mendieta, Federico Penelas, Bjørn Ramberg, James Tartaglia, and Chris Voparil for their commitment to Rorty’s pragmatist legacy and their support for this project. Their writings have opened doors for early career scholars like me to be creative and adventurous about doing philosophy. The tricky parts of the book were written at the University of Connecticut, where I have had fascinating conversations with scholars and graduate students at the Philosophy Department and the UConn Humanities Institute about various aspects of my work. In particular, I thank Lewis Gordon, Jane Gordon, Don Baxter, Heather Battaly, Michael Lynch, and Lynne Tirrell for creating an intellectual environment where ideas and passions can bloom in a multitude of ways. I am grateful to Áine Mahon and Ron Kuipers for their insightful feedback and enthusiasm as referees of the book. I also thank Amy Invernizzi, my editor at Palgrave Macmillan, for being a delight to work with from start to finish. My heart goes to friends and family everywhere for their generosity and support. It would have been impossible to finish this book without the love of Nick. Charlie and I are very lucky.

Contents

1 The Great Debate  1 2 Overcoming Nihilism 23 3 The Concept of Redemption 51 4 Averting Nihilism 85 5 Pragmatist Transcendence123 6 The Nihilisms of Our Time145 Bibliography153 Index163

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About the Author

Tracy  Llanera  is Assistant Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut and faculty affiliate at the UConn Asian and Asian American Studies Institute. She works at the intersection of philosophy of religion, social and political philosophy, and pragmatism, specializing on the topics of nihilism, conversion, and the politics of language.

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The Great Debate

I was suggesting that giving up on religious and Platonic hopes that one’s choices can be legitimated by nonhuman authority necessarily brings on a sort of emotional or spiritual crisis (or at least that it should bring on such a crisis). Cautioned by Schneewind, I now recognize that he is right in saying that my description of the liberal ironist does not get us beyond Mill. Neither does my distinction between the public and the private. My attempt to imagine a composite figure called “the liberal ironist”—half Mill, half-­ Nietzsche—was misguided. Schneewind is right that all antifoundationalism can do, when it comes to the moral life is “to take the nostalgia out of fallibilism.” We can, for example, tell Zarathustra that the news that God is dead is not all that big a deal. We can tell Heidegger that one can be a perfectly good example of Dasein without ever having been what he calls “authentic.” Nor should we be writhing our hands over the absence of the moral absolutes that our ancestors invoked. We should try to produce, as Schneewind puts it, “citizens raised knowing that there are limits to how far arguments about morality can go.” Richard Rorty, “Reply to J. B. Schneewind”. (2010c, 506–507)

Two assumptions undergird the contemporary debate about human meaning, the sacred, and the spiritual condition of modernity. The first assumption is that a sense of nihilism pervades modern life. In its existential sense, nihilism refers to the malaise of lostness, disorientation, and despair in the modern world. It is rooted in the claim that human life has no deep

© The Author(s) 2020 T. Llanera, Richard Rorty: Outgrowing Modern Nihilism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45058-8_1

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meaning, fundamental value, or authentic purpose—ends previously warranted by the collective belief in the God of the Judeo-Christian West. Charles Taylor, Hubert Dreyfus, and Sean Kelly, the main voices of this philosophical debate today, point out that nihilism is tied to a “human, all too human” view of meaning, or the view that godless human beings can create or reproduce (existential) meaning on their own terms (Taylor 1991, 1992, 2007, 2011; Dreyfus and Kelly 2011a, b). According to Taylor, this anthropocentric turn entails the narrowing and loss of many other “horizons of significance” beyond those of human welfare and ambition. The second assumption is that an adequate response to nihilism requires either the retrieval or revitalization of some non-human power, a power recognized across different cultures as the “sacred.” The sacred is the non-­ anthropocentric locus of a manifestation of the extraordinary and holy in contradistinction to the ordinary and the profane. Taylor, Dreyfus, and Kelly think that a modern articulation of the sacred might save us from the scourge of emptiness and despair, since encounters with the sacred are sources of existential and spiritual enrichment. What undergirds Taylor’s position is the conviction that we are not alone. Taylor draws on a variety of moral sources to show how we are part of a larger and meaningful order of existence; moreover, he thinks that the non-human iteration of these moral sources articulates the objectively  good best: “A formulation has power when it brings the source close, when it makes it plain and evident, in all its inherent force, its capacity to inspire our love, respect, or allegiance” (1991, 96). His theory of expressivism argues that the “subtler languages” of art and poetry can help us find our inner link with this larger order or map out our place as human beings in the world (Taylor 1991, 81–82; Rorty 1993, 3). In his (less substantiated) version of a renewed theism, Taylor also postulates that rekindling our relationship with God is a direction to reconsider in modernity. Meanwhile, Dreyfus and Kelly propose a version of polytheism inspired by Homer and Herman Melville. As an existential-spiritual framework, their modern polytheism presumes that the sacred is alive and thriving but is unrecognized as such today. Our culture must learn to tap its power. The sacred reveals itself in heroic, skillful, creative, and awe-inspiring events, ranging from Rudolf Nureyev’s extraordinary ballet performances, the experience of “whooshing up” with a thousand fans in a Premier League final, the act of saving a person’s life while risking one’s own, to the meticulous craft of expert sushi-­making. To ward off the threat of nihilism, our task is to learn how to be in sync with these plural manifestations of the sacred in the modern world.

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For Taylor, Dreyfus, and Kelly—hereafter referred to as the “sacred redemptionists”—redemption from nihilism requires the power of the non-anthropocentric sacred. They follow what I call the strategy of “overcoming” nihilism. While the overcoming strategy takes on various forms in the history of Western philosophy, it boils down to the view that human culture can quell the threat of nihilism by seeking the help of the non-­ human sacred. But is this overcoming strategy our only saving option in modernity? My hunch is that this orthodox approach has stifled alternative ways of thinking about the problem of modern nihilism, resulting in an impasse in the debate. In this book, I argue that the writings of the American pragmatist Richard Rorty offer a way of reframing and advancing this discussion. Rorty debated with Taylor and Dreyfus on a broad range of metaphilosophical issues since the 1970s; in their co-authored book Retrieving Realism, Taylor and Dreyfus express regret over his absence in the exchange as their “friend, adversary, and sparring partner” (2015, see preface). What Rorty can contribute to the debates on modernity and the sacred remains unexplored in contemporary scholarship. This book takes up this neglected, albeit surprising, perspective. Outgrowing Modern Nihilism offers both a critical and a constructive approach to modern nihilism. On the one hand, it serves as a critique of our traditional understanding of the problem. Challenging the dominant assumption that nihilism is a problem that human culture must overcome, the book argues that the overcoming strategy is a step backward. This approach traps us within an onto-theological framework that panders to a misguided fear of nihilism. Inspired by Rorty, the book reframes the problem in two ways. First, it argues that a reconfiguration of Rorty’s work on redemption and egotism reveals an innovative way of averting nihilism. In this account, the problem of egotism precedes the doom of nihilism, so that attending to the former could ward off the latter’s dangerous consequences from taking place. Second, the book defends the claim that a “human, all too human” culture also contains the resources to outgrow nihilism. Rorty’s metaphilosophy suggests a pragmatist approach: by adopting what I call his conception of “pragmatist transcendence,” which recommends a way of life that has shaken off the vertical onto-theological cultures of transcendental authority in favor of horizontal relationships of justification and “redemptive” commitment, human beings could jettison the threat of nihilism in the long run. If this view takes hold, it may minimize the risks of nihilism and hopefully render the problem futile in the modern world.

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Why Rorty? Rorty is far from being an obvious participant in the debates on nihilism, let alone appear as the best person to advance it. Any intellectual work involving nihilism and the sacred inevitably engages the concepts of the “universal,” “metaphysical,” “transcendent,” and “non-human,” the traditional philosophical and religious resources that Rorty dismantles in his writings. According to Jürgen Habermas, Rorty has two ends in mind in his philosophy. First, as a pragmatist, Rorty positions himself as an anti-­ metaphysical, anti-authoritarian thinker. He distrusts dogmatic foundationalism and our culture’s “conceptual obsessions of Greek philosophy and a fetishism of science that sprouted from the furrows of metaphysics” (Habermas 2008, 5). Second, as an intellectual visionary, Rorty desires a human culture fueled by an ethic of self-reliance. Rorty believes in the infinite potential of the human condition to serve, as Habermas puts it, as “the motor driving the creativity of a restless transformation of society and culture” (2008, 6). Richard Bernstein rightly sums up Rorty’s pragmatism as stirred by the singular force of the maxim that “there is nothing that we can rely on but ourselves and our fellow human beings” (2008, 118). Based on his reputation, Rorty seems ill-fit to either take part in a contemporary debate on nihilism or offer commentary on the status of modern spiritual life. But there is more to Rorty’s work than meets the eye. For instance, he has found resources to use in the concept of redemption, a religious trope deeply connected to the theme of the sacred. On the one hand, he criticizes its link to the sacred and the transcendent; on the other, he utilizes the power behind the concept to articulate his pragmatist vision. Taylor distinguishes the sacred as non-human forces located in “certain places (e.g., temples), times (e.g., feast days), actions (e.g., rituals), or people (e.g., priests, victims)” in contrast what he calls as the “merely worldly” (2011, 118). In religion, these examples of the sacred function to elevate the ordinary human constitution and sublimate everyday experience. The sacred is also connected to the transcendent, a concept that originates from the monotheistic scaffold of Axial religions. Karl Jaspers first introduced the notion of the Axial age in the 1949 book Vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte (2016). Describing the Axial age from the eight to the third BCE as “pivotal to the spiritual development of humanity,” Karen Armstrong cites various Axial traditions from four distinct regions:

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Confucianism and Daoism in China, Hinduism and Buddhism in India, monotheism in Israel, and philosophical rationalism in Greece (2006, xii). These traditions distinguished “the central monotheistic idea—through Plato’s metaphysical philosophy, the Buddha’s conception of Nirvana, and various religious notions of Eternal Life—that there is a transcendent Divine good beyond everyday well-being” (Dreyfus and Kelly 2011b, 196). The narrative of redemption features significantly in the doctrines that these Axial traditions inspired. Christianity, for example, paints human beings as “fallen” or “suffering” beings that need transcendence from natural, moral, and spiritual evils, a process that culminates in a final rendezvous with God. The Christian version of redemption is Dante’s Paradiso. Rorty is critical of this religious idea of redemption. In his 2005 Turin lecture entitled “An Ethics for Today,” he explicitly states that redemption, conceived as taking place in moments “when reason conquers passion, or when grace defeats sin,” is a bad idea (2010a, 13). The religious notion of redemption maintains that human beings are composed of a mortal body and an immortal soul. It presupposes a dualistic account where the animal needs of the body are secondary to the soul’s spiritual interests. In order to be saved, the higher, spiritual interests of the latter should triumph over the lower, animal needs of the former. Rorty argues that this salvation story is a wrong turn in our self-conception. For him, we “are not degraded beings, not immaterial souls imprisoned in material bodies, not innocent souls corrupted by original sin” (2010a, 13). What makes this religious dualism wrong in a pragmatist sense is that it makes human beings accountable to a divine being or to a supernatural authority. As Rorty points out in his interpretation of John Dewey’s view of sin and religious authoritarianism: To have a sense of Sin, it is not enough to feel guilty. It is not enough to be appalled by the way human beings treat each other, and by your own capacity for vicious actions. You have to believe that there is a Being before whom we should humble ourselves. This Being issues commands which, even if they seem arbitrary and unlikely to increase human happiness, must be obeyed. When trying to acquire a sense of Sin, it helps a lot if you can manage to think of a specific sexual or dietary practice as forbidden, even though it does not seem to be doing anybody any harm. It also helps to anguish about whether you are calling the divine Being by the name he or she prefers. (1999, 8)

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While the idol of God has been used to articulate traditional possibilities for human happiness as well as moral and spiritual development, Rorty believes that the overarching nature of religious authority is doing human culture more harm than good, especially today. Following Nietzsche’s philosophical anthropology, he thinks that we are simply clever animals whose primary need is to be made happier. With Deweyan ethics, he also argues that human beings ought to be morally accountable to each other instead. It is fortunate that we are now, slowly but sure-footedly, uncoupling ourselves from the misguided desires that the onto-theological tradition has rammed into us, from the unquenchable thirst for eternity to the ideal of the summum bonum according to Rorty. It is easy to conclude on the basis of this discussion that Rorty’s capsizing of the nature and responsibility of human beings, alongside his pragmatic deflation of metaphysical and religious principles, means that he holds no spiritual aspirations at all. This accusation is justified if one equates spirituality to religious transcendence—if spirituality is understood as a yearning to achieve immortality in an immaterial world ad infinitum. But Rorty has a concept of the spiritual, and it has something to do with humanity’s relationship with the future (among other things that will be discussed in the next section). For instance, he argues that while onto-­ theological transcendence is not something he believes in, his brand of atheism is based on “an exalted sense of new possibilities opening up for finite beings” (2010a, 14). This romantic and spiritual hope for a better world is something he shares in common with modern philosophers in the liberal, utilitarian, critical, and pragmatist traditions. Rorty thinks that they all profess a general hope for “a world in which human beings live far happier lives than they live at the present time” (2010a, 14). He agrees with J. S. Mill and William James that the right beliefs to have and the right actions to perform are the ones that promote human happiness best. Rorty also sympathizes with Karl Marx’s point that instead of contemplating about the afterlife, we should devote all our energies to increasing the amount of happiness in the world instead (2007, 4). Recognizing that there are many possible projects of human fulfillment, Rorty upholds a pluralistic vision of utopia. He follows Mill in heeding Wilhelm von Humboldt’s classic liberalist tenet that “the grand leading principle… is the absolute and essential importance of human development in its richest diversity” (Mill 1869, see epigraph). Rorty recognizes that “there are diverse, conflicting, but equally valuable forms of human life” and that persons should be able to admire and abide by the ideals of their moral

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and spiritual heroes (2007, 29). He argues that democracy is the most suitable political system that we have imagined so far that can accommodate this pluralism. At their best, people and governments ought to recognize that their practical responsibility is to keep a free and democratic space alive, where various and multiple resources for human flourishing are available. In the world Rorty envisages, “everybody gets to worship his or her symbol of ultimate concern, unless worship of that symbol interferes with the pursuit of happiness by his or her fellow citizens” (2007, 40). Together with Dewey and Walt Whitman, he dreams of a future society where “the possibility of as yet undreamt of, ever more diverse, forms of human happiness” will come to fruition (2007, 41). But the secularization of culture is not the end of the redemption story for Rorty. While he is suspicious of the religious architectonic of redemption and unproblematically entertains a conception of spiritual life in a secular world, he also capitalizes on the idea that redemption is important; indeed, for him, human beings need saving. In 2001, Rorty wrote “Redemption from Egotism: James and Proust as Spiritual Exercises” as a response to Harold Bloom’s literary criticism and a rejoinder to Martha Nussbaum’s literary ethics.1 Here Rorty attacks what he calls egotists or self-satisfied individuals. At their most severe, egotists are intellectually, morally, and spiritually rigid in their thinking and action. Rorty argues that egotism needs correction and that reading literature can help redeem egotists from their cognitive and behavioral rigidity. Exposure to literature cultivates the capacity to adopt different perspectives. It also invites an engagement in imaginative reflection beyond everyday experience. Rather than religion and philosophy, Rorty sees literature as the most invaluable tool in steering our culture to “a decrease in social and individual egotism, and increased flexibility and sympathy in the making of moral decisions” (2010b, 42). In 2004, Rorty published “Philosophy as a Transitional Genre,” where he rehearses a cultural history of redemption in the West. Rorty narrates that the West’s first redemptive principle was man’s relationship with God, the guarantor of universal truth, meaning, and salvation. God was eventually dethroned by the Truth of philosophy, a cultural 1  The Rorty Reader states that “Redemption from Egotism” was published in Spanish and German before coming to print in English posthumously and that a draft of the work in English was available in Rorty’s Stanford webpage for a short time. There is a discrepancy here, for while the title and the abstract of the article in Telos were in Spanish, the text was written in English (see Rorty 2001, 2003).

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shift heralded by the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution. Truth’s goal was to decipher the blueprint of reality. At present, the Truth is being nudged over by the Imagination. The modern imagination aspires to enlarge our acquaintance with humanity and enrich ethical relations. Rorty argues that a culture of imagination can serve the redemptive purposes previously ministered by religion and truth. He calls this a literary culture, a culture where meaningful human relationships are “mediated by human artifacts such as books and buildings, paintings and songs” (2010b, 478). For Rorty, the literary culture may usher a world motivated by the ideal of human solidarity. Rorty’s contemporary use of redemption in these works has three interesting implications. First, it implies that human beings need redemption from various man-made problems, such as their cultures of egotism or their complex and problematic relationships with religion and science. Second, it suggests that instead of religion, the literary culture holds the exclusive power to deliver a modern form of redemption, in a manner suitable to a liberal, secular context. While as early as 1967 Rorty had already suggested that literature is crucial to the development of modern morality, his later works articulate more clearly how the power of literature and the imagination can redeem human beings (1982, 60–71). Third, Rorty’s version of redemption has a deliberate function in formulating his pragmatist vision. Even if he finds the demise of religion in favor of secularization celebratory, he uses redemption, a primary component of religious language, to retain the spiritual power tendered by religion. He redirects the power of redemption toward altogether new and secular ends. This move suggests that this religious concept is worth reconfiguring if it can diagnose or address something lacking or wrong or terrible in the world today. As we shall see later on, Rorty’s unique use of redemption disputes and refashions the terms of the debates on modern nihilism and the sacred. It is precisely the counterintuitiveness of his participation that makes him useful in the discussion.

The “Spiritual” Apart from the concept of redemption, situating Rorty effectively as a conversation partner in the “Great Debate” also entails mapping the common ground he shares with the sacred redemptionists. Their common ground is the recognition of the importance of the “spiritual” in human life. Broadly put, the concept of the spiritual has something to do with our encounters with self-transcending sources, objects, experiences, or

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communities of existential meaning and self-transformation. The value of the spiritual appears frequently in Rorty’s later works. While he rejects the otherworldly and the marginal conceptions of the sacred, he leaves ample room for other spiritual experiences, at least when being galvanized takes on a secular form. For instance, Rorty judges the devotion of Christian believers electrified by the mystic texts of Bonaventure and Ignatius Loyola as akin to the spiritual commitment of secularists dedicated to Henry James and Marcel Proust. In both cases, readers treat their beloved texts with a hallowed sense of importance. These writings intensified or transformed  their experience of life, leading them to form  cult-like religious and literary communities. However, Rorty also highlights their differences: the hope of the religious intellectual “is for union with God, with something sublime, mysterious, unconditioned, belonging to another world”; meanwhile, the objective for the intellectual who exalts James and Proust is to make life cohere as a work of art, fueled by the hope that “she will someday be able to look back and bring everything together into some sort of pattern—her loves and her rivalries, her fantasies and her defeats, herself in youth and in old age” (2010b, 405). In other words, we can treat the religious yearning for sublimity and the literary ambition for self-maturity as charged with a comparable level of spiritual aspiration. While Rorty has more in common with the latter in terms of his edifying relationships with poetry and prose, he considers both as meaningful forms of human redemption (see Rorty 2010d). Spiritual power is also felt in moments of creative solidarity, according to Rorty. He engages this idea in his review essay of Taylor’s Sources of the Self (1995, 197–201). One of Taylor’s arguments is that a “heightened, more vibrant quality of life” finds vivid expression in epiphanic works of art in modernity (1992, 373). Epiphanies in art—that is, of instances of subjective, sacred-like experience wrought by the creative imagination—can function as an alternative or even a replacement for religion, if we take them to serve as the locus of our moral sources in the modern world. When it comes to our contemporary sources of morality, in the words of Nicholas Smith, “the modern sense of belonging to a meaningful reality, of having a meaningful reality, takes unprecedented imaginative forms” (2002, 223). Two points are relevant for us here. First, Taylor’s expressivism contends that modern epiphanies are most potently derived from the personal articulation of key figures in the West. Taylor’s list includes Romantic poets and post-Romantic and

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modernist poets, novelists, and thinkers, ranging from Samuel Taylor Coleridge to Charles Baudelaire, John Constable to J. M. W. Turner, Marquis de Sade to Friedrich Nietzsche, and James Joyce to Ezra Pound—“an exclusionary few,” in Rorty’s count. More than creating great art, Taylor believes that their works disclose an ontological reality that is “personally indexed” to the artist (Smith 2002, 220). Ultimately, Rorty judges that the spiritual power they offer are reductive and privatized. If modern epiphanies were exclusive to these elitist languages and mediums, he fears that their character would undermine the spiritual pursuit of democratic happiness. Second, Rorty, as a pragmatist, has a problem with Taylor believing that what can satisfy our spiritual urges, following phenomenological tropes, is something “found,” or “revealed,” or “given,” rather than what we have “made” or “achieved” by virtue of being human. Rorty observes that the only thing that Taylor “seems willing to count as a transaction between the world and ourselves is something which the world initiates—a response to a call from something already there in the world” (1995, 200). Taylor’s view is that the external world makes authentic claims on us, so that the proper response to its demands is something like “Heideggerian and Rilkean gratitude” (Rorty 1995, 200). To experience the sacred in the modern world, we need the redeeming input of something non-human in Taylor’s narrative. On the first idea, Rorty contends that spiritual force need not be tied to the subjective majesty of privatized or reductive languages. We are self-­ interpreting beings, and in his view, our “self-interpretations are at their best when they are social” (1995, 199). Rorty thinks that epiphanies of “utopian social democratic political thought” rage with a spiritual power that is collective and secular. We can mobilize the strength in Whitman’s Americans, John Keats’s “Grand Democracy of Forest Trees,” or Hans Blumenberg’s vision of The Glorious Social Future to vivify the hope for social progress and the amelioration of humankind (1998, 125–40). This response is related to Rorty’s rejoinder to the second idea. Unlike Taylor, he doubts if our saving grace lies in any non-human source, believing that we ought to rid ourselves of religious nostalgia (a recurring theme in Rorty’s work). He follows what he considers as the pragmatist faith of James, Dewey, and George Herbert Mead. Their prime model, the great American poet Whitman, wields the power of art the best to animate the love for one’s nation. In the words of Nicholas Gaskill, “Whitman’s belief—powerful enough to energize the aesthetic thought of a

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philosophic movement—was that a creative poetic style might, within a full-­bodied aesthetic experience, give rise to new political subjects and new civic communities” (2008, 176). For pragmatists like Rorty, shudders of awe and evocations of a better, pluralist future flow from this Whitmanian conviction. In Rorty’s view, the future is an open-ended project  and  it matters that we are roused to imagine and build it with religious zeal. Of interest here is that Rorty acknowledges the significance of employing the vocabulary of religious tradition for the purpose of building a better world, pointing out that the social ideals that secular humanists like himself champion are often cast in religious terms (2010b, 457). And with good reason: we communicate the spiritual force of secularized ideas like human dignity or social justice more clearly when we describe their worth as “sacred,” “universal,” and “inviolable.” Using these descriptive Christian terms underscores not only their importance but also their indispensability. Rorty also notes that in articulating the ideal of egalitarian hope, The New Testament is one of the few historical productions that continue to inspire the vision of a morally edifying world. Regarding it in the same light as The Communist Manifesto, Rorty describes the Christian text as “the founding document of a movement that has done much for human freedom and human equality” (1999, 203). Contrary to the impression he often gives in his writings, Rorty also does not completely dismiss theism in modernity. Notwithstanding his opposition against traditional religion, it is worth mentioning that there is a radical vision of monotheist religion that Rorty restates as hospitable to the concern of secularization. This view involves Gianni Vattimo’s revisionist account of Christianity, which surmises that the process of secularization acquires an “extraordinary meaning” in the contemporary age when linked to the long-standing and figurative story of Christian redemption. Vattimo argues that: Secularization is, more fundamentally, an essential aspect of the history of salvation, as other modern philosophers saw, and long before them too, Joachim of Fiore. If the Bible speaks of being as an event, and of God as the one who abandons his own transcendence, first by creating the world, and then by redeeming it through the Incarnation and the Cross—through kenosis—then the desacralizing phenomena characteristic of modernity are the authentic aspects of the history of salvation. (2003, 35)

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While Rorty has his deep disagreements with Vattimo’s religious views, he favors this reading of modern theism. Secularization, in this sense, is constitutive of the genuine historical experience of religion. It is the proper endpoint of religious salvation. Rorty interprets Vattimo as sharing a stance akin to his ideal of private redemption, averring that “Vattimo seems to be aiming at such a privatized religion when he describes the secularization of European culture as the fulfillment of the promise of the Incarnation, considered as kenosis, God’s turning everything over to us” (2005, 38). This view encourages the interpretation that the theological idea of “God’s self-emptying” and the human attempt of realizing that “love as the only law” are the same and that this point licenses Vattimo to regard “all the great unmaskers of the West, from Copernicus and Newton to Darwin, Nietzsche, and Freud, as carrying out works of love” (Rorty 2005, 38). In stating that “the gradual movement within Christianity in recent centuries in the direction of the social ideals of the Enlightenment is a sign of the gradual weakening of the worship of God as power and its gradual replacement with the worship of God as love,” Rorty is endorsing the view that theistic religion is at its most progressive when it follows the secular road toward spiritual maturity (2005, 56). Human beings, no longer subservient to the laws and commandments of an angry and tyrannical Father, can take charge of their lives as responsible and mature adults in this new world. Secularization also enables people to engage their relationship with God as outside the arena of truth. This intimate connection swings free of the need for universal justification for legitimacy or salvation; redemption here is existential, rather than epistemic in nature. Vattimo’s interpretation of the essence of Christianity, according to Rorty, permits theists to regard God not as a master, but as a friend. While Rorty resists universalizing this view, he admires this form of religious friendship. In sum, Rorty keeps spiritual power alive for purposes of existential meaning, for vivifying and strengthening democratic solidarity, and for the secularization of human culture. These purposes have nothing to do with the malaise of nihilism that sacred redemptionists are so fearful of. But what exactly is so frightening about nihilism, and why should it matter in our conception of the modern spiritual condition?

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Spiritual Disjointedness We can answer the question of what is at stake in the current debates on nihilism and modernity by exploring the phenomenon that Taylor calls being “spiritually out of joint.” In “The Moral Topography of the Self,” Taylor observes that across various cultures, there are human beings who, apart from familiar physical, mental, and emotional pains and frustrations, also suffer from alienation and intense existential meaninglessness. Persons often conceptualize this experience as being “lost, or condemned, or exiled, or unintegrated, or without meaning, or insubstantial, or empty” (1988, 200). Taylor also states that: Corresponding to each of these descriptions of breakdown is some notion of what it would be to overcome it, to have integration, or full being, to be justified, or found, or whatever. But more, there is a notion of ‘where’ this integration, fulness, etc., might come from, cosmic order, or identity with Brahman, or unity with God, or harmony with nature, or the attainment of rational insight, or finding the strength to say “yes” to everything one is, or hearing the voice of nature within, or coming to accept finitude, or…, again the list stretches on indefinitely. (1988, 200)

Paradigm cases of spiritual disjointedness are abundant in religion, history, literature, even pop culture. Examples include Siddhartha Gautama’s quest for Enlightenment, Martin Luther’s alienation from the Catholic Church, Ivan’s rehearsal of The Grand Inquisitor in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov, and Donald Draper’s deep dissatisfaction with a life of deceit and material discontent in the television series Mad Men. Spiritually disjointed persons exist in an uneasy state, unable to feel at home or to find meaning and fulfillment in their respective cultures. Following Taylor’s view, one can fall victim to existential detachment and breakdown regardless of one’s culture and status, as seen in these cases of a Shakya prince in ancient India, a monk in the medieval ages, a young rationalist in fictional Russia, or an advertising man in twentiethcentury, post-war United States of America. Accounts of redemption address the phenomenon of spiritual disjointedness in its many different forms. Two observations are relevant: first, while spiritual disjointedness is a recognizable human experience in different cultures, there is no universal form of redemption that can attend to all of its variations. The saving power, for Taylor, is context dependent. Second, each human culture houses the resources for the redemption that suits its needs. If

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traditional powers or conceptions of the sacred are ineffective in serving their redemptive purposes, then it becomes an important task for us to search for salvific clues that are given and available in a certain culture. In the writings of Taylor, Dreyfus, and Kelly, nihilism stands out as the experience of spiritual disjointedness unique to modernity. It is tied to an anthropocentric view of human life or the extreme view that all truths, meanings, and values are humanly projected. In The Ethics of Authenticity, Taylor observes that the dark side of individualism, informed by instrumental reason and the atomist model of freedom, has steered Western culture toward anthropocentrism: the idea that there is nothing else more important than upholding the principle of radical freedom and the quest for self-determination. Taylor argues that anthropocentrism is the greatest danger related to the rise of self-centered forms of identity for two interrelated reasons: first, it narrows access to other and richer sources of meaning apart from the self, and second, it threatens to undermine all possible horizons of significance in modernity (1991, 68). If left undeterred, this egocentric position will yield a flattened world where “there aren’t very meaningful choices because there aren’t any crucial issues” (1991, 68). In All Things Shining, Dreyfus and Kelly state that the death of God in the West refers to the collapse of a “rounded, public, and shared sense that there is a single, unquestioned set of virtues—Judeo-Christian virtues—in accordance with which one’s life is properly led” (2011a, 44). The demise of the theocentric framework has given rise to the conviction that modernity’s highest triumph is human freedom. Yet the promise of liberation comes at a cost. There is reason to fear freedom: bearing full responsibility for how our lives will turn out is terrifying. The dysfunctional relationship between freedom and modern nihilism is best rendered in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996), which centers on our fascination with the distractions of contemporary life that help us escape the burden of choice. The book portrays how venerating human freedom as our generation’s sacred commitment has led to an increase in the experience of disinterest, boredom, angst, and loneliness in modernity. Freedom as a burden, according to Dreyfus and Kelly, is a “peculiarly modern phenomenon,” and what plagues “a world that no longer has any God or gods, nor even any sense of what is sacred and inviolable, to focus our understanding of what we are” (2011a, 7) is nihilism. Taylor, Dreyfus, and Kelly are interested in overcoming spiritual disjointedness in the form of nihilism, the malaise of existential vacuity, disorientation, and despair in modernity. As will be explored further in this

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book, they commit to the recovery of sacred forces (in monotheistic faith and Ancient polytheism) or the articulation of modern conceptions of the sacred. Rorty advocates a different narrative. Contra the sacred redemptionists, he argues that the existential issue we must address with urgency is not nihilism but egotism. The problem is not that we are living in de-­ spiritualized conditions but that many of us today live with a narcissistic and militant sense of self-satisfaction. Put this way, Rorty appears more concerned about moral redemption rather than salvaging spiritual meaning. His starting point and cultural ambition are also different from Taylor, Dreyfus, and Kelly. Rorty has neither a God nor gods. While he uses the concept of the spiritual in his work, he disagrees with the notion that we can attune ourselves to powers and forces beyond our human communities. He eschews any view that approximates a longing for metaphysical comfort. To confront the existential malaises of the current age—egotism, uncertainty, contingency, and even meaninglessness—we need to acknowledge that all we have is each other and that only we can redeem ourselves from ourselves. Rorty’s pragmatist position prompts the following questions: What is his overall conception of redemption? Why does he say that egotism is the human perdition we need saving from? If redeeming humanity from its egotistic affliction is important, how can we link Rorty’s view with the mainstream accounts of nihilism and redemption by Taylor, Dreyfus, and Kelly? What elements in Rorty’s vision apply to defeating nihilism, which Nietzsche touts as the “uncanniest of all guests” and the greatest threat to the human condition? Outgrowing Modern Nihilism attempts to address these concerns.

The Book I have so far summarized the contemporary debate on nihilism, where Taylor, Dreyfus, and Kelly propose a re-enchantment of human life to combat the problem of modern spiritual disjointedness. I have suggested that Rorty can advance these debates, despite initially appearing as an unlikely interlocutor in this discursive space. Executing this book’s task poses several challenges. The main concern is the fact that Rorty and the sacred redemptionists do not acknowledge a clear theoretical lineage on nihilism in their writings. No consensus about the nature of modern nihilism exists in philosophy either. Western philosophers prior to Taylor, Dreyfus, and Kelly—Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Barth, Martin Heidegger, Albert Camus, and Soren Kierkegaard—have engaged nihilism in a range

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of ways: as the ground of human existence, as a constitutive concept in their systematic theories, or as a natural conclusion of their philosophical or religious reflections. In contemporary literature, Eastern philosophy and Black Existentialism approach nihilism from different points of departure, that is, in a metaphysical sense, or in relation to the question of Being and its nature of fundamental negation (Nishitani 1982, 1990), or in a sociopolitical sense, or as a damning consequence of Western imperialism, white supremacy, and colonization, of which many of us are still paying a hefty price (West 1993; Gordon 1995; Johnson 2017; Warren 2018). Put simply, there is no agreement about what nihilism really is in the philosophical tradition. With this point in mind, this book approaches nihilism from a particular angle, offering a critical reading of modern nihilism in terms of a history of “overcoming” in Chap. 2. I structure the narrative using Nietzsche and Heidegger as its pivotal figures, since their philosophy grounds the set of conceptual assumptions about modernity, religion, and secularism that the sacred redemptionists generally share. I argue that Taylor, Dreyfus, and Kelly follow Nietzsche and Heidegger in formulating the modern status of nihilism as a “man-made” problem that human culture should overcome and that contact with the sacred can  help mend. Rorty rejects this dominant view, instead developing a curious relationship with the concept of nihilism that leads him to treat the problem differently in his writings. I also address the charge that Rorty is nihilistic in this chapter. I argue that it is misleading to profile him as an existential nihilist, since his work reveals a deep concern for existential meaning and an interest in the problem of its depreciation and loss, which the malaise of nihilism embodies in contemporary literature. The next challenge is to justify Rorty’s entry into the said debate, and the idea of redemption serves the purpose of anchoring his contribution. I reconstruct this overlooked concept in the third chapter. My claim is that redemption can be read as a motivational force behind Rorty’s philosophical project. Not only does the concept appear deliberately in his later work, but it also helps illuminate Rorty’s motivation and ambition in his pragmatism. I explain the origins of the concept of redemption and introduce two basic ideas that undergird this redemptive theme: first, that Rorty aims to direct us away from the Western tradition of metaphysical essentialism, and second, that the motivation behind his philosophical project is edification, or the enlargement and transformation of the self. I then focus on the nature of Rortyan redemption. I begin by presenting Rorty’s reconceptualization of the original, pre-philosophical religious

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redemption to a contemporary form of spiritual redemption. Rorty argues that redemptive power is expressed either through relationships (with other beings) or epistemic truths (religious belief and science). He seeks to dispose of the latter source and uphold a version of the former form. This version is suited to a literary culture, which Rorty characterizes as the best imaginable world for accommodating diverse spiritual aspirations. Finally, I articulate Rorty’s invitation to welcome a new self-image for humanity. What constitutes this change in self-conception are a greater sense of linguistic creativity, imaginative self-reliance, and future-orientedness. In Rorty’s perspective, we are obliged to own up to this kind of moral maturity and dispel our religious nostalgia to inhabit this imagined literary culture. The fourth chapter articulates Rorty’s contribution to the nihilism debate. It examines why Rorty is more interested in the problem of egotism than nihilism, unlike Taylor, Dreyfus, and Kelly. Egotism, in this reading, pertains to a way of living in the world that is conditioned by dogmatic self-certainty and self-contentment, an existential position that the authoritarian cultures of religion and philosophy have engendered and which Rorty’s anti-authoritarian pragmatism has sought to undermine. My critical reconstruction of Rorty’s work shows that his redemptive antidote to egotism is self-enlargement, a process guided by the values of selfcreation and solidarity. I argue that in the process of crafting their self-­projects and expanding their final vocabularies, human beings remain beholden, even indebted, to the contributions of other people and that these contributions are irreducible. In this reading, there is no such thing as a pure self-creator. Solidarity, more straightforwardly, is about expanding one’s “we-vocabulary,” working to embrace a wider variety of human beings and things into our horizon of care and commitment. I then present the connection between egotism and nihilism: that prior to becoming nihilists, human beings begin as egotists. I argue that by addressing the religious and philosophical egotism that precedes modern nihilism, Rorty shows a way of assuaging the horrors of nihilism before they manifest. This is a novel perspective that the accounts of Taylor, Dreyfus, and Kelly have neglected to integrate in their writings. This reading breaks the stalemate in contemporary debates around nihilism, redemption, and the sacred, since it suggests  a way in which the malaise of nihilism can be averted. After showing how human culture can undercut nihilism, I then present how the problem can be outgrown by reconstructing the rich

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conceptual resources available in Rorty’s pragmatism. I develop the concept of pragmatist transcendence in the fifth chapter. I point out that while Rorty is against the traditional ambition to transcendence, his metaphilosophy shows great respect for pre-philosophical impulses aimed at transcendence of some kind, in particular, the romantic (and indeed religious) experience of awe at something greater than oneself, and the utopian striving for a radically better world. These impulses do not disappear in Rorty’s metaphilosophy but are reshaped in a pragmatist iteration of transcendence, a version of self-enlarging, “redemptive” transcendence that is most suited to achieving Rorty’s egalitarian goals of human happiness and radical democracy. Pragmatist transcendence, an expression I admittedly have to put in Rorty’s mouth, can be characterized as horizontal (rather than vertical) and weak (rather strong), which distinguishes Rorty’s metaphilosophy from the accounts of Emmanuel Levinas and Habermas that also aspire for a post-metaphysical ambition to transcendence. This comparison with other accounts reveals that a Rortyan framework is more suited to a world that faces up to the challenges of modern secularization in comparison to projects that betray a residue of the traditional, ontotheological version of transcendence. In the conclusion, I summarize how Rorty’s pragmatist philosophy helps reframe the debates on modern nihilism by articulating the conceptual, social, and structural conditions that can help us outgrow this malaise. I also talk about the implications and limits of this reading and suggest fresh avenues for reflecting about our modern spiritual life. It is worth mentioning the interesting history behind this book. In his unpublished memorial lecture for Rorty, Dreyfus wrote: Dick always cared about the general state of the philosophical discussion. I remember back in 1994, when we were in Cerisy talking about Rorty and Habermas, I mentioned on one of our walks that I was go[i]ng to write on the relevance of Homeric Polytheism for our current cultural condition. Grinning he said, “Then I’ll write on poly-atheism. We’ll start a Great Debate.” It was a causal [casual] remark but he did it in his article, “Pragmatism as Romantic Polytheism.” In fact he beat me to the Press (2002).2 2  Correction in brackets mine. I thank Professor Hubert Dreyfus for the electronic copy of his memorial lecture for Rorty, his permission to use it in my research, his hospitality during my visit at the University of California, Berkeley, and for introducing me to Mary Varney Rorty in January 2015. Bert passed away on April 22, 2017. His passing was wittily announced as “Reports of my demise are not exaggerated” on Twitter.

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Rorty passed away in 2007, the same year that Taylor published his book A Secular Age. Dreyfus and Kelly published All Things Shining in early 2011. The journal Inquiry’s special issue on “The Secular and the Sacred,” where the works of Taylor, Dreyfus, and Kelly finally come to a critical engagement, was published later that year. Taylor’s and Dreyfus’s co-­ authored book Retrieving Realism, which deals with religion in the final section entitled “Plural Realism,” was published by Harvard University Press in June 2015. Taylor’s The Language Animal was published in 2016. The succession of publication dates and events paints this picture: a grand philosophical discussion about the spiritual condition of modernity, one involving three of the most influential philosophers of our time, would have taken place if contingency did not get in the way. Unfortunately for us, it did. This book hopes to rekindle enthusiasm for Rorty’s voice in the “Great Debate”—a debate that would have probably developed a little differently, if the tides had taken another turn.

References Armstrong, Karen. 2006. The Great Transformation. London: Atlantic Books. Dreyfus, Hubert. 2008. Memorial for Richard Rorty (Unpublished Manuscript, March 20), Typescript. Dreyfus, Hubert, and Sean Dorrance Kelly. 2011a. All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age. New York: Free Press. ———. 2011b. Saving the Sacred from the Axial Revolution. Inquiry 54 (2): 195–203. Dreyfus, Hubert, and Charles Taylor. 2015. Retrieving Realism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gaskill, Nicholas. 2008. Towards a Pragmatist Literary Criticism. New Literary History 39 (1): 165–183. Gordon, Lewis. 1995. Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism. Amherst: Humanity Books. Habermas, Jürgen. 2008. ‘…And to Define America, Her Athletic Democracy’: The Philosopher and the Language Shaper; In Memory of Richard Rorty. New Literary History 39 (1): 3–12. Jaspers, Karl. 2016. The Origin and Goal of History. Abingdon, Oxon; London: Routledge. Johnson, Devon. 2017. Beyond Tradition: A Short Rumination on Africana Philosophy and Nihilism in 21st Century America. The American Philosophical Association Newsletter 16 (2): 22–23. Mill, John Stuart. 1869. On Liberty. London: Longman, Roberts & Green.

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Nishitani, Keiji. 1982. Religion and Nothingness, trans. Jan Van Bragt. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 1990. The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism, trans. Graham Parkes and Aihara Setsuko. Albany: State University of New York Press. Richard J.  Bernstein, (2008) Richard Rorty’s Deep Humanism. New Literary History 39 (1):13–27. Rorty, Richard. 1982. Consequences of Pragmatism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 1993. In a Flattened World, Review of The Ethics of Authenticity 1991 by Charles Taylor. The London Review of Books, 3. 9 April 1993. ———. 1995. Taylor on Self-Celebration and Gratitude, Review of Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity by Charles Taylor. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 54 (1): 197–201. ———. 1998. Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth Century America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 1999. Philosophy and Social Hope. New York: Penguin. ———. 2001. La Redención del Egotismo: James y Proust como Ejercicios Espirituales [Redemption from Egotism: James and Proust as Spiritual Exercises]. Telos 3 (3): 243–263. ———. 2003. Der Roman als Mittel zur Erlo¨sung aus der Selbstbezogenheit [The Novel as a Means of Salvation from Egotism], ed. Joachim Küpper and Christophe Menke, Dimensionen ästhetischer Erfahrung [Dimensions of Aesthetic Experience], trans. A.  J. Johnston, 49–66. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. ———. 2005. The Future of Religion with Gianni Vattimo. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2007. Philosophy as Cultural Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2010a. An Ethics for Today: Finding Common Ground Between Philosophy and Religion. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2010b. The Rorty Reader, ed. Christopher Voparil and Richard J. Bernstein: Wiley-Blackwell. ———. 2010c. Reply to J.B. Schneewind. In The Philosophy of Richard Rorty, ed. Randall Auxier and Lewis Edwin Hahn, 506–508. Chicago: Open Court. ———. 2010d. Intellectual Autobiography. In The Philosophy of Richard Rorty, ed. Randall Auxier and Lewis Edwin Hahn, 1–24. Chicago: Open Court. Smith, Nicholas. 2002. Charles Taylor: Meaning, Morals and Modernity. Cambridge: Polity. Taylor, Charles. 1988. The Moral Topography of the Self. In Hermeneutics and Psychological Theory, ed. Stanley Messer, Louis Sass, and Robert Wooldolk, 299–331. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. ———. 1991. The Ethics of Authenticity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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———. 1992. Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 2007. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 2011. Recovering the Sacred. Inquiry 54 (2): 113–125. Vattimo, Gianni. 2003. After Onto-Theology: Philosophy Between Science and Religion. In Religion After Metaphysics, ed. Mark Wrathall, 29–36. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wallace, David Foster. 1996. Infinite Jest. Boston: Little, Brown, and Co. Warren, Calvin. 2018. Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation. Durham: Duke University Press. West, Cornel. 1993. Race Matters. Boston: Beacon Press.

CHAPTER 2

Overcoming Nihilism

At this juncture I cannot suppress a sigh and one last hope. What do I find absolutely intolerable? Something which I just cannot cope alone with and which suffocates me and makes me feel faint? Bad air! Bad air! That something failed comes near me, that I have to smell the bowels of a failed soul! … Apart from that, what cannot be borne in the way of need, deprivation, bad weather, disease, toil, solitude? Basically we can cope with everything else, born as we are to an underground and battling existence; again and again we keep coming up to the light, again and again we experience our golden hour of victory, – and then there we stand, the way we were born, unbreakable, tense, ready for new, more difficult and distant things, like a bow that is merely stretched tauter by affliction. – But from time to time grant me – assuming that there are divine benefactresses beyond good and evil  – a glimpse, grant me just one glimpse of something perfect, completely finished, happy, powerful, triumphant, that still leaves something to fear! A glimpse of a man who justifies man himself, a stroke of luck, an instance of a man who makes up for and redeems man, and enables us to retain our faith in mankind! … For the matter stands like so: the stunting and levelling of European man conceals our greatest danger, because the sight of this makes us tired … Today we see nothing that wants to expand, we suspect that things will just continue to decline, getting thinner, better-natured, cleverer, more comfortable, more mediocre, more indifferent, more Chinese, more Christian – no doubt about it, man is getting ‘better’ all the time … Right here is where the destiny of Europe lies – in losing our fear of man we have also lost our love for him, our respect for him, our hope in him and even our will to be man. The sight of man now makes us tired – what is nihilism today if it is not that? … We are tired of man ... © The Author(s) 2020 T. Llanera, Richard Rorty: Outgrowing Modern Nihilism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45058-8_2

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Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘On the Genealogy of Morality’ and Other Writings. (2006, 25)

Nihilism in this book refers to the malaise of existential and spiritual impoverishment in modernity, often expressed in philosophical literature as the experience of meaninglessness, alienation, and despair. The disintegration of Judeo-Christian values as a bulwark of belief (in the words of Taylor) is the nihilist’s primary source of fear and trembling (in the words of Kierkegaard). For the nihilist, questions such as “What is the meaning of life?”, “What am I here for?”, or “Why do human beings exist?” lose their significance in modernity. Bereft of God or gods, the nihilist dwells in a sea of negations, believing that human existence holds no epistemological value, moral weight, or spiritual agenda, due to its not having a role or place in a universal, onto-theological order of meaning. This existential description, of course, reveals a very specific use and history of the term nihilism. This chapter explains the origins behind the overcoming strategy against nihilism in relation to these existential terms. The overcoming strategy purports that challenging existential nihilism hinges on being in touch with the power of the non-human, also known as the sacred. In The Banalization of Nihilism, Karen Carr argues that there are many possible definitions of nihilism and that these definitions heavily overlap. In particular, she suggests five kinds that inform the concept of nihilism in philosophy: (1) epistemological, or the denial of the possibility of knowledge; (2) alethiological, or the denial of the reality of truth; (3) metaphysical or ontological, or the denial of an (independently existing) world; (4) ethical or moral, or the denial of moral values; and (5) existential, or the feeling of emptiness and pointlessness of life, due to existence having no meaning (1992, 17–18). While our main concern in this book is the existential form of nihilism, we must underscore that it is inextricably connected, or is  even fundamentally dependent, on other forms. As Carr argues, acquiescing to the truth of one or two (or all) of the preceding forms of nihilism (i.e., of the epistemological, alethiological, metaphysical, or moral kind) can lead to existential nihilism: “It is because we believe there is no truth that we conclude the world is pointless; it is because we think that knowledge is mere illusion that we describe life as meaningless; it is because we see no moral fabric in the universe that we see our existence as without value. The despair of existential nihilism is parasitic on one of the other logically prior form” (Carr 1992, 20).

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Existential nihilism in the modern world has inspired urgent reflection on the part of philosophers like Nietzsche and Heidegger. The shared ground on which they tread is, in Taylor’s terms, a “disenchanted” version of modernity, one that has witnessed our becoming unchained from, or slowly breaking links with, the beings and things that possess sacred power or that are ultimately divine. In other words, the modern world is diminished compared to earlier epochs in terms of spiritual content, at least in the otherworldly sense of the word. Becoming cut off from traditional sources of spiritual meaning, and having to put all our bets on science, technology, and “human, all too human” freedom as sources of existential and spiritual value, has created a condition for the malaise of nihilism to thrive. In The Gay Science, Nietzsche, through the figure of the madman, proclaims the death of the Judeo-Christian God: “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him” (1882; see Nietzsche 1974, 181). He argues that nihilism stands out as the greatest consequence of God’s death in modernity. Overall, Nietzsche believes that this event is not such a bad thing. In place of the misguided and now deflated spiritual values of the Christian tradition, he thinks that nihilism, while dangerous in many ways, also encourages the creation of new and more worthwhile goals for human beings (see Nietzsche 1967, 1974, 1990, 1992). For Nietzsche, the ability to transcend the life-negating horrors of nihilism serves as a testament to human resilience and its endless potential for greatness (with the caveat that only a few can achieve this level of self-transcendence). In Heidegger’s view, nihilism is indicated by our increasing attunement to the modern moods of anxiety and boredom, resulting from a world “enframed” by instrumental reason and the relentless advance of science and technology. To achieve redemption from life’s meaninglessness, he argues that we should embark on the quest of revealing life’s authentic meaning as Dasein, which we find in the early Heidegger, or discover new and non-instrumental ways of relating to the world, which we find in his later writings and serve as the focus of my discussion in the subsequent section on Heidegger (see Heidegger 1962, 1977, 1991a, b). There are many other influential statements of existential nihilism in the Western philosophical tradition, from C. G. J. Jacobi and Johann Gottlieb Fichte, and its conceptual development in the works of Soren Kierkegaard, Arthur Schopenhauer, the French existentialists, the Russian nihilists, and the Black existentialists of the contemporary period. These versions converge in familiar ways and usually culminate with the charge that we should engage the task of surmounting the malaise. My reading organizes the overcoming narrative using

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Nietzsche and Heidegger as its pivotal figures, since the sacred redemptionists take their departure on nihilism and the redemption from its horrors from their writings. Rorty also considers them as influential to his conceptual understanding of modernity. In what follows, I show how these modern philosophers characterize modernity as driven by anthropocentricism and frame nihilism as a problem to defeat. I also present how both thinkers propose their own ways of overcoming the problems of the human condition: in Nietzsche’s case, via the ruthless assertion of the human will, and in Heidegger’s case, via relating anew with the modern sacred.

Nietzsche: The “Uncanniest of All Guests” It is a daunting task to provide a standard interpretation of Nietzsche’s nihilism. Nietzsche, who made the concept infamous in Western philosophy, uses nihilism in various ways. These uses are, more often than not, in tension with one another. As Carr points out, nihilism in Nietzsche’s writings ranges from being a “historical process, a psychological state, a philosophical position, a cultural condition, a sign of weakness, a sign of strength, as the danger of dangers, and as a divine way of thinking” (1992, 26). There are also copious amounts of secondary literature about Nietzsche’s use of the concept. In this section, I propose reading Nietzsche as a philosopher whose role has been to emphasize that nihilism is an existential problem that human beings must overcome; in other words, treating it as a problem that we have to take by the bull’s horns, struggle against, and eventually defeat in our capacity as willful and free human beings. This reading will show that Nietzsche’s writings treat nihilism as anthropocentric in its origins, in line with the contemporary readings offered by the sacred redemptionists. One way Nietzsche used the term nihilism is by capturing the multifaceted dangers accompanying the breakdown of monotheistic religion in the modern West. According to Paul Ricoeur (1977), Nietzsche’s works can be described as performing a “hermeneutics of suspicion,” being in the business of decoding and revealing the disguised meanings and dimensions of central, organizing concepts and values of modern life and their corresponding implications. Like Marx and Freud, the other “masters of suspicion” who described religion as “the opium of the people” and “the wish for a father-God,” respectively, Nietzsche sought to unmask religion as promoting “slave morality” through

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monotheism. Monotheism, according to Nietzsche, is a system that has shaped, directed, and governed fundamental human drives and the growth of culture in the West for many centuries. Inherited from Plato, its metaphysics is dualistic, in that it pits a conception of the ideal versus its flawed counterpart: the other-­world vs. this-world, immortal life vs. mortal life, soul vs. body, purity vs. impurity, perfection vs. imperfection, truth vs. appearance, good vs. evil, and immanence vs. transcendence. In Nietzsche’s view, monotheism as a way of life has crippled the potential of human beings for greatness. He calls it “the greatest danger that has yet confronted humanity,” in the sense that it provides a refuge for the weak and the degenerate and has led to “the premature stagnation that most other species have reached” (1974, 191–192). Why the hostility against monotheism? Nietzsche points out that a monotheist framework promotes a slave morality, or a system of moral values where compassion, benevolence, humility, kindness, and sacrifice are regarded as the highest or most admirable of all virtues. These are the values of the “good,” or the cowardly, sick, or unhappy Christians, and in upholding them as sacred values they were able to suppress and blame the strong, proud, and powerful for their misery and the stunted condition of the world, perverting their strong values as “evil.” As a cultural order, monotheism was created by the slavish and the weak to existentially justify the horrors of the world: misery and sacrifice in this life meant bliss in the afterlife, and evil and suffering were accorded the weight of spiritual significance. Monotheism, in short, affirmed a higher purpose to our existing world. In the Will to Power, Nietzsche outlines four reasons to explain how Christian morality protected human beings from the malaise of nihilism: 1. It granted man an absolute value, as opposed to his smallness and accidental occurrence in the flux of becoming and passing away. 2. It served the advocates of God insofar as it conceded to the world, in spite of suffering and evil, the character of perfection including “freedom”: evil appeared full of meaning. 3. It posited that man had a knowledge of absolute values and thus adequate knowledge precisely regarding what is most important. 4. It prevented man from despising himself as man, from taking sides against life; from despairing of knowledge: it was a means of preservation (1967, 9–10).

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As Nietzsche’s story goes, if this monotheist edifice crumbled, then the entire way of life of the Christian West, with its metaphysical and moral values, would go down with it. And crumble it did: when Nietzsche was writing in the nineteenth century, many intellectuals took pride in being part of the Enlightenment project, the goal of which was “to raise the edifice of reason upon the ruin of opinions” (Márkus 2011, 19). Kant’s answer to his 1784 essay “Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?” (Answering the Question: What Is Enlightenment?) is able to capture this optimistic mood well: “Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-­ incurred immaturity.” But Nietzsche points out that deconstructing the myths behind “God” and “religion” does nothing to liberate us from the existential fears and anxieties that have led human beings to create them as cultural safeguards in the first place! Judging this Enlightenment maturity as naïve, Nietzsche argues that the inevitable result of murdering God in modernity is a total crisis of meaning, or nihilism. As Nietzsche’s Madman ends his lamentation: “What then are these churches now if not the tombs and sepulchers of God?” (1974, 182). The “death of God” in Nietzsche’s view is best read as an event: it is a profound historical change in the condition of “spirit,” or in Western society’s structures of meaning, that deeply affects and  even transforms the character of European culture. It signifies the collapse not just of a set of beliefs, but of a whole moral-spiritual outlook, leading to de-spiritualized conditions. And what, according to Nietzsche, are the responses to nihilism? He gives human beings two options, which we will re-examine in their contemporary form in Chap. 4. The first is a passive response, or merely succumbing to the existential vacuity that results from the collapse of monotheism. Nietzsche sees this as a sign of weakness. Note that this passivity is at risk of turning destructive: since the nihilist has nothing to value or affirm in the world, the only human drive left for the individual to channel is the urge to destroy. The second is an active response, which Nietzsche argues is a sign of strength. A person who responds actively to nihilism recognizes that in the face of old and debased aims and values, richer, more powerful aims and values have to be created, and they ought to have the power to realize the drives and needs of the modern spirit. Nietzsche preaches that persons of the “noble,” higher type will prosper and grow in these nihilistic conditions. Against Christianity’s “slave morality,” they have the capacity to erect strength and independence as the highest values in human culture by invoking their “will to power.” Arthur Danto defines Nietzsche’s will to power as “an impulse and a drive to

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impose upon an essentially chaotic reality a form and structure, to shape it into a world congenial to human understanding while habitable by human intelligence” (1965, 30). Neither being separate nor fixed by the world, human beings can assert and channel this will to transform the world and its values without invoking any divine or world-transcending ideal. In short, Nietzsche suggests a wholesale “transvaluation of values” as a new way of relating to the world, one that emphasizes the central role of man’s will to power in the process, to overcome the crisis of nihilism. The sacred redemptionists treat Nietzsche’s anthropocentric response against nihilism not only as unsatisfactory, but dangerous. As we will see in the next sections, and with the nudging of Heidegger, the help of the non-human, or some conception of the sacred, became an attractive option to these philosophers in the “Great Debate.”

Heidegger: When the Hammer Breaks While Nietzsche shapes the anthropocentric origins and responses to nihilism through his critique of monotheism, Heidegger contributes to the overcoming strategy by showing how we can come into contact with the sacred in its modern form. In his 1954 essay Die Frage nach der Technik (trans. “The Question Concerning Technology”), Heidegger contends that the most pressing peril in the modern world is that we now live under the dominion of Ge-stell [enframing], a nihilistic era in which the drive to control and instrumentalize the world, a brutal expression of the Nietzschean will to power, has reached its peak.1 William Lovitt characterizes this as an epoch of scientific prowess, where “no object has significance in itself and where the ‘orderability’ of everything, from energy and statistics to machines and persons, is all-important” (1977, xxx). A way of understanding this “enframed” ethos is via the recognition of the primacy of instrumental reason in the modern world. A wholly 1  Note that Heidegger interprets and re-appropriates Nietzschean nihilism according to the ontological schema of Being in his Nietzsche lectures (see Heidegger 1991a, b). I chose not to focus on these lectures for two reasons, which both have to do with thematic coherence: first, the preceding discussion on Nietzsche suffices for introducing the topic of modern nihilism, and second, Dreyfus and Kelly, in particular, refer to Nietzsche in their elaboration of nihilism as a problem, and Heidegger for showing how art can be mobilized against the threat of nihilism. The “overcoming” strategy is better explained by highlighting what is most influential to the sacred redemptionists in their reading of Nietzsche and Heidegger.

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utilitarian way of relating to the world sees all things as means, and not ends; in other words, each and every thing in the world is recognized as an object for, and an instrument of, the human will. The mode of thinking that dominates such an ethos is calculative rationality, which measures our actions on the basis of maximum efficiency, cost-output ratio, and the prospect of immediate gratification. Rationality via calculation, engendered by the toxic mixture of unbridled scientism, capitalism, and commodification in modernity, is often associated by critical philosophers with various negative “moods,” from the obsession with self-interest and accumulation of capital, the desire to dominate and manipulate all aspects of the world, to the careless disregard for nature, people, and other sentient creatures. As Rorty himself reads the Ge-stell aspect of Heideggerian philosophy: As Heidegger tells this story, it culminates in what he calls the “age of the world picture,” the age in which everything is enframed, made into material either for manipulation or for aesthetic delectation. It is an age of giantism, of aesthetico-technological frenzy. It is the age in which people build 100-megaton bombs, slash down rain forests, try to create art more thoroughly postmodern than last year’s, and bring hundreds of philosophers together to compare their respective world pictures. Heidegger sees all these activities as aspects of a single phenomenon: the age of the world picture is the age in which human beings become entirely forgetful of Being, entirely oblivious to the possibility that anything can stand outside of a means-end relationship. (1991, 68–69)

This reifying framework blocks all other possible ways for man to relate with the world according to Heidegger. It obstructs how the world can manifest or speak. It also kills any talk of the sacred or the possibility of spiritual transcendence. Taylor, Dreyfus, and Kelly pay heed to this Heideggerian analysis in their critique of modernity. However, this situation should not cause despair or automatically engender nihilism, if we are ready to listen to what the world has to say. Alluding to Friedrich Hölderlin’s hymn “Patmos,” Heidegger declares that “where danger is, grows the saving power also” (1977, 28). Since modern technology carries within it both our ruination and the possibility of hope, it could only be overcome from within. While man cannot bring about this change of Being by himself, he must be prepared to welcome the possibility of what Heidegger calls an “impending turn.” He believes that it is only by

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reflecting on the essence of modern technology that we can decipher how we can relate anew to it. He proposes that this essential reflection should occur in a region that is both akin (as techne and as poiesis, or as a skillful way of unconcealing/revealing/bringing forth reality) and different (from Ge-stell/enframing, or a challenging-forth or ordering of the world) from modern technology. This is the domicile of art for Heidegger, who argues that reverting to the original meanings of technology and art can reveal a new relationship to Being in modernity. Heidegger also thinks that if and when we are truly attuned to Being, the saving power will reveal itself in specific things in our midst. In his 1950 essay Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes (trans. “The Origin of the Work of Art”), he cites the painting A Pair of Shoes (1885) by Vincent Van Gogh, C. F. Meyer’s poem “The Roman Fountain” by Conrad Ferdinand Meyer (1825–1898), and a Greek temple at Paestum as examples of salvific meditation in the modern world. Heidegger does not treat these pieces as representations of everyday objects but as art. They illuminate life-worlds by making coherent and accessible the experience of living at a particular junction in space and time. These three works of art are able to shape the historical sensibilities of their culture by “collecting the scattered practices of a people, unifying them into coherent and meaningful possibilities for action, and epitomizing this unified and coherent meaning in a visible fashion” (Dreyfus and Wrathall 2005, 12). They work to reveal the people, things, and events that most (and least) deserved attention, care, and participation in their culture, serving as radiant, sacred exemplars for centralizing and preserving human practices. Following Dreyfus’s interpretation of the saving power of these artworks, our encounters with them reveal the “nonobjectifying and nonsubjectifying ways of relating to nature, material objects, and human beings” (Dreyfus 1980, 22). They can save us from nihilism because they allow us to relate to the world anew. For Heidegger, it is only under the shared light of the artwork where people can intersubjectively relate to each other in significant and meaningful ways in modernity. And it is also under this light where “things and people appear in a rich rather than a banal way,” as heroes and slaves did in Ancient Greece, or saints and sinners in the Middle Ages (Dreyfus 2005, 414). From this Heideggerian perspective, salvation from the nihilism in the era of Ge-stell [Enframing] can take place by reflecting on works

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of art that function to manifest, articulate, and reconfigure our experiences in the contemporary world. Heidegger emphasizes the structure of overcoming nihilism in his writings. He argues that the increased emphasis on control and domination—the worst features of an “enframed” world governed by instrumental reason—has impoverished our way of Being-in-the-world. To combat existential impoverishment, we ought to re-establish contact, and come to grips, with the Being of modernity. Key to this reinvigorated relationship is the recognition that technology and art serve as points of contact with the marginal sacred. The saving power of technology and art illumines new pathways of world-making previously hidden from our modern view (Heidegger 2001). The world speaks through them and the redemption of mankind depends on our being able to hear and respond to their call. They can save us from nihilism because of their non-human origins, the source of their holy or sanctified quality, in the story that Heidegger weaves for modern humanity.

Taylor: Modern Moral Sources Taking their cue from Nietzsche and Heidegger, the sacred redemptionists argue that a modern version of the sacred is key to overcoming nihilism. The status of the spiritual condition of modernity takes a moral form in Taylor’s philosophical narrative, infamous for its nature, order, and scope. In Sources of the Self, Taylor defines a moral source as “something the contemplation, respect, or love of which enables us to get closer to what is good,” empowering us to “live up to what is higher” and aim for ends that are “valuable, worthy, admirable” (1992, 92–96). Traditional sources include Plato’s Idea of the Good, the God of Christianity and Judaism, and the modern notions of Kantian rational agency and human dignity. Taylor argues that in each kind of human culture, the crucial role of a moral source needs to be occupied to centralize and promote the ends of self-integration and spiritual inspiration. Modernity’s moral order, sired by the Enlightenment conviction that “we are in charge of our fate” (Taylor 2007, 638) and marked by an exclusive humanism that “closes the transcendent window” (Taylor 1999, 26), can be described as Janus-faced. On the one hand, the logic of the modern moral order endeavors to cater to the welfare of every human being. It esteems the affirmation of life, fights for common flourishing, and lauds democracy, altruism, and justice. As Taylor explains: “modern liberal political culture is

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characterized by an affirmation of universal human rights—to life, freedom, citizenship, self-realization—which are seen as radically unconditional; that is, they are not dependent on such things as gender, cultural belonging, civilizational development, or religious allegiance, which always limited them in the past” (1999, 16). He thinks this modern moral order is perhaps the best that has been established in human history. That we can recast our social and political structures without any transcendental buttress or justification on a wide scale is an unprecedented achievement. Indeed, Taylor states that we now have the non-religious moral sources to support this level of responsibility: “All of these possible substitutes for grace—the clear vision of scientific reason, the Rousseauian or Romantic inner impulse of nature, the Kantian good will, Sarastrian goodness—have helped to ground a confidence that we can meet the demands of universal benevolence” (1992, 413). On the other hand, Taylor notes that this modern moral nobility is set on too high a pedestal, for “never before have people been asked to stretch out so far, so consistently, so systematically, so as a matter of course, to the stranger outside the gates” (1999, 31). This demand is overwhelming, since he doubts if our non-transcendent moral sources suffice to achieve the ambitions of universal brotherhood. Moreover, the sight of frailty, betrayal, and depravity can also make our humanist efforts backslide. Human beings disappoint, at times monumentally. As Taylor warns: “It is clear that modern humanism is full of potential for such disconcerting reversals: from dedication to others to self-indulgent, feel-good responses, from a lofty sense of human dignity to control powered by contempt and hatred, from absolute freedom to absolute despotism, from a flaming desire to help the oppressed to an incandescent hatred for all those who stand in the way. And the higher the flight, the farther the potential fall” (1999, 34). And when a humanist stumbles from such heights, she can easily flip into a nihilist, disillusioned by human weakness and treachery, and hopeless about the fate of the world. Taylor adds that the modern moral order’s tendency to favor a strict and abstract morality, and its privileging of ordinary life and egalitarianism, can bury our potential for individual greatness, threatening “to crush our spontaneity, or our creativity, or our desiring natures” (2007, 20). In response to the flattening of the experience of life, Taylor recognizes the role of “immanent counter-enlightenment” thinkers— Arthur  Schopenhauer (1788–1860), Nietzsche (1844–1900), Stephane Mallarme (1842–1898), Robinson Jeffers (1887–1962), Georges Bataille

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(1897–1962), Michel Foucault (1926–1984), Maurice Blanchot (1907–2003), and Jacques Derrida (1930–2004)—in rebelling against this modern repression “in the name of the great, the exceptional, the heroic” (2007, 373; see also Taylor 2001). They do this not by reverting back to the glory of onto-theological transcendence, but by allowing our natural and amoral energies to run unbridled. Two ideas may help illuminate the theme of immanent revolt better. First, the proponents of the movement regard modernity as a prison, for it endorses an existence that Nietzsche baptizes as “a miserable ease,” where the Dionysian force of life has been subsumed under the Apollonian order of modernity (Taylor 2007, 599). This has resulted in the tempering of “the essential priority of the spontaneous, aggressive, expansive, form-giving forces that give new interpretations and directions” (Nietzsche 1989, 79). This stance kills off the vibrant and affirmative force of life in favor of comfort and tedium. Second, prominent immanent counter-enlightenment thinkers tend to valorize death and violence. Regarded as breaks from the humdrum of ordinary life, these radical moments make us feel most in touch with our humanity and serve as sites for enriching our self-conception. Taylor points out that Mallarme and Bataille both confront and articulate death and suffering as locations of meaning in their work. Mallarme, the “first great modern poet of absence,” counter-privileges death instead of glorifying life (Taylor 2001, 394). Death is where life centers and collects itself, and the moment of giving up life ultimately opens an avenue for meditating upon existence, both its beauty and horror. Bataille, similarly, sees death as the eye of the storm, where the senses of the sacred, of terror, of sadness and joy come together, acknowledging that one’s corporeal end is the biggest threat to our longing to live in continuity (Taylor 2007, 24). Hence, for Nietzsche, Mallarme, and Bataille, the immediacy, intensity, and communion with life manifest themselves best in turmoil and destruction. Putting both the sense of modern imprisonment and the acknowledgement of our destructive nature together, we arrive at a critical point: that the upholding of death and violence, as manifested in both primitive religions and in modern art, reinforces the idea that man has a basic nature of homo religiosus: a bent toward the ecstatic, a search for the spiritual in the corporeal (Taylor 1999, 28). As Taylor explains: In Schopenhauer’s transposition of Romantic depths as the Will, these are the site of wild and formless striving, of violence and unrestrained sexuality. These are the depths invoked in Conrad’s heart of darkness; in early

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Stravinsky; in the whole age of the Primitive. These illustrate the immense power of the post-Romantic, Schopenhauerian influence on art and thought at the turn of the twentieth century. In different ways, the search was to recover a sense of the numinous in the human depths, including sexuality and aggression, a power which could be tapped through aesthetic presentation. (2007, 672)

This characterization confirms our natural orientation, or our religious impulse, to a life beyond, combined with the Darwinian recognition of our inability to recourse back to God. The counter-enlightenment movement, then, despairs for the power of the transcendent in the immanent. Taylor is critical of this movement that mobilizes how art, immanent transcendence, and violence constellate to emphasize the dark and cruel aspects of human experience. Taken this way, modern art serves as a site for the vicious and amoral character of human life. To live a rich and admirable life, these immanent counter-enlightenment thinkers suggest that we must always come close to the brink of annihilating ourselves. Taylor thinks we, surely, ought to stop fetishizing this viciously “inward” approach, since this is neither the best (if at all desirable) nor the only road to existential and spiritual meaning in modernity. If our humanist (in this case, anthropocentric) sources prove to be insufficient in serving as a moral source, if the immanent resources we have are undesirably amoral and destructive, and if many individuals are living spiritually disjointed lives in the modern world, Taylor proposes that we should rekindle contact with the non-anthropocentric sacred sources so long as they are suited to the conditions of modernity. We ought to aspire for a re-enchanted modern  world. In other words, he proposes to overcome nihilism by reinstating our relationship with transcendent or marginally sacred sources of meaning. In “Recovering the Sacred,” he offers two ways how: first, he recommends an exploration of the interstitial sacred, or “what arises in [the] interface between Dasein and the world,” and second, an examination of the anchored sacred, which Taylor calls “the anchored-in-reality-beyond-us” (2011, 119). The first way belongs to Taylor’s theory of expressivism. In the interaction between human beings and the universe, Taylor argues that non-random and non-­subjective meanings may arise for us in art as modern moral sources. Art allows for the retrieval of the fullness of experience with nonsubjectivist articulations of its sources. These meanings are manifested in fluid and subtler languages, such as in “the sense of the force running

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through nature and ourselves, as with Wordsworth” as well as in Durkheim’s sociality of the sacred, which “helps constitute us as moral beings” (2011, 118). In a recent interview, Taylor again confirms that post-Romantic poetics is a point of departure for this kind of thinking about the modern, marginal sacred: A good example is Hamann. He uses one of the conceptions of an order plugged into the universe, which is to think of it as a script, as a language, a language of God, and we can’t quite get that. So what we do instead is, we translate it into speech. I think of this line about “Reden is Übersetzen,” and Walter Benjamin has built on this idea of “subtler language,” the notion that belief in these orders is no longer really available, so people are kind of inventing their orders, and he puts it in a much too subjectivist mode, I think, so that we invent them and live within them. Excellent examples are something like William Wordsworth, Tintern Abbey, but you could also get very good examples from German romantics, Novalis and so on, and follow that through a whole lot of ways in which that is continued. What is being done here is that the sense of the importance of art is being expressed or realized, and these works of art, when we inhabit them, give us a very strong sense of connection with them. (Meijer and Taylor 2019)

Since Taylor believes that “high standards need strong sources” (1992, 516), he also suggests a stronger, more ontologically “anchored” way to the sacred: a renewed theism.2 He claims that what is genuinely sacred can only be transcendent and what is ultimately transcendent can only be God. His theism combats the modern view that the access to the sacred, in its most fundamental sense, is by virtue of any human capacity or feature or ideal. Taylor explains: “if you respond to the Kantian phrase of ‘the starry sky above and the moral law within,’ then there is some relation to the cosmos, but it’s mediated by a sense of awe within. This goes along with the sense that reason in me is infinitely higher than the rest in me. By invoking the notion of an ‘anchored’ reality, I want to make a claim that the sense of everything being inside of us (purity, reason) is an inadequate selfunderstanding” (Meijer and Taylor 2019). Since the idea of transcendence remains inescapable in our culture, it then requires a recharged philosophical and moral articulation. Moreover, Taylor warns that if talk of the “anchored” is dropped in our increasingly secular age, then human beings stand to lose sight of their own moral and spiritual identities and become 2

 I thank Michiel Meijer for routing me to the resources on Taylor that articulate this point.

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at risk of nihilism. What is needed, if we are to rise up to the challenges of the modern moral order, is a re-examination of God’s role in modernity.

Dreyfus and Kelly: “Whooshing” Up Dreyfus and Kelly argue that the pre-Axial age reveals something important about the polytheistic nature of the sacred. In Homer’s world, human excellence is said to reach its peak when individuals are inspired by, or in other words, attuned to, an event or an activity’s sacred “moods.” The moods of Homerian polytheism are chiefly represented by Olympian divinities, standing for the various ways of being and acting excellently in the world: What makes Helen great in Homer’s world is her ability to live a life that is constantly responsive to golden Aphrodite, the shining example of the sacred erotic dimension of existence. Likewise, Achilles had a special kind of receptivity to Ares and his warlike way of life; Odysseus had Athena, with her wisdom and cultural adaptability, to look out for him. Presumably, the master craftsmen of Homer’s world worked in the light of Hephaestus’s shining. (2011a)

In Ancient Greece, these sacred moods were external and shareable. With these moods serving the communal standards for belief and action, men were judged according to their openness to the invitation of these gods-­as-­moods: to be courageous in battle, cunning in trade and adventures in foreign lands, erotic in the bedchamber, or loyal to hearth and home. As Western history progressed, Dreyfus and Kelly point out that these moods morphed into private states or dispositions, expressed as universal, inward-­looking, and soul-searching moods in the religious, literary, and philosophical works of Aeschylus, the Gospel of John, Paul, Augustine, Dante, Luther, Descartes, and Kant. The public nature of sacred moods was transformed into a fixation about man’s inward states, so that sources of existential meaning were articulated via the inner consciousness, beliefs, and responsibilities exclusive to every thinking and feeling subject. The status of man shifted from being a vessel of the gods, a victim dancing to the sway of forces beyond one’s control in the preAxial world, to a free and dignified self-consciousness able to steer the direction of one’s life in the modern world. Kelly points out that the loss

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of public symbols of meaning and existential concern, and the consequent emphasis of human culture on individual freedom, had grave consequences: Without any clear and agreed upon sense for what to be aiming at in a life, people may experience the paralyzing type of indecision depicted by T.S. Eliot in his famously vacillating character Prufrock; or they may feel, like the characters in a Samuel Beckett play, as though they are continuously waiting for something to become clear in their lives before they can get on with living them; or they may feel the kind of “stomach level sadness” that David Foster Wallace described, a sadness that drives them to distract themselves by any number of entertainments, addictions, competitions, or arbitrary goals, each of which leaves them feeling emptier than the last. The threat of nihilism is the threat that freedom from the constraint of agreed upon norms opens up new possibilities in the culture only through its fundamentally destabilizing force. (2010)

As the story goes, one way of overcoming the problems of meaninglessness and disorientation in modernity is through an “all too human” form of salvation: we must, with effort and resolve, will to experience the world in a meaningful way. Following the anthropocentric line from Nietzsche to D.  F. Wallace, this is “a choice that takes strength and courage and persistence, of course; perhaps it takes even a kind of heroism” (Dreyfus and Kelly 2011a, 40). In other words, in order to live fully and defeat the threat of nihilism, we have to become gods ourselves, the true masters of our lives, by exerting our will to be free to its maximum. This is a bad idea. As we will see more clearly in Chap. 4, resorting to pure personal will is self-defeating, since this role is so overwhelming for so finite and fragile a human creature. Such merciless willing also destroys the capacity to maintain social bonds and leaves the concerns of other people in their wake. As sacred redemptionists, Dreyfus and Kelly suggest looking for other possible moods or other ways of being or attuning ourselves to the contemporary world in a non-anthropocentric, non-inward gazing manner, since they may help address our need for existential meaning and assuage the dangers of nihilism. Of course, their version of Homeric polytheism does not advocate a return to the childlike fervor of the Ancient Greeks, where control is given up in favor of Olympic thralldom. Instead, it accounts for the lesson that Dreyfus and Kelly have learned from Heidegger about art: that the sacred may appear in forms suited to modernity, so that we ought

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to be engaged in the task of discovering how the sacred forms reveal themselves to us in a uniquely modern way. Dreyfus and Kelly point out that people who perform fantastic deeds or display amazing ability—the best athletes, artists, and writers of our time— sometimes cannot explain their extraordinary performances or works of art. They hypothesize that rather than pure talent and luck, these individuals were also (and more importantly) in sync with the modern sacred, which enabled them to shine as heroes during their greatest moments. In order to experience modern life at its best, we need to become attuned to modernity’s multifarious sacred moods as they present themselves in different contexts. Since “the greatest poets speak from something beyond themselves,” reading literature may reveal to us how we can be in touch with the modern versions of the sacred (2011b, 198). Following the writings of Heidegger, Dreyfus and Kelly argue that art focuses on what is important and meaningful in a specific culture. They follow the idea that “when works of art shine, they illuminate and glamorize a way of life, and all other things shine in their light. A work of art embodies the truth of its world” (2011a, 102). For instance, to remedy the nihilistic perils exemplified by “Eliot’s indecision, Beckett’s interminable wait, and Auden’s expressionless world; even to the stomach-level sadness of Wallace’s American millennium,” we can learn to heed “Homer’s wonder and Aeschylus’ caring mood of cultivation, Dante’s bliss, Luther’s joy, and Descartes’ calm mood of quiet reflection” as counter-moods (2011b, 202). Sacred moments include times when one is overtaken by great force (hearing an inspiring sermon or listening to marvelous music) or feel miraculously cared for (surviving certain peril or experiencing a miracle). All Things Shining describes these moments as being “whooshed up,” that is, experiencing “something so overpowering happens that it wells up before you as a palpable presence and carries you along as on a powerful wave” (2011a, 194). Examples of great contemporary moments range from heroic deeds (Wesley Autrey), moving speeches (Lou Gehrig, Martin Luther King), and displays of remarkable athletic prowess (Roger Federer, Bill Bradley). The sacred at work in these events are communal: other people acknowledge that something extraordinary is transpiring and are consequentially swept away by it, ultimately affected by its splendid nature. Note that these sacred events

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are transient. They are not sustainable “highs”—they happen, their effects well up within one’s being, and then they fade away. While our responses may not be directly under our control in the midst of being under the influence of the sacred, we can decide what course to take next after the overwhelming effect of the experience has dissipated. Moreover, the sacred is not always on the side of the good. As Melville’s Moby Dick decodes the polytheist nature of the sacred: “Sometimes the universe is meaningless, it is true—sometimes a death is senseless or dumb. But the universe has its brute and reflex-like moments as well, in addition to malicious and vindictive and devilish ones. And in addition to all these, it is also gently joyous and divine” (2011, 185). In other words, a great moment can at times inspire goodness and heroic action and at other times lead to evil and ruin. Martin Luther King’s address may be judged  as equally  sacred-like as Adolf Hitler’s rhetoric, since both speeches were able to rally crowds to action in admirable and sinister ways. Given the unavoidable renunciation of reflective, critical thought in the face of a sacred experience, Dreyfus and Kelly argue that our response to shining moments should, in some way, be trained or tempered. In view of the unpredictable or amoral nature of the sacred, they recommend the cultivation of meta-poesis, or the higher-order skill of discerning the appropriate response to an extraordinary event (2011a, 206–212), a proposal we will return to in Chap. 4. While the nature and substantive content of the sacred’s participation escape our full comprehension, Dreyfus and Kelly argue that  we must learn to acknowledge its presence as a reminder that our lives are always buffered and protected from meaninglessness. Intensity and meaning, for sacred redemptionists, cannot be imposed upon experience; rather, they become part of experience when individuals are in sync with the sacred moods that energize particular events. In short, a modernized polytheism is another way of defending ourselves from spiritual disjointedness: “to lure back these Homeric gods is a saving possibility after the death of God: it would allow us to survive the breakdown of monotheism while resisting the descent into a nihilistic existence” (2011a, 61). In their endorsement of a polytheist, marginal relation with the sacred to rehabilitate the spiritual condition of the modern world, Dreyfus and Kelly remain betrothed to the overcoming strategy against nihilism with Taylor. How does Rorty come into the picture? As this book will argue, quite indirectly.

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Rorty the Nihilist? The concept of nihilism occupies an interesting position in Rorty’s oeuvre. Returning to Carr’s classification, nihilism is conceptualized in five general ways. Ontological nihilism refers to the denial of an independently existing reality. Epistemological nihilism rejects the possibility of knowledge. Alethiological nihilism denies the reality of objective truth. Moral nihilism disavows the existence of universal moral norms. By far the most familiar form, existential nihilism refers to the experience of lostness, disorientation, and despair prompted by the realization that human life has no fundamental meaning, value, or purpose. Rorty’s writings bear connections to the first four kinds of nihilism. While he does not deny that the world exists, Rorty contends that reality is fundamentally unknowable. He is an ontological nihilist insofar as he thinks that projects of ontology—projects that presume access to the essential nature of beings—are sterile. Rorty is also critical of the correspondence theory of truth. His criticism has a lot to do with what he takes to be the role of language in human life. Rorty argues that language does not play a truth-finding, representational function but a world-coping, mediational one. He characterizes language as “the employment of words as the use of tools to deal with the environment, rather than as an attempt to represent the intrinsic nature of the environment” (1999, xxiii). By setting up language as a social construction and the quest for objective certainty as an impossibility, Rorty could then be framed as an epistemological nihilist (see Upton 1987). Finally, Rorty does not believe in the existence of “an ahistorical, incorruptible, transcultural moral law”; moreover, he argues that moral progress “is not a matter of rising above the sentimental to the rational” but “a matter of wider and wider sympathy” (Rorty 1999, 82–83). Disavowing any possibility of ethics in the universalist sense, Rorty can be framed as a moral nihilist. In sum, Rorty’s arguments could be rightly described as nihilistic insofar as a non-nihilistic argument stands for the claim that there are ultimately correct standards for appraising reality, knowledge, and moral action. As John Marmysz points out, Rorty’s position “seems very close to an almost complete form of nihilism, combining ontological, epistemological, ethical, and political elements into a rather systematic whole” (2003, 83). Curiously, nihilism is not a prominent idea in Rorty’s writings. With the rare exception of his review of Stanley Rosen’s Nihilism (1969) in 1972, Rorty neither employs the vocabulary of nihilism to describe his position

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nor uses the term to centralize his philosophical arguments. In fact, he hardly mentions it at all. He prefers instead to stick with descriptions such as “antifoundationalist,” “anti-essentialist,” “anti-Platonist,” or “pragmatist” to designate his positions on metaphilosophy, epistemology, and ethics. Yet some of his critics either take nihilism to be the defining characteristic of Rorty’s writings or judge nihilism to be the grim consequence of his brand of neopragmatism. Thomas Upton, Gary Madison, Jason Boffetti, and Carr use the concept pejoratively in evaluating Rorty’s philosophy. Upton states that Rorty’s attempt to destroy our traditional foundations of knowledge makes him an epistemological nihilist, given that “Rorty claims that nothing can be known, at least known in the Platonic sense of being the object of genuine understanding (episteme, nous) rather than of mere opinion (doxa)” (1987, 1). Madison chastises Rorty for celebrating Nietzsche’s dark legacy of nihilism: “If he is anything at all, Rorty is a carefree, happy-go-lucky nihilist who is not about to let himself be bothered any more by the old concerns of philosophy” (1992, 5). Defending his reading of the classical pragmatist William James, Boffetti argues that as a whole, “James’s philosophy does not succumb to the nihilism, atheism, and perspectivalism characteristic of Rorty’s ‘Nietzscheanized’ pragmatism” (2004, 605). Carr also concludes in her book that Rorty’s antifoundationalism models a dangerous and banalizing form of nihilism in the modern world. In her view, Rorty does not treat nihilism as a big deal, in the sense that he thinks that human beings can still live with themselves without the guidance of absolute moral laws or the hope for universal truth. Carr warns that Rorty’s postmodern and nonchalant attitude to morality and truth in due course culminates into a form of dogmatism: When we fully and happily dispatch with truth, what we gain is not pluralism, not toleration, but rather the absolutization of the dominant power structures of the culture to which we belong. Nihilism, once complete, leaves us with nothing but the set of currently existing social practices and beliefs; in the absence of anything else, these practices and beliefs become, for all intents and purpose, absolute. (1992, 134)

What we can gather from these examples is that these critics make much more of nihilism than Rorty himself does in his writings. So why does he avoid using the term, despite the seemingly obvious connections of his work to the philosophical concept? One perspective is that Rorty’s evasion

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has something to do with the conceptual baggage that accompanies nihilism in its existential sense. As Carr points out, the existential element of nihilism is energized by prior claims about nihilism, claims that could lead to the conclusion that all of human life is fundamentally meaningless. An existential nihilist, following this description, is someone who finds it difficult to take human activities seriously or to make strong and lasting commitments. This difficulty stems from an extreme skepticism of ontological, epistemological, or moral truths. But Rorty does not represent this kind of nihilistic thinker and he has taken steps to make this anti-­nihilistic position clear in his work. For instance, Rorty specifies in an interview that his attempts to dismantle the problems of the Western philosophical tradition are not intended to be nihilistic (Wenning et al. 2006). His work was not designed to put an end to philosophical thinking as we know it. It was instead a call for an alternative approach to the pseudo-­problems of ontology and epistemology, which more careful readers like Kai Nielsen were able to appreciate: “Nielsen was one of the few Anglophone readers of my Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature not to treat it as nihilistic and frivolous. Instead he read that book as I would most like it to be read” (Wenning et al. 2006, 54). Furthermore, Rorty denies the existence of moral nihilism that eventually leads to existential nihilism in his work. When asked about his romantic convictions and what appears to be his post-metaphysical attempts to overcome nihilism, he gives a dismissive answer: “I don’t believe there are such things as ‘modern forms of disenchantment and moral nihilism’—these seem to me bugbears invented by traditionalists” (Wenning et al. 2006, 57). For Rorty, religious and philosophical anxieties are not universal, enduring problems that human beings require spiritual and moral redemption from. They are temporary, man-made products of old worldviews that have outlived their usefulness; for example, worldviews which purport that human beings must return to religion or mirror the Platonic Forms of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful to live a meaningful, authentic life. Finally, Rorty disdains being misrepresented as a thinker whose pragmatism has no place for deep and meaningful commitments to humanist ideals and values. He explains that “the depth of an attachment (to a person, a polis, an ideal, a god, or whatever)” should be regarded as “a matter of the inextricability of the object of attachment from one’s most cherished self-descriptions” (2001, 89). Rorty believes that there is no intrinsic link between the ultimate truth and human obligation. A lover or a socialist, should they be so dedicated to their

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respective causes, would not require any transcendent justification to care for a specific human being or to painstakingly work for a political utopia. The force of metaphysics or the universal does not ground their deep existential attachments; rather, they are profoundly conditioned by the person’s self-understanding or, in Rorty’s terms, the individual’s “final vocabulary.” If we follow this pluralistic view, different people simply live for the sake of different things. Thus, Rorty would disagree with being classified as an existential nihilist, or as someone who thinks that there is nothing in human life worth living for. Abandoning the quest for truth, certainty, and universality does not lessen our capacity to live meaningfully for Rorty. By disputing the existential assumptions made about his writings, Rorty could then be seen as a thinker who may have much more to say about the modern challenges to human meaning than meets the eye. In this light, I now focus on his approach to nihilism, either conceptualized as a lack or the destruction of human meaning. Nihilism in the existential sense appears sporadically in Rorty’s writings and its implications often need to be teased out. In the next section, I mention and analyze three cases of existential nihilism in his oeuvre.

Three Cases Rorty’s first treatment of existential nihilism can be found in his review of Rosen’s book Nihilism (1972). In this essay, nihilism is described as a potential existential danger that accompanies the rise of antifoundationalist philosophy. Rorty summarizes Rosen’s work as driven by the hypothesis that adopting a Wittgensteinian or Heideggerian attitude to language, history, and philosophy is a bad move. For Rosen, this postmodern approach disparages efforts to provide “correct” accounts of epistemology, morality, and self-justification, leading to nihilism. Rosen advocates a return to Platonism, albeit a modified version, to counter this trend. In response, Rorty offers a reply on behalf of the nihilist that is caricatured in Rosen’s book. He states that Rosen’s mistake lies in confusing two different things: one problem is about “despair over the success of the Platonic project” and the other is about “despair over human life” (1972, 104). Unlike Rosen, Rorty argues that metaphilosophy and the justification for human existence are not inextricable from each other. Following his interpretation of Wittgenstein (and Dewey and Comte), Rorty considers the possibility that “Platonic philosophy is, like Christianity, just one

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somewhat parochial development which our society may have outgrown” (1972, 104). His view is that if our culture were to get over philosophical foundationalism, it would be incorrect to assume that it would result in the dystopia of epistemological and ethical non-justification that Rosen dreads. Quite the reverse, Rorty hopes that this new culture would instead respond positively to nihilism. This culture would be a context in which human beings, not anymore answerable to Platonic Ideas, have become fully responsible for themselves. In this “all too human” future, nihilists would at best be “prudent, temperate, and just” in their complete self-­ reliance, a result which would then make nihilism “the latest and best product of the Socratic tradition” in Rorty’s view (1972, 104–108). As the case above shows, nihilism appears most threatening to philosophers when the foundations of knowledge, morals, and human meaning become flimsy and unreliable. This uncertainty can lead to existential nihilism, in the sense that the fallibility of structures of belief and conviction creates cultural conditions that are unable to sustain the experience of meaningfulness. But Rorty also indicates that persons are at risk of nihilism even when human roles and sources of meanings are certain and fixed. In Rorty’s work, nihilism appears for the second time in “Redemption from Egotism” as the meaninglessness of a banal human life. He concludes this more recent essay by describing a case representing this alternate form: Although not everybody should try to overcome themselves, everybody can and should hope to end their lives with some sense of what it meant, how it hung together, what form it took. This is easy to do if one’s life was nothing but remorseless grinding dawn-to-dusk toil, or if it was lived within the confines of a backwoods village, or of a narrow and unquestioned faith. Yet these are just the sorts of lives that people who use novels as aids to spiritual development think of as in danger of “meaninglessness.” (Think here of the novel-reading heroines of Madame Bovary and of Sinclair Lewis’ Main Street). The epithet is used because such people think that a life has meaning just insofar as the person living it is able to find some unity in, impose some form on, as great a variety of persons and things and events as possible. (Rorty 2010a, 406)

While repetitiveness and predictability can provide sense and value in a person’s life, they can also amplify its lack of variety, excitement, and inspiration. Moreover, the predictability of life can expose what Albert Camus describes as human life’s fundamental absurdity  (2000), leading an

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individual to brood the dark question: “Is there more to life than this?” In other words, life’s stability can also lead to existential nihilism. Rorty explains in his essay that one way of warding off the threat of meaninglessness is by entertaining projects of self-creation. He notes that a crucial resource for developing one’s self-project is literature. More specifically, novel-reading opens the possibilities of a multitude of ways that a life and its inadequacies could be justified, inspired, or overcome (Rorty 2010a, 406). Finally, nihilism appears for the third time in his response to J.  B. Schneewind’s “Rorty on Utopia and Moral Philosophy,” where Rorty refers to nihilism as the cultural result at stake behind his theories of self-creation and solidarity (2010b, 479–505). In Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, Rorty argues that it is possible to maintain deep, personal, and idiosyncratic projects while engaging in constructive dialogue and social participation in a liberal democracy. The figure that is able to attend to these two commitments is the liberal ironist, who regards self-creation as a private project and solidarity as a public aim. Rorty concedes to Schneewind that his attempts to justify the liberal ironist and promote the private-public distinction were designed to smooth over the nihilism that might arise when we lose metaphysical justification for our traditional hopes. Rorty says that his blunder was that he conflated “the unruffled pragmatist” and “the anguished existential adolescent” in his writings, thinking that a person “could not be an antifoundationalist and a romantic self-creator without becoming a Sartrean, ever conscious of the abyss” (Rorty 2010b, 506). He acknowledges that the dread of a metaphysical void ceases to be a problem in a world that has learned to take nihilism for granted. Rorty thus repudiates the existential assumption that underlies the private-public distinction in this reply, reverting back to his 1972 position (contra Rosen) that nihilism is a problem that could be surpassed in modern culture. This point will be re-examined in Chap. 4, where I discuss the private-public distinction and its relationship with the ideals of self-creation and solidarity.

Conclusion Scholars on nihilism point out that Rorty helps us rethink the malaise in such a way that evades its dangers of despair and destructiveness. Marmysz and Carr correctly claim that Rorty does not find nihilism an interesting problem at all. For those plagued by the problem, Rorty helps us

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reconsider the validity of nihilism as a crisis, since the highest values that justify the crisis have never existed in the first place; in short, he “undercuts the problem of nihilism by getting rid of the criteria against which the human situation looks hopeless” (Marmysz 2003, 83). As Carr puts it: “Rather than wringing our hands in mock heroic despair, says Rorty, we should turn away from an issue which is, in the final analysis, just not that interesting, and get on with our lives” (1992, 116). Similarly, Michael Casey states that while Nietzsche and Freud view meaninglessness as a difficult predicament, Rorty offers a sunnier alternative for philosophical reflection. His perspective entails “a simple interest in the immediate possibilities of the present and a commonplace indifference about the ‘deep’ questions of meaning and purpose” (Casey 2002, 194). James Edwards credits Rorty as an influence on his modern notion of normal nihilism, which goes against the traditional view that nihilism is a paralyzing individual or cultural condition of pessimism. Like Rorty’s ironist, a normal nihilist is someone who is able to live with the “rueful recognition and tolerance of her own historical and conceptual contingency” (Edwards 1997, 46–47). Unlike Casey and Edwards, my view is that Rorty’s work is less useful to the debates on nihilism if we accept nihilism as a dead end. It makes it appear as if our only recourse is to acquiesce to the reality of nihilism, bearing either a know-it-all smile or with a sigh of resignation, convincing ourselves that nihilism is not as bad as it seems to be with the sobering help of Rorty’s writings. While I agree with Marmysz and Carr that Rorty shows us a way of thwarting nihilism by doubting its ontological validity, I also think that Rorty’s dismissal of the criteria for the meaninglessness of the human condition does nothing to convince anyone, not least the sacred redemptionists, that the malaise of nihilism is not worth our philosophical attention. After all, nihilism remains a problem deeply felt in the existential sphere of human life. It cannot be conveniently set aside. In other words, turning Rorty into an effective interlocutor in the “Great Debate” entails that he is able, via a nuanced reconstruction of his writings, to engage the problem of nihilism existentially. This task means not taking Rorty at his word but subjecting his writings under a closer, more scrupulous interpretation. It entails showing that Rorty’s pragmatism does not remain ensconced within the “overcoming” framework sedimented by Nietzsche and Heidegger and adopted by the sacred redemptionists. It also requires that we show how the resources we find in

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Rorty’s work offer us clues as to how the problem of nihilism can be outgrown by human culture. In the next chapter, we can begin spelling out Rorty’s positive contribution to the debates on nihilism by examining the unexplored angle of redemption in his work.

References Boffetti, James. 2004. Rorty’s Nietzschean Pragmatism: A Jamesian Response. The Review of Politics 66 (4): 605–631. Camus, Albert. 2000. The Myth of Sisyphus. Translated by Justin O’Brien. London: Penguin. Carr, Karen. 1992. The Banalization of Nihilism: Twentieth-Century Responses to Meaninglessness. Albany: State University of New York Press. Casey, Michael. 2002. Meaninglessness: The Solutions of Nietzsche, Freud, and Rorty. Lanham: Lexington Books. Danto, Arthur. 1965. Nietzsche as a Philosopher. New  York: Columbia University Press. Dreyfus, Hubert. 1980. Holism and Hermeneutics. The Review of Metaphysics 34: 3–23. ———. 2005. Heidegger’s Ontology of Art. In A Companion to Heidegger, ed. Hubert Dreyfus and Mark Wrathall, 407–419. Oxford: Blackwell. Dreyfus, Hubert, and Sean Dorrance Kelly. 2011a. All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age. Free Press. ———. 2011b. Saving the Sacred from the Axial Revolution. Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 54 (2): 195–203. Dreyfus, Hubert, and Mark Wrathall. 2005. Martin Heidegger: An Introduction to His Thought, Work, and Life. In A Companion to Heidegger, ed. Hubert Dreyfus and Mark Wrathall, 1–17. Oxford: Blackwell. Edwards, James. 1997. The Plain Sense of Things: The Fate of Religion in an Age of Normal Nihilism. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Heidegger, Martin. 1962. Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. ———. 1977. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt. New York: Harper and Row. ———. 1991a. Nietzsche, volumes I and II, trans. David Krell. New  York: Harper Collins. ———. 1991b Nietzsche, volumes III and IV, trans. David Krell. New  York: Harper Collins. ———. 2001. Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter. New  York: Perennial Classics.

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Kelly, Sean. 2010. Navigating Past Nihilism. The Stone  – The New  York Times. https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/05/navigating-past-nihilism/. Accessed 19 Nov 2019. Lovitt, William. 1977. Introduction to Martin Heidegger. In The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, xiii–xxxix. New York: Harper and Row. Madison, Gary. 1992. Coping with Nietzsche’s Legacy: Rorty, Derrida, Gadamer. Philosophy Today 36 (1): 3–19. Márkus, György. 2011. Science and Society: The Constitution of Cultural Modernity. Leiden: Brill. Marmysz, John. 2003. Laughing at Nothing: Humor as a Response to Nihilism. Albany: State University of New York Press. Meijer, Michiel, and Charles Taylor. 2019. Fellow Travellers on Different Paths: A Conversation with Charles Taylor. Philosophy & Social Criticism (online first). https://doi.org/10.1177/0191453719866233. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1967. The Will to Power, ed. Walter Kaufmann, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale. New York: Random House. ———. 1974. The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Random House. ———. 1989. On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo. Edited by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books. ———. 1990. Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ, trans. R. J. Hollingdale. London: Penguin. ———. 1992. Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is, trans. R. J. Hollingdale. London: Penguin. ———. 2006. ‘On the Genealogy of Morality’ and Other Writings: Revised Student Edition (Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought), ed. Keith Ansell Pearson, trans. Carol Diethe, 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ricoeur, Paul. 1977. Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. New Haven: Yale University Press. Rorty, Richard. 1972. Review of Nihilism (1969) by Stanley Rosen. The Philosophy Forum 11: 102–108. ———. 1991. Essays on Heidegger and Others. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1999. Philosophy and Social Hope. New York: Penguin. ———. 2001. Response to Daniel Conway. In Richard Rorty: Critical Dialogues, ed. Matthew Festenstein and Simon Thompson, 89–92. Cambridge/Malden: Polity Press. ———. 2010a. The Rorty Reader, ed. Christopher Voparil and Richard J. Bernstein. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. ———. 2010b. Reply to J.B. Schneewind. In The Philosophy of Richard Rorty, ed. Randall Auxier and Lewis Edwin Hahn, 506–508. Chicago: Open Court. Taylor, Charles. 1992. Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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———. 1999. A Catholic Modernity?: Charles Taylor’s Marianist Award Lecture, with Responses by William M. Shea, Rosemary Luling Haughton, George Marsden, and Jean Bethke Elshtain. Edited by James L.  Helt. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2001. The Immanent Counter-Enlightenment. In Philosophy, ed. Canadian Political, 386–400. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2007. A Secular Age. Boston: Harvard University Press. ———. 2011. Recovering the Sacred. Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 54 (2): 113–125. Upton, Thomas. 1987. Rorty’s Epistemological Nihilism. The Personalist Forum 3 (2): 141–156. Wenning, Mario, Alex Livingston, and David Rondel. 2006. An Interview with Richard Rorty. Gnosis 8 (1): 54–59.

CHAPTER 3

The Concept of Redemption

From too much love of living,    From hope and fear set free, We thank with brief thanksgiving    Whatever gods may be That no life lives for ever; That dead men rise up never; That even the weariest river    Winds somewhere safe to sea. Algernon Charles Swinburne, excerpt from The Garden of Proserpine (1866)

Rorty’s earliest liaison with the idea of redemption can be traced back to a debate with Dreyfus and Taylor, published in a themed issue of The Review of Metaphysics (1980). The 1960s and 1970s displayed a strong resurgence of interest in hermeneutics, largely precipitated by the publication of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Wahrheit und Methode (1960; trans. Truth and Method). This led to much philosophical discussion on the role of interpretation in the natural and the social sciences, as well as human existence more generally. According to Dreyfus, the debates around hermeneutics at that time converged around two concerns: methodology and practice. Methodology deals with the epistemological approach required in the natural and the human sciences. It inquires if a crucial difference exists between how we know the material world (Natur) and how we understand human beings (the realm of “mind” or “spirit”; Geist). The problem of practice engages the social and political repercussions of © The Author(s) 2020 T. Llanera, Richard Rorty: Outgrowing Modern Nihilism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45058-8_3

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acknowledging such a difference. Dreyfus’s presentation of these two concerns frames the discussion with Taylor and Rorty. Dreyfus and Taylor contend that there is a firm methodological distinction between the Natur- and Geisteswissenschaften.1 The natural sciences aim to provide an account of reality independent of the human subject. They function by way of mutual cooperation in the pursuit of objectivity. They are at their best when they employ universally valid terms and operate under standardized conditions. Meanwhile, the human sciences function through interpretation. Human experience can only be expressed using subject-related terms that cover an ever-evolving domain of conceptual understanding. Unlike the natural sciences, the human sciences perform best in a state of tension, or when they analyze human culture “in the perpetual revolution and conflict of interpretations” (Dreyfus 1980, 18). By contrast, Rorty argues that there is no deep or interesting epistemological split between the natural and the human sciences. While they have different objects of inquiry, both sciences require hermeneutic intervention. Following the Jamesian pragmatist doctrine that “the trail of the human serpent is over all,” Rorty thinks that while things in the universe can be causally independent of us, nothing can be representationally independent (1998b, 86). Thus, he doubts that a fully objective method can be formulated. To free us from aspiring for an ultimate epistemology, Rorty recommends that we shift our view of hermeneutics from methodology to attitude. Gadamer’s hermeneutics should be read as “a universal willingness to view inquiry as muddling through, rather than conforming to canons of rationality—coping with people and things rather than corresponding to reality by discovering essences” (Rorty 1980, 39). Science matters if our goal is to describe a set of epistemic conditions around which a general agreement could be generated. Science normalizes procedure so that consensus is possible. But this scientific attitude, while appropriate for some ends, is not ideal for all. 1  Dreyfus describes the natural sciences as normal discourse and the social sciences as abnormal discourse. While commensurability is an ideal in the natural sciences, it usually means a call for hermeneutic help in the human sciences, indicating “an orthodoxy had gained control” (1980, 17). Taylor claims the two sciences require different kinds of understanding. Scientific understanding provides “an account of the world as it is independently of the meanings for human subjects, or how it figures in their experience” (1980, 31). Human understanding considers desirability conditions and subject-related terms of value such as emotions, aspirations, longings, and so on, which are the factors that natural scientists are expected to bracket out of their work.

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Rorty elevates the stakes by suggesting that their debate is symptomatic of a dysfunctional relationship with science in modernity. Invoking distinctions between “having a true theory” versus “finding one’s way about” or “subject-related terms” versus “non-subject related terms” (1980, 40), as Dreyfus and Taylor do, entrenches the use of a “scientistic” vocabulary. Motivated by the values of prediction and control, a culture of scientism participates in forging a naturalist and mechanized human life. As Rorty explains: The fear of science, of “scientism,” of “naturalism,” of self-objectivation, of being turned by too much knowledge into a thing rather than a person, is the fear that all discourse will become normal discourse. That is, it is the fear that there will be objectively true or false answers to every question we ask, so that human worth will consist in knowing truths, and human virtue will be merely justified true belief. This is frightening because it cuts off the possibility of something new under the sun, of human life as poetic rather than merely contemplative. (1979a, 388–389)

Rorty, Dreyfus, and Taylor agree that a more satisfactory ethos should replace scientism. But what sets Rorty apart is his argument that this effort requires relinquishing the notion of scientific objectivity that the others remain attached to. Only if we let go of the belief that there is such a thing as objective truth, and that the natural sciences can access it, will the culture of scientism loosen its firm grip on our cultural consciousness. To clarify, Rorty does not call for the death of the scientific voice. He wants scientism shorn of its privileged status and to endorse “a cultural paradigm which embodied… less of the Cartesian tradition of scientism” (Dreyfus et  al. 1980, 47). An alternative paradigm  to scientism would recognize the legitimacy of the heterogeneous voices that compose what Michael Oakeshott calls “the conversation of mankind.” Some of these voices include practical activity, science, and poetry, which all serve different ends: “just as activity in practice is desiring and obtaining, and activity in science is inquiring and understanding, so poetry is contemplating and delighting” (1962, 223–224). There are also various legitimate ways of talking about the same thing, and each interpretation enriches our understanding of human culture. As Oakeshott illustrates: And further, a word or a verbal construction may have a recognized home in more than one universe of discourse: “the French Revolution” for Blake was a poetic image, for de Tocqueville it represented a historical image, for Napoleon a practical image; the word “democracy” for some people repre-

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sents a quasi-scientific image, for many it signifies a practical image (the symbol of a condition desired and to be approved), for de Tocqueville it stood for an historical image, but for Walt Whitman it was a poetic image. In short, the character of an image is revealed in its behavior, in the sort of statements which can relevantly be made about it and in the sort of questions which can relevantly be asked about it. (1962, 226)

Rorty thinks that privileging the scientific voice restricts the way we make sense of other, and perhaps even more important ideas and ends, from fighting social injustice, cultivating political solidarity, to making people happier and healthier. An alternative culture driven by the “conversation of mankind,” at least as Oakeshott and Rorty present it, would prize the virtue of plurality. This turn from a discourse on hermeneutics to the fate of human civilization is a startling inflation of the original debate on Rorty’s part. But it is not so odd if we consider that there is something tremendous at stake in proposing this shift. As if guided by this thought, Rorty indicates that changing our mode of discourse may prevent the rise of a purely technocratic, non-romantic age. Heidegger is a decisive figure here, for we have seen in the previous chapter that he takes very seriously the need for salvation from the effects of modern mechanization. Rorty concurs with the Heideggerian proposal that redemption from the negative ramifications of scientism requires forging non-scientistic ways of relating to others. Following Dreyfus’s reading of Heidegger, Rorty also champions the activity of “keeping in touch with the practices that have made us who we are and to which the disciplinary society cannot do justice” (Dreyfus et al. 1980, 51). But unlike Heidegger, Rorty contends that our response need not require the favor of the sacred or the nonhuman. What can redeem us from the perils of modern technology is a strictly human approach: “Heidegger decides that, since the Nazis didn’t work out, only a God can save us now. Dewey, it seems to me, is saying: No, neither something like the Nazis, nor something like the descent of the spirit, but just conversation. That is, just us on our own” (Dreyfus et al. 1980, 52). While Rorty remains unclear about what this conversation is like, he is firm that the language of our modern discourses ought to change. For taking this position, Dreyfus indicts Rorty as a “religious, practical hermeneuticist”—someone who, like Heidegger, engages the question of redemption or damnation of human beings (Dreyfus et al. 1980, 51). It is

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noteworthy that Rorty does not repudiate Dreyfus’s charge. For someone who rejects the existence of God or the traditional idea of transcendence, it seems most unlikely that Rorty would embrace the (on the face of it, religious) idea of redemption, but this is just what he does in this philosophical exchange. Rorty confesses that what he is truly concerned about roams larger than debates in epistemology or ontology. His alternative to a culture of scientism—the conversation of mankind, which involves the task of “finding new, newer, more interesting, more fruitful ways of speaking”—stands for the destiny of the whole human enterprise (1979a, 360). Thus, Rorty discloses in this debate that his own views are stirred by the thought of redemption early on. Yet Rorty’s radical attempt to turn our philosophical interests from scientism and hermeneutics to a discourse on cultural redemption has gone by unnoticed. There is no work on Rorty that capitalizes on the insight that the concept of redemption informs the character of his intellectual project. Secondary works published about Rorty have hardly touched upon the theme. This oversight may have something to do with Anglo-­ American philosophy being dominated by theories about the mind, language, truth, and science in the late 1970s. Rorty’s Romantic-pragmatic shift would have been irrelevant or ill-suited to these areas.2 Furthermore, Rorty’s alternative to the analytic philosophical tradition, discussed in the last sections of The Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, was short and sketchy. Bernstein’s rebuke was that despite its potential, it was ultimately unconvincing: “there were some catchy phrases like ‘therapy,’ ‘edification,’ and ‘the conversation of mankind,’ but no clear sense of what even a successor discipline to traditional philosophy might look like” (1990, 32–33). In addition, while Rorty’s writings enjoyed wide influence in philosophy and the broader humanities, his contribution was eventually reabsorbed into mainstream philosophy. The focus of general academic interest was Rorty’s criticism and apparent rejection of analytic philosophy, and this well-documented view continues to populate the debates around 2  Half of the 85 essays in the biggest collection of secondary work about Rorty deal with mind, language, truth, metaphilosophy, and pragmatism (see Tartaglia 2010). Early compilations, for example, Malachowski and Burrows (1990), Saatkamp, Jr. (1995), and Brandom (2000), were responsive to his critique of analytic thought and neo-pragmatism. Recent collections better reflect what Habermas describes as “the peculiarly romantic, and very personal triple voice of metaphilosophy, neopragmatism, and leftist patriotism” in Rorty’s philosophy (2008); see Auxier and Hahn (2010), Gröschner, Koopman and Sandbothe (2013), Guignon and Hiley (2003), and Festenstein and Thompson (2001).

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pragmatism and epistemology today. These reasons may explain why Rorty’s ambition of redemption was not followed through in early scholarship. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989), Essays on Heidegger and Others (1991), and Truth and Progress (1998b) subtly picked up the theme of redemption again. Interestingly, Rorty assumes a posture of intellectual humility in the introduction to Essays on Heidegger and Others. He mentions that his essays should be read as “weak thought”—a kind of “philosophical reflection which does not attempt a radical criticism of contemporary culture, does not attempt to refound or remotivate it, but simply assembles reminders and suggests some interesting possibilities” (1991, 6). This claim stands in tension with Rorty’s more vivid and inspiring ventures about utopian social hope in Achieving Our Country (1998a) and Philosophy as Cultural Politics (2007b), an issue we will make sense of later on.  Rorty also returns to the theme of redemption in the literary culture in the last decade before his death, with an emphasis on the themes of democracy, egalitarianism, education, literature, and poetry. What can be gained from examining Rorty’s original endorsement of redemption? My idea is that reviving our interest in this overlooked question allows us to investigate if redemption underlies, to some extent, the ambitions behind his philosophical project. I think it is plausible to insist on this bold thesis. Building a better world for human beings, after all, is constitutive of his professed secular faith: My sense of the holy, insofar as I have one, is bound up with the hope that someday, any millennium now, my remote descendants will live in a global civilization in which love is pretty much the only law. In such a society, communication would be domination-free, class and caste would be unknown, hierarchy would be a matter of temporary pragmatic convenience, and power would be entirely at the disposal of the free agreement of a literate and well-educated electorate. (2005a, 40)

Rorty’s pragmatist hope for this future is the closest he gets to a belief in transcendence, and many of his works mention a liberal utopia redeemed from its cultural ills. To substantiate how redemption is developed in Rorty’s project, I now explore two notions that inspire his writings: essentialism and edification.

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Essentialism and Edification Rorty’s pragmatism is in the business of tearing down the notion of the mind as our “glassy essence,” demolishing universalist myths, and “discarding the image of the fierce father figure” or any other God-surrogates in human culture (1998b, 152). It assails the tradition of essentialism (and the related notions of authoritarianism, foundationalism, and absolutism) from a metaphilosophical level. Western philosophy’s quest for essentialism, according to Rorty, began with Greek philosophy’s desire to rise above arbitrariness and common opinion: Parmenides jump-started the Western philosophical tradition by dreaming up the notion of Reality with a capital R… Plato was enchanted by this hint of something even more august and unapproachable than Zeus, but he was more optimistic. Plato suggested that a few gifted mortals might, by modeling themselves on Socrates, gain access to what he called “the really real.” Ever since Plato, there have been people who worried about whether we can gain access to Reality, or whether the finitude of our cognitive faculties makes such access impossible. (2007b, 105)

This ancient epistemological worry is reincarnated in different ways by philosophers who treat knowledge as the central feature of their discipline according to Rorty.3 As we will see later on, the obsession with “the really real” is related to the question of what we need redemption from in 3  Rorty focuses on the prominence of the Cartesian-Lockean-Kantian tradition in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Rorty suggests that the privileging of this triadic root of modern epistemology was not an inevitable philosophical turn; rather, it was more a product of historical contingency. Rorty thinks that Aristotle already had less use of methodology as he viewed knowledge as the union of subject and object, which would have annulled their gap. Descartes, however, chose to stick with the knower/known paradigm, and this core assumption thereafter dictated the linear flow of modern thought. For Rorty, the Western tradition can be better understood as a synergized combination of contingent events rather than a product of a rational historical progress. Rorty is thus sympathetic to alternative histories that could be borne out of contingency and has offered thought experiments of this sort in his writings. For example, he thinks that modern morality would have been more socially inclusive if we took our signal from Hume’s sentimentality over Kantian reason, since the former theory invites the development of imaginative identification rather than disinterested moral abstraction (1996, 48). If philosophy followed the Humean trajectory, our contemporary moral focus would have then been geared toward establishing fellow-feeling and cultivating sympathy. Rorty argues that in such a scenario, our obsession with finding a perfect rational standpoint for ethics would be tempered and dreams of conceiving a universal rational being abandoned.

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modernity. Our modern anxieties could be relieved in part by abandoning our culture’s metaphysical aspirations. Why does Rorty take an anti-essentialist position, a position that sounds as equally, if ironically, absolutist? In his view, dismantling the philosophical legacy of Western essentialism is crucial for endorsing a politically motivated pragmatism. As Dreyfus correctly observes, Rorty regards theory as a kind of practice and does not view philosophy (or religion, or politics) as a self-contained activity (Dreyfus et al. 1980, 50). While a discipline can bracket or isolate its scope and concerns, it remains beholden to its history. Its practices can directly or inadvertently affect other areas of life. For instance, Rorty attacks the philosophical dualisms that serve as the bulwark of epistemology (“Truth without Correspondence to Reality”), metaphysics (“A World without Substances or Essences”), and morality (“Ethics without Principles”). He engages whether the employment of Platonic dualisms—for example, the use of appearance vs. reality, truth vs. opinion, good vs. evil—promotes or impairs the pragmatic goals of happiness and solidarity. Rorty judges that the latter is the case. Rorty’s issue with essentialism is captured in his critique of philosophical conceptions of human nature. The ancient and medieval notions that “moral intuitions are our recollections of the Form of the Good,” or that human beings “are the disobedient children of a loving God,” or that persons “differ from other kinds of animals by having dignity rather than mere value,” are claims that populate, albeit in modified forms, discourses on human rights, law, theology, and moral philosophy (Rorty 2010b, 354). That capitalist workers are alienated from their humanity or that men are “merely vehicles for selfish genes” or “eruptions of the will to power” pervade the analyses of the status of the modern subject (2010b, 355). There is nothing intrinsically wrong about coming up with varying philosophical descriptions of the human, since they prove the irreducibility of concepts and have different uses. But Rorty takes issue with the congealing of certain descriptions into dogma. This narrowing may ignore human diversity and be used to justify hatreds and cruelties on account of people falling short of ideal standards; consider the terrible conduct against heretics, madmen, and homosexuals, who are regarded sinful, irrational, or immoral in certain contexts. Rorty argues that we ought to adopt a more inclusive strategy. It is better to understand the human being as a “fuzzy and promising project” which, over time, is enlarged by the growing contributions of scientists, existentialists, poets, novelists, depth psychologists, sculptors, anthropologists, and mystics (1999, 52). An accumulative description accommodates more and more kinds of people:

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Convinced that there is no subtle human essence which philosophy might grasp, they do not try to replace superficiality with depth, nor to rise above the particular in order to grasp the universal. Rather, they hope to minimize one difference at a time—the difference between Christians and Muslims in a particular village in Bosnia, the difference between blacks and whites in a particular town in Alabama, the difference between gays and straights in a particular Catholic congregation in Quebec. The hope is to sew such groups together with a thousand little stitches—to invoke a thousand little commonalities between their members, rather than specify one great big one, their common humanity. (1999, 87)

Rorty’s distrust of essentialism goes hand in hand with a second notion that colors his theorizing: edification. In contrast to the religious idea of edification as moral or spiritual upliftment, his version of edification endorses a horizontal expansion of the self and embodies self-­transformation, ideas that have strong connections to the theme of redemption. Rorty’s strategy involves not only dealing with the content of a debate but also bringing out its consequences for culture and politics, a way of philosophizing that has something to do with his practical aim of edification. We find a clue about Rorty’s understanding of edification in his Foreword to Heidegger, Authenticity and Modernity, a collection of essays penned in honor of Dreyfus. He writes that reading Heidegger does not tempt him to ask “whether the phenomenology of Dasein in Part I of Being and Time gets human existence right” (2000a, xii). Unlike Dreyfus, whom he thinks reads for adequacy, Rorty reads for edification. Heidegger could be interpreted as either someone telling us how things really are about the human condition or someone who offers “interesting, and possibly useful, alternative descriptions of what is going on—descriptions which one need not choose” (2000a, xii). Rorty, in preferring to write about Heidegger the second way, is convinced that there is more to interpretation than unearthing the author’s original meaning. Edification is a technique of reading philosophy (and other forms of writing, like literature or poetry) that emphasizes the individual appropriation of texts. It involves a continuous and demanding exercise of the creative imagination, the kind in which a person can make use of available descriptions, and “pick them up, use for various occasions and purposes, and then lay them down again” (Rorty 2000a, xii). Rorty officially introduced the term by distinguishing between systematic and edifying philosophy in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. The former puts epistemology at the center. Its aim is to perfect an

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ultimate paradigm of knowledge that makes justification and defense unnecessary. Aquinas, Descartes, Hobbes, Kant, Newton, Husserl, and Russell are system-­builders  in philosophy. They value objectivity and rationality over mere agreement or convention. Rorty labels this kind of thinking as obsolete, for “it [has] failed to draw the necessary conclusions from the ‘linguistic turn’ and [has] remained ensconced in the outmoded paradigm of ‘representation’” (Wolin 2010, 75). By contrast, edifying philosophy is suspicious of traditional epistemology. Goethe, Kierkegaard, the later Wittgenstein and Heidegger, and the pragmatists Santayana, James, and Dewey are examples of edifying thinkers. They poeticize our familiar surroundings, help us come up with new aims, words, and disciplines, and take us “out of our old selves by the power of strangeness, to aid us in becoming new beings” (1979a, 360). But in 2007, Rorty called the distinction a false start, noting his unfamiliarity with post-Hegelian European philosophers who successfully resisted the lure of Kantian representationalism in the 1970s.4 4  Note that Rorty is at times inconsistent or that he uses the distinction problematically. For instance, he sometimes amends his view of the systematic and edifying aspects of a philosopher’s work. An example is his account of the good and the bad Heidegger. According to Rorty, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Dewey were initially ensnared by the Kantian conception of philosophy. The search for objectivity was foundational in their early writings before becoming historicist and edifying philosophers (1979a, 5). Rorty changes his tune in “Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and the Reification of Language” (1991), where he says that the early Heidegger, who developed “the Dewey-like social-practice pragmatism of the early sections of Being and Time,” slipped back to escapist metaphysics in his later writings, unlike Wittgenstein who rejected the philosophical purity he admired in Tractatus (1921) in favor of contingency and history in Philosophical Investigations (1953). Another problem for Rorty’s use of the systematic/edifying distinction is that it risks undermining his metaphilosophical view: it implies that philosophy will lose its relevance if there are no more systems to react against. But this is not Rorty’s position at all. He thinks that Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger will continue to be read even if their ideas may play a different role in future discussion. While philosophy today is considered an epistemological discipline, it need not always be the case. It can have a new face, one which could move beyond construction and reaction, Platonism, and metaphilosophical scientism. In fact, it is already being understood in different ways in the contemporary period. Rorty, for instance, classifies the modern conceptions of Western philosophizing as Husserlian (or “scientistic”), Heideggerian (or “poetic”), and pragmatist (or “political”): projects that pursue different ends and ally themselves with different disciplines (1991. 9). He also points out the division between analytic/ahistorical and non-analytic/historical camps of philosophy. While both carry the name of the same discipline, they are radically different in terms of approaches and aims. As Rorty explains: “The analytic tradition regards metaphor as a distraction from that reality, whereas the non-analytic tradition regards metaphor as the way of escaping from the illusion that there is such a reality. My hunch is that these traditions will persist side-by-side indefinitely. I cannot see any possibility of com-

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Rorty thereafter treated the Hegelian slogan of p ­ hilosophy being “its time held in thought” as the crucial turning point of modern thought and settled for distinguishing between “bad ahistoricist philosophizing” and “good historicist philosophizing” instead (2010c, 13–14).5 Despite abandoning the systematic/edifying distinction, Rorty kept the edification concept alive in his philosophical vocabulary. Edifying works, in his view, reconceptualize philosophy’s hand-me-downs and teach us new ways of thinking and speaking. For example, he cites Nietzsche and Freud as edifying philosophers.6 While their works can be approached reductively, their role in reconceptualizing human beings in the modern world has been revolutionary. Nietzsche investigated the question of what it entails to be greater, grander human beings by proposing the idea of Übermensch, while Freud added the unconscious and sexuality in our modern repertoire of self-understanding. They destabilized predisposed notions of the self and enlarged our acquaintance with other possibilities of being human. But more than reworking our inherited traditions, edification aims for transformation. Rorty describes his own process in his intellectual autobiography: I have spent my life rummaging through libraries, hoping to be bowled over—transformed—by some fiercely imaginative, utterly original book. Exalted by one such book, I would then come upon another, hard to reconcile with the first. Then I would try to bridge the gap between them, to find ways of restating what was said in each so as to allow for what was said in the other, to do what Gadamer calls “fusing horizons”. (2010c, 3)

promise, and I suspect that the most likely scenario is an increasing indifference of each school to the existence of the other. In time it may seem merely a quaint historical accident that both institutions bear the same name” (1991, 23). Furthermore, Rorty thinks that there are always new puzzles and purposes that can be triggered by thinkers who, by sheer genius, are able to blaze new conceptual trails. Idiosyncratic thinkers—the likes of Derrida and Wittgenstein and Dewey—can appear out of nowhere and ignite lightning bolts to revolutionize philosophy. In short, philosophy is not at risk of “coming to an end” (1979a, 394). 5  Rorty raises and reshapes metaphilosophical distinctions according to his purpose: “sometimes it is the difference between pure and impure philosophy, sometimes between professionalized philosophy and cultural criticism, sometimes between philosophy that is constructive and philosophy that is destructive, sometimes between capitalized Philosophy and uncapitalized philosophy” (Hiley 1988, 190–1). What is common among these distinctions is that the bad sort exemplifies the traits of ahistorical essentialism and the good ones do not. 6  See “Dewey and Posner on Pragmatism and Moral Progress” (2007a) for his take on the former and “Freud and Moral Reflection” (2010b) on the latter. Rorty also analyzes them together in Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (1989).

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Following his description of a strong misreader, Rorty beats writings “into a shape which will serve his own purpose” (2010b, 131). However, he does not see this practice as negative or unjustified, since accuracy of interpretation is not his main goal. Unsurprisingly, Rorty’s edifying approach to texts has infuriated readers and critics. For example, in Philosophy and Social Hope, readers can find what Rorty calls his  “own, sometimes idiosyncratic, restatements of Jamesian and Deweyan themes” (1999, xiii). They go as far as recommending what James and Dewey ought to have said so that their ideas fit into his neo-­ pragmatist agenda. For example, he suggests that James should have been satisfied with “The Will to Believe” rather than ending with his “brave and exuberant ‘Conclusion’ to Varieties of Religious Experience” (2007b, 36–37) when it comes to religion. In articulating “our continuity between us and the brutes,” Rorty thinks that Dewey should have dropped experience-­ talk as replacement for consciousness-talk (1998b, 297). Bernstein, one of Rorty’s most astute readers, finds Rorty guilty of “ruthless and violent” interpretations, of fabricating a Nietzscheanized James or a Wittgensteinian Derrida or a Heideggerianized Dewey. Rorty justifies his hermeneutical extravagance with an edifying aim: “I want us to see all six of them as heralds of a new dawn—not just a new stage in the history of philosophy, but a new self-image for humanity. I think of them all as assisting in the takeover by what I call a ‘literary culture,’ a culture unlike anything that has existed in the past” (2010b, 474). In line with his metaphilosophy, Rorty imagines this as a future where people, emancipated from the curse of essentialism, are able to form new self-images and have multifarious avenues for moral and spiritual growth: So that is the one task of philosophy: to exercise its addresses in an awareness of the contingencies of life on earth, in particular the contingencies that impact on the presumed foundations, on what we take to be our “final” vocabularies. In this way, Rorty practiced something of what the ancients called “wisdom.” And he used a word for this practice that is not by chance of religious origin, namely “edification”. (Habermas 2008, 9)

In a religious context, edification suggests the improvement of a person’s moral and spiritual knowledge and experience. In his own “human, all too human” way, Rorty is also concerned with it, informing his idea of redemption that I now develop in the next sections.

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Romantic Polytheism As pointed out in the introduction, Rorty criticizes the state of smug self-­ satisfaction with one’s cognitive and interpretative abilities in the essay “Redemption from Egotism.” He invites readers to resist universalism, expand their imaginations, and experience growth through literature and alternative “human” sources of spiritual inspiration. Rorty also rehearses an account of Western history as driven by the cultural ambition to be saved from our self-limitations in “Philosophy as a Transitional Genre.” After the ethos of religion and philosophy, the next phase in which the aim for self-growth is given form is the literary culture. Compared to previous stages of cultural development, the literary culture is reconciled with the realities of pluralism, contingency, and human finitude. At least in these writings that deal explicitly with the theme of redemption, redemption for Rorty is to be understood primarily as a non-traditionalist (and hence, non-essentialist) desire for the edification and self-enlargement of human beings. Put another way, redemption could be broadly understood as encounters (with persons, beings, things, events) that “might conceivably have moral relevance—might conceivably alter one’s sense of what is possible and important” (Rorty 1989, 82). Smith captures Rorty’s idea of redemption well by describing it as “a longing for one’s life to be ‘made good’ by virtue of some kind of participation in the life of this larger, awe-­ inspiring thing,” that is, it hopes for “a self-developing, self-transforming, and in a manner of speaking ‘self-completing’ encounter with something larger than oneself” (2005, 82). Having edifying experiences gives meaning to our lives and helps us achieve our various projects of happiness. This self-expanding orientation is usually constituted by “a fuzzy overlap of faith, hope, and love” (Rorty 1999, 160) and bears specific existential importance in the life of the individual. Rorty follows Dorothy Allison’s conviction that while redemption can center around different cultural (transcendent and non-transcendent) symbols, what is striking is that they seem to function in the same edifying way: There is a place where we are always alone with our own mortality, where we must simply have something greater than ourselves to hold onto—God or history or politics or literature or a belief in the healing power of love, or even righteous anger. Sometimes I think they are all the same. A reason to believe, a way to take the world by the throat and insist that there is more to this life than we have ever imagined. (Allison 1994, 181 [cf. Rorty 1999, 161])

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Our respective and special “symbols of ultimate concern,” sometimes chosen, sometimes created or found, help guide, develop, and transform us. The quality of a redemptive relationship with these symbols can be weighed by its capacity to bring to life powerful experiences like “overpowering hope, or faith, or love (or sometimes, rage),” responses that will fundamentally differ from person to person (Rorty 1999, 161). It is in this sense that Rorty advocates a “romantic polytheism”: as a polytheist in terms of spiritual and existential inspiration, he suggests that there already exists an abundant supply of these symbols, but that they may be hidden or remain unappreciated in comparison to traditional religion. This is a mistake: poetry, literature, and the love for nature can have a genuine existential claim in people’s lives, with the point being that there is no single ideal that could monopolize the experience of redemption for all persons. Since there is neither any final truth at stake, any ultimate standard of excellence to follow, nor any neutral criteria to judge these ideals, persons should be free to select their idols for edification (Rorty 2010a, 9). They could have one god or many. They could desert a previous ideal for a new spiritual resource, if it better suits their evolving needs, desires, and concerns. Even Rorty himself romanticized the possibility of experiencing a different (and deeper) sense of edification had he pursued another way of life. He intimated this regret in “The Fire of Life,” one of his last, posthumously published pieces, declaring that he should “have spent more time with verse” over prose when he was younger (2010b, 521). He admitted that poetry—the creative art that can succinctly capture a universe of experience in image, rhyme, and rhythm—gave him both comfort and opportunities for deep reflection on his deathbed. He reckoned that he could have lived more fully had he enriched his vocabulary with “old chestnuts” roasted by candescent imaginations. In Rorty’s vision of an ideal future, there will be no objective way of measuring and ranking human needs and desires, following the idealized dictum of the romantic polytheist: “different poets will perfect different sides of human nature, by projecting different ideals” (2007b, 35). However, its inhabitants will not lack moral and spiritual resources for redemption either. All these suggestions can be interpreted as part of the Rortyan gamble in favor of a radically pluralist vision. Only a pluralist culture can inspire mutual respect for each other’s multifarious sources and reasons for spiritual inspiration. Thus, Rorty’s view of redemption—one that does not aspire to escape time and chance, but simply hopes that

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human beings can be better and happier than they are today—ultimately displays deep convictions that are religious in nature: So, pragmatists transfer to the human future the sense of awe and mystery which the Greeks attached to the non-human; it is transformed into a sense that the humanity of the future will be, although linked with us by a continuous narrative, superior to present-day humanity in as yet barely imaginable ways. It coalesces with the awe we feel before works of imagination, and becomes a sense of awe before humanity’s ability to become what it once merely imagined, before its capacity for self-creation. (1999, 52)

Peter Dews’s observation hits the nail on the head: despite Rorty’s numerous misgivings against religion, his later works display “a conception of human emancipation able to house aspirations formerly nurtured by religion,” one in which our metaphysical convictions are “converted into moral-political aspirations for humanity at large” (2010, 646). By reconceptualizing the familiar trope of redemption, Rorty’s pragmatism attempts to retain these massive spiritual ambitions in the process of secularizing them.

The Religious Impulse The original impulse for redemption has a non-cognitive, pre-­philosophical religious root for Rorty. The source of this impulse may be a sense of human frailty, the futility of life, of its needless suffering, of the inclination to commit error, or the imperfection of self and world. Indeed, how can we be saved from the misery, shame, or dishonor of our human condition? Rorty argues that religion is the first and primary tradition to respond to these existential concerns. In its uncontaminated and undiluted form, religion is disinterested in questions of truth, following Kierkegaard’s view that one’s relation to God is irreducible to a creed (Rorty 2010b, 391–392). Rather than a system of epistemically defensible truths, what is vital in religion is the religious romance with the deity or deities. Religious romance is at play in the intimacy between a lesser being and a greater being in “the special devotion of the illiterate believer to Demeter, or to the Virgin of Guadalupe, or to the little fat god from the left at the temple down the street” (Rorty 2010b, 393). This romance nourishes and gives substance to the life of religious believers, inspiring them to live in a particularly meaningful way. To illustrate how the intelligibility of religious

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belief is not what redeems, Rorty analogizes religious faith with the experience of love (1999, 158). Fidelity to God in the face of relentless suffering and living with unrequited love could be argued as irrational or unfulfilling paths to a good life. But Rorty points out that a coherent set of beliefs and a mutually beneficial companionship are not the defining requirements for redemption in faith and love. Imperfect relationships, even if grueling or unfair, can be redemptive. They can redeem the believer and the lover by helping them experience life with meaning and intensity. Rorty strengthens his case against religious belief by claiming that pre-­ philosophical religion does not require any specialized knowledge of God or gods for redemption. Rather, what is indispensable is the existential commitment that pervades “the relation between a pious but uneducated Athenian of the fifth century and an Olympian deity, like that between an illiterate Christian and Christ” (Rorty 2010b, 393). A sophisticated understanding of faith is less significant in these polytheist and monotheist examples than a deep existential investment in the religious relationship. Simply put, spiritual power derives its fuel not from truth but for the most part in feeling. Rorty also thinks that the nature and ends of pre-­ philosophical, religious bonds may vary. Religious connections range from “one of adoring obedience, or ecstatic communion, or quiet confidence, or some combination of these” (Rorty 2010b, 477). They also function differently, from being a source of happiness, committing a worshipper to a particular way of life, or providing comfort in suffering and protection from nihilism. We can gather two things from Rorty’s view of the original redemptive impulse. First, intimate religious relations hold redemptive power, not belief, for Rorty. Second, he supposes that the non-cognitive, religious relationship entails a fundamentally private connection between a person and the awe-inspiring deity. In Rorty’s narrative, Western culture developed in such a way that the impulse for redemption eventually led to the formulation of redemptive truths. He defines redemptive truth as “a set of beliefs that would end, once and for all, the process of reflection on what to do with ourselves” (2010b, 475). It is designed to “produce maximal clarity and maximal coherence” and would redeem “by virtue of its explicit content, not because of its non-cognitive relation to a particular audience” (Rorty 2010b, 391). As an essentialist principle, the notion of redemptive truth fulfills “the need to fit everything—every thing, person, event, idea, and poem, into a single context, a context that will somehow reveal itself as natural, destined and unique” (Rorty 2010b, 476). In short, the originally

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non-cognitive and private dimension of redemption is transformed into something rational and public. Taken broadly, believing in redemptive truth means trusting that there exists a right and objective context to life, one which allows human beings to appear as they are and reveals the true nature of their needs, desires, and goals. As mentioned previously, both God (religion) and Truth (philosophy) served as the Western culture’s essentialist redemptive truths for Rorty. Both have tried to satisfy the desire for a universal non-human authority for belief. He also thinks that both have failed. Religion promised redemption by institutionalizing monotheistic belief. Prior to the modern period, making sense of how things fit together required a divine author as the guarantor of order, completeness, and salvation. Orthodox monotheism posited a being that is the uncaused cause, the creator of the world, and the ultimate source of meaning for all. As redemptive truth, the worship of a supreme deity supplied a fixed arrangement of references in human life according to Rorty. Rituals and prayers, sinners and saints, holy men and heretics served as actions and characters for guiding the traditional way of experiencing the world. Ideas of truth and knowledge, good and evil, beauty and love all reflected a transcendent dimension. The great texts of religion, philosophy, and literature—The Holy Bible, Augustine of Hippo’s De Civitate Dei or The City of God, Boethius’s The Consolation of Philosophy, Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiæ, and Dante Alighieri’s Divina Commedia or The Divine Comedy—illuminated man’s intellectual, moral, and spiritual bond with God. Devout belief and religious participation were designed to lead the virtuous to a heavenly paradise, where men could achieve unification with the highest being after death. Simply put, a deferential relationship with God promised full epistemological, ethical, and spiritual significance. However, this theistic synthesis weakened after Western intellectuals started interrogating the infallibility of religious belief and religion’s political authority. Modern humanism peaked with the Kantian declaration that as rational beings, we were capable of defining and abiding by universal moral obligations without any divine help. Due to argumentative vulnerability, the God of religion was eventually replaced by the Truth of philosophy. To fill the spiritual void caused by the loss of refuge in religious belief, Rorty argues that “after Kant, philosophers began to have the notion that if culture was going to be saved it would be saved by them, because they could explain the nature of rationality, method, and progress” (Dreyfus et  al. 1980, 54). Philosophy’s offer on the table was an

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appeal to universal truth, with the key to the intrinsic nature of reality available through rigorous scientific inquiry. The secular, philosophical version of redemptive truth—which Rorty labels as materialist metaphysics, the “apotheosis of the results of natural science”—was based on our trust that everything can be subsumed into a rational, universal system (2010b, 480). It claimed the ability to provide an empirical foundation for “‘grounding’ our culture, our moral lives, our politics, our religious beliefs, upon ‘philosophical bases’” (Rorty 2010b, 112). But science as redemptive truth proved to be insufficient in supplying redemptive significance compared to religion. While it offers us “an edifying example of tolerant conversability,” the promise of “a last theory of everything” is a poor resource for human flourishing (2010b, 486). Rorty points out that the question “So what?” began to be posted by literary intellectuals from Ralph Waldo Emerson to Charles Baudelaire to Nietzsche in the nineteenth century who pointed out that science was unable to provide a comprehensive vocabulary for “either political guidance or individual redemption”—tasks which at least monotheist religion as redemptive truth was able to fulfill for almost two millennia (2010b, 485). To reiterate: while their influence on Western culture is by no means over, Rorty thinks that religion and philosophy have outgrown their roles as redemptive truths. Redemption by truth promises our theoretical and practical reconciliation with some kind of supreme authority. But a supremely powerful God, susceptible to recurring doubt, is unreliable; the quest for Truth, in which scientific propositions are the optimum results, is an impoverished one. In other words, the idea that redemption can be derived from a collection of true and correct beliefs has failed as a model in Rorty’s view. But is it then possible to realize a different kind of redemption? Can a new ethos accommodate the fullness of redemptive power (as in pre-philosophical religion) without the epistemic dependence on truth? Rorty replies with a resounding yes.

Rise of the Literary Culture Redemption takes a new form in the literary culture, a culture where our normative responsibility as human beings is tied not to God or nature but to ourselves and other people. Rorty calls this culture “literary” given the effect of the massive rise of literary consumption in modernity. Since the turn of the nineteenth century, he argues that imaginative literature replaced the authority of both religion and philosophy “in forming and

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solacing the agonized conscience of the young” and that novels and poems became “the principal means by which a bright youth gains a self-image” (1982, 66). With the decline of religious authority, many intellectuals turned “the enrichment of our vocabulary of moral reflection over to novelists, poets, and dramatists” (Rorty 2010b, 271). Genres such as “ethnography, the journalist’s report, the comic book, the docudrama” have now become more effective than theory and that the “novel, the movie, and the TV program” are now more relevant than the sermon and the treatise for the purpose of identifying with more and more human beings (Rorty 1989, xvi). In terms of making sense of our human communities, Rorty lauds the practice of cultural criticism—the kind that T.S.  Eliot, Lionel Trilling, and Harold Bloom have engaged in—which covers not only the appraisal of poetry and prose but also extends to the genres of “theology, philosophy, social theory, reformist political programs, and revolutionary manifestoes” (1989, 81). In sum, the literary culture encourages the expansion of our self-conceptions via different media and accommodates a more extensive range of moral references. It is neither oriented toward “a non-cognitive relation to a non-human person” like pre-philosophical religion nor “a cognitive relation to propositions” like theology or philosophy. Instead, it focuses on the self’s “non-cognitive relations with other human beings” (Rorty 2010b, 478). The redemptive potential of this culture lies in treating all artifacts such as “books and buildings, paintings and songs” as mediums for enlarging our human acquaintance and as resources for imaginative recontextualization (Rorty 2010b, 478). Religion and philosophy are subsumed under a broader domain where they are treated, among many other options, as creations of the human imagination. They are perceived as candidates for self-­discovery and self-fulfillment in the literary culture. Featuring the redeeming power of human relationships, the literary framework offers a promising alternative to epistemic redemption in Rorty’s view. Its advantage over the previous redemptive truth cultures is that it can charitably house multiple sources of redemptive power. With the concepts of redemption and literary culture in tow, we now see more clearly that Rorty’s concerns loom larger than ethics. Günter Leypoldt rightly points out that a common mistake in interpreting Rorty’s view is that he wants literature to serve as a program for moral reflection, in the sense of offering guidance for ethical conduct, so that the more superior the literature, the more profound its lessons (2008). Unlike Nussbaum, who focuses on the link between the literary form and its

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moral value, Rorty considers the redeeming power of literature in a broader way according to Leypoldt. Its power does not lie in serving as an aesthetic response to the moral objective of goodness, though this may be a possible response. At its best, literature is significant in the process of “world-making” or the renovation of a person’s self-conception and understanding of his or her environment (Leypoldt 2008).7 When reading literature does impact our moral sensibilities, Rorty is careful not to appear as elitist; in his view, literature does not have to be canonical to be edifying. As Rorty points out, even if Uncle Tom’s Cabin is not treated as one of the best literary works ever produced, it contributed monumentally in undermining slavery and racial hatred, participating more than most books in the cultivation of moral progress in the last two centuries. Thus, there exist no formulae for inspiration in a literary culture, making it pointless to demand a hierarchy of spiritually redeeming texts. This is why, according to Rorty, we are unable to get an interesting answer if we inquire “what greatness-making properties The Iliad and The Idiot share” (2010d, 632). The point that inspiration is relative is clear “when we try—and typically fail—to be awed by the purported masterpieces of cultural traditions other than our own” (2010d, 632). While we can anticipate which works will appeal to us based on our Bildung, we cannot know in advance what might bring about a meaningful, self-metamorphosing redemption. Thus, attacks of literary elitism against Rorty’s literary culture—for example, questions such as “do Henry James’s superior narrative skills contribute to the moral depth of his vision?—are misplaced” (Leypoldt 2008, 146). Rorty’s analysis of the inspirational value of literary works suggests that there is no reliable way of measuring and ranking people and events and things can transform us most deeply. One man’s redemption may not necessarily be another’s. In Weberian terms, a person can simply be “religiously unmusical” but responsive to the prodding of literature or visual art. Following Deweyan pragmatism, if we reorient “religious power” toward a broader range of phenomena we then realize that self-growth “is sometimes brought about by devotion to a cause; sometimes by a passage of poetry that opens a new perspective; sometimes as was the case with Spinoza—deemed an atheist in his day—through philosophical reflection” (Dewey 1934, 14). Encounters, if they are redemptive, do not simply add 7  The use of the concept “world-making” here is distinct from Nelson Goodman’s use of the term. For Rorty’s appraisal of Goodman’s view, see 1979b.

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to one’s knowledge but can deeply impact a person’s morals, hopes, and existential orientation. The mode of existence in a literary culture is contextualist; literary citizens are open to the possibility that the next place they visit or the next person they fall in love with can change their life. The democratization of redemptive sources fits into Rorty’s larger project. Indeed, there are times when Rorty emphasizes the task of self-­ enlarging transformation. But at other times, Rorty muses about a bigger redemptive story of collective cooperation, where the point is to overcome the past in order to create a better future. Instead of a vertical relation of ascent between man and God or nature, this culture of solidarity prioritizes the horizontal relations of commonwealth between human beings (Rorty 2010a, 17).8 According to Rorty, this commonwealth is achievable in modern liberal democracies, where people could pursue their own goals and forms of happiness so long as they respect other people’s projects. Both private redemption and political cooperation are intertwined in Rorty’s narrative. As he explains, the culture of reading literature rose to prominence at the same time as the culture of democracy in the nineteenth century and has been progressing steadily since then (1989, 82). Using his private and public distinction, Rorty claims that literature in modernity appealed to two distinct goals. Some books were able to illustrate “what private perfection—a self-created, autonomous, human life—can be like”, for example, the philosophical and fictional works of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Baudelaire, Proust, Heidegger, and Nabokov, and others were able to show how we can be “engaged in a shared, social effort—the effort to make our institutions and practices more just and less cruel”, for example, the political treatises of Marx, Mill, Dewey, Habermas, and Rawls (1989, xiv). As Leypoldt puts it: “the inspirational sublime is a central attribute of literary world-making; another is the power to create the sort of empathetic identification that encourages human solidarity (non-competitive and non-hierarchical)” (2008, 156). A more rigorous treatment of self-creation and solidarity is offered in the next chapter, but it is important to note now that Rorty’s idea of redemption complements the modern objectives of private fulfillment and public cooperation, and that meeting these objectives is conditional upon the politics at work in a literary culture.

8

 The vertical-horizontal distinction in Rorty’s pragmatism will be discussed in Chap. 5.

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Liberal Democracy Rorty thinks that liberal democracy is the best political structure to house our private and collective aspirations. He claims that while democracy is “a specifically European invention, the idea of a democratic utopia finds resonance everywhere” (1995a, 204). He regards his vision of redemption as feasible in the modern world, one that is growing more responsive to the liberal values of autonomy and solidarity and one in which a perfectly secular utopia could serve as an important long-range goal (Rorty 2010f, 546). This gives the impression that there is teleology at play in human culture: we begin from a state of immaturity, believing that “the theistic and rationalistic philosophical traditions assured us that there was something powerful on our side—God or Reason” and our culture now is becoming reconciled with contingency and mortality (Rorty 2010e, 430–431). Is Rorty following a similar logic that runs in the narratives of Nietzsche and Hegel, who both understand human life as converging toward a historical destiny? Nietzsche believes that the intrinsic movement of Western metaphysics is undergirded by the desire to promote and value its own interest (see Heidegger 1977, 53–112). This desire informs the nature of the “will to power.” In Nietzsche’s story, this will begins in Platonism and climaxes in the conscious determination of the Übermensch. Rorty thinks that Nietzsche’s critique of religion and philosophy are expressions of this “will to power”: our reliance on a Godhead and Reason “represent[s] nothing more than the expediency of a certain race and species—their utility alone is their ‘truth’” (Nietzsche 1967, sec 608 [Cf. Rorty 1991, 2]). Meanwhile, Hegel believes that universal history culminates with the realization and completion of self-consciousness, where art, religion, and philosophy serve as the three moments of the “objective spirit.” Believing he had determined “the structure of fully unfolded reason,” Hegel left behind two tasks: either illuminate the world in its correct view, as taken up by the right Hegelians, or realize “an image of the world pervaded by reason,” as heeded  by the Left (Dews 2010, 638). For both Nietzsche and Hegel, there is something that naturally drives or determines humanity. Should we then read Rorty’s anthropocentric view of democracy, redemption, and the literary culture in a similar way? The answer is no: Rorty does not prescribe a logic behind his narrative. Rather, he treats the rise of redemptive possibilities in a literary culture as a product of a fortuitous historical contingency. Unlike Nietzsche, Rorty believes that there is no metaphysic underlying our emancipation from

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religion and science and no innate principle driving our culture to a conclusion of human dominance. Also, what Rorty admires most in Hegel is not the self-realizing ambition of the Spirit, but his claim that our culture is a product of our “present discursive practices” which can be contrasted with “alternative past or proposed practices” (2007b, 24). As a fully historicist argument, Rorty takes this to mean that “intellectual and moral progress not as getting closer to anything but as the process by which the kaleidoscope keeps getting bigger and more colorful” (2010c, 22–23). Rorty also thinks that the literary turn can be better explained as a product of contingency. Modern culture was shaped by positive changes in our socio-economic condition, which have made it possible for “more and more people to become literate, and to have enough surplus time and energy to read books, magazines, and newspapers” (Rorty 2010e, 430). And while he is optimistic, the cultural sustainability of the literary culture and liberal democracies cannot be guaranteed. It is too dependent on the stability of the socio-political paradigm of the modern West. In his reply to Susan James, who argues that Rorty’s assurances about liberalism are unwarranted, he confesses no such confidence in the steadfastness of liberal values. Mutual respect, tolerance of diversity, and social cooperation are in peril in the advent of dangerous events. Our emotional capacities for liberalism might easily break if terrorists make use of nuclear weapons or if the global economic system destabilizes the security of the middle class (Rorty 2010e, 430). The literary culture can flourish only if we work hard to keep it and if the odds are not against us. In a nutshell, the literary culture is not the culmination of the Western narrative of redemption. It is the best imaginable framework for accommodating our personal and collective spiritual hopes, and Rorty thinks that human beings are now starting to embrace a self-image that fits this kind of future.

A New Self-Image Rorty argues that we should learn to live in the modern world without any indebtedness to a higher being and with full trust in our human capacities. This new autonomy, he states, is “the kind of change in self-description which could in the end make a difference” (2005b, 143). As Habermas observes, Rorty implores us to learn how “to see ourselves as the sons and daughters of a self-confident Modernity, if in our politically, economically, and socially torn global society Walt Whitman’s belief in a better future is to have a chance at all” (Habermas 2008, 6). But what constitutes this

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modern self-image? Clues are offered in Rorty’s writings, all of which follow his pragmatist maxim that goes: “Look, there isn’t any authority that we can appeal to settle the quarrels between us. We’re going to have to deal with them ourselves” (2005b, 143). This new self-image features linguistic creativity, self-reliance, and future-orientedness. Linguistic creativity reflects our ability to come to terms with the function that imagination and language play in our lives. Rorty avows his agreement with George Santayana that the only source of our moral ideals, that is, ideals prized by religion or art or philosophy, is the imagination (2010a, 8–9). He thinks that one of the greatest poems of human culture is the traditional vision of religion (and philosophy), which purports that our moral and spiritual ideals are grounded in something Real. Its redemptive power is constituted by the claim that God or nature can corroborate our beliefs and principles. Rorty wants to cast off our worship of this Platonic view and take heed of a rival ode: the poetry of utilitarianism. Utilitarians believe that society should endeavor to maximize happiness for all. Rorty notes the attractiveness of Mill’s pluralist, utilitarian elegy, which supports the rise of “a planetwide global commonwealth” (2010a, 17). Rorty’s views about the Platonic quest for truth and the utilitarian quest for happiness are already familiar. But Rorty emphasizes a fresh point in this text: that these two competing visions are compositions of the human imagination. Why the imagination? In “Pragmatism and Romanticism” (2007), Rorty re-examines the romantic idea, beautifully averred in P. B. Shelley’s manifesto “A Defence of Poetry” (1821), that the imagination should take credit for opening the many worlds that reason has proceeded to inhabit. The imagination has everything to do with “the ability to come up with socially useful novelties” and it uses the language of scientists, philosophers, novelists, poets, and the like, to execute this function (Rorty 2007b, 115). The formula goes something like this: “No words, no reasoning. No imagination, no new word. No such words, no moral and intellectual progress” (Rorty 2010b, 520). Thus, Rorty claims, “the imagination creates the games that reason proceeds to play” (2007b, 115). The first game that we played centered on our estrangement from the Real; our task was to get back in touch with it with the aim of perfecting ourselves. But this can be replaced; another game to play is how to overcome the past in favor of a better future, with the new aim being progress. For Rorty, escaping the magnetism of Plato’s vocabulary obliges us to employ the alternative language game that utilitarians and pragmatists concocted in the nineteenth century.

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Rorty’s posture, paradoxically deflationary and romanticist, has important implications. Our longing to fall back into the arms of God, transgress our finitude, and dominate the world are designs of our imaginative capacity rather than products of rational necessity. The foundations and consequences of grand social and political projects, ranging from inexpressible religious hope and dread, the modern sense of existential anguish and alienation, and even the predatory technological hunger for power and control, spring from the responses of human creativity to its circumstances. Our aspirations, dreams, and illusions, as well as the drives and effects they stimulate, are rooted in the imagination. Moreover, Rorty also thinks that the creative use of language sparks self-transformation. There are no permanent desires and outcomes; they bend and flex according to the vocabulary of human history. Language can help set aside inactive dreams, establish new expectations, and engage our rational capacities in original ways. Rorty even interpolates that what is traditionally considered as transcendental or sacred is connected to language-use. For instance, he characterizes the mystical experience not as a way toward the transcendent but as “a way of leaping over the boundaries of the language one speaks,” which in turn creates a new language to illuminate the “ordinary” consciousness (2010a, 18). The imagination goes all the way up and all the way down in Rorty’s view. His groundless hope does not seem so groundless after all, since the imagination, with its power of linguistic variation, is an infinite well of cognitive, practical, moral, and spiritual possibilities. Why is language important in the issue of a modern self-image? It is worth pointing out that Rorty’s literary culture can be interpreted as the projected fulfillment of the linguistic turn he championed since his early days. In the late 1960s up to the 1980s, the notion of a linguistic turn in philosophy was generally considered a good idea, but there were numerous disagreements about what it meant. In 1967, Rorty edited The Linguistic Turn, where he claimed that linguistic philosophy framed philosophical problems as “problems which may be solved (or dissolved) either by reforming language, or by understanding more about the language we presently use” (1992, 3). He also coined the linguistic turn the most recent philosophical revolution. But in “Twenty-Five Years After” of the 1992 reprint of the book, Rorty modified his initial position. He explained that the linguistic turn’s real impact should not be seen in terms of providing a method or a procedure of inquiry to tackle philosophical problems. Rather, its contribution was that it helped shift our preoccupation with experience to language as a medium of representation and even

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set aside the notion of representation itself. Rorty thought that our liberation from a representationalist view of language cleared the path for us to think of it “as strings of marks and noises used by human beings in the development and pursuit of social practices” (1992, 373). The key importance of language-use lies not in its ability to mirror nature, which for Rorty is a misguided venture, but in responding and coping with our evolving social practices. This pragmatic shift is the underside of Rorty’s romantic claim that a fecund vocabulary is crucial in ushering our redemptive possibilities: “Because I think of the enrichment of language as the only way to enrich experience, and because I think that language has no transcendental limits, I think of experience as potentially infinitely enrichable” (1995b, 36). Rorty also highlights the importance of self-reliance in reinventing our self-conception, evident in his response when he was asked about the viability of adopting the framework of redemption in Ancient Greece to re-­ energize our spiritual lives in modernity. It was pointed out to Rorty that Odysseus, prior to Catholicism, Islam, and Judaism, served as the archetype of heroic laicity. Instead of contemplative intelligence (nous), Odysseus confronted his tribulations by using operational intelligence (metis), without reference to God (ut Deus non esset) (Rorty 2010a, 22). Odysseus was redeemed from his problems by his own clever doing and could serve as a hero of secular progress. However, Rorty is skeptical of the prospect of reverting back to this framework: I don’t think that we can go back at all, either to the secularism of Odysseus or to the days of Mohammed or to the days of Christ or the days of Abraham. We know much more than any of these prophets and heroes and visionaries knew. We have accumulated more experience than they had. We are not closer to any universal truth than they are. We are not closer to anything transcendent than they were. We are simply more experienced, more able to see what will cause harm and what might do good. So I don’t think that it’s a question of returning, it’s a question of constantly attempting to make the future still more different from the past. (2010a, 23)

Since the world we navigate now is radically different, we cannot tailor previous redemptive practices to respond and articulate the ends of modern life. Traditional religions also cannot usher the spiritual satisfaction that they were previously able to offer in the past; too much has changed. Our task is to catch up with the level of social and moral intelligence

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required to close the gap with the increase of knowledge and our means of understanding in the modern age (Dewey 1934). In Rorty’s view, part of this process includes ridding ourselves of the outdated dictums and formulating updated ones in their stead. We should become self-reliant. This task demands recognizing that unlike the previous orders, “the high culture of the modern times has become aware that the questions human beings have thought inescapable have changed over the centuries” (Rorty 1984, 60). Modern society can now better accommodate a vocabulary that is responsive to the ideas of contingency, progress, and human responsibility. It can also imagine and work toward its own vision of the future. Rorty shares a similar view about the character of future-orientedness with Habermas. Habermas thinks that the unfulfilled project of modernity is about “a differentiated relinking of modern culture with an everyday praxis that still depends on vital heritages, but would be impoverished through mere traditionalism” (2008, 13). We cannot keep rekindling a nostalgic relationship with antiquity. Instead, we must adopt a critical consciousness of our past and present achievements and recognize what needs to be abandoned, preserved, or re-imagined. Rorty also maintains that we are “still plugging away at the familiar tasks set for us by the Enlightenment” and indicates that his work as an intellectual is to get “our fellow citizens to rely less on tradition, and to be more willing to experiment with new customs and traditions” (1999, 168). But how can we encourage a pragmatic attitude about our future? Conjuring utopias is a good approach for Rorty. Describing utopias that are “greatly preferable to the socio-­ economic setup we have at present” and heeding “narratives that recount the fortunes of an ever greater variety of possible human societies” refocus our concerns to forming better communities (Rorty 2001, 222). Dystopias are important too, since they illustrate the future to avoid. Calling it the best introduction to political philosophy, Rorty recommends reading Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1931). He describes the book as presenting what kind of “human future would be produced by a naturalism untempered by historicist Romance, and by a politics aimed merely at alleviating mammalian pain” (2000b, 189). In summary, linguistic creativity, self-reliance, and future-orientedness inform Rorty’s ideal of a new image for humanity. To reconcile this new self-image with the idea of redemption, I link Rorty’s project with the quest for human meaning and spiritual flourishing in the next section.

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Religious Nostalgia Rorty observes that today, “human beings (in the richer and more powerful parts of the world) have shown an increasing ability to put aside the question ‘What is the meaning of human life?’ and to substitute the question ‘What meaning shall we give to our lives?’” (1995c, 71). While the desire for meaning endures in both questions, the more recent question presumes that there are many legitimate answers to meaningfulness. That existential meaning can also be a choice empowers Rorty to criticize moral and spiritual desires that for him have led mankind astray. It enables him to say that the redemptive importance we place on particular idols in the Western tradition are better off placed somewhere else. Case in point: since the aspiration for eternal bliss and the quest for certainty are not universal needs, then we should not “wring our hands over the absence of the moral absolutes that our ancestors invoked” (Rorty 2010g, 507). Now if the claim that there is no absolute meaning to human life were true, how then does Rorty handle the question “what meaning shall we give to our lives?” in modernity? The answer can be approached negatively. Again, he is opposed to anything that betrays Platonic hopes and broaches a secure path to existential certainty. His writings against the priority of religion and scientism over politics and solidarity are numerous, and his pragmatism argues that our preoccupation with redemptive truth reduces our sources of human meaning. Interestingly, these responses can be read as an assault against a common enemy: religious nostalgia. The nostalgia for religion is manifested in the tendency to theorize at the “spiritual level at which Plato and Nietzsche confront each other” or to argue by “ascending to heights or plumbing depths” (Rorty 2007b, 79–80). Rorty argues that Heidegger is guilty of this sin, having abandoned the scientistic model of philosophy and falling back to a desire for “holiness” in his later years (1991, 26). Heidegger transfers our ancestors’ dependence on priests to a faith on the genius of philosophers and lyric poets, believing that these shining few can attune themselves to the voice of Being. These Heideggerian  exemplars possess the skill of revealing how the horrors of our modern technological fate could be avoided and are instrumental for our spiritual reconciliation with the modern world. Rorty reads Heidegger to mean that for the latter, other people exist for the sake of those who can decipher the destiny of the West: “where is a Thinker or a Poet, there human life is justified, for there something Wholly Other touches and is touched. Where there is not, the

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wasteland spreads” (1991, 76). According to Heidegger, without the poetic nudging of great individuals like Hölderlin (or himself), the modern age will be left in the dark. But Rorty has no use for this valorization. The spiritual battle for modern redemption is not what Heideggerians exaggerate as happening “on the scale of world and earth” and in which Hölderlin and Heidegger serve as saviors of linguistic illumination; rather, the real battle is “between two historically-situated groups of mortals” (Rorty 2010b, 675–676). Agreeing with Marx, Rorty contends that our role as philosophers, poets, and literary theorists is not to contemplate our cultural destiny but to help secure the possibility of a better future for human beings. It is a job that is parallel to professions that regulate and improve, bit by bit, their areas of expertise. Like “the engineer or the lawyer,” according to Rorty, “the philosopher is useful in solving particular problems that arise in particular situations—situations in which the language of the past is in conflict with the needs of the future” (1995a, 199). Rorty puts faith on all creative, progress-oriented citizens, emphasizing the contributions of “the poets and the engineers, the people who produce startling new projects for achieving the greatest happiness of the greatest number” (1995a, 199), in building a better future. This transformation of Western tradition and our various cultural practices, for him, now commits us to exploring answers that bear no shadow of religious nostalgia. Rorty’s project helps us confront the challenge of human meaning in a way that regards religion (or its surrogate version in philosophy) as optional. It empowers us to ask: “Do we want to weave one or more of the various religious traditions (with their accompanying pantheons) together with our deliberation over moral dilemmas, our deepest hopes, and our need to be rescued from despair?” (2007b, 21), as well as to answer: no, not in this lifetime.

Conclusion I have raised the claim that we can interpret Rorty’s philosophical project as undergirded by the theme of redemption in this chapter. Redemption is about relationships with persons, ideas, events, and things that draw out powerful experiences such as overpowering hope, love, and happiness from us. A redemptive relationship infuses our lives with existential meaning and significance, inspires risk and sacrifice, and leads to the enlargement and transformation of our old selves. Reconstructing the subject has

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led us to examine the two attitudes that inform the nature of Rorty’s writings: first, that as a pragmatist, he is consistent in debunking essentialist claims generated by reductive philosophizing, and second, that he is motivated by edification or the active appropriation of resources (originally texts, but also ideas, events, and things) for the expansion of his understanding and imagination. These postures reveal Rorty’s dissatisfaction with traditional philosophy, with his own method of philosophizing cradling the hope of self-transformation. Rorty’s concept of redemption is indebted to the original understanding of pre-philosophical religion. Salvation in pre-Platonized religion was fueled by man’s relationship with a higher, divine being unencumbered by the demand for strict epistemic proof. The systematization of religious belief led to the conviction that a specialized knowledge of redemptive truth can save us. Possessing a set of universally correct beliefs, first in the form of theological truths, and next through knowledge of scientific principles, was then construed as the primary requirement for redemption. But Rorty argues that institutional religion and materialist science have now outlived their redemptive usefulness. We should now recognize a different kind of relationship—not an association with a higher, infinitely more powerful entity, but a renewed relationship with other human beings. Redemptive power pulses through encounters that enlarge our imaginative acquaintance and lead to moments of self-metamorphosis. The most appropriate framework to house these diverse redemptive relationships is the emerging literary culture, a culture that could only be fully realized in liberal democracies. His hopes of preserving our democratic successes and upholding a polytheist space for modern redemption are thus closely enjoined. Rorty’s use of redemption, as this chapter argues, is deliberate. While he abandons its traditional content, he keeps the (pre-philosophical) idea of redemption alive. Redemption as a religious trope reminds us that our modern sources of existential significance are at stake should our literary culture fail. Thus, we must fight for this democratic vision with religious zeal. Part of the process involves invoking a new self-image for humanity, one that is at peace with the qualities of self-reliance, linguistic creativity, future-orientedness, and a willingness to let go of religious nostalgia. If Rorty were to entertain Taylor’s question in A Secular Age, which goes “why was it virtually impossible not to believe in God in, say, 1500 in our Western society, while in 2000 many of us find this not only easy, but even inescapable?”  (2007, 25), then Rorty’s answer would be because our self-­conception has evolved substantially. Our culture is more open to

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coping with the fact of human finitude and discovering the spiritual satisfactions offered by a temporal world. After fleshing out his account of redemption, Rorty’s distinctive contribution to the debates of nihilism can now be articulated in the next chapter.

References Allison, Dorothy. 1994. Skin: Talking About Sex, Class, and Literature. Ithaca: Firebrand Books. Auxier, Randall, and Lewis Edwin Hahn, eds. 2010. The Philosophy of Richard Rorty. Chicago: Open Court. Bernstein, Richard. 1990. Rorty’s Liberal Utopia. Social Research 57 (1): 31–72. Brandom, Robert, ed. 2000. Rorty and His Critics. Oxford; Malden, MA: Blackwell. Dewey, John. 1934. A Common Faith. New Haven: Yale University Press. Dews, Peter. 2010. “The Infinite Is Losing Its Charm”: Richard Rorty’s Philosophy of Religion and the Conflict Between Therapeutic and Pragmatic Critique. In The Philosophy of Richard Rorty, ed. Randall Auxier and Lewis Edwin Hahn, 635–655. Chicago: Open Court. Dreyfus, Hubert. 1980. Holism and Hermeneutics. The Review of Metaphysics 34: 3–23. Dreyfus, Hubert, Richard Rorty, and Charles Taylor. 1980. Rorty, Taylor and Dreyfus: A Discussion. The Review of Metaphysics 34 (1): 47–55. Festenstein, Matthew, and Simon Thompson, eds. 2001. Richard Rorty: Critical Dialogues. Cambridge/Malden: Polity Press. Gadamer, Hans Georg. 1960. Wahrheit und Methode. Tübingen: Mohr. Gröschner, Alexander, Colin Koopman, and Mike Sandbothe, eds. 2013. Richard Rorty: From Pragmatist Philosophy to Cultural Politics. New York: Bloomsbury. Guignon, Charles, and David Hiley, eds. 2003. Richard Rorty. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Habermas, Jürgen. 2008. ‘…And to Define America, Her Athletic Democracy’: The Philosopher and the Language Shaper; In Memory of Richard Rorty. New Literary History 39 (1): 3–12. Heidegger, Martin. 1977. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Trans. William Lovitt. New York: Harper and Row Publishers. Hiley, David. 1988. Philosophy in Question: Essays on a Pyrrhonian Theme. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Leypoldt, Günter. 2008. Uses of Metaphor: Richard Rorty’s Literary Criticism and the Poetics of World-Making. New Literary History 39 (1): 145–163. Malachowski, Alan, and Jo Burrows, eds. 1990. Reading Rorty: Critical Responses to Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature and Beyond. Oxford; Malden, MA: Blackwell.

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Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1967. The Will to Power. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Random House. Oakeshott, Michael. 1962. Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays. London: Metheun. Rorty, Richard. 1979a. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 1979b. On Worldmaking, Review of Ways of Worldmaking by Nelson Goodman 1978. Yale Review 69 (2): 276–279. ———. 1980. A Reply to Dreyfus and Taylor. The Review of Metaphysics 34 (1): 39–46. ———. 1982. Consequences of Pragmatism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 1984. Philosophy in History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1989. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1991. Essays on Heidegger and Others. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1992. The Linguistic Turn: Essays in Philosophical Method. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1995a. Philosophy and the Future. In Rorty and Pragmatism: The Philosopher Responds to His Critics, ed. Herman Saatkamp Jr., 197–206. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press. ———. 1995b. Response (to Charles Hartshorne). In Rorty and Pragmatism: The Philosopher Responds to His Critics, ed. Herman Saatkamp Jr., 29–36. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press. ———. 1995c. Response (to Richard Bernstein). In Rorty and Pragmatism: The Philosopher Responds to His Critics, ed. Herman Saatkamp Jr., 68–71. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press. ———. 1996. On Moral Obligation, Truth and Common Sense. In Debating the State of Philosophy: Habermas, Rorty, and Kolakowski, ed. Jozef Niznik and John Sanders, 48–51. Westport: Praeger. ———. 1998a. Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth Century America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 1998b. Truth and Progress. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1999. Philosophy and Social Hope. New York: Penguin. ———. 2000a. Foreword. In Heidegger, Authenticity and Modernity: Essays in Honor of Hubert L. Dreyfus, ed. Mark Wrathall and Jeff Malpas, vol. 1, ix–xii. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. ———. 2000b. Response to Robert Brandom. In Rorty and His Critics, 183–190. Oxford; Malden, MA: Blackwell. ———. 2001. Response to Matthew Festenstein. In Richard Rorty: Critical Dialogues, ed. Matthew Festenstein and Simon Thompson, 219–222. Cambridge/Malden: Polity Press.

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———. 2005a. The Future of Religion with Gianni Vattimo. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2005b. Worlds or Words Apart? The Consequences of Pragmatism for Literary Studies. In Take Care of Freedom and Truth Will Take Care of Itself: Interviews with Richard Rorty, ed. Eduardo Mendieta, 120–147. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 2007a. Dewey and Posner on Pragmatism and Moral Progress. The University of Chicago Law Review. 74 (3): 915–927. ———. 2007b. Philosophy as Cultural Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2010a. An Ethics for Today: Finding Common Ground Between Philosophy and Religion. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2010b. The Rorty Reader, ed. Christopher Voparil and Richard J. Bernstein. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. ———. 2010c. Intellectual Autobiography. In The Philosophy of Richard Rorty, ed. Randall Auxier and Lewis Edwin Hahn, 1–24. Chicago: Open Court. ———. 2010d. Reply to Miguel Tamen. In The Philosophy of Richard Rorty, ed. Randall Auxier and Lewis Edwin Hahn, 631–634. Chicago: Open Court. ———. 2010e. Reply to Susan James. In The Philosophy of Richard Rorty, ed. Randall Auxier and Lewis Edwin Hahn, 430–432. Chicago: Open Court. ———. 2010f. Reply to Jeffrey Stout. In The Philosophy of Richard Rorty, ed. Randall Auxier and Lewis Edwin Hahn, 546–549. Chicago: Open Court. ———. 2010g. Reply to J.B. Schneewind. In The Philosophy of Richard Rorty, ed. Randall Auxier and Lewis Edwin Hahn, 506–508. Chicago: Open Court. Saatkamp, Herman, Jr., ed. 1995. Rorty and Pragmatism: The Philosopher Responds to His Critics. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press. Smith, Nicholas. 2005. Rorty on Religion and Hope. Inquiry 48 (1): 76–98. Tartaglia, James, ed. 2010. Richard Rorty: Critical Assessments of Leading Philosophers. London: Routledge. Taylor, Charles. 1980. Understanding in Human Science. The Review of Metaphysics 34 (1): 25–38. ———. 2007. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wolin, Richard. 2010. Richard Rorty in Retrospect. Dissent 57 (1): 73–79.

CHAPTER 4

Averting Nihilism

Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded creatures glide under water, unapparent for the most part, and treacherously hidden beneath the loveliest tints of azure. Consider also the devilish brilliance and beauty of many of its most remorseless tribes, as the dainty embellished shape of many species of sharks. Consider, once more, the universal cannibalism of the sea; all whose creatures prey upon each other, carrying on eternal war since the world began. Consider all this; and then turn to the green, gentle, and most docile earth; consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself? For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half-known life. God keep thee! Push not off from that isle, thou canst never return! Herman Melville, Moby Dick; or The Whale (1851; 1972, 380–381).

Rorty, together with Taylor, Dreyfus, and Kelly, are concerned about existential meaning and spiritual expression in the modern world. But unlike Rorty, the sacred redemptionists identify a problem unique to modernity and recommend kindred solutions. They think that our modern culture is threatened by the mood of anthropocentrism and nihilism. A “human, all too human” outlook encourages the belief that everything is up for grabs: all meanings and moral values subjective, and at worst, arbitrary. It risks © The Author(s) 2020 T. Llanera, Richard Rorty: Outgrowing Modern Nihilism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45058-8_4

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turning freedom into something to be weaponized and feared, with living beings and things in the world serving as mere instruments to one’s own ends. At its extreme, this anthropocentric perspective leads to the life-­ negating attitude that nothing is truly important in the world, since nothing matters as an end-in-itself. To combat this threat, sacred redemptionists propose projects of re-enchanting the modern world. Overcoming nihilism entails either a recovery of the sources of moral and spiritual meaning or an attunement to modern sacred experiences. Taylor, Dreyfus, and Kelly believe that meanings without humanly projected value are best revealed by great art and literature. The sacred announces its presence in the work of artists, poets, and painters, whose expressive powers articulate the character of our age. Our task is to heed sacred experiences when they arise in the marginal interface between human beings and the universe. Our rendezvous with the sacred could save us from feelings of insignificance, emptiness, and despair. It also affords glimpses into human lives that are meaningful and spiritually nourished. Recall that Rorty, Taylor, Dreyfus, and Kelly use a broader notion of spirituality and the religious impulse than is meant by these terms. Rorty defines spiritual growth as akin to edification, as “any attempt to transform oneself into a better sort of person by changing one’s sense of what matters most” (2010a, 404). The other three thinkers evoke modified conceptions. But what is significant is that for sacred redemptionists, the nature of what can redeem us from nihilism, and transform us into better sorts of people, is, at its best, non-human. Rorty challenges this thesis. First, while Rorty admonishes the notion that the best connection we can make is tied to the non-human. Since the imagination is the root of all our malaises and accomplishments, Rorty thinks we can discard visions of the transcendent and the metaphors of ascent and descent that undergird the concept of the non-human sacred. Fixing these inbred faults is necessary for reconciling our hope for a better world to modernity’s secular turn. Second, the rise of literature has helped us gradually acquiesce to the realities of contingency and secularism. It has given way to new aspirations distinct from the desire for “a union with God, with something sublime, mysterious, unconditioned, belonging to another world”; now, the maturation or “rounded completion and self-recognition” of a person’s narrative is an equal competitor for existential meaning (Rorty 2010a, 405). Reading novels also increased access to a broader range of sources of moral and spiritual growth, following Milan Kundera’s view that “the novel is the characteristic genre of democracy, the genre most closely associated

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with the struggle for freedom and equality” (Rorty 2010a, 309). Finally, Rorty proposes that redemptive relationships encourage self-enlargement and transformation. Rorty lauds the novel an important resource for establishing relations with people and cultures so deeply unlike ourselves and our own traditions, since it is “one of the elements of our culture that is not structured around transcultural notions of validity” (1990, 638). He points out, contra Thomas McCarthy, that luckily “we live in a culture that has been nurtured not just on ‘the Bible, on Socrates and Plato, on the Enlightenment,’ [p. 365] but on, for example, Rabelais, Montaigne, Sterne, Hogarth, and Mark Twain” (Rorty 1990, 637–638). The emerging literary culture, which treats edification as its paramount spiritual activity, allows such edifying experiences to flourish. Our modern culture should neither endorse nor revive non-human religiosity according to Rorty. He disregards the idea that the lethal combination of anthropocentrism and nihilism is the great modern problem. He bypasses the need to intellectualize the spiritual itch for something otherworldly, believing that the best we can hope for is “an intellectual world in which human beings are responsible only to each other” (2010a, 474). But if the sacred redemptionists are correct in their accounts of modernity, then Rorty seems to be out of touch with the genuine needs of the modern world. Instead of settling the status of modernity’s spiritual condition once and for all, I want to take a step back and engage the blind spot that Rorty’s redemption model reveals: that there is something amiss in clamoring for the divine as a response to nihilism. Taylor, Dreyfus, and Kelly believe that there are moral and spiritual sources to retrieve or that there is something to emulate about the past for modern redemption. But their strategy not only risks reviving the false hopes that accompany these religious aspirations but may also entrench the less admirable elements of traditional religion. Unlike them, Rorty entertains the question of what it is like to make peace with the notion that we are magnificently alone in the world. What is promising about Rorty’s way of revitalizing the modern spirit is that it allows us to tackle the problem of nihilism afresh. We can frame Rorty’s alternative with a series of questions: if we are the imaginative creators of our spiritual problems and the generators of their solutions, what then stands as the greatest threat to human beings? What prevents us from creating a better moral and spiritual culture in modernity? If not nihilism, what do we need saving from according to Rorty? The core issue relates to a familiar human flaw: egotism. An egotist has a moral bearing that condescends to others, inhibits kindness, and promotes

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cruelty. While egotism at first appears to be an ordinary and banal vice, it underlies grievous cultural faults in different societies and traditions. In short, Rorty wants redemption from egotism and its dangers in the modern world. Egotism acts as an anathema to his spiritual hope for a self-­ enlarging, pluralistic, and polytheist utopia. My aim in the next section is to show how egotism can be characterized as a malaise of modernity.

Egotism Rorty describes the egotist as someone who is self-centered not so much in being selfish, but in being self-satisfied. She is armed with a core set of beliefs that provides a firm foundation for all kinds of judgment. This makes her resistant to different views, believing that her understanding, which she expresses using her “final vocabulary,” is fully informed. Recall the pivotal, world-making role of a person’s language for Rorty. For him, a final vocabulary pertains to the language used by persons to articulate and justify their life world. To clarify, Rorty does not append the word “final” in his description because he thinks that these vocabularies are inflexible. Rorty’s ironist—a person who puts to doubt her inherited vocabularies and traditions—has a final vocabulary too, albeit one that involves “the cultivation of a wilful linguistic infidelity” (Rée 1990, 32). Finality here should be understood in the sense that the language-user is at risk of becoming argumentatively feeble without it: “If doubt is cast on the worth of these words, their user has no noncircular argumentative recourse. Those words are as far as he can go with language; beyond them there is only hapless passivity or a resort to force” (Rorty 1989, 73). An ideal final vocabulary for Rorty is creative and open to transformations which can occur when meeting different people, encountering unfamiliar cultures, and reading books, since “a turn of phrase in a conversation or a novel or a poem—a new way of putting things, a novel metaphor or simile—can make all the difference to the way we look at a whole range of phenomena” (Rorty 2010a, 391). In light of this description, we can describe egotists as individuals whose final vocabularies are resistant to change. Rorty’s writings point to common sense, cant, and ideology as examples of egotistic languages. They cripple the imagination’s flexibility and creativity. In Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Rorty frames Western common sense as driven by core Platonic and Kantian assumptions ranging from “truth is independent from the human mind” to “man is naturally good.” Those who abide by

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these classic tenets of common sense are often resistant to the challenges of contingency and historicism. In “Redemption from Egotism,” Rorty attacks our reliance on cant, which ranges from “the untutored common sense (the so-called ‘folk wisdom’) of a peasant village, through the unthinking reiteration of quotations from the sacred scripture, to the equally unthinking reiteration of the best-known sentences in the works of Heidegger or of Bloom itself” (2010a, 390). Since they arouse neither interest nor suspicion, they serve as the easy fallback when the coherence of social beliefs is disrupted. Ideology also gets a beating in the same essay. Following Harold Bloom, Rorty defines ideology as “a set of general ideas which provide a context in which the reader places every book she reads” (2010a, 390; see Bloom 2000). For Rorty and Bloom, the recourse to ideology—as Heideggerian-Derridean critiques of metaphysics or Marxist-­ Foucauldian analyses of capitalism or power—diminishes the self-­liberating potential of literature, since it privileges only one or two ways of reading texts. At its most severe, an egotistic standpoint is intellectually, morally, and spiritually sufficient in its convictions. The egotist thrives in what Rorty describes as knowingness: “a state of soul which prevents shudders of awe. It makes one immune to romantic enthusiasm” (1998a, 126). Instead of finding value in the utopic thinking that life is capable of being transformed, an egotist is content in “taking refuge in self-protective knowingness about the present” (Rorty 1998a, 140). She views other people unlike her as “deprived of truth, of moral knowledge” (Rorty 2010a, 361). The egotist, redeemed from ignorance, perceives herself as occupying a position of advantage over the unenlightened. To illustrate, Rorty classifies religious believers and some philosophers as egotists: Egotists who are inclined to philosophize hope to short-circuit the need to find out what is on the mind of other people. They would like to go straight to the way things are (to the will of God, or the moral law, or the nature of human beings) without passing through other people’s self-descriptions. Religion and philosophy have often served as shields for fanaticism and intolerance because they suggest that this sort of short-circuiting has been accomplished. (2010a, 395)

Since religion and philosophy are the pillars of Western culture, the systematized egotism derived from these traditions remains widespread and entrenched. Rorty states that “Catholic bishops, the Mormon General

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Authorities, the televangelists, and all the other religious professionals who devote themselves not to pastoral care but to promulgating orthodoxy and acquiring economic and political clout” remain influential, commanding adherence from its followers (2010a, 456). Members of the New Atheism, claiming the glory of materialist science, are not edifying either. Instead of ushering a dignified secularist revolution, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett (the “Four Horsemen of the Non-Apocalypse”), and other radical atheists seem to be more successful in inspiring hate and derision in the public sphere. But not all egotists are extremists in the public eye; the everyday egotist is stubborn and often unlikeable except to her peers and idolizers. If we interpret egotism as a character flaw, its mild forms will then be recognizable in different people, ranging from privileged WASPs to sexist and homophobic parents. So how could egotism serve as a malaise of our times? Could it even come close to the darkness of nihilism that Taylor, Dreyfus, and Kelly are troubled about, when egotism sounds so common and ordinary? But it is precisely egotism’s ordinariness that makes it threatening. Rorty’s claims about egotism parallel Judith Shklar’s and Hannah Arendt’s anxieties about ordinary human attitudes. Meanness, unthinkingness, and lack of imagination are vices that etch grave social wounds in our communities. Shklar suggests that liberal politics requires “the possibility of making the evil of cruelty and fear the basic norm of its political practices and prescriptions” (2004, 157; see Rorty 1989, xv, 74, 146). Cruelty, like hypocrisy, snobbery, treachery, and at its worst, misanthropy, can “flaw us so deeply, they are a common sight everywhere” (Shklar 1984, 2). These behaviors also lead to destructive consequences. Arendt, for instance, offers a radical re-reading of evil in her analysis of the Adolf Eichmann trial. She argues that the death of the Jews in Eichmann’s hands had more to do with Eichmann’s simple desire to rise up the bureaucratic ranks coupled with the failure of moral empathy, rather than his harboring of venomous anti-Semitism (Arendt 1964). In the form of extremist religious and misogynist attitudes, we can see it at work in the paradoxes of human behavior: “The problem is the gallant and honorable Serb who sees Muslims as circumcised dogs. It is the brave soldier and good comrade who loves and is loved by his mates, but who thinks of women as dangerous, malevolent whores and bitches” (Rorty 2010a, 359). Dangerous in ways similar to cruelty and banal evil, we should be alarmed by the normalcy of egotism.

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To reiterate: that a person should be concerned about what hurts others, and that she should be kind, are worthy moral purposes for Rorty. He militates against egotists who would rather be redeemed from impiety (if religious) or irrationality (if philosophical), instead of intolerance and insensitivity. In this sense, Rorty moralizes redemption to combat egotism. His remedy involves invoking the self against itself, an idea that is expressed well by the already familiar term “self-enlargement.” In the next section, I propose a reconstruction of Rorty’s controversial privatepublic distinction that frames self-creation (a private end) and solidarity (a public end) as ways of realizing self-enlargement. My work goes against traditional interpretations of Rorty’s distinction, which characterize these private and public ends as either problematic or irreconcilable. In my reading, self-­creation and solidarity share self-enlargement as a fundamental quality, an insight that can change the way Rorty’s private-public distinction works.

The Private-Public Distinction The private-public distinction has been fiercely debated since its inception, mostly in terms of its problematic application to issues in politics, social theory, religion, and literature (see, among many other treatments of the split: Ballacci 2017; Barthold 2012; Bernstein 1990, 1992; Erez 2013; Fraser 1989, 1991; Guignon and Hiley 2003; Lynch 2007; McCarthy 1990a, b; Rodeiro 2018; Topper 1995; Wicks 1993). The common view about the distinction is that it is more trouble than it is worth. There are two main reasons for this. First, critics and supporters alike doubt Rorty’s assertion that the private and the public have non-overlapping concerns. Second, Rorty’s defense of the distinction often embroils him in inconsistent and contradictory claims. What is interesting is that despite facing a host of unresolved problems, Rorty refuses to give up the private-public concept in his oeuvre. He is steadfast in maintaining a “firm” distinction between the two spheres, believing it vital for guaranteeing room for projects of self-creation and solidarity in his ideal liberal society. In what could be considered as his final word about the private-public distinction, Rorty explains: Justice is, indeed, as Rawls says, the first virtue of society. But societies are means to an end—namely, aesthetic enhancement, the creation of a world in

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which, as Dewey wrote, “the arts and sciences will be the unforced flowers of life.” In that world, every human being will be able, as Whitman said, to invite his or her soul. (2010b, 21)

This statement on justice and esthetic enhancement represents both the merit and the weakness of Rorty’s position: he wants to uphold what he regards as our best inheritances from the Enlightenment and Romantic traditions, two modern movements whose ideals, methods, and goals oppose each other. Their inherent antagonism reverberates throughout Rorty’s formulations of the private-public distinction. Christopher Voparil describes this as a tension that emanates from Rorty’s desire to “defend both Enlightenment liberalism and a poeticized culture that continually threatens to undermine the primacy of its political goals” (2010, 38). On the one hand, Rorty asserts that we have already triumphed in drafting the best political framework for living well, at least in theory. He argues that Enlightenment liberalism stands for Western social and political thought’s “last conceptual revolution” (1989, 63). In relation to extending our sense of human solidarity, “every culture, no matter how parochial, contains material which can be woven into utopian images of a planetwide democratic political community” (Rorty 1995, 204). For Rorty, the political challenge is to sustain and advance our democratic achievements of freedom, security, human rights, and civil liberties. On the other, Rorty also dreams of the literary culture: a Romantic culture charged by the power of the imagination. He regards the human imagination as a potent source of human meaning and fulfillment. Recognizing that there are many projects of human enrichment, Rorty upholds a liberal utopia where many and diverse forms of human happiness have a place (2007, 41). The problem with this proposal is that some imaginative ventures may endanger the cause of egalitarian liberal politics; Romantic creativity, after all, occasions the relentless transformation of human beings, including their social and political structures. To limit this Romantic risk, Rorty disciplines the processes of self-creation and solidarity by applying the private-public distinction to his project. As mentioned previously, in Rorty’s ideal liberal world, “everybody gets to worship his or her symbol of ultimate concern, unless worship of that symbol interferes with the pursuit of happiness by his or her fellow citizens” (2007, 40). Rorty is not always successful in defending this position with consistency. One reason he gets into difficulties in presenting a consistent formulation of his pragmatist vision is his insistence that self-creation and

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solidarity have nothing significant in common. While he goes as far as saying that public cooperation must make room for idiosyncratic projects of self-realization, he does not interpret these two values as working together, and in a similar way, to achieve his hopes for a liberal utopia. To be clear, Rorty has clarified that he has never made “the absurd claim that politics and art, the pursuit of justice and the pursuit of idiosyncratic bliss, have, or should have no effects upon one another” (2010b, 20–21). He does not argue that a boundary exists, only that self-creation and solidarity are irrelevant to each other. I argue that this is a mistake: self-creation and solidarity are relevant to each other, and they are so because they share a common feature. This is the feature of self-enlargement as described in Rorty’s later writings. In what follows, I demonstrate how self-­enlargement can be invoked to alleviate tensions in Rorty’s synthesis of Enlightenment and Romantic ideals, which in turn opens up a way of justifying the relevance of Rorty’s private-public distinction. The most sustained account of the private-public distinction can be found in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, where Rorty criticizes the Western commitment to unify private and public interests. This bias undergirds both “Plato’s attempt to answer the question ‘Why is it in one’s interest to be just?’ and Christianity’s claim that perfect self-­ realization can be attained through service to others” (Rorty 1989, xiii). Judging these projects as misguided, he argues that we must distinguish between individual and collective purposes and allow for both to flourish in a liberal society. Self-creation serves the ends of edification and self-­ transformation, which refer to “the effort of an individual thinker to free himself from his tradition” (1998b, 308). Solidarity stands for the hope for an egalitarian utopia as guided by “the collective political enterprise of increasing freedom and equality” (1998b, 308). In the Western canon, self-creation is prized by thinkers like Nietzsche, Wilde, and Derrida, and follows the belief that “aesthetic enhancement is the aim of human life”; solidarity, meanwhile, is a concern held in common by Kant, Mill, Rawls, and Dewey, who think that “our responsibility for other people comes first” (Rorty 2010b, 20). Rorty admits that these two objectives conflict in practice. Giving precedence to self-creation can leave one cold to the goal of assuaging suffering, while prioritizing solidarity can impinge on the realization of various personal projects. Acknowledging the private-­ public distinction could help balance two goals: it encourages people to negotiate the problem of how they can be free in private while being committed to common liberal concerns. Following Rawls, Rorty’s justification

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goes: “the extent of your cooperation in social projects is a proper object of concern, but your private projects are your own business, as long as they can be carried out within the framework of just laws and institutions” (2010b, 21). I now  present how this formulation of the private-public distinction appears unsuitable to support Rorty’s liberal hopes in three specific instances. The first instance relates to his engagement with feminism. Nancy Fraser claims that Rorty does not realize that the personal is conflated with the political, especially regarding race, gender, and identity politics. Creative re-evaluations of feminist concepts—concepts such as “sexual harassment,” “marital rape,” and “the double shift” that were integral for transforming social consciousness—transpired in the public sphere and not the private (Fraser 1991, 266).1 She also observes that when Rorty takes up the question of identity formation and praises the ‘prophetic’ tone in the contemporary feminism of Catherine McKinnon and Marilyn Frye, his usual distinctions between “the private and the public, the community and the individual, the political and the aesthetic” become irrelevant (Fraser 1991, 262). In her view, Rorty uses the value of Romantic redescription to promote “the collective enterprise of overcoming oppression and restructuring society” so that he is wrong in invoking binary categories (1991, 262). Fraser is mistaken in thinking that Rorty restricts creative redescription to the private sphere. Rorty has consistently valued the creative imagination in both spheres; in particular, Contingency has a section on Orwell and cruelty relevant to developing the political imagination. But her observation about Rorty’s shifting positions can undermine the firmness of the private-public formula. In tackling feminism, the boundaries between Rorty’s oppositions are blurred because he argues that the poeticizing of feminist activists advanced egalitarianism. Upholding a rigid distinction between the private and the public makes little sense for feminist projects, since self-creation and solidarity in these cases are working together. Moreover, 1  See Janack (2010). Rorty’s famous rejoinder is that Fraser misreads his work, since he defines the private as something like Whitehead’s definition of religion, that is, “what you do with your solitude,” which differs from the interaction that occurs in the kitchen or the bedroom (Nystrom and Puckett 2002, 62). Rorty has also addressed the charge of him discounting the idea that “the personal is the political”: “But I do not think that anything I wrote can be cited in support of the view that men have the right to beat their wives in the privacy of their homes, without state interference. I was not trying to define limits of state power, but rather say what, in the long run, states are good for” (2010b, 20).

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Fraser’s critique shows that self-­creation for women redefining identities they inherited in a patriarchal culture has egalitarian motives. Feminism strives to surmount a domineering patriarchal culture to build an equal society. When it comes to feminist projects, private and public goals can coalesce desirably. Rorty’s distinction appears vulnerable a second time when he engages the role that self-creation plays in stimulating human progress. He contradicts himself on this issue by acknowledging that some projects directed toward private autonomy are vital for revolutionizing culture and society. For example, Rorty states that Platonism and Paulinian Christianity did not start out as collective enterprises. They began as private and original utopic fantasies of Plato and St. Paul, two historical individuals who redirected the course of Western philosophy and religion (Rorty 1991, 121). Rorty even states that the risks of self-creation are worth it if it innovates culture. With Pico della Mirandola, Charles Fourier, and Jean-Paul Sartre in mind, Rorty argues that “lots of the experiments in individual and social living that these self-creators carried out were, to be sure, disastrous failures. But such failures are part of the price we pay for progress” (2010c, 572). If we follow Rorty’s reasoning, human civilization is indebted to the power of private imaginations. If these Romantic energies were cordoned off, won’t it result to cultural stagnation? Rorty finds self-creators social indispensable in a liberal utopia. He welcomes as many of them as possible, arguing that a progressive society needs “a constant supply of wild-­ eyed visionaries to keep coming up with fresh descriptions” (2010c, 572). The important caveat for him is that their ideas should not harm liberal concerns. However, the utility and impact of these fresh descriptions cannot be determined in advance; they have to enter public discourse first to effect change. It is thus incoherent for Rorty to valorize the divide between the private and the public, particularly when he admits that their interaction is critical for human progress. Finally, Rorty also seems ready to disown his private-public distinction when it suits his argument. He appears to reject his conceptions of the liberal ironist and the private-public distinction in his response to Schneewind, as discussed in Chap. 2. If nihilism is not the guaranteed result of antifoundationalism, then esteeming self-creation becomes unnecessary in his framework. While this change of mind sounds troubling at first, it applies to a different side of Rorty’s project. In questioning whether self-creation is necessary to compensate for losing ultimate foundations, he repudiates an existential assumption that underlies the

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distinction but does not engage the political motivation behind it. If the motive for democratic pluralism is set aside as Rorty does in this exchange, then his conception of a liberal utopia loses its shape and pragmatic purpose. In brief, while Rorty’s disavowal here is not a total rejection of the private-public distinction, the consistency of his view suffers in his neglect to distinguish the existential from the political goals of his liberal hopes. These three instances show that private-public distinction remains shaky. However, it would be wrong to reject it given Rorty’s dedication to keeping the distinction. Thus, the challenge is to account for self-creation and solidarity in a way that can take Rorty’s project forward. We need an interpretation of the private-public distinction that minimizes the strain between the Enlightenment and Romantic tendencies in his writings that have led him to make inconsistent statements. In what follows, I show that when considered as self-enlargement remedies  against egotism, Rorty’s values of self-creation and solidarity can be reconciled in a way that justifies a less problematic version of the private-public distinction. This less problematic version could be used as a model to ground Rorty’s participation in the debate with the sacred redemptionists.

Self-Creation and Solidarity A closer look at Rorty’s writings reveals that self-creation is best achieved when one loses the self to create the self. A person comes closer to achieving the modern dream of “autonomy” or “authenticity” when self-­ fashioning is based on expanding one’s repertoire of human experiences and encountering a great variety of human beings. Solidarity, meanwhile, takes the form of a civic religion that Whitman and Dewey have offered America. Rorty celebrates their hope to replace “God as the unconditional object of desire” with social justice as “the country’s animating principle, the nation’s soul” (1998a, 18). Democratic solidarity, which expands our loyalties in the service of egalitarianism, is the political framework of Rorty’s liberal utopia. My reading proposes taking self-creation and solidarity as the primary redemptive paths from egotism. These two liberal ideals centralize our efforts toward becoming less self-satisfied and more other-orientated. Applied to Rorty’s literary culture, self-creation and solidarity exist for the sake of each and buoy the strength of the other. Rorty claims that Wilde’s dictum “socialism for the sake of individualism” stands

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as the rationale behind their companionship as ideals (see Wilde 1966).2 Rorty argues that human beings are worth caring about because “we all have, given sufficient security, wealth, education, and leisure, the capacity to be the artists of our own lives” (2010b, 20). Hence, we should participate in cooperative social projects while promoting the meliorist agenda of allowing many forms of human flourishing. But how can self-creation and solidarity work as ways of realizing self-enlargement? Self-creation conveys the individual’s power to transcend her milieu. For Rorty, it realizes the person’s freedom to present novel and creative redescriptions of her character. Of utmost importance to self-creators is constructing an identity unfettered by their intellectual or cultural tradition. Their project is about becoming “one’s own person rather than merely the creation of one’s education or one’s environment” (Rorty 2010b, 476). This desire for originality can befall persons who, for example, have a taste for philosophy and wish to articulate a complete picture of their existence; that is, “if one’s vocation, one’s private pursuit of perfection, entails constructing models of such entities as ‘the self,’ ‘knowledge,’ ‘language,’ ‘nature,’ ‘God,’ or ‘history,’ and then tinkering with them until they mesh with one another” (Rorty 2010b, 255). Those with a Romantic streak see self-creation in a Freudian way; as Rorty puts it, self-­ creation is about “the search for a character, the attempt of individuals to be reconciled with themselves (and, in the case of some exceptional individuals, to make their lives works of art)” (2010b, 269). Nietzsche, Proust, Heidegger, and Derrida serve as Rorty’s exemplary self-creators. They represent his claim that “one of the many ways in which human life has improved in recent centuries is that it left more room for the people who get a kick out of the production of originality” (2001a, 131). In philosophy, Rorty suggests two common conceptions of self-­ actualization: either the search for purity through self-knowledge (asceticism) or the desire for self-creation (aesthetic). Plato and Kant evoke the former, which involves a puritanical completion of the self, or “the desire to purify oneself is the desire to slim down, to peel away everything that is accidental, to will one thing, to intensify, to become a simpler and more 2  While Rorty endorses its catchy phraseology, Wilde’s essay does not reflect his politics of democratic socialism. The liberal utopia is not about elitist flourishing: “certain passages in Wilde will not bear repeating, as when he speaks of ‘the poets, the philosophers, the men of science, the men of culture—in a word, the real men, the men who have realized themselves, and in whom all humanity gains a partial realization’” (Wilde 1966, 1080 [cf. Rorty 2010b, 488]).

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transparent being” (Rorty 2001a, 131). Rorty advocates the aesthetic form of self-creation, performed by those “who are interested in their own autonomy and individuality rather than in their social usefulness and whose excursions into politics are incidental to their principal motives” (Rorty 1998b, 308). In this aesthetic sense, self-creators wish “to embrace more and more possibilities, to be constantly learning, to give oneself over entirely to curiosity, to end by having envisaged all the possibilities of the past and of the future” (Rorty 2010a, 269). Rorty cites the likes of William Blake and Charles Baudelaire for sharing with Nietzsche and Heidegger this desire for self-transformation through their limit-transgressing art and poetry (1991, 193). The actual content and techniques for esthetic self-­ enlargement vary: for Marquis de Sade, it is through sexual expression; for Lord Byron, through political engagement; and for Hegel, through the enrichment of one’s vocabulary (Rorty 2010a, 269). Notice that the element that ties Rorty’s self-creators together is their ingenious use of language. They formulate poetic achievements, ranging from Heideggerian litanies to Derridean puns in philosophy, to escape the theoretical constraints of their language, culture, or style. In other words, self-creation is the process of transfiguring the ego’s final vocabulary. At first, self-creation appears to be a project available only to geniuses with a penchant for linguistic gymnastics. It is a form of redemption designed for a specific demographic: well-read intellectuals who enjoy feeding their natural hunger for art, knowledge, and experience. But it would be incorrect to assess self-creation in such a restrictive way, since Rorty promotes self-creation as becoming an option to more people in the modern world. For example, Rorty points out that Freud, whom he calls as “an apostle of the aesthetic life, of unending curiosity,” has been integral in democratizing the appeal of self-exploration (2010a, 270). The theory of the unconscious and the creative power of interpretation paved the way for his patients and readers to weave original, self-enriching narratives. By seeing ourselves as “centerless, as random assemblages of contingent and idiosyncratic needs,” Freud helped make attractive the moral value of becoming “increasingly ironic, playful, free, and inventive in our choice of self-descriptions” (Rorty 2010a, 270). This change resulted in a modern vocabulary of moral reflection enriched by the language of the unconscious and psychoanalysis. Modern self-creators now have more resources at their disposal for pursuing their idiosyncratic ambitions. In terms of the self-enlarging potential of self-creation, Rorty also insists that today, the best way of achieving a sense of “Heideggerian authenticity—the best way, as Nietzsche said, to

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‘become who you are’—is not to ask ‘what is the truth?’ but rather to inquire ‘what sorts of people are there in the world, and how do they fare?’” (2010a, 390). The self-creator as someone pursues autonomy through a kind of comparative literary morality. She is someone who, to understand her surroundings, “passes rapidly from Hemingway to Proust to Hitler to Marx to Foucault to Mary Douglas to the present situation in Southeast Asia to Gandhi to Sophocles” (1982, xl). Rorty admits that the self-creator, in search of what purposes to have, is often “lucky enough to have the money and leisure to do something about it: to visit different churches or gurus, go to different theatres or museums, and, above all, to read a lot of different books” (2010a, 476). The self-creator takes this cosmopolitan, interdisciplinary route to be acquainted with as many human vocabularies, as many forms of life, and as many ideas as possible for constructing an idiosyncratic self-image. According to this paradoxical interpretation, the self-creator best creates an authentic self by mislaying her ego. Self-creation is one way by which a person could be redeemed from her own egotism without succumbing to transcendent ambitions. But as Habermas relays, “private edification is, of course, only half of the business of philosophical communication. Public commitment is the other, even more important task of philosophy” (2008, 9). Solidarity is the other and more straightforward path to combat egotism in Rorty’s work. The Western liberal tradition stands for the protection of our democratic achievements, the highest goal of which is to promote freer, happier, and richer lives, according to Rorty. Whitman’s hymn about America—that “we are the greatest poem because we put ourselves in the place of God: our essence is our existence, and our existence is in the future”—is something Rorty wants extended to cover a larger sense of belongingness (1998a, 22). Solidarity is the allegiance shared by a community of individuals with overlapping beliefs, kindred desires, and a common public vocabulary of moral concern. In a 1997 interview, Rorty provides an interesting description of how solidarity operates: I see it as people thinking of themselves first and foremost as members of a trade union or citizens of a country, or members of an army, people engaged in a common effort, so that if the effort fails, identity is in trouble. If the revolution doesn’t succeed, if the union can’t be organized, if the country doesn’t survive, if the war isn’t won, then the individual is crushed. Solidarity is just what exists in these movements. It is accepting reciprocal responsibil-

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ity to other members of the group for the sake of a common purpose. In the sense the Communist Party of the Soviet Union had solidarity, the Nazis had solidarity, Mao’s cultural revolutionaries had solidarity. The bad guys can have solidarity too. [Laughter.] Solidarity is morally neutral, so to speak. It’s like self-respect. It’s for groups what self-respect is for individuals. (2005a, 61)

Rorty’s description of solidarity has interesting implications. First, it suggests that solidarity is linked to a person’s identity. As their membership is an integral part of their self-conception, solidarity can rouse people to sacrifice themselves for their beliefs and ideals. It can motivate people to stand up for what they believe to be good or rational causes, which outsiders to their community perceive as evil or irrational. To illustrate: when Jacquelyn Ann K. Kegley argues that bad communities are identifiable and undeserving of anyone’s loyalty, Rorty responds by inquiring: “But what criterion should somebody raised in the bosom of the Mafia use when deciding whether to rat out her friends and relatives? How does she figure out whether the community in which she has been raised is ‘ultimately anti-community’”? (2010d, 136–137). Second, Rorty’s description suggests that solidarity is a source of existential meaning. At its best, solidarity acts as a rich motivational source for personal growth. Members aspire to represent themselves in the best light: as model citizens, good comrades, or compassionate workers. At its worst, the group’s defeat could result into a personal or moral crisis, leading to the experience of alienation and disillusionment. Third, Rorty’s description illuminates how the commitment to secular causes is comparable to the zeal and intensity of religious faith. Solidarity is not exclusively allied with the transcendent. Marxism, for instance, approximated the social influence of Christianity in the twentieth century (Rorty 1998a, 39). Solidarity in this sense responds to the redemptive impulse of participating in a spiritual romance with a community. How can solidarity redeem from egotism? Rorty argues that the existence of different solidarities is often a source of moral conflict. Our behavior highly depends on the loyalties we uphold. Our loyalties, in this sense, are manifestations of social egotism, and our task is to expand them to include more and more people as part of our moral kin. Rorty argues that this perspective puts us in a better position to respond compassionately to a wider range of cases. He claims that the more the overlap, the greater our chances for regarding others as “the sort of people one can live

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with—and eventually, perhaps, the sort one can be friends with, intermarry with, and so on” (2007, 53). In Rorty’s view, the kind of solidarity that does this inclusive work is democratic solidarity, one inspired by a free and egalitarian liberal utopia. Rorty rehearses his version of this American dream in Achieving Our Country: We were supposed to love our country because it showed promise of being kinder and more generous than other countries. As the blacks and the gays, among others, were well aware, this was a counsel of perfection rather than description of fact. But you cannot urge national political renewal on the basis of descriptions of fact. You have to describe the country in terms of what you passionately hope it will become as well as in terms of what you know it be now. You have to be loyal to a dream country rather than to the one to which you wake up every morning. Unless such loyalty exists, the ideal has no chance of becoming actual. (1998a, 101)

Endorsing democratic solidarity, Rorty argues that we should heed “the hope for a religion of literature, in which works of the secular imagination replace Scripture as the principal source of inspiration and hope for each new generation” (1998a, 136). Following Allison, Bloom, and Matthew Arnold, he believes that reading literature can steer the redemptive power of solidarity toward an imaginative and self-enlarging direction. This egalitarianism is articulated by the likes of Whitman, Wordsworth, Blake, and Dewey: poets and intellectuals whose words have inspired people like Jean Jaures, Eugene Debs, Vaclav Havel, and Bill Bradley to engineer politics toward social justice (Rorty 1998a, 139). Solidarity in favor of a robust social democracy is Rorty’s spiritual hope. He urges us to set ablaze the democratic energy of public spiritual symbols of concern. Rorty does not only endorse literature that promotes democratic ideals. That would miss the point. The alleviation of cruelty is also an important goal of Rorty’s liberal utopia, and literature is valuable because it illuminates human  experiences vividly and with careful attention. In his oeuvre, Rorty prizes the novel as the principal literary form that shows us how to understand other people in ways unmediated by questions of truth, helping us to grasp “the variety of human life and the contingency of our own moral vocabulary” (Rorty  2010a, 393). As Voparil puts it, the value of Rorty’s conception of the power of the novel “resides in the epistemological egalitarianism it embodies and its orientation toward social change” (2012, 126). Self-enlargement comes to play in the literary culture when readers engage in sentimental

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re-education. Moral philosophers, historians, biographers, novelists, and others involved in artistic expression widen our understanding of human beings. They reveal the unfamiliar and the excluded. Narratives unimagined can change our old ways and prejudices, for they: [h]elp us imagine what it is like to be a cradle Catholic losing his faith, a redneck fundamentalist adopting hers, a victim of Pinochet coping with the disappearance of her children, a kamikaze pilot of the Second World War living with the fact of Japan’s defeat, a bomber of Hiroshima coping with the price of America’s victory, or an idealistic politician coping with the pressures that multinational corporations bring to bear on the political process. (Rorty 2010a, 394)

Literature issues an invitation to care, allowing readers to engage justifications such as “because this is what it is like to be in her situation—to be far from home, among strangers” or “because she might become your daughter-­ in-law” or “because her mother would grieve for her” (Rorty 2010a, 365). For Rorty, the exposure to a variety of experiences is an effective way of moralizing humanity toward solidarity and to keep increasing the limits of empathy. He even suggests that we should even consider extending our solidarity to include “all those who, like yourself, can experience pain—even the cows and the kangaroos—or perhaps even to all living things, even the trees” (2007, 45). At its ideal, this commitment would produce a kind of being “envisaged by Christian and Buddhist accounts of sainthood—an ideal self to whom the hunger and suffering of any human being (and even, perhaps, that of any other animal) is intensely painful” (1999, 79). In a certain sense, Rorty’s ambition for solidarity is not too far off from the ideals and archetypes of some familiar religions.

Self-Enlargement I have argued that Rorty’s ideals of self-creation and solidarity can be mobilized as paths toward self-enlargement. If the goal were to address egotism in its individual and social forms, then the gap between private and public concerns would not be as huge as Rorty spells it out to be. While self-creation and solidarity may substantially differ in motivation,

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their enemy (egotism) and the method of redemption (self-enlargement) are akin in character. This reconstruction to a certain extent clashes with Rorty’s intentions for framing the distinction, since he has argued that “we should not try too hard to integrate these two—not to struggle to bring the private together with the public” (2010b, 20). While my interpretation does not amalgamate the ends of self-creation and solidarity, it proposes points of compatibility between private and public objectives. The task now is to show how this proposal eases the EnlightenmentRomantic tension that pervades Rorty’s private-public distinction. I would like to offer two suggestions here. The first is to consider that more than the application of the private-public distinction, the ideals of self-creation and solidarity represent Rorty’s main concerns best. Indeed, the distinction has been at the forefront of various philosophical discussions given Rorty’s commitment to liberalism. However, the private-­ public distinction derives its pragmatic justification from self-creation and solidarity. Not only are these two ideals at the core of his liberal utopia, but he can also be read as endorsing self-enlargement as their identifying feature in his various works. The role of the private-public distinction is secondary: it exists particularly to support self-creation and solidarity and not the other way around. To advance Rorty’s project in future debates, I propose that the discussion should gravitate toward his conceptions of self-creation and solidarity and their effectiveness in promoting his ideal liberal society. My second suggestion follows from the first. If we take the private-public distinction as a pragmatic tool that supports self-creation and solidarity, then it need not always be as strict as Rorty suggests. For the distinction to work, it should be flexible enough to accommodate all kinds of projects that promote self-enlargement in a liberal utopia. Based on this interpretation, self-enlarging individual and collective projects require both Enlightenment and Romantic energies to work together in order to become successful endeavors. This perspective opens up a way of reconciling Rorty’s seemingly opposing Enlightenment and Romantic ideals. It also suggests how we can appease the three criticisms against Rorty’s private-public distinction raised earlier. Let us first go back to Rorty’s debate with Schneewind, where Rorty disowns the private-public distinction. He rejects the idea that self-­creation is necessary for existential legitimation when our metaphysical hopes collapse. Is Rorty justified in making this claim? I have mentioned that this rejection works against him since it does not distinguish between the

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existential and political conditions that justify his liberal hopes. This disavowal also runs contrary to his projections about the future of a liberal society. In the previous chapter, we have seen how Rorty contends that a new ethos is emerging from the West: the literary culture. When we consider this cultural shift, my reconfiguration of self-creation and the privatepublic distinction matters on two levels. First, it helps us rethink the existential role that self-creation plays in Rorty’s project afresh. Rather than placate religious or Platonic hopes, self-creation responds to the challenge of achieving self-realization in a post-religious, post-philosophical world. It justifies the notion of self-responsibility in Rorty’s liberal politics. Second, my interpretation supports the idea that Romantic self-creators would be motivated to defend Enlightenment liberalism. The best framework for a creative, pluralist, and tolerant society is a democratic one. Self-­ creators will want to keep sources for self-enlargement free and available, since what is at stake are their responses to the modern question of existential meaning. They would therefore not only care about defending Enlightenment politics to pursue private projects (Rorty’s original negative point) but also because their projects of self-overcoming depend on the richness and diversity of their cultural sources (a new positive point). Rorty’s hopes of preserving democratic achievements and upholding personal freedom are thus more closely enjoined in my interpretation. This is one way that the Romantic-Enlightenment tension can be eased. Another way of alleviating this tension has something to do with how self-enlargement changes the terms of the two previous criticisms. Recall that Rorty makes inconsistent remarks when tackling private projects that promote the public ends of egalitarianism and cultural progress. These projects include the prophetic feminism that Fraser supports and the experimental projects of Mirandola, Fourier, and Sartre that Rorty admires. If we were to follow a “firm” version of his private-public distinction, by principle these projects would be consigned to the private sphere. However, Rorty hesitates to stick with this restriction, since doing so would mean losing their progressive contributions to politics and the cultural imagination. Their projects are crucial for articulating novel ways of making society more pluralistic, freedom-loving, and imaginative. They are cases where both of Rorty’s anti-egotist private and public objectives coincide desirably. If we follow my reconfiguration of self-creation and solidarity as self-enlargement, this private-public boundary would cease to be an issue. Rorty could argue that these self-expanding projects should have a place in political and social discourse. In fact, they represent

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“Romantic” projects in an “Enlightened” liberal utopia. In these instances, the role of the private-public distinction would not be about sorting out which sphere a project belongs to. Its primary function would be to remind us of the limits of these projects, which Rorty has engaged in his writings about Mill’s harm principle, Shklar’s aversion to cruelty, and the relationship between egotism and the sentimental imagination. This attitude is also consistent with Rorty’s remarks regarding the distinction that “there is no bright line of separation between the different functions, but there is a spectrum” and that private beliefs can “leak through, so to speak, and influence the way one behaves toward other people,” justifying the civic need to take responsibility for their interaction (2005b, 50). My proposal not only supports the idea that self-creation and solidarity tolerate the need for each other (Rorty’s original negative point), it actually strengthens the argument that these values can justify and stimulate each other’s expression while remaining loyal to Rorty’s staunchest liberal views (a new positive point). Given his notorious ambivalence toward the private-­public distinction, there is hope in wagering that if Rorty could, he would again change his mind and endorse this reformulated version.

Nihilism and Egotism So far I have reconstructed Rorty’s redemption model of self-enlargement in terms of self-creation and solidarity. Rorty’s non-traditional view of self-­ creation is that “being authentic, being faithful to ourselves, is being faithful to something which was produced in collaboration with a lot of other people” (Rorty 1993, 3). The exemplars of self-creation like Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida are indebted to the resources supplied by history, experience, and relationships for fashioning their personal projects. Solidarity, meanwhile, is about being inspired by the ideal of humanistic belongingness. Rorty follows the civic religion of Whitman and Dewey that regards social justice as its guiding light. My interpretation shows that these ideals can cultivate human meaning and spiritual enthusiasm suited to the conditions of Rorty’s secular vision of modernity. To satisfy the agenda of this chapter, Rorty’s role in the contemporary exchange about modernity and the sacred needs to be fleshed out. This section links Rorty’s work on redemption from egotism with the projects of Taylor, Dreyfus, and Kelly, and presents how his position can transform our original understanding of the debate.

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Recall that for the sacred redemptionists, nihilism can pervade a modern context that suffers from godlessness. But instead of nihilism, Rorty believes that what individuals need redemption from is egotism. The egotist’s desire haunts the followers of both religion and philosophy, which he (overstatedly) describes as: “the dream of completeness, of the imperturbability attributed by the wise, of the mastery supposedly possessed by those who have, once and for all, achieved completion by achieving enlightenment” (2010a, 392). Rorty’s assessment exposes the underlying motivation of human beings who are, so to speak, “self-satisfied,” which sets the egotist up to be as far removed from the nihilist as possible. A self-­ righteous egotist would not feel deprived or threatened by meaninglessness; rather, she would be firm and secure about her convictions. But consider this: egotists derive their self-assurance from a deep and fundamental authority—whether this “omnipotent” or “all-encompassing” authority wears the face of God, Nature, or the Self. If this authority is doubted, then the sense of its collapse can give way to feelings of existential angst, powerlessness, and disillusionment. This breakdown can be interpreted as the point when the egotist loses the claim to privilege and falls into despair. In this reading, egotism precedes nihilism. There are two general reactions to this event: either the egotist transforms into a nihilist or the egotist grows more violently attached to her egotism. Both responses, if we mine the accounts of Taylor, Dreyfus, and Kelly, end in tragedy. The first response is the transformation of the egotist into a nihilist. In The Ethics of Authenticity, Taylor mentions the phenomena of “individualism,” “anthropocentrism,” and “egoism,” which can be interpreted as allusions to egotism. Taylor characterizes individualism as a moral ideal. He agrees that it is one of the finest achievements of modern civilization, as individualism celebrates the freedom of the person to choose her path to self-fulfillment. Its dark side, however, is that it works to limit our contact with richer sources of moral, social, and spiritual meaning, for example, religion, community, and other human relationships. This impoverishment becomes most palpable when this individualism takes the step to anthropocentrism, which entails treating the world, people, things, and other living creatures as subordinate to one’s own purposes. Once anthropocentrism reaches its most radical stage—that is, when “the notion of self-determining freedom, pushed to its limit, doesn’t recognize any boundaries, anything given that I have to respect in my exercise of self-­ determining choice”—then the individual becomes divested of the

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capacity to experience any non-self projected significance (Taylor 1991, 68). Other people not only become tools for instrumentalization but they also transform into competitors, and not sources, of meaning. For Taylor, the result is an isolated life that takes on a degraded, absurd, or trivialized form. Dreyfus and Kelly are also aware of the existential isolation that results from portraying egotistic self-will as the imperative of every individual. Conveyed by T.S.  Eliot’s The Waste Land and Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, the modern burden of self-determination has produced an atmosphere conducive to nihilism (Dreyfus and Kelly 2011a, 68). Robert Pippin’s observations support this diagnosis of modern culture. He notes that in the late eighteen to the twentieth century, a mood of spiritual decline dominated modernity. The Western high culture was permeated by a mood of “melancholy, profound skepticism and intense self-criticism” as expressed in: Faust’s failed bargain (or the “failure of science” and especially scientific power and knowledge, “for life”), Hölderlin’s elegiac sense of modernity’s profound loss, Hegel’s claim in Glauben und Wissen that the religion of modern times is: “God is dead,” Balzac’s, Stendhal’s, Flaubert’s pictures of our new but not at all better bourgeois, competitive, low-minded world, constant prey to romantic fantasies of recovery and restoration, Henry James’s international theme and its ever fading (dying) traditional Europe, its acquisitive, money-obsessed, new-age Americans, Proust on the passing of (and exposure of) the Guermantes’s world for the Verdurin’s, Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor speculations, Joyce’s and Eliot’s ironic use of ancient myth, Rilke’s elegiac metaphysics of absence, Husserl on the “crisis” of the European sciences, Heidegger on the forgetting of Being, and the nightmare worlds of Beckett and Kafka, dominated by mere pretensions to presence and authority. (Pippin 1999, xi–xii)

The nihilistic view propagated in these writings is that human meaning in the modern world is a worthless pursuit—a realization further compounded by the disbelief in anything higher, or more powerful, that can serve as a source of consolation. The Rortyan egotist with an anthropocentric view can metamorphose into the forsaken nihilist that Taylor, Dreyfus, and Kelly desire to treat in their own accounts. Aside from falling into despair, another consequence is that the egotist may hold on more belligerently to her beliefs as a defense against nihilism. Since an egotist is tormented by anything that could dislodge her security, she may challenge the nihilistic threat with ruthless self-assertion. In All

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Things Shining, Dreyfus and Kelly refer to this condition of existential militancy as the “now egotistical sky” of modernity—an assessment they bring to life using the language of Melville’s Moby Dick (1851). Both Dreyfus and Kelly regard Melville as our generation’s Hölderlin. In his time, Hölderlin’s poetry envisioned the danger of “the flight of the gods” in the age of Enlightenment. As an antidote to this condition, Hölderlin embraced Homeric polytheism as “offering a non-nihilistic sort of enlightenment radically different from that of Kant and his contemporaries” and suggests that poets can “‘wrap up god’s thunderbolts and deliver them to the people’” (2011b, 197). Melville today serves as our poet-guide for revealing the plural manifestations of the sacred according to Dreyfus and Kelly. His novel breathes life to the “monomaniacal” atmosphere of modernity and suggests a new framework to admit a happy polytheism in our age. In Moby Dick, the great “wickedness” of egotism comes to life in the character of Ahab, the captain of the hunting expedition whose goal is to harpoon the great white whale. Sifting through the biblical and literary allusions in the novel, Dreyfus and Kelly argue that Ahab’s pursuit can be read as a story of a misguided passion for monotheism. The egotist Ahab, whom Dreyfus and Kelly portray as having “the strongest identity possible,” most abhors the idea that “the universe might be inscrutable to the last; that there might be ‘naught beyond’” (2011a, 181, 161). This propels him to chase after Moby Dick, the king of the “kings of the boundless sea,” which stands for the greatest and most God-like in Ahab’s world, in the sense of the beast being absolutely mysterious. Simply put, Ahab’s goal is to solve the puzzle of “whether there is a God against whom to rebel” (2011a, 161) and that if there is, he desires to come face to face with Him as an equal. Dreyfus and Kelly take the character of Ahab as a mix of “Kant’s theory of human beings as autonomous selves and Dante’s religious hope for eternal bliss,” whose world is the kind in which “the universe is a set of deep meanings we can strike through to with the strength of our autonomous will” (2011a, 168). Apart from their description of Ahab, Dreyfus and Kelly add that Melville also identifies the egotistic will as permeating our scientistic way of life. Egotism’s calculating and domineering attitude has left our hills “unhaunted” (2011b, 197), so that citizens of the modern world hold every non-human mystery and wonder in suspicion. Now we can see that like Rorty, Dreyfus and Kelly recognize that the modern human condition is plagued by religious and philosophical egotism. Egotism delegitimizes redemptive powers that can be found from any other source apart from God the Father, Science, or

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Self-Will. It takes away our ability to perceive the world in other ways, since it “covers up the very real and polytheistic joys that are already to be found right here on earth” (2011a, 168). And when egotism fails—which Melville’s prose evokes inevitably will happen, as Ahab dies without any resolution to his crisis—then the result is nihilism. We can further appreciate Rorty’s contribution to the egotism-nihilism issue by drawing the contrast between his view and Dreyfus’s and Kelly’s perspective on egotistic self-creation. As reiterated, the premise of All Things Shining is that in modernity, the totalizing framework of a monotheistic, universal, and transcendent spiritual motivation does not any more hold sway. This results to the nihilistic logic that once the modern world has made its full secular transformation, then “the lone source of meaning in human existence would be the strong individual’s force of will” (2011a, 46). Expressed in the Rortyan language of self-creation, this means that the self-creator believes that she can choose the way she encounters everything. She sees herself as a singular agent who can shape the world and the lives of others according to her needs and desires. Using D. F. Wallace’s view of the imperial egotist, Dreyfus and Kelly interpret the egotistic self-creator as someone with “a freedom of will so complete that by its force one can experience searing pain as overwhelming joy; crushing, crushing boredom as instant bliss; hell itself as the sacred, mystical oneness of all things deep down” (2011a, 49). The egotism behind the self-creator drives her to think that whatever is meaningful and sacred can be imposed upon experience, a stance that heeds the radical Nietzschean spirit behind the idea that we can become gods ourselves. In my view, Dreyfus and Kelly are correct in their appraisal that this kind of self-­ creation is doomed to failure, since the egotist remains trapped within the monotheistic dream. In thinking that the self-creator can unceasingly experience the world in a sacred way, Nietzsche and Wallace are clamoring for divine state of experience that is impossible for any human being to achieve. Against the externalization of eternal hope or bliss in any form, Rorty would agree with Dreyfus and Kelly that Nietzsche/Wallace framework is unsustainable. But I think that the criticism that Dreyfus and Kelly raise about self-creation is not enough to dismiss its redemptive possibilities altogether. Rorty shows us how self-creation can operate in a non-egotistic way. His self-creator does not aim to conquer the world; rather, it suffices for her to play with her evolving self-description. She does not aspire for the otherworldly sacred; instead, she pins her hopes on enriching her

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life with existential meaning. Unlike the tyrannical Nietzschean-Wallacean egotist, she recognizes her indebtedness to human vocabularies and traditions, which she uses to enlarge her personal repertoire and mold an authentic self. Rorty’s self-creator knows that the attainment of perfection is unachievable. She knows that no one can ever be totally freed from tradition. Thus, in renouncing the ego for self-creation, the self-creator responds to the modern task of spiritual enhancement without seeking non-human re-enchantment. If our purpose is to redeem ourselves from this potent combination of egotism-nihilism, then we need to inquire whether we have entertained the best options available to grapple with the problem. While Taylor, Dreyfus, and Kelly recognize that nihilism originates from egotism, the problem of egotism is not addressed in their accounts. The sacred redemptionists search for redemption elsewhere. Taylor looks at non-human moral sources and a modernized understanding of the transcendent. He thinks that it is necessary to re-establish a new kind of relationship with nature, art, and with God to experience a renewed horizon of significance for human beings. Dreyfus and Kelly are resolute in their polytheist view. If the cosmos were not a host to an array of spiritual forces, then we would not be able to make sense of many great experiences in human history. Apart from a god indifferent to us, they argue that “there are other gods as well—malicious and vindictive and joyous and divine—and the universe is all of these by turns. Which is to say that ultimately it is no one of them. A whole pantheon of gods is really there” (2011a, 185). The task is to lure back these gods and invite their multifaceted truths to shine on our lives. How does Rorty change the terms of this discussion? Unlike Taylor, Dreyfus, and Kelly, Rorty’s project tries to nip nihilism in the bud by rearing the horns of egotism against itself. He attempts to treat it at its core by transforming the notion of self-will from self-completion to self-­ enlargement. He honors our Enlightenment liberation from our self-­ incurred immaturity by re-orienting us toward modern sources of spiritual motivation in his literary culture. By trying to stop egotism in its tracks, Rorty invites us to see how we can undercut the drama of nihilism before it manifests in the lives of individuals and cultures. Taylor, Dreyfus, and Kelly do not entertain this strategy of self-enlargement. By going back to the non-human and the marginal, they have made a jump in concluding that the only way to be saved is by moving away from what needs to be fixed. In doing so, they neglected to see that there are paths for spiritual rejuvenation that have not been exhausted. We already have the resources

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to address this issue without going too far or too otherworldly. Rorty intervenes by introducing a preventative strategy. If self-enlargement were fostered as a moral ideal, then we can address the problems of egotism and nihilism with a single blow. This is a new avenue for the contemporary debates on modern nihilism opened up by Rorty’s writings on redemption. When we read self-creation and solidarity as attempts to engage nihilism using secular, humanist terms, the second contribution of Rorty’s work comes to light: we need to critically evaluate the modern strategy of retrieving religion to overcome nihilism. I examine this strategy in relation to the solutions offered by Taylor, Dreyfus, and Kelly in the next section.

Post-Metaphysical Redemption My claim is that the strategy of sacred redemptionists has its risks. Taylor, Dreyfus, and Kelly think that our ability to make rich, life-fulfilling commitments in modernity is weakened without the transcendent or the marginally sacred. Their absence is the source of our spiritual deterioration. We can challenge this position in two ways. First, following Rorty, we can defend the idea that we can make strong commitments to people or to ideals without any non-human buttress. Second, accounts of sacred retrieval or recovery, which measure themselves according to the language of the transcendent or the marginal sacred, prevent us from coming to terms with secular modernity. If we take these challenges seriously, then going back to sacred expressivism and theism (Taylor) as well as sacred polytheism (Dreyfus and Kelly) prevents us from gaining the change in self-image needed for modern self-reliance. The Rortyan point about commitment questions the conditions required for experiencing strong and fulfilling existential meaning in human life. Rorty’s response to the need for transcendental conditions of commitment is in his review of Taylor’s The Ethics of Authenticity. As mentioned previously, Taylor thinks that the rise of anthropocentrism (or for our purposes, egotism) has limited our moral and spiritual horizons of significance. Commitment to people, things, and events is best sourced from a really real moral ground or horizon according to Taylor. Rorty challenges this assumption, arguing that in the first place: You cannot think without having a horizon of significance—for to have such a horizon is just to see the relevance of some things to your concerns and the

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irrelevance of others, to see the point of some projects and not of others. The most a philosopher (or a poet, or a lover, or a political revolutionary, or anyone else) can do is to alter your sense of relevance and point, thereby moving you from one horizon of significance to a slightly different one. The only way somebody could arrange for you to have no horizon of significance would be to lobotomise you or enslave you. (1993, 3)

Rorty contends that everyone has a perspective or framework that already illuminates what is significant to their own lives. Horizons can change depending on their encounters with ideas, things, people, and events that enlarge and transform them. These encounters, however, do not have to be based on any objective moral ground, since deep attachments are not metaphysical in nature. Moreover, in his response to Daniel Conway’s essay, which Rorty interprets as a commentary that makes the “metaphysical” coextensive with a “deep” commitment, Rorty explains that for him, “the depth of an attachment (to a person, a polis, an ideal, a god, or whatever)” should be regarded as “a matter of the inextricability of the object of attachment from one’s most cherished self-descriptions” (2001b, 89). Rorty thinks there is no intrinsic link between metaphysics and human obligation. A lover or an activist, for example, will not require transcendent support to care for her beloved or to painstakingly work for social welfare. They will sacrifice and even die for their prized causes because their goals articulate an important part of their self-conception. Hence, the lack of the transcendence factor will not lessen our capacity to make strong commitments. It will not hinder us from having meaningful encounters that can lead to our self-transformation. The force of metaphysics or the transcendent does not ground deep attachments; rather, our attachments are profoundly conditioned by human culture. In Rorty’s view, we will continue making and living with these commitments in a Godless modern world. When confronted with John Horton’s question of whether a nominalist and historicist utopia is possible—as having deep moral (and for our own purposes, spiritually redemptive) commitments in a metaphysically unhinged world can still be put to doubt—Rorty answers: “let’s experiment and find out” (2001c, 31). Many still believe that a true cause has to be absolute to be legitimate, and on this basis, Rorty argues that we cannot infer the impossibility of a post-metaphysical culture. The traditional state of mind needs to adapt before judging if enduring moral and political commitments are possible without non-human anchorage.

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Dreyfus and Kelly’s reading of Wallace poses a good rejoinder to Rorty’s point. The issue is not only about our ability to make commitments but how to sustain them. They argue that today, our personal commitments, and the roles we play in society, are too plural and malleable in form. They appear weaker compared to the commitment of an errant Christian who risks excommunication and death in the sixteenth century or an adulterer who lives in fear of the fires of hell. We are saturated by choice, and it is far easier for us to switch careers, convert from one religion to another, and select our causes and obligations than ever before. When it comes to our commitments, we now have the power “to qualify them, change them, and take them back” (Dreyfus and Kelly 2011a, 24). This trivializes the depth and substance of obligations in people’s lives, since passions and interests are treated as passing and neither necessary nor definitive of human identities. In sum, we can now choose and “un-choose” our horizons of significance in the modern world. The consequence is the moral and spiritual buoyancy of meanings and commitments. First, Wallace’s view of human freedom is extreme. In my reconstruction of Rorty’s modern redemption, self-enlargement and redemptive transformations are rarely a matter of choice. We neither choose the people we hopelessly fall in love with nor predict which books or places will usher our transformation. These relationships often come by unexpectedly and we value them because there is something inexplicable, compelling, and mysterious in the way they transfigure our personal vision. In Rorty’s redemptive story, commitments derive their power not in their ability to pin our identities to the ground but in their capacity to renew and inspire us. This means that there is nothing wrong if our redemptive relationships and experiences change—if, for example, we fall out of love, change political advocacies, or regret our past choices. Of course, deep inspirations are difficult to come by and redemptive sources are not easy to swap or replace, but their contingency does not trivialize their redemptive value. Rorty’s account of redemption is characterized by its openness: in the face of the loss of inspiration, it preserves and even inspires the hope for transformation. Every person can be saved anew, and over and over, despite human imperfection and mortality. Another perspective to consider is that we are measuring commitments according to the expectations of a foundationalist or essentialist framework. Rorty thinks that it does not have to be this way, and in their account of modern polytheism, Dreyfus and Kelly advocate a similar position. To be ameliorated from the hegemony of mono-religion and mono-reason,

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they argue that we must treat moments of sacred experience in a non-­ absolutist sense. Sacred power is felt in getting caught up in the excitement of play in sport or in witnessing feats of human excellence. A person who participates in these communally energized activities merges with something that transcends what he or she can contribute to it. For Dreyfus and Kelly, these astonishing, albeit fleeting experiences of “whooshing up” lift the human spirit, a phenomenon familiar to Rorty. In his memorial lecture, Dreyfus attributes the invention of this English term to Rorty: For those who don’t know this aspect of Rorty’s work, Whooshing up is Dick’s translation of German word [anwesen] which Heidegger uses to translate of Physus [physis]. It is usually translated welling-up and describes the way of heroes, gods, moods, and so forth rise up suddenly, linger for a while, and then fade away. Welling up is too tame so, in his account of Heidegger on the PreSocratics, Dick replaced it with w[h]ooshing up. Dick had an incredibly good ear for finding the right word that would resonate within the philosophic community and beyond. Even more remarkable, Dick used this ability generously to enhance everyone’s understanding of everyone else. W[h]ooshing is his contribution to Heidegger. (2008)

We can even posit that this concept of “whooshing up” is related to Rorty’s modified idea of the religious impulse, which aspires to engage in a spiritual romance with the life of something larger than the self. But Taylor identifies a problem about this flexible setup of redemption and the sacred. He states that the modern polytheism that Dreyfus and Kelly advocate attend to two separate concerns: it not only democratizes our contingent and ever-changing sources of redemption but also hopes that the consequences of our “whooshing up” will adhere to what we deem as morally good. Since the polytheism of Dreyfus and Kelly have internalized this standpoint of “higher” moral goodness, they are pulled in different directions: they support both “the human meanings which arise for us, whooshing up through physis in common celebrations, or finely discerned through the exercise of skill in poiesis” and “the demands of universal human rights and welfare” (Taylor 2011, 124). While Dreyfus and Kelly agree that movements like Nazism and Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) have a great spiritual dimension, we also have to refuse to go along with them “because of the sacrificial cost imposed on scapegoats and outsiders” (Taylor 2011, 123). We need to develop what Dreyfus and

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Kelly call meta-poiesis—a skill for re-appropriating good and morally uplifting sacred moments (so we can resist nihilism) and resisting them when they assume an “abhorrent, fanatical form” (to avoid evil) (2011a, 205). This allows us to be open to experience greatness and awe, but without risking the loss of the stance of an enlightened maturity. In other words, we need to resist being overtaken by the amoral spiritual lure of events and institutions that harm other people. Unlike the framework of ancient Homeric polytheism, where the actions of human beings are drawn out by the moods set by both cruel and noble gods, we need to know when to disengage or even suppress destructive spiritual exhilaration in the modern world. Meta-poesis stands for the idea that “living well in our secular, nihilistic age, therefore, requires the higher-order skill of recognizing when to rise up as one with the ecstatic crowd and when to turn heel and walk rapidly away” (2011a, 212). The question of how to develop this skill is a weak spot in their polytheist account. Taylor concludes that we cannot hope for the happy polytheism that Dreyfus and Kelly propose. Instead, he thinks that any spiritual experience that aspires for the “higher” good and also “seems freest from illusion” will necessitate “some kind of anchored sacred” (Taylor 2011, 123)—a basis of objectivity and permanence. This anchorage is needed for stabilizing our modern sense of the moral and justifies Taylor’s invitation to go back to theism. But at this point, we know that polytheism and theism are not our only options. Rorty’s project of redemption offers a way of entertaining both the spiritual richness from multiple redemptive sources and responding to the demands of universal flourishing without endorsing the divisive character of their goals. Again, the concept of self-enlargement is the key here, and both self-creation and solidarity operate based on expanding our individual and collective consciousness. The ideal of self-­ creation pays heed to the importance of a pluralism of redemptive sources. Solidarity hosts a magnificent amount of spiritual power, and in its utopic form, it accommodates all beings as kin. If we consider these two values as our moral ideals, then they can help sever our modern world from the framework that Taylor, Dreyfus, and Kelly insist is inescapable. Rorty claims that if we are to achieve moral and spiritual maturity, then we must work to abandon religious nostalgia. The accounts of Taylor, Dreyfus, and Kelly can re-entwine us to religious dependency and also prevent us from becoming functional modern citizens in Rorty’s view. Accentuating the saving power of the religious or the sacred traps us within the binary vocabulary of human and non-human, religious and

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secular, sacred and profane, that is, the Axial language of transcendence and immanence. Rorty’s pragmatism is suspicious of traditional dualisms like these, since they encourage the conviction that a culture of self-­ reliance is impossible. We can even hypothesize that the language of transcendence is responsible for our cultural experiences of egotism and nihilism if we follow Rorty’s observations. Recall that egotism can be linked to our inheritance of the metaphysical frameworks of religion, philosophy, and science, which serve as authorities behind egotist belief. The collapse of these bulwarks of belief is the cause of nihilism. If these authorities were stripped of their transcendent and overarching role over human lives, then the threat of egotism and nihilism may lose their hold over modern culture. Peter Gordon’s critique of Taylor reflects the Rortyan distrust of religious nostalgia. Gordon argues that Taylor persuades us to treat spiritual experiences derived from an immanent worldview, such as listening to music or viewing works of art, as merely “substitutes to eternity.” Compared to the glory of transcendence, these substitutes are impoverished. Taylor thus takes “the Axial definition of transcendent religion as the authoritative criterion by which to evaluate modern experience overall” (Gordon 2011, 136). But is this the right standard for evaluating spiritual experiences? Gordon surmises that maybe not and uses classical music as an example. While Beethoven labels the third movement of his “Quartet in A Minor (Opus 132)” as “a song of gratitude” for the Godhead—in this sense, as something oriented toward the transcendent— it does not mean that the object of its art is something otherworldly (Gordon 2011, 137). It only indicates that a past vocabulary limited Beethoven’s linguistic expression. At present, his music retains its spiritual power to inspire awe even without abiding by the composer’s religious intentions. We can interpret its power in a language that is free from onto-­ theological inheritances. Becoming attuned to modernity means welcoming a secular language; it means that for a change, according to Gordon, we should learn “to think of modernity as a completely new stage that may permit us truly to cast off the language of the Axial revolution itself” (2011, 138). To overcome our desires for the eternal sacred and re-align our modern expectations, we must learn “embrace modernity on its own terms… would mean finally coming into an understanding of the world for which the very distinction between transcendence and immanence no longer retained its validity” (Gordon 2011, 138). Taylor, of course, will not be persuaded by this argument, given that his philosophy is framed by

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the Axial vocabulary. However, this might just be where Rorty’s position on linguistic creativity breaks new ground. Rorty agrees with Taylor, Dreyfus, and Kelly that instead of listening to priests and philosophers, we should hearken to poets and novelists instead. They are the most qualified to provide a new moral vocabulary that can transcend our present one: “Maybe Wordsworth and Rilke can help us find a horizon of significance which is no more anthropocentric than it is theocentric, no more subjectivist than it is metaphysical” but avoids what Dewey regards as “‘the essentially irreligious attitude… which attributes human achievement and purpose to man in isolation from the world of physical nature and his fellows’” (Rorty 1993, 3). But while the sacred redemptionists listen to these Romantic voices, Rorty argues that they continue to use the vocabulary of the non-human and the human to make sense of them—just as they have done in their debates about the natural and human sciences in the 1980s. Their polytheistic and theistic frameworks belong to the transcendent-immanent vocabulary of the Axial world. However, Rorty’s project uses a renewed vocabulary of redemption that attempts to save us from egotism-nihilism without attracting the dangers of religious nostalgia. A new language, which the great collective human imagination can fire up to being, is necessary to articulate the creative, redemptive, and altogether secular hope that Rorty doggedly aims for in his literary culture.

Conclusion Rorty’s project issues a new invitation to engage redemption afresh. His attempt to emancipate the “religious” from “religion” is admirable. His project aspires to escape from the Axial framework by denying the transcendent altogether and the expectations of universal goodness, truth, and salvation that comes with the package. This makes it possible for him to imagine a world where a larger moral and existential order of traditional religion does not anymore dominate the dreams and aspirations of human beings. While Taylor, Dreyfus, and Kelly also modify redemption to fit modernity, the Axial language remains ensconced in their theistic and polytheistic frameworks. In Taylor’s case, he maintains that since human beings have varying and unfulfilled aspirations for self-integration and realization, it is not too easy to “draw a clear line between acceptable and unacceptable ways of transcending” (Taylor  2007, 630). Iain Thomson sees this as a way of justifying Taylor’s theistic commitment to “leave room

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in his theoretical account for an onto-theological creator God who stands outside the world and ultimately unifies its meaning” (Thomson  2011, 140). But it never becomes clear what kind of renewed theism can serve as an amalgamating locus of meaning for all human beings, given the phenomena of pluralism and secularization of redemptive sources. Is it possible to formulate a theism without claims of epistemological absolutism and moral foundationalism? Religious fundamentalists will find this impossible; moderate believers are already struggling to reconcile their faith with the demands of modernity; and many others, like Rorty, are unmoved by it. But rejecting this route leads us back only to Taylor’s “substitutes to eternity,” which are impoverished compared to the magnificence of a Supreme Being. What this shows is that Taylor’s conceptual vocabulary remains stuck within the traditional Axial bind, with no convincing path toward resolution. Dreyfus and Kelly, meanwhile, remain at pains to reconcile the fanatic “bads” and the glorious “goods” of the plural, marginal sources of the sacred in their polytheism. Redemption in their paradigm is amoral. This is problematic in a modern world that aspires for spiritual values that lead us closer to the good rather than remaining ambivalent to it. Their response to this problem is training our meta-poiesis, or the practical skill at distinguishing good and bad spiritual experiences. But meta-poiesis requires more substantiation. What is the nature and power of this skill? How can we train it better? Is it reliable? These are burdens that Rorty’s project can dodge. Instead of vacillating between the oppositions of the moral and immoral, Rorty posits his democratic solidarity as the public moral and spiritual ideal that deserves common veneration. Solidarity supersedes singular and idiosyncratic projects of redemption if they interfere with the lives of others. In this sense, Rorty escapes the transcendence-­ immanence language by rooting his analysis on the secular language of his pragmatic, liberal framework. Overcoming the Axial language is integral to achieving reconciliation with a secular modernity; unfortunately, the nostalgic proposals of Taylor, Dreyfus, and Kelly may prevent Western culture from achieving this goal. Their linguistic and conceptual structure works against ushering new models of redemption, limiting their philosophical projects to the traditional “overcoming” strategy to nihilism. In endorsing self-enlargement to achieve self-authenticity and empower social loyalties, Rorty traces a path that can treat both our moral callousness and release us from our fears of spiritual deprivation. His metaphilosophy, which we will take a closer look at in the next chapter, suggests to us how life might look like in this self-reliant, secular world.

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References Arendt, Hannah. 1964. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: The Viking Press. Ballacci, Giuseppe. 2017. Richard Rorty’s Unfulfilled Humanism and the Public/ Private Divide. The Review of Politics 79 (3): 427–450. Barthold, Lauren Swayne. 2012. Rorty, Religion and the Public-Private Distinction. Philosophy and Social Criticism 38 (8): 861–878. Bernstein, Richard. 1990. Rorty’s Liberal Utopia. Social Research 57 (1): 31–72. ———. 1992. The New Constellation: The Ethical-Political Horizons of Modernity/ Postmodernity. Cambridge: The MIT Press. Bloom, Harold. 2000. How to Read and Why. New York: Touchstone. Dreyfus, Hubert. 2008. Memorial for Richard Rorty (unpublished manuscript, March 20), typescript. Dreyfus, Hubert, and Sean Dorrance Kelly. 2011a. All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age. New York: Free Press. ———. 2011b. Saving the Sacred from the Axial Revolution. Inquiry 54 (2): 195–203. Erez, Lior. 2013. Reconsidering Richard Rorty’s Private-Public Distinction. Humanities 2 (2): 193–208. Fraser, Nancy. 1989. Solidarity or Singularity? Richard Rorty Between Romanticism and Technocracy. In Unruly Practices, Power, Discourse and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory. Cambridge: Polity and Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 1991. From Irony to Prophecy to Politics: A Reply to Richard Rorty. Michigan Quarterly Review 30 (2): 231–258. Gordon, Peter. 2011. Must the Sacred be Transcendent? Inquiry 54 (2): 126–139. Guignon, Charles, and David Hiley, eds. 2003. Richard Rorty. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Habermas, Jürgen. 2008. ‘…And to define America, Her Athletic Democracy’: The Philosopher and the Language Shaper; In Memory of Richard Rorty. New Literary History 39 (1): 3–12. Janack, Marianne, ed. 2010. Feminist Interpretations of Richard Rorty. Pennsylvania: Penn State University Press. Lynch, Stuart. 2007. On Richard Rorty’s Use of the Distinction between the Private and the Public. International Journal of Philosophical Studies 15 (1): 97–120. McCarthy, Thomas. 1990a. Ironist Theory as a Vocation: A Response to Rorty’s Reply. Critical Inquiry 16 (3): 644–655. ———. 1990b. Private Irony and Public Decency: Richard Rorty’s New Pragmatism. Critical Inquiry 16 (2): 355–370. Melville, Herman. 1972. Moby Dick; or The Whale, ed. with introduction and commentary by Harold Beaver. London: Penguin.

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Nystrom, Derek, and Kent Puckett. 2002. Against Bosses, Against Oligarchies: A Conversation with Richard Rorty. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press. Pippin, Robert. 1999. Modernism as a Philosophical Problem: On the Dissatisfactions of European High Culture. 2nd ed. London: Wiley-Blackwell. Rée, Jonathan. 1990. Timely Meditations. Radical Philosophy 55: 31–39. Rodeiro, Manuel. 2018. Rorty’s Private-Public Distinction as a Pragmatic Tool. Contemporary Pragmatism 15 (4): 476–501. Rorty, Richard. 1982. Consequences of Pragmatism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 1989. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1990. Truth and Freedom: A Reply to Thomas McCarthy. Critical Inquiry 16 (3): 633–643. ———. 1991. Essays on Heidegger and Others. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1993. In a Flattened World, Review of The Ethics of Authenticity 1991 by Charles Taylor. The London Review of Books. 9 April 1993: 3. ———. 1995. Philosophy and the Future. In Rorty and Pragmatism: The Philosopher Responds to His Critics, ed. Herman Saatkamp Jr., 197–206. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press. ———. 1998a. Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth Century America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 1998b. Truth and Progress. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1999. Philosophy and Social Hope. New York: Penguin. ———. 2001a. Response to Kate Soper. In Richard Rorty: Critical Dialogues, ed. Matthew Festenstein and Simon Thompson, 130–133. Cambridge, UK/ Malden: Polity Press. ———. 2001b. Response to Daniel Conway. In Richard Rorty: Critical Dialogues, ed. Matthew Festenstein and Simon Thompson, 89–92. Cambridge, UK/ Malden: Polity Press. ———. 2001c. Response to John Horton. In Richard Rorty: Critical Dialogues, ed. Matthew Festenstein and Simon Thompson, 29–32. Cambridge, UK/ Malden: Polity Press. ———. 2005a. There is a Crisis Coming (Interview). In Take Care of Freedom and Truth Will Take Care of Itself: Interviews with Richard Rorty, ed. Eduardo Mendieta, 56–65. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 2005b. Toward a Postmetaphysical Culture (Interview). In Take Care of Freedom and Truth Will Take Care of Itself: Interviews with Richard Rorty, ed. Eduardo Mendieta, 46–55. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 2007. Philosophy as Cultural Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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———. 2010a. The Rorty Reader, eds. Christopher Voparil and Richard J. Bernstein. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell. ———. 2010b. Intellectual Autobiography. In The Philosophy of Richard Rorty, ed. Randall Auxier and Lewis Edwin Hahn, 1–24. Chicago: Open Court. ———. 2010c. Reply to Raymond D. Boisvert. In The Philosophy of Richard Rorty, ed. Randall Auxier and Lewis Edwin Hahn, 571–574. Chicago: Open Court. ———. 2010d. Reply to Jacquelyn Ann K. Kegley. In The Philosophy of Richard Rorty, ed. Randall Auxier and Lewis Edwin Hahn, 136–138. Chicago: Open Court. Shklar, Judith. 1984. Ordinary Vices. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Shklar, Judith. 2004. The Liberalism of Fear. In Political Liberalism: Variations on a Theme, ed. Shaun Young, 149–166. New York: SUNY Press. Taylor, Charles. 1991. The Ethics of Authenticity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 2011. Recovering the Sacred. Inquiry 54 (2): 113–125. Topper, Keith. 1995. Richard Rorty, Liberalism, and the Politics of Redescription. American Political Science Review 89 (4): 945–997. Voparil, Christopher. 2010. General Introduction. In The Rorty Reader, ed. Christopher Voparil and Richard J. Bernstein. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell. ———. 2012. Rorty and the Democratic Power of the Novel. Kritika & Kontext 16 (44): 126–133. Wicks, Andrew. 1993. Divide and Conquer? Rorty’s Distinction between The Public and The Private. Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal 76 (4): 551–569. Wilde, Oscar. 1966. The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde. London: Collins.

CHAPTER 5

Pragmatist Transcendence

And I say to mankind, Be not curious about God, For I who am curious about each am not curious about God, (No array of terms can say how much I am at peace about God and about death.) I hear and behold God in every object, yet understand God not in the least, Nor do I understand who there can be more wonderful than myself. Why should I wish to see God better than this day? I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and each moment then, In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass, I find letters from God dropt in the street, and every one is sign’d by God’s name, And I leave them where they are, for I know that wheresoe’er I go, Others will punctually come for ever and ever. Walt Whitman, excerpt from Song of Myself (1892 version)

In combating the problem of egotism, I have argued that Rorty’s writings offer a way to avert the malaise of nihilism. But prevention is only one side of the coin. The other, and perhaps more important task of this book, is to show how nihilism could be taken for granted in modern culture. Rorty’s metaphilosophy is useful for this purpose. It allows us to sketch a broad but plausible framework that is both safeguarded from the dangers of nihilism and whose spiritual character is suited to the modern (secular) condition. In the previous chapter, I claimed that “spiritual” qua self-­enlarging experiences of redemption are not merely incidental to © The Author(s) 2020 T. Llanera, Richard Rorty: Outgrowing Modern Nihilism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45058-8_5

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Rorty’s utopian vision, but the extent to which they do matter in his overall project remains to be explored. My claim in this chapter is that his metaphilosophy does endorse a kind of transcendence, one that is categorically distinct from the transcendence posited in the Axial framework of transcendence and immanence and, as will be explored later on, the onto-­theological framework. In particular, Rorty’s pragmatism articulates a version of transcendence that captures the romantic experience of awe at something greater than oneself and the utopian striving for a radically better world (see Smith and Llanera 2019).1 These pre-philosophical redemptive impulses to transcendence do not disappear in his metaphilosophy but are reshaped in a pragmatist iteration that can be characterized as horizontal (rather than vertical) and weak (rather strong) transcendence. This interpretation, which serves as the culmination of recurring Rortyan themes and arguments discussed in the book, sets up the idea of “pragmatist transcendence” as the defining spirit of a modern culture unshackled from onto-theological dreams of God, eternal truths, or magical powers. This reading also distinguishes Rorty’s metaphilosophy from the “intersubjectivist” accounts of Levinas and Habermas, which also share a post-­metaphysical ambition to transcendence. I show how Rorty’s account, in comparison to the others, does a better job of ridding itself of the remnants of onto-theological  transcendence  and is more suitable to a world en route to secularization. Only when we are reconciled with this spiritually rich version of a world without religious nostalgia can we call ourselves, in Rortyan fashion, “the sons and daughters of a self-confident Modernity” (Habermas 2008, 6). Metaphilosophy is concerned about providing a general conception of philosophical inquiry and its corresponding goals. Although Rorty does not always distinguish them as his goals, there are two outstanding candidates in his oeuvre, both now familiar to us at this stage. The first goal is the promotion of happiness. Slowly, and always with an awareness of the frailty of our achievements, we can strive to ameliorate our human condition. The second goal is the promotion of democracy, which can also be done in a piecemeal way. But Rorty thinks that it helps to have a long-term goal: the liberal utopia, which features prominently in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity and his later writings. The citizens of the liberal utopia all enjoy a good share of happiness—they are rich, comfortable, and free to 1  I co-wrote an article on this topic with Nicholas Smith for a special issue on Rorty. I thank Nick for agreeing to my use of our article in this book.

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pursue their own versions of self-flourishing—but they are also “classless,” “casteless,” and “cosmopolitan.” They are, in other words, equals. None of them enjoy the kind of privilege that attached itself to wealth, status, race, and so on. There is no class distinction, not just in economic matters, but throughout society and culture. As a philosophy based on the repudiation of essentialist concepts such as Truth and Reality, Rorty’s pragmatism can contribute to these two metaphilosophical ends. Since pragmatism trains us to think without essentialist distinctions, it can serve as preparation for the liberal utopia to come, as well as for making small improvements to existing democracies. Rorty’s liberal utopia offers a striking vision of a world without distinctions of rank. Pragmatism can be seen as a mode of thought well suited to such a radically democratic world. In the immediate term, pragmatism levels the disciplines; in the longer term, it might help to level society by providing an image of what a non-hierarchical, truly egalitarian world would look like. But the leveling carries a danger: the leveling in thought urged by pragmatism, like the social leveling that characterizes radical democracy, is accompanied by a spiritually deadening or flattening effect. Simply put, if we level all ways of thinking, being, and doing, if we treat all human activities as equal, and if we think that “no kind of thing is more fundamental than any other kind of thing” (Rorty 2007, 156), and understand the term “thing” in its most general sense, then we cripple our ability to discriminate and act on shared human purposes that are truly important. This, of course, is a criticism commonly hurled at Rorty (see Chap. 2). In this caricature of human culture, where relativism seems to go all the way down, nihilism remains a latent threat. If this risk of flattening is accurate, then Rorty’s pragmatist vision appears to leave room for the dangerous idea that human life has no meaning, value, or purpose to fester. The problem of this chapter can be put like this: how can pragmatism be a leveler without being a flattener? The answer is through a notion of pragmatist transcendence. A developed conception of this idea latent in Rorty’s writings saves the leveling moves at the heart of his pragmatism from being flattening ones. To be clear, his pragmatism is against transcendence tout court. But his repudiation of it in its traditional sense still leaves room for other ambitions that can be described as matters of transcendence. While the Platonic and Kantian ambition to transcendence goes awry, Rorty’s metaphilosophy is nonetheless informed by pre-­philosophical, redemptive impulses that endure and ought to be given some expression.

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Of course, the impulse to obey, to submit or to subordinate oneself to something greater, a higher realm of being or a quasi-divine law has no place in pragmatism. But Rorty thinks that it is possible to break the link between “the impulse to stand in awe of something greater than oneself,” which we should not surrender, “and the infantile need for security, the childish hope of escaping from time and chance,” which we should (1998a, 17–18). Indeed, Rorty’s metaphilosophy is radical precisely on account of its ambition to transcendence of the first sort, the sort energized by awe at something greater and hope for a radically better world, rather than submission to a higher authority. This radical character is also what safeguards pragmatism from the nihilism that may arise from the “flattening” consequences anticipated by thinkers like Nietzsche (Taylor 2001).

The Ambition to Transcendence That transcendence might play a positive role in Rorty’s oeuvre initially seems implausible. Rorty is infamous for rejecting the idea that human practices are accountable to some external, Archimedean standpoint, a kind of  “God’s-eye point of view” or a “view from nowhere,”  and his endorsement of the historicist view that standards of rationality are products of time and chance. Some of Rorty’s characteristic philosophical moves in epistemology, philosophy of mind and language, and ethics involve rejecting the possibility or desirability of transcendence. It is true that his writings have an anti-transcendentalist flavor, but only if transcendence is understood in its prominent sense. I now briefly rehearse the case against traditional transcendence that Rorty is known for, before making explicit the “pragmatist” version of transcendence latent in his work. Rorty uses Thomas Nagel’s expression “the ambition to transcendence” to identify an approach to philosophical problems (1998b, 121). An example is the problem of consciousness in terms of intrinsicality and relationality: is consciousness what it is on account of properties that are “intrinsic” to it (Nagel’s view) or can consciousness be explained “relationally” (Dennett’s view), without any reference to putative intrinsic qualities (in this case, an ineffable feel)? In this particular debate, Rorty sides with Dennett and then examines Nagel’s metaphilosophical motivation for defending the idea of intrinsicality in the first place. In Rorty’s view, this motivation has something to do with the need to respect the gap between “what there is or what is true” and what we “could discover or conceive of or describe in some extension of human language” (Nagel

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1986, 105–106 [cf. Rorty 1998b, 104]). That gap is preserved by a series of fundamental philosophical distinctions, including the modern scheme-­ content and real-intentional object distinctions, but also the longer standing distinctions between truth and illusion and between reality and appearance. The ambition to Transcendence (note the upper case) is responsible for the characteristic distinctions of modern philosophy, including “the distinction between the world and our conception of the world, between the content and the scheme we applied to that content, between the truly objective and the merely intersubjective” (Rorty 1998b, 109). This ambition led philosophers to maintain a philosophical standpoint from which the gap between “Us and What We May Not Be in Touch With” could faithfully be witnessed (Rorty 1998b, 108). In short, the ambition to Transcendence gave rise to the philosophical distinctions that Rorty’s pragmatism strives to dismantle or overcome. This ambition to Transcendence that undergirds philosophy serves as a clue, in Rorty’s view, to explain the “condescension” philosophy professors often show to professors in other subjects and their “pretension” to possess a fixed set of concepts that enable them “to classify, comprehend and criticize the rest of culture” (1982, 221). In his 1981 essay, “Philosophy in America Today,” Rorty observes, and tries to explain, that the self-­image of analytical philosophers as a “corps d’élite” (1982, 219), with an armory of super-concepts (1982, 222) at their disposal, is not just a conceit. For Rorty, it is a delusion encouraged by the egotistic identification with a tradition of inquiry whose key figures include Plato, Kant, and their most militant contemporary heirs (at least in Hans Reichenbach’s assessment), the logical positivists. In Rorty’s view, inquiry in such tradition is based on a series of super-distinctions—between reality and appearance, truth and illusion, the analytic and the synthetic, and so on—which apply to all other forms of inquiry without being properly understood by them. It is as if the philosophers themselves had a special, privileged place, a higher rank in the community of inquirers, on account of their specialized knowledge of these super-distinctions; in other words, on account of their unique grasp of the super-concepts Truth, Reality, and so forth. The best way for philosophers to rid themselves of this folly, Rorty urges, is for them to drop their allegiance to the Plato-Kant tradition, to abandon the idea that there is a special role, to be performed by a special class of inquirers, of guiding the broader culture or holding it to account. Philosophers must embrace a pragmatist self-understanding of their discipline as one amongst equals, and crucial to this shift in perception is the

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repudiation of a sense of Transcendence, noting his “own sense of what is worthwhile and important for human beings to do requires abjuration of the ambition of transcendence to which Nagel remains faithful” (1998b, 121). Elsewhere, Rorty describes as his principal motive the belief that “we can still make admirable sense of our lives” without the ambition to transcendence, and that a culture without that ambition is preferable to the onto-theological tradition the ambition helped to sustain (1990, 12). The ambition to Transcendence, then, is not just a quirk of modern philosophers like Nagel but the driving force behind the whole onto-theological tradition beginning with Plato. Given that the ambition to Transcendence Rorty decries in Nagel’s work turns out to be an atavistic recurrence of this ambition, Rorty’s account of its historical roots in the onto-­theological tradition is worth re-examining. If we do this, it becomes clear that for Rorty, the ambition to Transcendence is a response to pre-philosophical impulses that find expression not just in philosophy, but also in religion and other forms of culture. By framing the ambition to Transcendence in the onto-theological tradition as a contingency, then alternative expressions of the ambition to transcendence open up for exploration.

Vertical Transcendence and the Onto-Theological Tradition The ambition to Transcendence is one of the key impulses for the whole of what Rorty calls, following Heidegger, the Western onto-theological tradition. We can think of this tradition in terms of the pursuit of transcendence in the vertical plane. In its first phase, it does this through the concept of God. Human beings are considered to be made in God’s image, ranked higher than non-human animals, and  are tasked to do good deeds and avoid sin. They must subject themselves to the higher authority of God or his representatives on earth and, so far as possible, partake in the goodness of His Being. Their reward is eternal happiness in the afterlife. The indebtedness of this vertical transcendence narrative to Platonic philosophy is clear according to Rorty. For Plato, the true, universal, and timeless forms exist in the Ideal world. All we find in the physical world are imperfect copies of the original. Human beings, finding themselves in the physical world, cannot realize their true nature there or occupy their proper place in the hierarchy of being. They must

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seek to rise above their finite and corrupted earthly condition. They can only do this effectively by imitating the pure, perfect forms, which means yielding to their power and authority after a long and arduous spiritual or intellectual ascent. Socrates provided Plato with the prototype: he showed us, as Rorty puts it, how to “gain access to what he [Plato] called ‘the really real,’ how to gain access to Reality” (2007, 105). The reward for those who follow this path is the Truth, though a propitious place in the afterlife may be waiting, too. And if we are to believe Kant, the story of those lives guided by respect for the Moral Law rather than the most real being, by an ideal of the Right rather than the True, ends in a similar way. In Rorty’s story, Kant initiates a later phase of the onto-theological tradition. Since Kant famously repudiated the mix of ontological and theological speculation typical of pre-critical philosophy, this characterization may seem absurd. But in Rorty’s view, the Kantian critique of onto-­ theology was not the radical departure Kant thought it to be. It altered how the ambition to Transcendence came to be expressed but was unable to fundamentally transform the ambition. For Rorty, Kant’s resetting of the philosophical agenda, the primacy he gave to epistemology over ontology, to reflection on the conditions of objective experience rather than the grounds of being, merely replaced one set of Transcendence-inspired concepts and distinctions with another. So did his proposals for replacing Divine Command theories of morality with a theory grounding morality in rational (human) agency. In Rorty’s view, distinctions such as those between appearances and things-in-themselves, between phenomena and noumena, and between conditional and categorical worth, betray a dualism in Kant’s thought that shows its underlying continuity with Platonism. This is also the case for the whole epistemological turn in modern philosophy, indebted as it is to Kant. Rorty thinks that insofar as modern epistemology and Enlightenment thought remain wedded to distinctions such as Truth vs. Illusion, Reality vs. Appearance, Analytic  vs. Synthetic, Scheme vs. Content, and so forth, they continue the onto-theological tradition even though they explicitly repudiate ontology (or “metaphysics”) and religion. The Western onto-theological tradition’s reliance on a vertical model of transcendence becomes particularly vivid when we recall the redemptive function of religion and philosophy discussed in Chap. 3. Both religion and philosophy respond to impulses in which something like a yearning for redemption is at stake in Rorty’s view. Rorty distinguishes the various phases in the onto-theological tradition’s answer to this question, each of

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which involves a redemptive truth. The first is through God: on this understanding, it is the religious life that provides the path to redemption, which is typically conceived as a life of obedience to God’s will and commands, of submission to God’s higher authority. In the beginning, this is a pre-rational relationship, but over time the redemptive relationship to God acquired a more cognitive character. As it did so a second phase began: redemption through Philosophy. Philosophy as science, oriented to Truth shorn of all religious error, offered a new route to salvation. It promised to reinstate human dignity after its fall into religious darkness; to redeem us by making available a cognitive standpoint that puts us in touch with the Truth or how things really are. Understood in this way, redemption through science retains the vertical structure typical of the onto-­ theological tradition. As noted earlier, Rorty’s metaphilosophy proposes a different measure for evaluating inquiry: its goals should be the promotion of human happiness and the realization of democracy. It is not hard to see that those goals might be ill-served by the vertical model of transcendence and its concomitant mode of redemption. First, it downgrades ordinary human happiness, making it seem as if it were an unworthy goal to pursue. It makes it seem as if true honor and dignity could only be obtained by rising above the purposes and desires that ordinarily make human beings happy, as if redemption required self-sacrifice or self-abnegation. Indeed, the link between redemption from imperfection and a process of self-purification, understood as a cleansing of those imperfections, is often explicit (see Rorty 2010b, 269). Second, the religious and philosophical cultures that integrate the vertical model of transcendence are hierarchical at their core. Not only are they unlikely to be conducive to democracy, understood as a classless, casteless, cosmopolitan way of life, they are likely to be in conflict with it. In the onto-theological tradition, transcendence is a matter for the elites, for philosophical geniuses like Socrates or moral saints who achieve purity of heart and soul. The idea that sources of meaning, moral duties toward others, and conceptions of self-flourishing must be framed as a matter of getting in touch with some universal or absolute law, or a metaphysical power that is higher or deeper, attaches itself too readily to categorizations of people who are especially talented in that capacity or perhaps lack it altogether. And a culture that inculcates obedience and submission to father figures as the surest pathway to redemption is hard to reconcile with the self-managing ethos of a democracy.

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But exposing the conflict or incompatibility between the vertical model of transcendence and the goals of happiness and democracy is only the negative side of the argument. The positive side of the argument entails showing how Rorty’s writings propose a horizontal model of transcendence and redemption. It should show that the horizontal model is not only suited to the goals of happiness and democracy, but that while it is idealized it is also within reach if we adopt a pragmatist outlook.

Horizontal Transcendence and Pragmatism A horizontal axis of transcendence articulates the pre-philosophical impulse to stand in awe at something greater than oneself, and to find redemption, by way of a sideways rather than a vertical movement, a movement that does not involve rising up a hierarchy. In Rorty’s pragmatism, justificatory relations already have a horizontal rather than vertical structure. That is because human beings are answerable only to themselves, in conversations they have between each other as epistemic equals, rather than being answerable to some higher truth-making or validity-­ conferring power. The pre-philosophical impulse to submit to such a power, and the reflective idea that contact with it is the goal of inquiry, is not so much to be reconfigured as to be rejected by pragmatism. There is no higher authority than human conversational practices by which to justify beliefs. But we are talking now of an awe-inspiring ideal and a source of redemption, and Rorty states in his work that the impulse that gives rise to articulations of these, whether in religion or philosophy or other cultural forms, finds a voice in pragmatism. Indeed, he thinks that it finds a clearer and more compelling voice there than in the old onto-theological tradition. It is this metaphilosophical ambition of Rorty that provides him with an ambition to transcendence, albeit in a horizontal plane. Rorty’s horizontalist redescription of transcendence is fundamentally and consistently a matter of self-enlargement. As I have argued in Chap. 4, the two chief pathways to self-enlargement are engaging in projects of self-­ creation that expand personal horizons, on the one hand, and entering into ever-widening relations of solidarity and social cooperation, on the other. It is by engaging in such projects and entering into such relations that we become aware of and participate in the life of something “greater.” But the greater thing we imagine ourselves to be part of cannot be some hierarchically ordered entity, and it cannot be by imagining oneself to be

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closer to the top of some social or natural hierarchy that self-enlargement, understood as the ideal of horizontal transcendence, is attained. Two points about self-enlargement need to be stressed here. First, it is an ideal of individual self-realization, a matter of happiness-for-the-individual, rather than happiness for the kind of entity an individual is. It resembles authenticity to the extent that self-experimentation is involved, but unlike authenticity it is not well captured by descriptions such as being “true to oneself” or finding out “who one really is.” This is why Rorty prefers the expression “self-creation” to “self-discovery.” Self-enlargement also resembles autonomy, in being a matter of individual freedom, but again is not well expressed by talk such as “giving the law to oneself” or having a “self-determining, non-heteronomous will,” to mention the common Kantian formulations. The second point to be emphasized is that the “something greater” the self becomes enlarged by cannot be antagonistic to the freedoms and opportunities for self-experimentation available to each individual. There can be no in principle exclusion from access to these freedoms and no in principle limits to the bonds of solidarity between individuals. Self-enlargement through solidarity with others, as Rorty conceives it, is in principle unbounded and is never a matter of identification with a group defined by its natural or intrinsic superiority over others. Racist and ethno-national forms of identification, though they may bring intra-ethnic or racial forms of group “solidarity,” are not self-enlarging in the sense that makes for horizontal transcendence. They are rather self-­ enclosing forms of identification that work by assuring the members of certain groups that they are higher, or superior, or set apart by nature from other groups. The positive idea that horizontal transcendence is a matter of “redemption from egotism” is an important insight of Rorty’s later writings. It is also a distinctive mark of his pragmatist metaphilosophy and, as we have seen in the previous chapter, it plays a crucial role in averting the problem of nihilism. Egotism, clear at this stage of the book, is a condition of inflated self-sufficiency and knowingness, and it is a regrettable feature of the onto-theological tradition that it provides fertile ground for egotism (and consequently, nihilism). Philosophical egotists may not be satisfied with conventional frameworks for understanding the way things really are, but a settled framework for such understanding, reachable in principle monologically, is what they seek. It is this egotist dream that drives them to formulate super-concepts and super-distinctions. Self-creation and

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solidarity turn this egotistic impulse against itself.2 To the extent that they involve self-enlargement, they can be said to spring from an “egotistic” source. But in their case, the self-enlarging movement is shaped by encounters with other voices, imaginings, and points of view, rather than a narrowing in or purification of the self. Self-creation, so understood, is achieved by expanding one’s repertoire of human experiences and encounters by way of exercises of the imagination. Solidarity, on the other hand, involves enlarging our loyalties, a process activated by exercising the creative imagination. Literature, art, film, and philosophical redescriptions in the pragmatist vein work to enlarge our understanding of various kinds of people, people who otherwise might appear alien or inscrutable or inferior on account of caste or class. This interpretation of horizontal transcendence shows that Rorty’s ideals of self-creation and solidarity suggest forms of human life that are not answerable to something divine and non-­ human, yet are not flattened in terms of spiritual and existential meaning. They help provide nuance to our understanding of the goals of human happiness and democracy, in a way that shows them to be in no way 2  My suggestion to read self-creation and solidarity in terms of self-enlargement complements recent interpretations of Rorty’s concept of irony, which argue that a better version of Rorty’s irony needs to account for its deep connections to the public life.Bjørn Ramberg points out that the ironist is fundamentally concerned about what normative demands her practical identity, an identity that is open to change and transformation, requires of her: “This is where the existential dimension of irony connects with the political. Liberal ironists pry open available practical identities as liberals, they shake our more or less implicit, more or less reflective, understandings of what it is to be committed as we are. It may be hard to be such liberal ironists, but they are good to have around” (2014, 160).William Curtis explains that there are two senses of irony in Rorty’s work, an irony for citizens of a liberal utopia and an irony for the intellectual avant-garde: “The first sense is the civic virtue that all liberal citizens should ideally possess because it helps them be tolerant, adaptable, and just. The second sense is the more active and radical mental habit that ‘ironist intellectuals’ exhibit as they challenge the conventional wisdoms of the cultural domains in which they work” (2015, 93). In Curtis’s view, irony plays an important social function in liberal societies and can be mobilized as a civic virtue. The social is so deeply embedded to the personal that Rorty’s irony, in the words of Mendieta, is“active, activist, critical, forward-looking. It is the power of irony that turns our confessed ethnocentrism into an imperative to create ever more critical pictures of what we have turned into and what we have failed to become. Irony, which is often seen as a form of cruelty, disdain, and derogation, is really linked to solidarity. Irony liberates us to a greater humanity. Irony grants us the power to abandon narrow, cruel, exclusivist versions of our old and inherited ‘we’, whose outer perimeter is drawn and re-drawn from the perspective of the marginalized people, from the perspective of those we have been socialized to think of as ‘they’ rather than ‘us’” (2005, xxii).

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spiritually second class without the conceit of claiming privileged access to onto-theological Transcendence. Pragmatist transcendence, consistent with Rorty’s conception of humanity’s new self-image in modernity, is also oriented to the future, with its temporal dimension assuming a diachronic rather than synchronic form (see Rondel 2011; Kuipers 2013). His liberal utopia may lie in the distant future, and may be causally very remote (1999, xiv), but it does not reside outside of time and chance. It is a task of pragmatist philosophy, in Rorty’s view, to imagine by way of thought-experiments what that future might look like and how the path leading from the present to that future might be described. Such philosophical reflections do not provide predictions, based on knowledge of putative laws of history. They do not provide rational reconstructions, in the sense of accounts of the steps that would have to be taken if utopia were ever to be reached. There is nothing but time and chance to be taken into consideration from a philosophical point of view. But this does not prevent pragmatism from taking up and reshaping pre-philosophical impulses to transcendence, in the sense of being based on “an exalted sense of new possibilities opening up for finite beings” (2010a, 14). The religious imagery Rorty invokes when describing  his liberal utopia can hardly be missed. But he uses it in a manner consistent with deep suspicion about the use of such imagery and its interpretation in the onto-theological tradition. As Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud helped us to see, a fraudulent idea of Transcendence served to mask the powers of the human imagination and the capacity for self-­ creation. Pragmatism can contribute to that unmasking, not by appeal to a hidden human nature, metaphysical principle, or the secret workings of the unconscious, but by reminders of what the human imagination has achieved and suggestions for how humanity might become what it imagines itself to be at its best.

Strong and Weak Transcendence I have argued that a pragmatist ambition to transcendence persists in Rorty’s project. His metaphilosophy shows a way of describing spiritual possibilities, achievement, and fulfillment without invoking the problematic hierarchies of the onto-theological tradition. The transcendence at stake is horizontal in the literal sense that it pertains to “horizons,” or a going beyond given horizons of meaning through a merging with others. Rorty is fond of Gadamer’s metaphor of a fusion of horizons, but in

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Rorty’s case, the image illuminates not so much historical understanding but the endorsement of an other-orientated culture of self-enlargement and what the future may hold for it. But this needs further qualification, to avoid over-dramatizing Rorty’s orientation to transcendence and conflating Rorty’s version with others. Rorty is certainly not the only philosopher to want to outgrow the onto-theological tradition without reinstating hierarchical orders of meaning or being, on the one hand, and abandoning humanity to spiritual emptiness or flattening, on the other. Both these pitfalls can be avoided by describing Rorty’s pragmatist metaphilosophy as oriented by a weak rather than strong form of transcendence, in addition to it taking on a horizontal form. To differentiate between weak and strong transcendence, it helps to go back to Rorty’s alignment with what Gianni Vattimo and other Italian philosophers have called “weak thought.” In Chap. 3, I pointed out that Rorty recommends that his essays be read as “weak thought,” that is, as a kind of “philosophical reflection which does not attempt a radical criticism of contemporary culture, does not attempt to re-found or re-motivate it, but simply assembles reminders and suggests some interesting possibilities” (Rorty 1991, 6; see Vattimo and Rovatti 1983). While this may be a modest summary of his metaphilosophical ambitions, one that seems to clash with his avowed utopian hopes, it is best to take Rorty at his word here. Characterized by Vattimo, weak thought avoids making strong ontological claims, especially concerning human beings. Inspired by Nietzsche’s perspectivism, weak thought insists that there is nothing “beyond interpretations” and thus no interpretation-free way to criticize, re-found, or re-motivate the interpretations that make up a culture as a whole. Clearly, there is no question of a transcendence of culture or interpretations in general being at stake in Rorty’s metaphilosophy: there is no strong transcendence. But taking the assemblage of reminders and suggestions of interesting possibilities as ends-in-themselves, as if the putting together of such reminders and possibilities were to be done for its own sake, is a mistake. The practical ends of Rorty’s pragmatism are human happiness and democracy. Pragmatism aims to capture the humane and democratic content of the pre-philosophical impulses also expressed, only less effectively, in religious language and imagery. The task of pragmatist philosophy as Rorty understands it is to help provide a language and imagery that is more conducive to a democratic culture, and more at home in one, than the concepts and distinctions that inform the onto-theological tradition. The point of the “reminders,” and what makes suggestions of possibilities

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“interesting,” is precisely to bring the democratic ideals to life, or to make the liberal utopia in some sense closer. If it does not exactly seek to “refound” or “re-motivate” liberal democratic culture in that way, as it would if it were oriented by a “strong” form of transcendence, pragmatism does re-energize the democratic impulses embedded within a liberal democratic culture, or at least attempts to at its best. The notion of weak transcendence can also show how Rorty’s metaphilosophy differs from other horizontalist models of transcendence. Rorty accepts that the motivation to overcome the hierarchies sedimented in the onto-theological tradition was shared even by Kant: “The secularization of high culture that thinkers like Spinoza and Kant helped to bring about has put us in the habit of thinking horizontally rather than vertically” (Rorty 2007, 88). But it is those modern philosophical outlooks that propose an intersubjectivist alternative to the vertical transcendence of the onto-­ theological tradition, and are horizontal in that sense, that come closest to Rorty’s own proposals. For this reason, it is instructive to compare his metaphilosophical position with those of two prominent intersubjectivist philosophers: Emmanuel Levinas and Habermas. While both Levinas and Habermas are advocates of horizontal transcendence, unlike Rorty they also share some commitment to a strong notion of transcendence. This latter commitment ends up spoiling their intersubjectivist credentials, since it re-introduces features more characteristic of the vertical model of transcendence. Levinas rejected the thesis that human beings are fundamentally answerable to Being in their thought and actions (1969,1981). While drawn to Heidegger’s reformulation of the phenomenological method, he was adamantly opposed to Heidegger’s use of it to reconceptualize the human vocation in terms of an authentic appropriation of being (or in his later work, letting being be). In Levinas’s view, what redeems human beings from their merely ontic status, their status as one kind of being struggling for existence among others, is not the thought of, or approximation to, the Being of beings. Rather, it is the acknowledgement of the “rupture” within being established by the ethical relation. For Levinas, the ethical relation is the substitution of the other for the self, and it is only in and through the substitutive relation to the human other that human beings achieve transcendence and get close to “the holy.” As in Rorty’s pragmatism, Levinas’s “humanism of the other person” has no place for ontic transcendence. And like Rorty in his later work, Levinas also sees philosophy at its best as offering reminders of how “redemption from egotism”

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can be achieved, and thereby a mode of horizontal transcendence. But whereas Levinas presents these reminders in the “strong” register of pure phenomenological description, responsive to the “thing itself,” for Rorty they are just a matter of replacing one mode of description with another, more useful one. And whereas for Levinas the egotism to be redeemed from is essentially self-interestedness, understood as an ontic characteristic, to be opposed by self-disinterestedness (substitution), understood hyperbolically as a rupture within being, Rorty views the ontological difference itself as an ember of the onto-theological tradition. Rorty takes the problem with egotism to be narrowness of interest and self-enclosure, to be countered by a broadening of the self’s horizons, a widening of the self’s loyalties, or self-enlargement. These differences between Levinas’s and Rorty’s projects can be summed up as a difference between philosophies of strong and weak horizontal transcendence, respectively. Admittedly, this is not quite how Rorty himself characterizes his disagreement with a Levinasian understanding of the tasks of philosophy, but this interpretation of the basic difference between their metaphilosophical positions is consistent with what he does say (see Rorty 1996, 42; Kuipers 2013, 127–32). Habermas, who unlike Levinas is strongly influenced by pragmatism, shares Rorty’s skepticism about the ability of the phenomenological method to yield pure descriptions and to bypass the onto-theological tradition by that route. Habermas also shares Rorty’s commitment to the secular premises of philosophy in “post-metaphysical” conditions, a phrase Habermas often uses to describe the conditions of contemporary thought, which rules out the commitment to the philosophical centrality of the idea of God (see Smith 2008). Furthermore, Habermas agrees with Rorty that a secular, post-metaphysical understanding of the tasks of philosophy is compatible with an acknowledgment of a “semantic potential” (Habermas 1992, 15) within religious language and imagery that philosophy should recognize and somehow help keep available. Indeed, like Rorty’s own writings, Habermas’s later work is also marked by an increasing preoccupation with this problem (see Habermas 2002). And it is not just that they share a concern for the problem: they also propose solutions in which the idea of democracy comes decisively into play. But the manner in which they bring it into play is different. For Habermas, the norms of mutual recognition, reciprocity, and solidarity that are central to the democratic ethos are, in a certain sense, written into the pragmatics of language as “counterfactual presuppositions” of communicative action (1984). It is

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the task of “transcendental pragmatics,” the label Habermas and Apel gave to their early philosophical project, to reconstruct those norms and on that basis provide a foundation for social criticism, without their project conflating the tasks of normative reconstruction and utopian description or seeing itself as grounding criticism of cultures as a whole (see Apel 1973, 1976; Habermas 2001, 75). Although Habermas understood transcendental pragmatics as having a fallibilistic character, he nonetheless took it to be reconstructing norms that were intrinsic to language use and of universal reach. To that extent, and in aiming to provide a grounding for social criticism, it does not fit the conception of “weak” thought that Rorty sought to advance. The post-metaphysical character of Habermas’s project ensured that transcendence was to be secured on a horizontal plane. But its universalist and transcendental mode of argumentation, it remained a “strong” as opposed to a “weak” version of such transcendence. By contrast, Rorty’s democratic norms are simply products of time and chance. They are better advanced by imagining future liberal utopias than by reconstructing norms that are “always already” in play whenever we engage in communicative action.

Three Concerns Some objections can be raised against this reading of Rorty’s metaphilosophy and the concept of pragmatist transcendence, suggesting the inadequacy of this interpretation to achieve the goals of Rorty’s pragmatism in the first place. First, one could argue that it is hard to avoid the impression that something in the spiritual and cultural landscape gets flattened, or goes missing, once we adopt the pragmatist’s leveling vantage point as Rorty envisages it in his metaphilosophical project. Perhaps the most striking one is the range of spiritual impulses bound up with a sense of attachment to, and responsibility for, the natural environment. Rorty’s pragmatism is unabashedly anthropocentric and his notion of transcendence shares this feature. This is related, of course, to his Darwinism, which seems to rule out from the start any notion of there being claims on human beings from a non-human source. Not only does this threaten to short-circuit the flourishing of spiritual possibilities that take their departure from this Romantic, naturalistic impulse, but also it is far from implausible to suppose that the coming-to-be of a liberal utopia—the rich, classless, casteless cosmopolitan society the pragmatist dreams  of—is dependent on such impulses being acknowledged and allowed fuller expression. But we should note that

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Rorty’s writings have been used in the last thirty years in environmental ethics: the relevant claim, in particular, is that a form of solidarity, bound by a shared “human” sense of attachment to the natural environment and the need for its preservation, can be justified using Rorty’s pragmatism (see Sagoff 1988; Hood 1998).3 In other words, Rorty’s emphasis on an otherorientated redemptive impulse and a self-­enlarging liberal utopia does not preclude or constrain forms of commitment to nature and our environment, if our understanding of the world accounts for our place in it as its inhabitants. What of course would be incompatible with the Rortyan model is a purist, deontological conception of relating to the environment. Rorty would resist any argument that we ought to relate to our world for its own sake, devoid of any acknowledgment or participation of other human beings or communities, as if the world could “speak” or impose demands on us by virtue of itself. He also would be suspicious of the idea that a spiritual force resides in the natural environment in a realist sense, that is, independently of human expression and appreciation. What kinds of spiritual inspiration we do indeed lose in shaking off this perspective, in Rorty’s view, remains to be defended. A second area of concern relates to the religious provenance of pragmatist transcendence. Rorty’s metaphilosophy is very much focused on how things might be better and on how the human condition might be improved in terms of prosperity, self-creation, and equality. It has little to say though about the persistence of human failure and suffering, other than to increase our sensitivity to the suffering of others and to get us to think that “cruelty is the worst thing we can do” (1989, xv). Arguably, since the metaphilosophical focus is shifted to the sunny ideal of human happiness and the conditions for fostering it, the transition from religion to pragmatism may represent a loss or a decline in the capacity to make sense of that suffering (see Dews 2010; Smith 2005). Indeed, Rorty has received much criticism for defending the justification that alleviating the suffering of others can only rely on Western ethnocentrism serving as a (blunt or problematic) tool for overcoming the same Western ethnocentrism: It may seem strange to attribute this sort of willingness to the recent West—a culture often said, with excellent reason, to be racist, sexist, and imperialist. But it is of course also a culture which is very worried about being racist, 3

 I thank Sergio Gallegos for this constructive point.

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sexist, and imperialist, as well as about being Eurocentric, parochial, and intellectually intolerant. It is a culture which has become very conscious of its capacity for murderous intolerance and thereby perhaps more wary of intolerance, more sensitive to the desirability of diversity, than any other of which we have record. (1991, 81)

But this so-called blindspot of pragmatist transcendence—that our making collective sense of suffering is at risk of impoverishment and deterioration if human culture pursues it—bears weight only if we take Rorty’s metaphilosophy on its own and in an abstract sense; many scholars would argue that a different picture emerges if we take a closer look and develop Rorty’s contributions to questions of ethics, justice, moral progress, and political philosophy. Recent scholarship on Rorty has tended to focus on the problems of cruelty and suffering in the face of liberal democratic hopes and mines his oeuvre for the resources we can use, revise, improve, or reject for the purposes of ameliorating our human condition (see Dieleman et al. 2017; Chin 2018; Curtis 2015; McClean 2016). These issues, after all, are about the numerous constraints and limitations to human happiness and the social and political obstacles that get in the way of building a more egalitarian world. In short, these responses are not only complementary but are inextricably connected to the realization of the metaphilosophical goals outlined in the conception of pragmatist transcendence. The third concern is a practical matter. Recall the character of Rorty’s utopian vision: in this world, “communication would be domination-free, class and caste would be unknown, hierarchy would be a matter of temporary pragmatic convenience, and power would be entirely at the disposal of the free agreement of a literate and well-educated electorate” (2005, 40). Surely, the social hope at the core of Rorty’s metaphilosophy needs much more than awareness of possible routes from here to utopia, conjured in the thought-experiments of pragmatist philosophers, to sustain it. A believable route must be to hand somewhere, and this arguably requires a more critical and jaundiced view of actually existing liberal societies than Rorty often expressed (1998a). Indeed, Rorty says confusing things about the feasibility of his utopian hopes. Sometimes, he defends the provocative view that the idea of a socially just and democratic utopia resonates universally, making it a strong candidate to replace religion and philosophy as our new cultural order (1995, 204). At other times, Rorty says discouraging things about establishing a long-term project, speaking as though this

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vision is improbable to plan for, let alone achieve, in this day and age. He admits his pessimism about the political future, acknowledging that democracy only works if wealth is evenly spread and if the gulf between the rich and the poor is eliminated. Why is the question of practicality important? Why can’t we remain satisfied with the answer that this vision coming to fruition is dependent on contingency, a topic we have covered in Chap. 3? Remember that what is at stake in endorsing pragmatist transcendence as a cultural framework, and in supporting the liberal utopia that Rorty desires as a political reality, is the suppression and elimination of varieties of religious, scientific, and political traditions which—despite their dangers and inadequacies—today still serve as existential sources of meaning, trust, certainty, and even redemption for a vast majority of people. If we are wagering on a frail or illegitimate democratic vision, then we lose a lot in realizing that Rorty’s project is as impracticable as all other conceived utopias in history: a οὐ (“not”) and τόπος (“place”), or a “no place.” He, of course, would argue that this is a risk worth taking. In short, the recognition of the limits of Rorty’s pragmatism issues an invitation to address them not only through philosophy but also via our practical projects. So even if, as we have argued, a notion of pragmatist transcendence does inform his metaphilosophy, and does so in a way that contributes to its attractiveness, it is an open question whether it equips philosophy sufficiently for the tasks that face it today.

Conclusion There is something awkward in the expression “pragmatist transcendence,” as if the component parts do not quite belong together. But such awkwardness is not something that would worry Rorty. In his view, philosophy gets its point from the contribution it has to make to the promotion of human happiness and democracy, goals that are fused in the idea of a prosperous, classless, casteless, cosmopolitan society. His vision constitutes a world where egotism and nihilism, problems with onto-theological pedigrees, have no place. One way in which philosophy can positively contribute to this vision is by replacing concepts and distinctions made familiar through the onto-theological tradition by new ones. The new concepts and distinctions may seem incoherent or clumsy at first, but when successful they loosen the grip of familiar modes of thought that impede the promotion of happiness and democracy and enable us to envisage, and inch closer to, liberal utopia. In Rorty’s metaphilosophical project,

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conceptual transformation depends on discarding burdensome ideas such as “original sin” or “transcultural notions of validity” or “implicitness” or “externality” and their corresponding frameworks, or at the very least finding ways for them to fall out of favor or cease to be of theoretical and linguistic interest. In his view, there is something to be won in pursuing “a long-term, militantly secularist, philosophical agenda” (2010c, 549). This is the real goal of utopia, and we need to be able to track down “what human life might be like a thousand years down the road” (2010c, 549). Part of his job as a thinker is to visualize the secular human paradise that awaits at the imagined finish line. Rorty indeed commits himself to a radical existential task that Ato Sekyi-Otu beautifully captures in this passage: Listening to religion not by accepting its truth-claims but by understanding the radical needs to which it ministers and thereby returning its vaunted redemptory mission to this inverted world; that is to say, reframing the sacred as the earthly holiness of every single one of us, and, consequently, our equal moral standing, dignity, and right to all that is conducive to human self-fashioning and flourishing—egalitarianism as the matter of reverence, the vital “substance of things hoped for”. (2019, 2)

The idea of pragmatist transcendence serves this purpose of secular visualization by highlighting the awe-commanding character of this liberal utopia, by presenting it as just as worthy of edification as traditional ideas of God, Truth, Reason, and so forth. Rorty’s pragmatist transcendence signals an invitation to reclaim philosophy’s spiritual ground in a manner consistent with the sober disenchantment of the Darwinian worldview while minimizing the threat of nihilism, given its clear aversion and challenge to egotism. For those who see that worldview as having no spiritually redeeming features, the idea of pragmatist transcendence will seem a sham. Rorty’s challenge is to make them think again. Elsewhere, he invites a similar re-evaluation of philosophy by adopting another awkward term: romantic utilitarianism (2007, 27). Originally coined as a condemnation of the incoherence of pragmatism, it is a term that Rorty urges pragmatists to embrace on account of it signaling a commitment to goals that flourish together in liberal utopia, but which traditional philosophical language and imaginaries render distinct and incompatible. The pragmatist, in being a utilitarian, need not be advocating a pig-philosophy, but can let her imagination soar in the manner of the most inspired poet. The pragmatist can be a leveler, in counting each person as an equal, without flattening the spiritual possibilities of the culture in which they do so count.

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CHAPTER 6

The Nihilisms of Our Time

Water, is taught by thirst. Land—by the Oceans passed. Transport—by throe— Peace—by its battles told— Love, by Memorial Mold— Birds, by the Snow. Emily Dickinson (1830–86), Water, is taught by thirst.

In his critical essay on Rorty, Dews points out elegantly that it is not so easy to give up on our religious and philosophical inheritance without first coming into proper terms with it: “We cannot escape from under the weight of fixations unless we also come to apprehend what gave them their hold over us in the first place—unless we learn to understand how they provided a false, constricting channel for genuine needs and legitimate aspirations” (2010, 636). My hope is that this book has shown that these fixations are open to transformation. Recall the classic formula for existential nihilism: when we give up on religion and Plato as paths for legitimating our highest metaphysical and deepest moral hopes, then the crisis of nihilism is the expected result. The loss of universal, ontological authority can lead to an atmosphere of uncertainty and melancholy, as existentialists like Dostoyevsky, Camus, and Kierkegaard imagined in the twentieth century, and the likes of Taylor, Dreyfus, and Kelly have continued to investigate in the contemporary period. However, for Rorty, this

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grand anxiety about nihilism is neither an automated nor an inescapable response. Returning to the epigraph in the first chapter, we can now make better sense of why Rorty candidly suggests that “we can, for example, tell Zarathustra that the news that God is dead is not all that big a deal. We can tell Heidegger that one can be a perfectly good example of Dasein without even having been what he calls ‘authentic’” (2010, 507). Concerns about nihilism loosen its hold in a world that takes the ontotheological tradition for granted. In this context, there would be no reason to placate any metaphysical worry or anxiety, since the question of modern meaninglessness would cease being a constant existential threat or malaise. But more than evading the problem, this book argues that a world pervaded by the hope of pragmatist transcendence can safeguard us from the re-­emergence of nihilism. In short, not only can our human culture avert nihilism, it can also outgrow it. Central to understanding Rorty’s contribution to the “Great Debate” on nihilism is what Taylor calls the phenomenon of spiritual disjointedness. Religious and contemporary accounts of redemption and the sacred endeavor to remedy the historically general and existentially particular condition of being spiritually out of joint.  To recall, Taylor states that apart from the physical, mental, and emotional frustrations of daily life, a person could also feel deeply out of sync with one’s self and community. The experience of alienation differs in every cultural epoch and is expressed in a variety of ways; they include prolonged episodes and deeply negative experiences of lostness, emptiness, triviality, meaninglessness, or despair. Taylor surmises that in every context, there would also correspond some general approach to overcome this negative condition. There exists a way for a person to become full or to be found or for their life to be integrated, justified, completed, or made authentic, whether in this lifetime or the next (Taylor 1988, 300). Put another way, cultures offer their own (effective or ineffective) modes of redemption. This suggests that there is no unifying sense of what salvation or redemption ultimately is. The condition of eternity or absoluteness, linguistic residues of the onto-theological tradition and the Axial vocabulary of transcendence and immanence, is not a universally fitting solution for spiritual disjointedness. What truly matters is that the inhabitants of a particular context are responsive to, or in Heideggerian terms, attuned to whatever

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Being, truth, person, event, or relationship the power of redemption makes itself felt. In order to be saved from the contemporary version of spiritual disjointedness, according to sacred redemptionists, we ought to find, discover, or unmask where the moral or spiritual strength truly lies in modern culture and work on making its redeeming power come alive. The consensus between Taylor, Dreyfus, and Kelly is that the most salient manifestation of spiritual disjointedness in modernity is condensed in the mood of nihilism. Now that universal religious and scientific answers are losing their grip on human beings, questions about how to live a meaningful and spiritually enriched existence have come to fore. This explains the philosophical interest in the contemporary debates on modern spiritual life, with Taylor proposing an expressivist philosophy and a new return to theism, and Dreyfus and Kelly advocating a modernized version of Homeric polytheism. But Rorty’s contribution does not lie in overcoming the effects of modern nihilism that the other three thinkers are so worried about. This is not his main concern at all. He does not raise or broaden the stakes of redemptive re-spiritualization the way Taylor, Dreyfus, and Kelly do, if by this we mean finding a path to repair nihilistic lives or cure a pervasive climate of meaninglessness. This admission, at first, may lead a reader to think that Rorty is completely irrelevant to the debates about the spiritual condition of modernity. However, a more extensive treatment of Rorty’s project shows that he can help us rethink the way we understand the relationship between nihilism and modernity. Rorty’s contribution consists in finding a way to undercut the nihilism problem existentially. It does this by treating the malaise of egotism, which can be construed as the underlying sociohistorical source of nihilism in the first place. This book has traced this strategy by revealing the inextricable link between egotism and nihilism: prior to becoming nihilists, human beings first suffer from the culturally entrenched religious or philosophical egotism that Rorty’s self-enlargement strategy tries to address. This is a merit that is exclusive to his account of redemption, a previously unconsidered perspective to advance the current debates about how we can experience meaning and spiritual fulfillment in the modern world. Naturally, this contribution can make Rorty’s pragmatist view appear modest compared to the original motives of other accounts, since it does not target the healing and recovery of human lives that are already infected by the feelings of lostness, emptiness, and despair that escort the malaise of modern nihilism. We cannot deny this fact. We cannot just say “it’s no big deal” or “just grow up!” to individuals heaving under the heft of their

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existential and spiritual fixations and expect an easy, painless process of recuperation. Nihilism, moreover, is not a private problem but a cultural one, and a response to it requires a reorganization of our psychological, social, and material sources of meaning and living in our shared communities. But since the route to recovery from nihilism has never been Rorty’s focus in his pragmatism, it would be misplaced to ask how his story of redemption can solve manifestations of the nihilism problem in all its shapes and forms. Rather, we need to take him at his word and tackle the problem of egotism, which I have argued precedes the phenomenon of nihilism. Given the way Rorty’s concern has been fashioned in this book, the problem of egotism qualifies being seen as a moral and spiritual malaise. Religious fundamentalists, dogmatic atheists, racists, sexists, and bigots—possibly all who are militantly unwilling to welcome other walks of life and who feel justified in ostracizing groups of people they deem unworthy of respect—are living, breathing examples of the egotists Rorty idealizes his literary culture to be free of. Through Rorty, we have hypothesized that their predisposition for group egotism can be linked to our uncritical inheritance of the metaphysical frameworks of religion and science. These systems are responsible for endorsing the claim that there exist sources of absolute and incorrigible authority that can justify and support their egotistic views, safe from any objection. The collapse of these bulwarks of belief is the cause of nihilism, at least in  the lives of these people. Rorty’s pragmatism breathes a new perspective to this issue. It repudiates the philosophical idea that ultimate foundations exist in the first place and argues that we only have ourselves and others to be responsible for. The possibility of a better, kinder future rests on our hands. If we are to live in a better world, we should learn to treat egotism as a key fault in human culture and cultivate modern strategies of self-enlargement. In suggesting this, Rorty engages how the egotistic-nihilistic destiny of the Western philosophical narrative can be circumvented and, more importantly, maneuvered toward a secularist utopia. He thinks that religion and philosophy are cultural phases that can and should be overcome by human culture, especially because their version of unattainable redemption promotes the malaise of egotism in which nihilism lies latent. A literary culture, with pragmatist transcendence serving as its metaphilosophical ideal and antidote, can help address and combat this malaise. In a culture of literature, people will seek redemption from egotism not only because they can become potential victims of nihilism but also because egotism, a

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vestige of the vertical onto-theological tradition, could prevent them from experiencing the power of redemptive relationships. These transformative relationships—the non-hierarchical kind, in which justificatory relations are horizontally constituted—are the best resource for experiencing meaningful and spiritually fulfilled lives in this culture. Beyond Rorty’s project and the contemporary debates on the spiritual condition of modernity, there is also the valid point that nihilism wears different faces in the world today and that the “Great Debate” captures only a specific iteration of it. Note that the term nihilism is employed, widely and pejoratively, to indicate a cultural crisis of truth, meaning, or morals. The feelings of disorientation and hopelessness are sometimes not generated by the loss of onto-theological authority and universalist ideals, but by the context-specific problems plaguing our modern world, ranging from the loss of traditional religious and cultural communities, worsening social and political strife, and environmental degradation. In political life, nihilism as a descriptive term has gained notoriety to mark the “post-truth era,” a political condition defined by tribal arrogance, a culture of lying, and the disintegration of apparently shared democratic values (see Lynch 2019). Cornel West has stated that the rise of Donald Trump “could easily produce a pervasive cynicism and poisonous nihilism. Is there really any hope for truth and justice in this decadent time?” (2017). The last few years have also seen the re-emergence and continuing rise to global power of authoritarian leaders like Rodrigo Duterte (Philippines), Jair Bolsonaro (Brazil), Vladimir Putin (Russia), Xi Jinping (China), Narendra Modi (India), Recep Tayyip Erdogan (Turkey), and Viktor Orban (Hungary),  who have gained support on the basis of their egotistic “strongman” campaigns, disdain for liberal democratic values, and willingness to commit crimes against humanity for political and economic ends. Describing the succession of events as nihilistic is apt in contemporary politics. The metaphors of overcoming and outgrowing nihilism on the political plane may be useful in making sense these issues, if the former means criticizing the fetish for ultimate political norms, values, and systems (and ultimate leaders!) as a solution to these modern problems, and the latter about reshaping our conception of collective responsibility and action as global citizens. Naturally, this claim will require an analysis distinct from the existential perspective offered in this book. Seen from the lens of critical philosophy of race, one could also argue that the nihilism rehearsed in this book is a version of “white” nihilism,

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localized within Judeo-Christian context. It  has mostly relied on the voices of philosophers produced by Western and homogenously white academic traditions (without surprise, the texts are also written by men). The expression of spiritual disjointedness that runs from Nietzsche to Heidegger, and from Taylor to Dreyfus to Wallace, is overwhelmingly depicted as ranging from boredom, or melancholy, or feeling out of touch, on the one hand, to feelings of resentment, anger, and fear of freedom and responsibility from the loss of metaphysical authority and assurance from God or gods, on the other. This picture makes it appear as if the world is composed of atomized individuals, each independently enduring the vast, magnificent emptiness of the world and of existence as a whole, much like Sisyphus absurdly rolling the rock up a mountain or Atlas bearing the weight of the world. Indeed, both Sisyphus and Atlas can be seen to serve as Hellenistic archetypes contra the modern threat of nihilism.1 As we have examined in the book, the root of this kind of modern nihilism is the malaise of anthropocentrism (Taylor, Dreyfus, and Kelly), or put differently, egotism (Rorty). This anthropocentric view at its worst expresses a virulent form of human freedom, one that focuses on the abundance of choices and options and the ability to conquer the world for one’s own existential fulfillment. In contrast, the nihilism of the oppressed and the colonized, whose spiritual disjointedness is rooted in their humiliation, degradation, and perpetually marginal existence in a white man’s world, has no conceptual or practical space for egotistic freedom (for more on anti-Black racism and Black nihilism, see West 1993; Gordon 1995; Johnson 2017; Warren 2018). The experience of nihilism, in the non-white tradition, is rooted precisely in the denial of human freedom and respect. It results from the dehumanization of human beings suffering in unjust and deplorable conditions. In other words, this framework of nihilism inverts the set of conceptual assumptions supporting its white counterpart, so that redemption from the meaningless injustice and vicious suffering created by imperialist sociohistorical conditions will require the articulation of other conditions of possibility not yet taken into account. Frantz Fanon, one of the most revolutionary intellectuals in the twentieth century and a key figure in the tradition of Black existentialism, gives 1

 I thank Ian James Kidd for the Atlas example.

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a beautiful description of the nihilism of this sort. It takes the form of existential fatigue in one of his early writings. When he was a resident intern under François Tosquelles at the Saint-Alban Psychiatric Hospital in the 1950s, he penned a Trait d’ Union editorial (Part 2, December 26, 1952) that poignantly describes how this overpowering lethargy takes shape in the body, capturing a formal and physical manifestation of nihilism. Addressed to men and women bogged down by the tedious and unreasonable demands of a modern workplace, Fanon mused to the hospital staff: We must not confuse “weariness” with “rest.” No more “weariness” with “idleness.” Weariness is the refusal to continue; we have been able to start, we have even gone quite far towards carrying out the act, but there now arises this immense weight in the arms, this unusual heaviness in the legs, this unusual void in the head and above all this anguish that harrows in your breast. (2018, 280)

And what is the right response to this modern and all too familiar kind of weariness? Fanon quotes Paul Valéry: “We must try to live.” Whether this modern corporeal nihilism can be understood in terms of Rorty’s egotism, as well as the metaphors of overcoming and outgrowing, is up for grabs and a project fit for future investigation.

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Index1

A Allison, Dorothy, 63, 101 Anthropocentrism, 14, 85, 87, 106, 111, 150 See also Egotism Arendt, Hannah, 90 Art, 2, 9, 10, 29n1, 30–32, 34–36, 38, 39, 64, 70, 72, 74, 86, 92, 93, 97, 98, 116, 133 Axial, 4, 5, 116–118, 124, 146

Commitment, 3, 9, 14, 17, 43, 46, 66, 93, 99, 100, 102, 103, 111–113, 117, 136, 137, 139, 142 Contingency, 15, 19, 47, 57n3, 60n4, 63, 72, 73, 77, 86, 89, 94, 101, 113, 128, 141 Conversation of mankind, 53–55

B Bernstein, Richard, 4, 55, 62, 91 Bloom, Harold, 7, 69, 89, 101

D Death of God, 14, 28, 40 See also Nietzsche, Friedrich Democracy, 7, 18, 32, 46, 53, 56, 71–73, 86, 101, 124, 125, 130, 131, 133, 135, 137, 141 Dewey, John, 5, 7, 10, 44, 54, 60, 60–61n4, 62, 70 Dews, Peter, 65, 72, 139, 145

C Camus, Albert, 15, 45, 145 Carr, Karen, 24, 26, 41–43, 46, 47 Christianity, 5, 11, 12, 28, 32, 44, 93, 100

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s) 2020 T. Llanera, Richard Rorty: Outgrowing Modern Nihilism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45058-8

163

164 

INDEX

Dreyfus, Hubert, 2, 3, 5, 14–19, 18n2, 29n1, 30, 31, 37–40, 51–55, 52n1, 58, 59, 67, 85–87, 90, 105–111, 113–115, 117, 118, 145, 147, 150 E Edification, 16, 55–64, 80, 86, 87, 93, 99, 142 Egalitarianism, 33, 56, 94, 96, 101, 104, 142 Egotism egoism, 106 egotist, 7, 17, 87–91, 106–110, 116, 132, 148 individualism, 106 Enframed, 25, 29–32 Enlightenment, 8, 12, 13, 28, 32, 77, 87, 92, 93, 96, 103, 104, 106, 108, 110, 129 Essentialism, 16, 56–62, 61n5 Existential, 1, 2, 9, 12–17, 24–26, 28, 32, 35, 37, 38, 41, 43–47, 63, 64, 66, 71, 75, 78–80, 85, 86, 95, 96, 100, 103, 104, 106–108, 110, 111, 117, 133, 133n2, 141, 142, 145, 146, 148–151 Expressivism, 2, 9, 35, 111 F Feminism, 94, 95, 104 Final vocabulary, 44, 88, 98 Fraser, Nancy, 91, 94, 94n1, 95, 104 Freedom burden, 14 choice, 106, 150 Freud, Sigmund, 12, 26, 47, 61, 98, 134

G Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 51, 52, 61, 134 Ge-stell, see Enframed God gods, 1, 2, 5–7, 9, 11–15, 24, 25, 27, 28, 32, 35–38, 40, 43, 51, 54, 55, 58, 63–68, 71, 72, 74–76, 80, 86, 89, 96, 97, 99, 106, 108–110, 112, 114, 115, 118, 123, 124, 128, 130, 137, 142, 146, 150 monotheism, 5, 27–29, 40, 67, 108 theism, 2, 11, 12, 36, 111, 115, 118 Great Debate, 1–19, 29, 47, 146, 149 H Habermas, Jürgen, 4, 18, 55n2, 62, 71, 73, 77, 99, 124, 136–138 Heidegger, Martin, 1, 15, 16, 25, 26, 29–32, 29n1, 38, 39, 47, 54, 59, 60, 60n4, 71, 72, 78, 79, 89, 97, 98, 105, 107, 114, 128, 136, 146, 150 Hermeneutics, 51, 52, 52n1, 54, 55 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 30, 79, 107, 108 Homer, 2, 37, 39 Horizontal transcendence, 131–134, 136, 137 I Imagination, 8, 9, 59, 63–65, 69, 74, 75, 80, 86, 88, 90, 92, 94, 95, 101, 104, 105, 117, 133, 134, 142 Immanent counter-­ enlightenment, 33, 35

 INDEX 

J James, William, 6, 42 Jaspers, Karl, 4 Judeo-Christian, 14, 24, 25, 150 K Kant, Immanuel, 28, 37, 60, 60n4, 67, 93, 97, 108, 127, 129, 136 Kelly, Sean Dorrance, 2, 3, 5, 14–17, 19, 29n1, 30, 37–40, 85–87, 90, 105–111, 113–115, 117, 118, 145, 147, 150 Kierkegaard, Soren, 15, 24, 25, 60, 65, 71, 145 L Language, 8, 10, 35, 36, 41, 44, 54, 55, 55n2, 74–76, 79, 88, 97, 98, 108, 109, 111, 116–118, 126, 135, 137, 138, 142 See also Linguistic turn Levinas, Emmanuel, 18, 124, 136, 137 Liberal democracy, see Democracy Liberal ironist, 1, 46, 95, 133n2 Linguistic turn, 60, 75 Literary culture, 8, 17, 56, 62, 63, 68–73, 75, 80, 87, 92, 96, 101, 104, 110, 117, 148 Literature, 7, 8, 13, 16, 24, 26, 39, 46, 56, 59, 63, 64, 67–71, 86, 89, 91, 101, 102, 133, 148 novel, 13, 17, 45, 46, 69, 86–88, 97, 101, 104, 108 M Marmysz, John, 41, 46, 47 Meaning existential, 2, 9, 12, 16, 37, 38, 78, 79, 85, 86, 100, 104, 110, 111, 133

165

meaninglessness, 13, 15, 24, 25, 38, 40, 45–47, 106, 146, 147 Melville, Herman, 2, 40, 108, 109 Metaphilosophy post-metaphysical, 18, 43, 111–117, 124, 137, 138 pragmatist, 3, 18, 42, 124, 134, 135, 138–141, 148 Meta-poiesis, 115, 118 Modern/modernity, 1, 24, 32–36, 54, 85, 123, 146 Monotheism, 5, 27–29, 40, 67, 108 Moods, 25, 28, 30, 37–40, 85, 107, 114, 115, 147 Morality, 1, 8, 9, 27, 33, 42, 44, 57n3, 58, 99, 129 Moral source, 2, 9, 32–36, 110 N Nietzsche, Friedrich, 6, 10, 12, 15, 16, 24–29, 29n1, 32–34, 38, 42, 47, 61, 68, 71, 72, 78, 93, 97, 98, 105, 109, 126, 134, 135, 150 Nihilism active, 28 alethiological, 24, 41 averting, 3, 132 Black existentialism, 16, 150 epistemological, 24, 41, 42 ethical, 24, 41 existential, 1, 2, 14–16, 24, 25, 41, 43–46, 145 Japanese philosophy, 102 metaphysical, 4, 24, 145 moral, 24, 41, 43 outgrowing, 149, 151 overcoming, 3, 14, 16, 23–48, 86, 118, 147, 149, 151 passive, 28 political, 149 Nussbaum, Martha, 7, 69

166 

INDEX

O Oakeshott, Michael, 53, 54 Onto-theological tradition, 6, 128–132, 134–137, 141, 146, 149 P Philosophy edifying, 59, 60 post-metaphysical, 137 systematic, 59, 60n4, 61 Western, 3, 26, 57, 95 See also Metaphilosophy Plato, 5, 27, 32, 57, 60n4, 74, 78, 87, 93, 95, 97, 127–129, 145 Poetry, 2, 9, 53, 56, 59, 64, 69, 70, 74, 98, 108 Poiesis, 31, 114 Polytheism, 2, 15, 37, 38, 40, 63–65, 108, 111, 113–115, 118, 147 ancient, 15 Homeric, 18, 38, 108, 115, 147 modern, 2, 113, 114 romantic, 18, 63–65 Pragmatism, 4, 16–18, 42, 43, 47, 55n2, 56–58, 60n4, 65, 70, 71n8, 74, 78, 116, 124–127, 131–139, 141, 142, 148 Pragmatist transcendence flattening, 125, 142 levelling, 125, 142 See also Transcendence Private-public distinction private, 46, 91, 93–95, 94n1 public, 91, 93–95 Proust, Marcel, 7, 9, 71, 97, 99, 107

R Reason, 5, 11, 14, 27, 28, 29n1, 33, 36, 56, 57n3, 63, 64, 72, 74, 91, 92, 136, 139, 142, 146 instrumental, 14, 25, 29, 32 Redemption post-metaphysical, 111–117 redemptive relationships, 64, 79, 80, 87, 113, 130, 149 religious, 17 See also Sacred redemptionists Religion atheism, 6, 42 God, 12, 28, 66, 67, 96, 107 monotheism, 5, 27–29, 40, 67, 108 polytheism, 2, 37, 40, 108, 111, 114, 115, 118 religious impulse, 35, 65–68, 86, 114 theism, 2, 11, 12, 36, 111, 115, 118, 147 See also Religious nostalgia Religious nostalgia, 10, 17, 78–80, 115–117, 124 Ricoeur, Paul, 26 Romanticism, 74 Romantic polytheism, 63–65 Rorty, Richard, 1, 26, 51, 85, 123, 145 Rosen, Stanley, 41, 44–46 S Sacred modern, 26, 39, 86 non-human, 3, 86 secular, 116 Sacred redemptionists, 3, 8, 12, 15, 16, 26, 29, 29n1, 32, 38, 40, 47, 85–87, 96, 106, 110, 111, 117, 147 Schneewind, J.B., 1, 46, 95, 103

 INDEX 

Science human sciences, 51, 52, 52n1, 117 natural sciences, 52, 52n1, 53, 68 Scientism, 30, 53–55, 60n4, 78 Secular, 7–12, 36, 56, 68, 72, 76, 86, 100, 101, 105, 109, 111, 115–118, 123, 137, 142 Self-creation, 46, 65, 71, 91–105, 109–111, 115, 131–134, 133n2, 139 Self-enlargement, 17, 63, 87, 91, 93, 96–98, 101–105, 110, 111, 113, 115, 118, 131–133, 133n2, 135, 137, 148 See also Self-creation; Solidarity Shklar, Judith, 90, 105 Smith, Nicholas, 9, 10, 63, 124, 124n1, 137, 139 Socrates, 57, 87, 129, 130 Solidarity, 8, 9, 12, 17, 46, 54, 58, 71, 72, 78, 91–94, 96, 102–105, 111, 115, 118, 131–133, 133n2, 137, 139 Spiritual, 1, 2, 4–15, 17, 18, 24, 25, 30, 32, 34–36, 40, 43, 45, 59, 62–67, 73–79, 81, 85–88, 100, 101, 105–107, 109–111, 113–116, 118, 123, 129, 133–135, 138, 139, 142, 147–149 spiritual disjointedness, 13–15, 40, 146, 147, 150 T Taylor, Charles, 2–4, 9, 10, 13–17, 19, 24, 25, 30, 32–36, 36n2, 40, 51–53, 52n1, 80, 85–87, 90, 105–107, 110, 111, 114–118, 126, 145–147, 150

167

Technology, 25, 30–32, 54 Theism, 2, 11, 12, 36, 111, 115, 118 Transcendence ambition to transcendence, 18, 124–129, 131, 134 horizontal, 131–134, 136, 137 pragmatist, 3, 6, 18, 134–138, 146, 148 strong, 124, 135 vertical, 128–131, 136 weak, 134–138 Truth, 7, 8, 12, 14, 17, 24, 27, 39, 41–44, 53, 55, 55n2, 58, 64–69, 72, 74, 76, 78, 80, 88, 89, 99, 101, 110, 117, 124, 127, 129, 130, 142, 147, 149 correspondence, 41, 58 V Vattimo, Gianni, 11, 12, 135 Vertical transcendence, 128–131, 136 Voparil, Christopher, 92, 101 W Wallace, David Foster, 14, 38, 39, 109, 113, 150 Weak thought, 56, 135, 138 Western philosophy, 3, 26, 57, 95 Whitman, Walt, 7, 10, 54, 73, 92, 96, 99, 101, 105, 123 Whooshing up, 2, 37–40, 114 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 44, 60, 60–61n4