The Ethics of Richard Rorty [1 ed.] 1032074892, 9781032074894

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The Ethics of Richard Rorty

This book contains diverse and critical refections on Richard Rorty’s contributions to ethics, an aspect of his thought that has been relatively neglected. Together, they demonstrate that Rorty offers a compelling and coherent ethical vision. The book’s chapters, grouped thematically, explore Rorty’s emphasis on the importance of moral imagination, social relations, language, and literature as instrumental for ethical self-transformation, as well as for strengthening what Rorty called “social hope,” which entails constant work toward a more democratic, inclusive, and cosmopolitan society and world. Several contributors address the ethical implications of Rorty’s commitment to a vision of political liberalism without philosophical foundations. Others offer critical examinations of Rorty’s claim that our private or individual projects of self-creation can or should be held apart from our public goals of ameliorating social conditions and reducing cruelty and suffering. Some contributors explore hurdles that impede the practical applications of certain of Rorty’s ideas. The Ethics of Richard Rorty will appeal to scholars and advanced students interested in American philosophy and ethics. Susan Dieleman is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, USA. She is the coeditor of Pragmatism and Justice (2017) and of the Conference Proceedings for the 2017 meeting of the Richard Rorty Society (2019). She is also coauthor of the entry on Richard Rorty for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. David E. McClean is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy and Business and Professional Ethics at Rutgers University, Newark, USA. He is the editor of The Integrated Ethics Reader: Reconnecting Thought, Emotion, and Reverence in a World on the Brink (2020) and Understanding and Combating Global Corruptions: A Reader (2021). He is the author of Wall Street, Reforming the Unreformable: An Ethical Perspective (Routledge, 2015) and Richard Rorty, Liberalism, and Cosmopolitanism (Routledge, 2014).

Paul Showler is a PhD candidate in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Oregon, USA. His dissertation draws from recent work in pragmatism and philosophical genealogy to develop and defend a new approach for thinking about moral status.

Routledge Studies in American Philosophy Edited by Willem deVries, University of New Hampshire, USA and Henry Jackman, York University, Canada

The Philosophy of Ralph Waldo Emerson Joseph Urbas Pragmatism and Social Philosophy Exploring a Stream of Ideas from America to Europe Edited by Michael G. Festl C. I. Lewis The A Priori and the Given Edited by Quentin Kammer, Jean-Philippe Narboux, and Henri Wagner Charles Peirce on Ethics, Esthetics and the Normative Sciences James Jakób Liszka The Ethics, Epistemology, and Politics of Richard Rorty Edited by Giancarlo Marchetti Intentionality in Sellars A Transcendental Account of Finite Knowledge Luz Christopher Seiberth Disability and American Philosophies Edited by Nate Whelan-Jackson and Daniel J. Brunson William James and the Moral Life Responsible Self-Fashioning Todd Lekan The Ethics of Richard Rorty Moral Communities, Self-Transformation, and Imagination Edited by Susan Dieleman, David E. McClean, and Paul Showler For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-Studies-in-American-Philosophy/book-series/RSAP

The Ethics of Richard Rorty Moral Communities, Self-Transformation, and Imagination Edited by Susan Dieleman, David E. McClean, and Paul Showler

First published 2022 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2022 Susan Dieleman, David E. McClean, and Paul Showler The right of Susan Dieleman, David E. McClean, and Paul Showler to be identifed as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identifcation and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this title has been requested ISBN: 978-1-032-07489-4 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-07657-7 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-20815-0 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003208150 Typeset in Sabon by SPi Technologies India Pvt Ltd (Straive)

Contents

List of Abbreviations of Works by Richard Rorty List of Contributors

ix x

Introduction: Stretched Thin: Rorty’s Ethical Vision

1

PAUL SHOWLER AND SUSAN DIELEMAN

PART I

Creating Moral Communities and Creating Selves 1

Reading Rorty in Tehran, or What Happened When I Road-Tested Rorty’s Philosophy of Life Inside an Iranian Prison

17

19

KIAN TAJBAKHSH

2

Self-Creation and Community: Nietzsche, Foucault, Rorty

29

DANIEL I. HARRIS

3

Richard Rorty, Ethnocentrism, and Moral Community: A Westerner’s Response to FGM

42

JOHN GIORDANO

4

Rorty’s Hope of Achieving a Global Civilization

55

CLARENCE MARK PHILLIPS

PART II

Imagination, Care, and Virtue

69

5

71

Imagination as a Social Virtue SANTIAGO REY

viii 6

Contents Can Trees Care?: The Overstory and Rorty’s Ideal of Inspirational Literature

81

BEN ROTH

7

Richard Rorty on the “Too Sane”

94

DAVID E. MCCLEAN

8

Scientifc Method and Moral Virtues

107

STÉPHANE MADELRIEUX

PART III

Engagements with Moral Philosophy 9

Talking with the Better-Looking Animals: Richard Rorty on Moral Status

121

123

PAUL SHOWLER

10 Rortyan Ethics: Zim Zuming to Maturity

137

RICHARD GILMORE

11 When Is Desire Dangerous? The Conversation Leading from Nietzsche’s “Delicate Boundary” to Rorty’s “Poeticized Culture”

151

JAMES HERSH

PART IV

Re/Interpretations of Rorty

167

12 Speaking for Oneself: Stolen Vocabularies and Imposed Vocabularies

169

SUSAN DIELEMAN

13 Pragmatism and the Tragic Sense of Death

181

BRYAN VESCIO

14 The Importance of Words: Ironism, Liberalism, and the Private/Public Distinction

193

FEDERICO PENELAS

15 The Ironic and Liberal Defcit in Rorty’s Irony

206

REBECA PÉREZ LEÓN

Index

220

Abbreviations of Works by Richard Rorty

PMN CP CIS ORT EHO TP AOC PSH PCP MLM

OPP

1979, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1982, Consequences of Pragmatism, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 1989, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, New York: Cambridge University Press. 1991, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers, Volume 1, New York: Cambridge University Press. 1991, Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers, Volume 2, New York: Cambridge University Press. 1998, Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, Volume 3, New York: Cambridge University Press. 1998, Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth Century America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 2000, Philosophy and Social Hope. New York: Penguin Books. 2007, Philosophy as Cultural Politics: Philosophical Papers, Volume 4, New York: Cambridge University Press. 2014, Mind, Language, and Metaphilosophy: Early Philosophical Papers. Leach, S., and J. Tartaglia (eds.). New York: Cambridge University Press. 2020, On Philosophy and Philosophers: Unpublished Papers, 1960–2000. Małecki, W. P., and C. Voparil (eds.). New York: Cambridge University Press.

Contributors

Susan Dieleman is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. She is coauthor of Stanford Encyclopedia’s entry on Richard Rorty (2021) and coeditor of Pragmatism and Justice (Oxford University Press, 2017) and the Conference Proceedings for the 2017 meeting of the Richard Rorty Society (Contemporary Pragmatism, 2019). She is author of several chapters and articles on Rorty’s work in venues such as The Cambridge Companion to Richard Rorty, Pragmatism Today, Contemporary Pragmatism, Hypatia, and The Pluralist. She currently is Secretary and Communications Director for the Richard Rorty Society. Richard Gilmore is Professor of Philosophy at Concordia College in Moorhead, Minnesota. He is the author of Philosophical Health: Wittgenstein’s Method in “Philosophical Investigations” (Lexington, 1999); Doing Philosophy at the Movies (SUNY, 2005); Postmodern Movies: Neo-Comic Tragedies, Neo-Noirs, Neo-Westerns (Theran Press, 2016); and Searching for Wisdom in Movies: From the Book of Job to Sublime Conversations (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). John Giordano is a visual artist and educator whose work looks at the pragmatist underpinnings of participatory practices in contemporary art. He has served as a faculty member on a variety of college studytravel trips in Europe, Africa, and East Asia. He is a lecturer in the Tufts University Experimental College and the Community Engagement master’s program at Merrimack College, both in Massachusetts. Daniel I. Harris is Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Trent University. Before joining Trent, he taught at the University of Prince Edward Island and was a postdoctoral fellow at Hunter College of the City University of New York. His research focuses on Nietzsche, as well as fgures in the history of philosophy to whom Nietzsche responds, especially Kant and Schopenhauer, and philosophers for whom Nietzsche was an important infuence, especially Foucault and Rorty. He has published on themes including truth, friendship, compassion, culture, the self, and moral responsibility. His work has appeared

Contributors

xi

in the Journal of Value Inquiry, Journal of Nietzsche Studies, and Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, among other venues. James Hersh is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Salve Regina University. His chief interest is political philosophy, particularly with a focus on the role that the poetic imagination plays in producing a less cruel society. His publications include Poeticized Culture: The Role of Irony in Rawls’s Liberalism (2005), “From Ethnos to Polis: The Furies and Apollo” (1985), “Ethnic Cleansing: The Enrinyes Are Still Angry” (1993), “Render and Surrender: Fundamentalist Monotheism Confronts the Separation of Church and State,” and “Austin’s Ditch: The Political Necessity and Impossibility of ‘Non-Serious Speech’” (1998). He also writes poetry and was named a fnalist for the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry (University of Tulsa, 2005). Stéphane Madelrieux is University Professor of Philosophy at University of Lyon (France). He is the author of William James. L’attitude empiriste (Presses Universitaires de France 2008) and La philosophie de John Dewey (Vrin 2016), as well as editor of Bergson et James: cent ans après (Presses Universitaires de France 2011), Henri Bergson: Sur le pragmatisme de William James (Presses Universitaires de France 2011), John Dewey: L’infuence de Darwin sur la philosophie (Gallimard 2016), and Relire Rorty (Archives de philosophie, 82, 3, 2019). His latest book, Philosophie des expériences radicales, will be shortly published (Le Seuil 2022). He is the current president of Pragmata, the French association for pragmatist studies. David E. McClean is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy and Business and Professional Ethics at Rutgers University. He is the Principal of The DMA Consulting Group, which provides regulatory, risk, and governance services to fnancial services industry frms. Among other publications, he is the editor of The Integrated Ethics Reader: Reconnecting Thought, Emotion, and Reverence in a World on the Brink (Cognella, 2019, revised frst edition, 2020), and has authored Wall Street, Reforming the Unreformable – An Ethical Perspective (Routledge, 2015); Richard Rorty, Liberalism, and Cosmopolitanism (Routledge, 2014); and a selfpublished 257-page monograph on climate change, “Climate Change: The Moral and Political Imperatives” (2017). Dr. McClean was recently nominated to serve as a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and serves as a director or adviser to several not-for-proft organizations in the United States and Africa. He is a member at large of The Richard Rorty Society. Federico Penelas is Independent Researcher at CONICET and Professor of “Philosophy of Language” at Universidad de Buenos Aires and Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata. He specializes in epistemology and philosophical semantics, with a special interest in pragmatism

xii

Contributors

(classical and postanalytic) and in the links between those areas and political philosophy. He has published Wittgenstein (Buenos Aires, Galerna 2020) and coedited the volumes El giro pragmático en flosofía (Barcelona, Gedisa, 2003), and Gramáticas, juegos y silencio. Debates en torno a Wittgenstein (Buenos Aires, Grama, 2006). He has published numerous articles in volumes in Argentina and abroad (Netherlands, Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, Peru), as well as in journals, including Contemporary Pragmatism, Pragmatism Today, Ragion Prática, Dianoia, Endoxa, and Ideas y Valores. He was President of the Asociación Filosófca Argentina (AFRA—2018–2019). He is currently Vice President of the Richard Rorty Society. He was elected President of the Richard Rorty Society for the period 2022–2023. Clarence Mark Phillips teaches philosophy at the University of New Orleans. His main interests include evolutionary psychology, pragmatism, and religious belief (he is slowly at work on a book entitled The Wonder of God’s Creation: And Just How We Do It). His PhD is from Tulane University, his master’s is from the University of Warwick in Coventry, and his bachelor’s is from Cal State Dominguez Hills (he also attended Purdue University, Philipps-Universität in Marburg, and the Université d’Aix Marseilles in Aix-en-Provence). He currently resides in New Orleans with 14 adorable delusions of grandeur, a pet guitar, and lots of great music. Rebeca Pérez León is a postdoctoral fellow at the Central European University in Vienna where she conducts the research project “Social Norms of Law Abidance: The Case of Mexico.” She studied political sociology at Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana in Mexico, earned an MA in critical theory at the University of Nottingham in the United Kingdom, and earned a PhD in philosophy at the University of Essex in the United Kingdom. She specializes in the topics of historicism of culture, the formation of democratic cultures, and democratic education from an interdisciplinary perspective, especially political sociology, education studies, and philosophy, notably pragmatism, deconstruction, and phenomenology. She has published papers on these topics, including “Notes on the Cultivation of Cosmopolitanism,” “A Defence of Rorty’s Liberal Ironist,” and “Historicism without Transcendence,” among others. Santiago Rey is an Adjunct Professor at Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia. His research focuses on the relationship between pragmatism and philosophical hermeneutics. His work has appeared in the European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy, Contemporary Pragmatism, and the International Journal of Philosophical Studies. He is editor of the collected works of Colombian philosopher Carlos B. Gutiérrez.

Contributors

xiii

Ben Roth teaches writing and philosophy at Harvard and Tufts. He has published articles on the relationship between narrative and the self in Heidegger, Sartre’s novel Nausea, and Rousseau’s Confessions, on the problem of nihilism in architectural phenomenology, and on Walter De Maria’s land art installation The Lightning Field and has others forthcoming on Wittgenstein and the fction writer Lydia Davis and ideology in Christopher Nolan’s flm Tenet. He has also published reviews and cultural criticism in more public-facing venues, as well as numerous works of very short fction. Paul Showler is a PhD candidate in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Oregon, USA. His research focuses primarily on ethics, pragmatism, and metaphilosophy. His most recent writings have been published in Synthese and BioSocieties. Kian Tajbakhsh is Senior Advisor to the Executive Vice President for Global Centers and Global Development at Columbia University. He is the Coordinator of the Committee on Forced Migration. He also teaches in Columbia’s Global Thought master’s program. His book Creating Local Democracy In Iran: State-Building, Authoritarianism and Politics of Decentralization will be published by Cambridge University Press in 2022. Other recent publications include “What Are Iranians Dreaming about Today? Refections on the Islamic Revolution at 40” (2019); “Hind Swaraj: Reading Gandhi’s Critique of Modernity in Tehran” (2018). Bryan Vescio is Professor and Chair of English at High Point University. He is the author of Reconstruction in Literary Studies: An Informalist Approach (2014), which develops a new pragmatist theory of literature. He has also published numerous theoretical articles on the uses of pragmatism for literary theory and numerous critical articles on nineteenth and twentieth century American writers, including Thoreau, Twain, Faulkner, West, and Steinbeck. Recently; his work in literary criticism has focused on the contemporary writer Cormac McCarthy. His current book project is a collection of essays entitled Dreaming as Doing: Literature and the Humanities in a Practical Age.

Introduction: Stretched Thin Rorty’s Ethical Vision Paul Showler and Susan Dieleman

One metaphilosophical commitment that Richard Rorty maintained throughout his career is that there are certain kinds of philosophical disagreements that are unlikely to be resolved through argument. When it comes to debates between, for example, representationalists and antirepresentationalists, or between naturalists and quietists, Rorty doubts that either side of the dispute can appeal to a set of premises that does not appear question-begging from the other’s perspective. Confronted in his own writings with these kinds of impasses, he often turns to redescription, with the aim of making the vocabulary in which the dispute is couched “look bad, thereby changing the subject” (CIS, 44). When successful, redescription promises to transform our sense of which philosophical problems are obligatory or important. Many of Rorty’s critics have found these claims to be intellectually irresponsible. Rather than solve philosophical problems, Rorty’s penchant for redescribing philosophical debates seems tantamount to trading argument for rhetoric (or worse, to giving up). This criticism, however, is misguided for at least two reasons. First, when Rorty does turn to redescription, his intention is not to eschew argument altogether but, rather, to transform the way we think about certain philosophical disputes so as to render them more conducive to the needs and ends of liberal democratic societies. This aspiration, however, need not entail the irrationalist conclusion that people should stop making arguments altogether. Rorty can happily admit that arguments often serve invaluable roles in various aspects of our lives while remaining skeptical about their utility for resolving metaphilosophical disagreements. Second, the distinction between argument and rhetoric is—like so many other philosophical dualisms—one that Rorty seeks to blur. To suggest that there is a hard-and-fast distinction between rational and irrational forms of persuasion is like claiming to be able to separate off the “rational” from the “passional” components of the soul. Rortyan redescription is best thought of as a robust persuasive strategy that combines cognitive, affective, and imaginative elements. DOI: 10.4324/9781003208150-1

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One especially effective form of redescription that Rorty employs involves showing that some philosophical term or notion lacks the “contrastive force” that its proponents take it to have. On Rorty’s view, some uses of a philosophical term or notion are meaningful because the philosopher assumes it can be contrasted with something it is not. For example, the notion of relative validity is only meaningful insofar as the philosopher who uses it can draw a clear contrast with absolute validity (CIS, 46–47). Rorty contends that, when a philosopher uses a term like “relative validity,” they must be assuming there is such a thing as absolute validity, from which “relative validity” gets its sense or meaning. But, upon investigating what the term “absolute validity” might refer to, he writes, “there would be no interesting statements which are absolutely valid” (47). As Rorty explains, “Absolute validity would be confned to everyday platitudes, elementary mathematical truths, and the like: the sort of belief that nobody wants to argue about because they are neither controversial nor central to anyone’s sense of who she is or what she lives for” (47).1 Because there are no “absolutely valid statements” worthy of (philosophical) investigation, the notion of “relatively valid statements” likewise loses its meaning. Similarly, the use of the term interpretation is only meaningful if it can be contrasted with some practice that does not involve interpretation (ORT, 102–103). When a philosopher uses a term like “interpretation”— and especially if they preface its use with “mere,” as in “mere interpretation”—they must be assuming there is some method of inquiry that is more than merely interpretive. Rorty inquires after the contrastive force of the term “interpretation” in the following passage: When we are told that a certain activity should be viewed as interpretive, we are usually being told that we should not, perhaps contrary to our earlier expectations, expect this activity to produce either knock-down arguments or a consensus among experts. We should not expect it to have a natural starting point, nor a method. Perhaps we should not even expect it to provide “objective truth.” We should be prepared to settle for recontextualizing what lies to hand, and then playing various recontextualizations off against each other. But advising us to settle for this fuzziness is only interesting insofar as we have reason to think that other people, in other areas of culture, manage to be less fuzzy than this. (ORT, 102) He continues, exploring how things might look from another perspective, one that takes anti-essentialism seriously: Suppose we are antiessentialist all the way. Then we shall say  that all inquiry is interpretation, that all thought consists in

Introduction: Stretched Thin

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recontextualization, that we have never done anything else and never will. We shall not grant that there is a useful contrast to be drawn between topics about which there is objective truth and topics about which there is not. (ORT, 102) In short, if we were to take up the anti-essentialist position, the contrastive force of “interpretation” would disappear. Since all inquiry would be a matter of interpretation, there would be no other method of inquiry with which to compare it. Rorty’s strategy here is to redescribe certain notions, like “relative validity” and “interpretation,” by removing them from the essentialist’s language game, where they are used for rhetorical purposes to contrast with their essentialist counterparts, and then placing them in the antiessentialist’s language game instead, where they are stretched thin and “deprived of contrastive and polemical force” (ORT, 103). This is a pragmatist strategy Rorty articulates in EHO, where he suggests “the best parts of Heidegger and Derrida” are those parts that help us to see how things look “when one begins to take the relativity of thinghood to choice of description for granted, and so starts asking how to be useful rather than how to be right” (EHO, 4–5). In losing this contrastive and polemical force, the charges of relativism or irrationalism leveled against Rorty by his critics lose their coherence. Using this redescriptive strategy as a lens provides a useful method for better understanding the shape of Rorty’s own ethical vision. Despite his skepticism about some of the central ambitions held by many contemporary moral theorists, it would be a serious mistake to conclude from this that Rorty has no positive views to offer on the subject. His negative positions are almost always accompanied by subtle and often highly original insights. Like his intellectual hero and fellow pragmatist philosopher John Dewey, Rorty is eager to reconstruct philosophical issues with the aim of expanding our sense of what is possible in order to enlist philosophy in projects of creating a better future. In this introduction, we outline Rorty’s positive ethical project by seeing how it emerges from his rejection of the contrastive force of four traditional ethical notions: (1) the assumption that moral obligations must be grounded in an account of universal human nature that contrasts with a merely contingent self, (2) the Kantian contrast between categorical obligations of morality and mere hypothetical obligations of prudence, (3) the central role afforded to universal moral principles contrasted with merely local decisions and commitments that stem from our attachments to certain groups, and (4) the contrast between philosophy, which provides special insight or expertise into ethical concepts and arguments, and mere culture or literature as a source of moral wisdom. We then highlight how the chapters in this volume contribute to his ethical vision.

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1. Against Human Nature Historically, many philosophers have sought to provide philosophical foundations for our ethical and political projects by grounding them in an ahistorical account of human nature. Often this involves identifying some shared essential feature or “added ingredient” common to all humans (or perhaps all targets of moral concern) by virtue of which we can be said to have obligations to each other and which ultimately “provides a reason for people to be nice to each other” (TP, 169). On this philosophical picture, paradigmatic candidates for such “added ingredients” include Reason or the possession of a soul, which are supposed to constitute who we are most fundamentally. That is, these essentialist philosophical projects purport to depict our true self, in contrast to those contingent features of our lives that are subject to chance and variation. Rorty rejects these foundationalist approaches to ethics—and their assumed contrast between the “true” and the “merely contingent” parts of the self—because of his metaphilosophical commitment to antiauthoritarianism, a commitment that animates his entire oeuvre. Indeed, he claims to have had “really only one idea: the need to get beyond representationalism, and thus into an intellectual world in which human beings are responsible only to each other” (Rorty 2010, 474).2 Antiauthoritarianism refers to the idea that there is no nonhuman authority to which we humans ought to humble ourselves, to whom we ought to answer instead of our fellow humans (Rorty 1999; see also Bernstein 2008). In addition to philosophical authority fgures such as God, Reality, or the Truth, which are viewed as powerful external forces which ought to be propitiated, Rorty regards such internal forces as the soul or the claims of Reason as performing the same function. What these cases have in common is that they posit some distinctive item of knowledge, the possession of which would allow one to circumvent the need to justify oneself to others. They are, as Rorty put it in PMN, so many attempts to forgo conversation for constraint (PMN, 315). In place of the foundationalist notion of a true self that is responsive to the claims of Reason, Rorty embraces the idea that one’s moral identity “is determined by the group or groups with which one identifes—the group or groups to which one cannot be disloyal and still like oneself” (PCP, 45). And rather than view moral progress as a process of discovering moral truths, derived, perhaps, from insights about human nature, Rorty offers a picture according to which moral progress involves “the ability to see more and more traditional differences (of tribe, religion, race, customs, and the like) as unimportant when compared with similarities with respect to pain and humiliation—the ability to think of people wildly different from ourselves as included in the range of ‘us’” (CIS, 192). The result is a compelling, yet underappreciated set of views about moral obligations, selfhood, and moral progress. It is also one that

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presents a challenge to one of the most widely embraced aspects of Kant’s legacy in moral philosophy: the morality-prudence distinction.

2. Against Categorical Imperatives For Kantians, moral considerations are said to apply unconditionally or inescapably. That is, one cannot simply absolve oneself of a moral obligation by changing what one feels or cares about. By contrast, prudential concerns—paradigmatically those which promote one’s rational self-interest—lack this sort of inescapability. They are merely “hypothetical imperatives” in the sense that they are not absolutely binding on all agents. There are at least two complaints that Rorty frequently raises about the morality-prudence distinction. The frst is that it presupposes an implausibly sharp division of the parts of the self, a division that runs afoul of Rorty’s anti-authoritarianism, as noted above. Moreover, Rorty proposes that the lack of consensus about what would constitute such a thing—even after thousands of years of philosophical speculation—suggests that it is not the sort of question to which we should expect a clear answer. The second reason is that a sharp distinction between morality and prudence is incompatible with a commitment to Darwinian naturalism. That one might determine some point in the course of human evolution when Homo sapiens stopped acting merely prudentially and began acting morally is, he thinks, highly implausible (PCP, 188). Rather than jettison entirely the Kantian morality-prudence distinction, Rorty reconfgures it on pragmatic grounds.3 In place of a sharp contrast between categorical and hypothetical obligations, Rorty regards the difference as a matter of degree of familiarity in the sense of doing what comes naturally (PSH, 78–79). On his view, prudential concerns are ones that we have as a matter of course. Feeding one’s children, tending to one’s parents, or helping a friend in need are, for so many of us, simply natural or pre-refective responses. They do not typically involve thoughts of “fulflling one’s obligation” (although they may in some cases). This is because these actions are directed toward those whose well-being is inextricably tethered to our own. Moral concerns, by contrast, arise when we are no longer able to navigate our inter-personal relationships in this habitual, matter-of-course way. They arise, for example, when we must decide whether to help those outside our immediate circle of concern, when it is unclear whether we are dealing with, in Rorty’s words, “people like us.” As he puts it, “Prudence”, “expediency” and “effciency” are all terms which describe… routine and uncontroversial adjustments to circumstance…. Morality and law, on the other hand, begin when controversy arises. We invent both when we can no longer just do what

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Paul Showler and Susan Dieleman comes naturally, when routine is no longer good enough, or when habit and custom no longer suffce. These will no longer suffce when the individual’s needs begin to clash with those of her family, or her family’s with those of the neighbors’, or when economic strain begins to split her community into warring classes, or when that community must come to terms with an alien community. (PSH, 73)

From this perspective, Kantian moral theory tends to neglect the fact that our “prudential” responses to others are often primary—not only when it comes to our moral development as individuals but insofar as they are more pervasive features of our ethical lives. Thus, Rorty commends the sort of position forwarded by Michael Walzer and Annette Baier, according to which we should invert the Kantian intuition that everyone begins with basic moral principles. Rather, generally speaking, “To behave morally is to do what comes naturally in your dealings with your parents and children or your fellow-clanmembers” (PCP, 45). Diffcult moral decisions—and hence the need for moral principles—come into the picture when there is a confict between the loyalties we feel to different groups, when we are pulled in different directions by our different allegiances and self-conceptions. Thus, in place of a rigid distinction between the demands of morality and those of prudence, Rorty offers a distinction of degree that ties together a number of key ethical ideas. The “prudence” end of the spectrum is characterized in thick ethical terms and involves motivations arising from one’s identifcation with certain social groups. The “morality” end of the spectrum is characterized in thinner terms and is rooted in our response to situations in which “doing what comes naturally” is no longer feasible—when our most central loyalties and commitments are stretched thin. Paradigmatically, for Rorty, these situations result from conficts between a person’s various moral self-conceptions or group identifcations. It is in these exceptional circumstances that we begin to think in terms of “obligations” or when we tend to reach for moral principles to guide our decision-making.

3. Against Moral Principles For many philosophers, a central goal of ethics is to formulate and defend general principles that can serve not only as a basis for ethical decisionmaking but to correct our intuitions and practices. On this view, moral principles are typically held to be universally applicable and to encapsulate agent-neutral reasons for action. That is, a moral principle should be one that any rational person could be brought to accept, no matter what they happen to believe or care about. To insist that moral philosophy ought to concern itself primarily with establishing moral principles

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suggests that there is good sense to be made of the contrast between principled and “nonprincipled” ways of thinking about ethics. Such a contrast might be drawn, for example, in terms of a distinction between reason and emotion, between impartiality and partiality, or between a view that prioritizes one’s obligations toward humanity or some other very large group over one’s more local attachments. Rorty’s move from authoritarianism to a Darwinian naturalism undercuts the central role afforded to moral principles and the tacit contrastive force that principle-centered moral philosophy tends to invoke. Indeed, as early as PMN, Rorty sought to diminish our expectations about the utility of moral principles (PMN, 190–191). Against this line of thought, he maintains that moral principles are no more than summaries of our moral intuitions, serving as succinct reminders for the accepted values already embedded in our practices and institutions (PSH, xxix; PCP, 186–187; Rorty 2006, 376). On this view, the moral philosopher who endeavors to establish moral principles is not discovering timeless truths but, rather, much like Thomas Kuhn’s practitioner of normal science, is engaged in a kind of mopping up project—providing useful generalizations of the culturally agreed-upon moral intuitions that have been forged by the contingent forces of history. “Principles” Rorty explains, “are handy for summing up a range of moral reactions, but they do not have the independent force that can correct such reactions” (PCP, 186–187). Consequently, moral principles—though valuable for their expediency—are not subject to the sort of universal validity that many philosophers have claimed for them. On Rorty’s view, agreement on a moral principle’s validity is predicated on the shared background beliefs and desires of those who promote it. While this might seem to suggest that Rorty is committed to an objectionable form of relativism, he rejected the label on the grounds that nobody actually seems to be committed to such a position—at least in practice. As he quipped, “Except for the occasional cooperative freshman, one cannot fnd anybody who says that two incompatible opinions on an important topic are equally good” (CP, 166). In fact, as already noted, the charge of relativism simply invokes the contrastive force Rorty seeks to identify and defate with his redescriptive strategy; it only sticks if the person leveling the charge believes there exists something like universally valid moral principles to which it can be opposed. However, while it is true that Rorty downplays the signifcance of moral principles, he stops short of denying altogether their utility. He acknowledges their usefulness in situations in which we are not dealing with those with whom we immediately identify, when our loyalties confict, or when we need help articulating our cultural self-image. Moreover, his attempt to envision “ethics without principles” often emerges in the context of his attemc, and imagination, as morally salient capacities that

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ought to replace a faculty of human Reason as the focus of our philosophical attention (PSH). To overlook these important qualifcations would mean failing to appreciate that Rorty himself embraces several general moral principles. As Jerome Schneewind has observed, Rorty is committed to the Rawlsian difference and equality principles (Schneewind 2010, 485). Moreover, Rorty occasionally refers to himself as a utilitarian (an ethical stance that advocates for moral principles, if any does). In “Pragmatism as Romantic Polytheism,” for example, Rorty advocates for “romantic utilitarianism” (PCP, 31). In “Grandeur, Profundity, and Finitude,” he writes, “The main reason for philosophy’s marginalization…[is] the fact that nowadays we are all commonsensically materialist and utilitarian” (PCP, 87). One might also argue that the defnition of liberalism that he adopts from Judith Shklar—that a liberal is someone who thinks that cruelty is the worst thing we do—entails something like a general moral principle. Yet on his view, these moral principles represent ‘mere’ summaries of practices and intuitions that have been arrived at as the result of time and chance, and his commitment to them is ‘merely’ contingent. This contingency demonstrates how the very notion of a “moral principle” is stretched thin within the ethical vision he propounds.

4. Against Philosophical Expertise Given these commitments, it should be no surprise that Rorty is deeply suspicious of the idea that philosophers can claim a privileged perspective or expertise concerning diffcult moral decision-making. The target of Rorty’s suspicion is well expressed in a 1974 New York Times article by the Australian philosopher Peter Singer, which, upon reading, Rorty admits to having “squirmed in embarrassment” (PCP, 185). In that piece, Singer claims for moral philosophers the role of cultural arbiters, whose “soundly based” theories can correct widespread ethical intuitions. The basis for such expertise is, he contends, the philosopher’s ability to analyze ethical concepts and to carefully scrutinize the logic of moral arguments. Singer’s position assumes, of course, that one can draw not only a sharp distinction between philosophical and non-philosophical methods and forms of knowledge but also that there exists a relatively uncontroversial means of separating moral from nonmoral issues. Rorty is skeptical both of the idea that philosophers could plausibly claim expertise about moral concepts (unlike technical concepts like “positron,” whose correct usage requires some level of expertise, one can employ terms like “good” or “responsibility” without specialized knowledge), as well as the idea there is something called “the logic of moral arguments” that is endemic to philosophy but not, say, jurisprudence or anthropology (PCP, 185–186). Rorty’s claim, of course, is not

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that philosophers have nothing of interest to say about ethics; rather, his point is that there is little reason to think that the study of philosophy will prepare one to make better ethical decisions than, say, the study of poetry, law, sociology, or history (Rorty 2006, 378). In fact, in his address to the annual meeting of the Society for Business Ethics, Rorty summarizes his view about the relevance of philosophy to applied ethics as follows: “[P]hilosophy is as relevant as lots of other academic disciplines to applied ethics, and perhaps a little more than most, but not much more” (Rorty 2006, 378). When it comes to the relevance of metaethics to moral decision-making, Rorty is even less sanguine, suggesting that the feld is no more relevant than is astrophysics or neurophysiology (Rorty 2006, 373). However, like so many of his other critical views, Rorty’s doubts about the relevance of moral theory to broader cultural concerns also require qualifcation. Despite his skepticism about the prospects of moral philosophy as having a privileged role within culture and that a “soundly based moral theory” might be able to correct our moral intuitions, he repeatedly voiced admiration for the work of numerous moral philosophers, including Annette Baier, Cora Diamond, Phillipa Foot, Sabina Lovibond, Jerome Schneewind, Alasdair MacIntyre, Bernard Williams, and Iris Murdoch, among others. Often, this praise was accompanied by endorsements about the direction in which moral philosophy might develop—especially the suggestion that it pay close attention to other disciplines such as literature, ethnography, and history. In his essay “Dewey vs. Kant,” Rorty offers a prediction about what moral philosophy might look like given the kind of “psychologized” version of the morality-prudence distinction discussed earlier (PCP, 192–193). This prediction depends on an analogy with the philosophy of science. Post-positivistic philosophers and historians of science (e.g., Thomas Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend, and Ian Hacking) have encouraged us to think of the distinction between science and nonscience in sociological rather than in metaphysical or epistemological terms. In doing so, Rorty claims, they have undermined the idea that there is some general feld called “the philosophy of science” while leaving open the idea that there may be valuable local questions about, say, the philosophy of biology or the philosophy of quantum mechanics. So too, he thinks, that a reconstructed version of the morality-prudence distinction might lead to a displacement of philosophical interest away from “moral philosophy” to more narrowly circumscribed felds as “the philosophy of American constitutional law,” “the philosophy of diminished responsibility,” or “the philosophy of sexual relationships” (PCP, 193). Philosophy in general, and moral philosophy in particular, would be stretched thin, deprived of their contrastive force, and used in service of what Rorty comes to call “cultural politics”—a set of practices that prioritizes the pursuit of freedom and fourishing over philosophical purity.

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Overview of Chapters Rorty’s willingness to engage with such a wide variety of terms and notions integral to traditional ethical thought is suggestive of the complexity and fecundity of his ethical vision. Elaborating on its shape and signifcance is a task that the chapters in this volume, most of which were originally presented as part of the 2019 meeting of the Richard Rorty Society, set out to accomplish. They consider the challenges of living out his vision as individuals and as members of local and global communities (Section I), draw out both the negative and positive elements of his ethical vision (Section II), explore how it relates to other areas of ethical inquiry (Section III), and carefully excavate his work to offer re/interpretations that promise additional resources for developing a Rortyan ethics (Section IV). The chapters that comprise Section I: “Creating Moral Communities and Creating Selves” consider the potential advantages, as well as the challenges, involved in bringing a Rortyan approach to morality to life as a member of local and global communities. The volume opens with Kian Tajbakhsh’s chapter, “Reading Rorty in Tehran, or What Happened When I Road-Tested Rorty’s Philosophy of Life Inside an Iranian Prison.” In this piece, Tajbakhsh refects on how Rorty’s ideas have both helped and hindered his self-understanding. Though they infuenced his decision to become involved with politics in Iran, and the work that he did there with the Open Society Foundation (21), they also ultimately failed Tajbakhsh when he was imprisoned in that country for promoting human rights. For example, Rorty’s “insouciant ironism” can too easily be adopted without a “deeply held concern for alleviating the suffering of others” (23), his recommendation that we shrug off “the tension between the awareness of our contingency and the inevitability of adopting a fnal vocabulary” (23) seems glib, and he too easily sets aside the role of meaningfulness and commitment in a person’s life and actions (24). Despite these reservations, Tajbakhsh still sees Rorty as a valuable interlocutor and sees the conundrums motivated by his views as productive. The apparent tension found in Rorty’s work between the demands of selfhood and those of community is taken up by Daniel I. Harris in the second chapter, “Self-Creation and Community: Nietzsche, Foucault, Rorty.” Harris explores this issue by contrasting Foucault’s and Rorty’s interpretations of Nietzsche, the difference between which comes down to “the extent to which a person must see herself as embedded in some community if she is to authentically engage in processes of self-creation” (29). Both interpretations, he claims, fall victim to “a false dilemma between “total transcendence of community and total immanence” (40), whereas Nietzsche fnds a middle ground between Foucault and Rorty, a middle ground that neither eschews nor gives everything over to the community.

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Whereas the frst two chapters of Section I explore the tension between the self and the community, the following two chapters explore the tension between the commitments we have to smaller and larger communities. John Giordano’s chapter, “Richard Rorty, Ethnocentrism, and Moral Community: A Westerner’s Response to FGM,” explores the challenges present in negotiating our “thicker” relationships with those who share most of our beliefs and our “thinner” relationships with those who do not. Refecting on trips taken with students to Mali and Kenya, Giordano asks whether it’s possible and what it means, from a Western, liberal perspective, to expand one’s moral community. A more optimistic reading of the possibility of thinking and working through global relationships is presented by Clarence Mark Phillips in the fnal chapter of this section, “Rorty’s Hope of Achieving a Global Civilization.” Phillips argues that we should read Rorty as “advocating for ‘America’ as a synonym for democracy generally” (65), as something that is a common project constantly in progress. Doing so requires reimagining America “as a human ideal, not as a landmass, as an ideal of global democratic unity, and not as a separately gated community” (62), a particularly urgent move in the context of climate change. That we might be able to reimagine America in this way builds upon something Darwin revealed and Rorty understood, that all human beings are ultimately connected and that “the only people ever referred to as ‘them’ are those with whom one disagrees about one thing or another, about things whose importance pale in comparison to those which unite us” (60). Section II: “Imagination, Care, and Virtue” includes chapters that work through and develop interpretations and applications of Rorty’s positive account of morality. Santiago Rey, in “Imagination as a Social Virtue,” reconstructs the concept of imagination as it is found in Rorty’s writings. He shows that, even though much of Rorty’s earlier work was seemingly enthralled by the novelties that could emerge from the efforts of “great heroes of imagination” (75), he comes in his later work to see imagination as just one part of a much larger and more involved process. Imaginative creations constitute “only the frst step of a long and arduous process that requires equal amounts of inspiration and perspiration, of adaptability and hard work” (76). This processual account of imagination is most clearly developed in Rorty’s essay “Feminism and Pragmatism,” Rey contends, wherein Rorty moves from an elitist to a democratic understanding of imagination, one that “depends not on the inherent beauty of its form but on the ability of a community to adopt and integrate novelty into their lives, something that requires effort, time, and good luck” (78). In “Can Trees Care? The Overstory and Rorty’s Ideal of Inspirational Literature,” Ben Roth also investigates the role of imagination in expanding our moral community; after all, he contends, for Rorty, “[s]tory, much

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more than argument, engages and expands the imagination” (86). Roth takes Richard Powers’s The Overstory to be an example of a novel that “inspire[s] hope in the way Rorty thinks great literature can and should” (82). In this, it differs from so many novels of the latter half of the twentieth century, which have forsaken hope for “self-mockery or self-disgust” (Rorty in Roth, 82). The takeaway from Powers’s novel, Roth contends, isn’t that it “help[s] us to imagine trees as fellow sufferers, but rather helps us see other human beings as our fellows in their ability to care in a way that surpasses plants” (88). This general claim about human nature—that what we have in common is the ability to care—might grate against Rorty’s view that “humanity as such” is too broad and general a category to be of much ethical use, but Roth contends that a Heideggerian understanding of care can help “to unify the split roles of public liberalism and private irony” (90). In his chapter, “Richard Rorty on the ‘Too Sane,’” David E. McClean recommends making what he calls a “sagacious turn” (101). In a Rortyan spirit, and following the advice of Rorty as a sage, McClean understands sagacity as the sort of thing one practices rather than the sort of thing “about which one can cobble together a philosophical theory” (102). It “seeks to create comity, fraternity, empathy, and solidarity” (102) rather than divide people up according to the theoretical and ideological positions they inhabit. Greater sagacity, he contends, can serve as a bulwark against being “too sane” to understand that the world may “swerve” and can help us deal with the swerves when they happen. As he puts it, “Keeping the conversation going requires that we stretch ourselves by means of the cultivation and employment of social imagination and the virtue of magnanimity to see the good in the other’s lifeworld, sentiments, political commitments, metaphysics, or religious convictions” (99). Finally, Stéphane Madelrieux, in “Scientifc Method and Moral Virtues,” forwards the suggestion that we think of the pragmatists’ “experimentalist attitude” as a set of moral virtues. He contends that, for Dewey, attitude, as “a complex system of intellectual dispositions” (111) is distinct from, and takes primacy over, method. Read this way, differences between Dewey and Rorty on method turn out to be merely apparent, and we can read Rorty as offering a continuation of the classical pragmatists’ efforts to motivate an ascent “from doctrine to method and from method to attitude” (114). Madelrieux understands this as a specifcally ethical ascent because the dispositions that comprise the “experimentalist attitude” are moral dispositions; as Rorty puts it, “[T]he rest of culture should exemplify the moral virtues characteristic of the empirical scientist—openness, fexibility, an experimental attitude toward everything” (Rorty in Madelrieux, 115). The chapters that comprise Section III: “Engagements with Moral Philosophy,” consider linkages between Rorty’s work and other areas of

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contemporary philosophical inquiry. Paul Showler, in “Talking with the Better-Looking Animals: Richard Rorty on Moral Status,” reconstructs a Rortyan account of moral status. On Rorty’s view, Showler contends, moral status is a matter of degree, granted on the basis of “the possibility for imagined conversation” (130). Some of these imagined possibilities will be dim or thin, giving rise to weaker moral obligations, whereas others will be more determinate or thick, giving rise to stronger moral obligations. This account of moral status, according to which “we understand attributions of moral status as expressions of our imaginative or sentimental capacities” (132) is expressivist in the sense that it attempts to show “how it functions to express the attitudes and imaginative capacities of moral agents” (131). It thereby rejects the common realist view that granting moral status is a task that involves recognizing and accurately describing attitude-independent facts about entities. In “Rortyan Ethics: Zim Zuming to Maturity,” Richard Gilmore uses Simone de Beauvoir’s ethics of ambiguity to help make sense of Rorty’s moral call to “make space for the voice of the other in order that the suffering of the other can be heard, responded to, and ameliorated” (138). According to Gilmore, Rorty’s professed aim for philosophy—to keep the conversation going—is the core of his ethics. It relates to Beauvoir’s notion of “allowing disclosure” and Harold Bloom’s use of the idea of the “zim zum” (143). Both refer to the contraction of the self as a precondition for the act of self-creation and, thus, self-transcendence. In the kind of utopian liberal society Rorty envisioned, Gilmore contends, “A reasonable pluralism of projects interfering with one another will call for a continual zim zuming and a continual, ongoing conversation” (144). In his chapter, “When Is Desire Dangerous? The Conversation Leading from Nietzsche’s ‘Delicate Boundary’ to Rorty’s ‘Poeticized Culture,’” James Hersh suggests that Rorty’s work usefully connects the insights of two thinkers: Nietzsche’s warning about how easily we can transgress the “delicate boundary” between desire and cruelty and Judith Shklar’s claim that cruelty “ought to be made the primary focus of our current political liberalism” (154). While Nietzsche failed to see the political implications of dangerous desire, and Shklar failed to recognize the way that desire can be cruel, Rorty’s account of “poeticized culture” offers a way of avoiding both shortcomings. This is because, as Rorty’s use of the example of Lolita shows, his concepts of contingency, irony, and solidarity “cohere in a way that dramatically advances the conversation on dangerous desire and its threat to liberal democracy” (156). The fnal section, Section IV: “Re/Interpretations of Rorty,” includes chapters that offer re/interpretations of key features of Rorty’s work that bear on his ethical vision. In her chapter, “Speaking for Oneself: Stolen Vocabularies and Imposed Vocabularies,” Susan Dieleman reinterprets the connections between CIS and “Feminism and Pragmatism,” a pair of readings many commentators have thought signals a shift in Rorty’s

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position from the view that social change emerges only from the efforts of strong poets to the view that political actors can also effect social change. She contends that these works actually focus on two different phenomena. In CIS, Rorty is interested in the fairly narrow phenomenon of when a person’s fnal vocabulary is stolen from them, as Winston’s is by O’Brien in 1984, whereas in “Feminism and Pragmatism,” he is interested in the broader phenomenon of when a person’s vocabulary is imposed on them, as in the case of women living under an androcentric fnal vocabulary. In reinterpreting this pair of readings, Dieleman’s chapter offers a more nuanced account of Rorty’s understanding of pain and humiliation, and the ways we can cause and/or be complicit in it. Bryan Vescio also considers the Rortyan conception of the self as a “centerless web of beliefs and desires” (185) in his essay, “Pragmatism and the Tragic Sense of Death.” Vescio argues, against Rorty’s own failure to acknowledge death as tragic: “To consider death tragic is not to renounce pragmatism’s acceptance of contingency and change but to embrace it” (183), understanding that death marks an end to growth, which is what motivates the activities of the ironist and the strong poet. What is tragic about death is “the hard-earned web of idiosyncratic associations that comprises our unique ways of seeing, feeling, and thinking about the world and the prospect of that web’s continued growth” (186). Vescio contends that this illuminates an important, if often criticized, dimension of Rortyan pragmatism—namely, the “value of the private self” (188). As with the preceding chapters in this section, Federico Penelas, in “The Importance of Words: Ironism, Liberalism, and the Private/ Public Distinction,” revisits Rorty’s conceptions of the self and of the public-private distinction. Noting that Rorty employs the term “fnal vocabulary” rather than “set of basic beliefs” (194), Penelas rejects an epistemological interpretation of ironism. Better, he contends, to think of irony as “the result of a break in the importance given to the fnal vocabulary we acquired” (195). The ironist’s desire to redescribe herself is, for Rorty, “the passion to be controlled in favor of liberalism” (199). There remains, however, a public form of redescription as well—liberal redescription—which refers to attempts to “modify the extent of application for the term ‘cruelty’” (201). Even though liberal redescription has the potential to cause humiliation, the liberal faces the diffcult task of balancing two potential cruelties: “the one fought by the liberal redescription and the one produced by such redescription” (202). In the fnal chapter of the volume, “The Ironic and Liberal Defcit in Rorty’s Irony,” Rebeca Pérez León provides a different reading than Penelas of Rorty’s concepts of liberalism and irony. She contends, “Rorty made an ironic and liberal mistake in suggesting that irony should be made universal, even if it is understood as political irony only” (207). This is because irony-as-civic-virtue (as opposed to

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irony-as-existential-anguish) is, borrowing a term from Rawls, a “comprehensive morality” (210). And though irony on its own is compatible with liberal democracy, its universalization is not. Moreover, Pérez León argues, Rorty’s attempt to universalize irony is symptomatic of a relapse into metaphysics, which he was “readily able to diagnose” in the work of philosophers such as Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger (214). Thus, irony should remain an “inherently private matter,” as Rorty’s “best democratic self” understood (218).

Notes 1 In addition to illustrating Rorty’s use of redescription, this example also refects his ability to inhabit both sides of a philosophical dispute, to see the philosophical landscape from his interlocutor’s perspective, thereby eliciting their central motivations and concerns. This feature of Rorty’s thought is illustrative of its deep ethical dimension, which, as Christopher Voparil has argued, is discernable from some of Rorty’s earliest publications dating to the 1960s (Voparil 2014). 2 The essay “Philosophy as a Transitional Genre” is published in Rorty’s 2007 collection of essays, PCP. However, the frst sections of the essay, from which this passage is taken, are excerpted from that version. Anti-authoritarianism is the topic of Rorty’s (1999) essay “Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism,” as well as a 2021 collection of his essays by the same name. 3 James Tartaglia has argued there is a Kantian strain in Rorty’s thought (Tartaglia 2016). Indeed, for the bulk of his career, Rorty defended Wilfrid Sellars’s account of obligations as “we-intentions”—Sellars, after all, was more open about his Kantianism than was Rorty.

Works By Rorty PMN. 1979. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton: Princeton University Press. CP. 1982. Consequences of Pragmatism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. CIS. 1989. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. New York: Cambridge University Press. ORT. 1991. Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers, Volume 1. New York: Cambridge University Press. EHO. 1991. Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers, Volume 2. New York: Cambridge University Press. TP. 1998. Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, Volume 3. New York: Cambridge University Press. PSH. 2000. Philosophy and Social Hope. New York: Penguin Books. PCP. 2007. Philosophy as Cultural Politics: Philosophical Papers, Volume 4. New York: Cambridge University Press. Rorty, Richard. 1999. “Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism.” Revue Internationale de Philosophie 53 (207): 7–20. ———. 2006. “Is Philosophy Relevant to Applied Ethics?” Business Ethics Quarterly 16 (3): 369–380.

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———. 2010. “Philosophy as a Transitional Genre.” In The Rorty Reader, edited by Christopher J. Voparil and Richard J. Bernstein. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell.

Other Works Bernstein, Richard J. 2008. “Richard Rorty’s Deep Humanism.” New Literary History 39 (1): 13–27. Schneewind, J. B. 2010. “Rorty on Utopia and Moral Philosophy.” In The Philosophy of Richard Rorty, edited by Randall E. Auxier and Lewis Edwin Hahn, 479–505. Chicago: Open Court. Tartaglia, James. 2016. “Rorty’s Ambivalent Relationship with Kant.” Contemporary Pragmatism 13 (3): 298–318. Voparil, Christopher. 2014.“Taking Other Human Beings Seriously: Rorty’s Ethics of Choice and Responsibility.” Contemporary Pragmatism 11 (1): 83–102.

Part I

Creating Moral Communities and Creating Selves

1

Reading Rorty in Tehran, or What Happened When I Road-Tested Rorty’s Philosophy of Life Inside an Iranian Prison Kian Tajbakhsh

I am not a philosopher by training, but Richard Rorty changed my life.1 It began when his ideas bolstered my decision to return to Iran and then again when my interpretation of those ideas got me arrested in Iran—and imprisoned under threat of execution for treason. In 2009, I was accused of promoting Western liberal democracy and human rights and thereby endangering the national security of the Islamic Republic. At the time, I was the representative of George Soros’s Open Society Foundation in Iran. Of course, I was guilty as charged—the charges aligned precisely with Soros’s audacious, romantic project of promoting open societies and personal liberty around the world. I had left academia and joined Open Society in part because of the conceptual path Rorty’s ideas had cleared for me. Let me try to explain how all this came about. Consider it a story with three acts.

Act One I frst encountered Rorty’s ideas in the late 1990s when I was a junior faculty member at the New School for Social Research. I had been trained as a political scientist and urbanist, and I was working on a book about the promise of the modern city and the defciencies of the then-fashionable Marxist approaches to modern urban life. The fnal chapter was proving diffcult to write because I couldn’t see how to weave together some of the ideas that I was advancing—including deconstruction, Habermas’s critical theory, feminism, and liberal democracy—as superior to Marxist approaches. Over coffee one day, a colleague listened attentively to my description of my block, then said, “I’ve got just the man for you. You had better have a look at Rorty.” I had not read anything by Rorty at that point, but I knew him as a left-leaning American philosopher with a soft spot for traditional labor DOI: 10.4324/9781003208150-3

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class politics. My frst encounter with Rorty’s ideas involved some controversy. Because the incident I wish to recount has, as far as I am aware, not been fully covered in the published reports, it is worth recalling, if only for having it enter into the historical record. I had frst heard Rorty when he spoke at my alma mater Columbia University in October 1996 at an event billed as “The Fight for America’s Future: A Teach-In with the Labor Movement.” The event featured quite a lineup of academic and intellectual luminaries, including Cornel West, Betty Friedan, Todd Gitlin, Orlando Patterson, and Katha Pollitt, as well as John J. Sweeney, the new president of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations. The event created, unexpectedly, something of a stir. I was one of over 1,700 people crammed into the grand Low Rotunda; outside in the cold, an overfowing crowd listened on loudspeakers while Socialist Workers Party activists were trying to sell their newspaper. The event was widely covered; Malcolm Gladwell summarized the event in The New Yorker as a “Labor Love In.” The most memorable part of the evening for me was when Rorty threw the proverbial cat among the pigeons. I distinctly recall being riveted as Rorty sounded the most strikingly politically incorrect note of the evening. (It turns out I like political incorrectness.) He excoriated the members of the American New Left, many of whom were now safely ensconced in academic centers such as Columbia, for having damaged the cause of social justice by undermining the democratic promise of the United States. He criticized them for supposedly unpatriotic acts such as writing America with a “K” and for spitting on returning Vietnam vets—and ultimately for abandoning class politics for the fashionable cultural politics of academia, which for him was no more than a chimera. (Unfortunately, as a graduate student in the late 1980s, I had been seduced by the false promise of “radical philosophy”—so fashionable at that time—and so was sympathetic to the charge of its fatuousness.) First, the hall went silent. Then the hisses and boos rose in volume. Looking down from the rafters, I heard someone (I think it was Gitlin) shout out, “But we stopped the war!” Rorty had frst aired these ideas a few years earlier in a New York Times editorial titled “The Unpatriotic Academy.” A year after the Columbia event, they would form the substance of Achieving Our Country, a book wherein he reminded his contemporaries, “Outside the academy, Americans still want to feel patriotic. They still want to feel part of a nation which can take control of its destiny and make itself a better place” (AOC, 99). All the points in this polemic would return with great signifcance for me as my own struggle with national belonging and identity unfolded over the following decade. But for now, prompted by my colleague, it was time to plunge into Rorty’s wider body of work as a way to make sense of my own evolving ideas about political theory and philosophy. Soon, I was engrossed in his writings, and a new world opened to me; it was as if I had turned the kaleidoscope of ideas and suddenly a coherent pattern emerged into view.

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Rorty’s ideas became an important element in the evolution of my selfunderstanding and political orientation in three main ways. First, they showed me a philosophically compelling way to be a liberal. I accepted Rorty’s cheerful ironism and secularism as the best private vocabulary. It ft with my cosmopolitan upbringing as a native-born Iranian raised in Europe and the United States. Rorty also showed me a respectable way to be an American, and then by extension an Iranian, having pride in “our country.” Those two words in the title of his book on American culture were at frst shocking to my ingrained cosmopolitanism but soon became appealing. Finally, his ideas showed me a respectable way to be an internationalist—an American liberal internationalist no less. His heartfelt advocacy of the moral duty of “us” Westerners to support the expansion of democratic freedoms in foreign countries (as opposed to sending them jet bombers and predatory Wall Street practices) was just the encouragement I needed (Rorty 1999). Having completed the book, I decided to leave academia and return to the country of my birth to pursue just that agenda. Within months I had accepted an offer to work for the Open Society Foundation in Iran. To the job, I brought Rorty’s innovative approach to the public-private split, his striking re-description of the conundrums of morality in his essay “Justice as a Larger Loyalty,” his view of ideologies as competing vocabularies and descriptions, and the irrelevance of much academic theoretical debate to the cause of democratic politics and justice. I threw myself into the task of supporting the growth of a liberal democratic civil society in Iran and throughout the Middle East. I fnally met Rorty in 2004 and told him how important his work was to me when he traveled to Iran and boldly presented his argument about the “priority of democracy over philosophy” to an audience of eager students and middle-class professionals. At a dinner held in Tehran for him and his wife, I was fortunate to be able to chat with him. Rorty said something that has infuenced me ever since—namely, that social scientists should model themselves more on journalists than scientists in a laboratory. His presence in Iran was an act of solidarity with those fghting for pluralist and liberal ideals under diffcult circumstances. Yet the space for reform in Iran was closing rapidly. My colleague at the small nongovernmental organization we both worked in, who organized the event, Ramin Jahanbegloo, would be arrested in 2007 for promoting liberalism and secularism and bringing Western thinkers such as Rorty to Iran.

Act Two: The Crisis The crisis came with my own arrest a few months later. Sitting in a solitary cell in Evin Prison, I sought desperately for a way—emotionally, intellectually—to make sense of my predicament. Among the tools I found were the Psalms and the works of Reinhold Niebuhr, who became

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a foil for Rorty. By comparing their ideas, I began to glimpse answers to questions I desperately needed answered; together these answers became the new music that led me, Orpheus-like, out of hell. Foremost in my mind as I sat in my prison cell was the bewildering anachronism of a theocracy in the modern world. The world’s only offcial theocratic state might execute me; I had to take this theocracy seriously, as I had thus far failed to do so. The alternative was to treat my jailers as aliens and barbarians—but to do so would be the way of madness. If these men were incomprehensible, then everything I had assumed to be worthwhile and true would prove to have been illusory. Rorty was little help here. His starting point was how best to envision a future in a society that had already “shoved aside” religious traditions and in which Enlightenment principles had already become a force. But Niebuhr could help me. Because he interpreted the present against the backdrop of 2,500 years of Judeo-Christian history, he could do justice to what he saw as the “moral ambiguities of government”—ambiguities that were facing the religious reformers in Iran. This passage from The Nature and Destiny of Man seemed particularly pertinent to me: According to [one passage in the Old Testament], government is an ordinance of God and its authority refects the Divine Majesty. According to another [passage] the “rulers” and “judges” of the nations are…subject to divine judgment and wrath because they oppress the poor and defy the divine majesty.2 (Niebuhr 1996, 2:269) Replace God with the people, and this was the political struggle that the reformists and I were caught up in. Just as pressing as the need to take the theocracy seriously was a stark existential question I confronted for the frst time in my life. It was my cellmate, Mustafa, a leader of the Islamic Reformist movement, who posed the question to me: “Kian,” he said, “you have to fgure out who you are.” He explained that knowing who I was meant knowing what I was willing to give up. Here, the cheerful, easy ironism Rorty advocated failed me. The “proof” of the inadequacy of such an insouciant ironism, which was personal and painful, included the actions of a person, let’s call him X, who in many ways personifed the worse version of a Nietzschean ironist. He had long told friends and family of the pointlessness of adopting any fnal commitment in life because of the impossibility of assuming metaphysical certainties; accordingly, he advocated a life built on “brief habits” liberated from any authority the past might hold over your present. In such a way, X argued, one could say of any transformation “thus I willed it” without “pain or paradox.” He vehemently denied the qualitative distinction between human beings and animals—so much the better to excuse our animal instincts. He downplayed faith as fantasy and

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neuroses. I could go on. In any event, X was reluctant to disrupt some personal plans and left our family when we most needed support. X did not balance his Nietzschean ironism, as Rorty did, with deeply held concern for alleviating the suffering of others. Still, this experience of what ironism could look like in practice stained my view of the possibilities of such a cosmopolitan ironism. I had once been enthralled by Rorty’s endorsement of the ironist’s private search for self-enlargement: “[T]he life of unending curiosity, the life that seeks to extend its own bounds rather than to fnd its center” (EHO, 154). I now realized what was missing was an answer to Mustafa’s question: what are you committed to? What forms your center? I began to see what was missing from my centerless life that had led me to suffer. As the Psalmist said, I am poured out like water, and all my bones are disjointed. My heart is like wax; it melts away within me. My strength is dried up like a potsherd. Only later outside prison, after I pursued a footnote in Niebuhr referencing Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Anxiety, did I fnd an alternative framework questioning Rorty’s paradigm of ironism, which Rorty confdently affrmed was precisely “the ‘aesthetic’ life” that Kierkegaard criticized. But I could no longer believe such aestheticism to be compatible with living a human life of the highest order; later, I came to agree with critics such as Jonathan Lear in fnding aestheticism to be a tactic for escaping commitment. I was missing what even Rorty recognized as the “seriousness” of a fnal vocabulary (CIS, 112) built on commitment and, yes, risk, including the risk of failure—of obvious relevance to someone sitting in a dungeon. (By fnal vocabulary, I mean the ultimate concerns that defne who you are and whose loss would lead to the loss of your world—and if a “new Isaac”—i.e., object of commitment—cannot be found, insanity.) Rorty’s reasoning seemed to undermine the possibility of the risk of commitment by viewing fnal vocabularies instrumentally—that is, as a means toward the end of “increasing our power” to get what we want (CIS, 115). By means of Hubert Dreyfus’s and Charles Taylor’s notion of the unrationalizable background, which they gleaned from Heidegger’s Vorhabe and MerleauPonty’s concept of context, I became familiar with the idea that we are always already partly constituted by the affrmation of that to which we are called from within the culture into which we are born. This resonated with me, and indeed Rorty recognizes the tension between the awareness of our contingency and the inevitability of adopting a fnal vocabulary. Yet he recommends we shrug the tension off. But I don’t think it is possible to shrug it off. Or at least, if we could, the resulting combination of private autonomy and public solidarity would be a less powerful poem than

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one  that tarried with the tension. Putting his cards on the table, Rorty wrote of Kierkegaard’s three existence spheres: “C’est magnifque, mais ce n’est pas la guerre.” (“It’s magnifcent, but it’s not war”; PCP, 169). But for me, not only are they magnifcent, but they also describe precisely the terrain where the greatest battles of life are waged. It seemed to me that there was an ambiguity in Rorty’s understanding of commitment that he left unresolved; this worry remains even if we follow Bernstein in distinguishing theoretical from practical commitment. On the one hand, Rorty endorsed the idea that “what makes us moral beings is that, for each of us, there are some acts we believe we ought to die [for] rather than commit” (AOC, 33). He illustrated the force of this idea in one of his most powerful passages wherein he recalls what was really at stake in O’Brien’s torture of Winston Smith at the end of Orwell’s 1984. Rorty related his critique of nihilism to metaphysics rather than what concerned me, meaningfulness. Yet at the same time, one consequence of his critique of nihilism, I felt, was to undermine the signifcance of a fundamental commitment. For instance Rorty counsels us to be “dubious about total dedication and passionate commitment” and recommends that we educate the citizenry in the civic virtue of having as few compelling interests, beliefs, and desires as possible, to get them to be as fexible and wishy-washy as possible, and to value democratic consensus more than they value almost anything else. (Rorty 1998) Thus he defended a minimalist liberalism. I also believe in the priority of democratic consensus and the intention of thwarting fanatical coercion in favor of persuasion. But this solution too hastily and easily shrugs off the tension between individual and community. My experiences in prison reinforced my sense that the contradictions and tensions between the two are enduring and that this understanding must also be incorporated in the heart of the story of liberal ironism, in a way that goes beyond a calculation of utility. Rorty’s easy endorsement of aestheticism seems to me also to be related to his foreshortened account of the domain of the private. From Kierkegaard’s model of the three existence spheres and from Dreyfus’s lucid exposition, I learned that the private sphere has two dimensions: frst, the aesthetic sphere, characterized by “lower immediacy,” close to instinctive naturalness, but second, a sphere of particularity above the universal ethical or social sphere, which offers a “higher” immediacy. Here you “give up what you want to do for what you are called to do,” creating permanent tension with our social roles. Contrary to the claim that this higher immediacy depends on having fnally arrived at metaphysical truth, it in fact involves the “risk of faith” because, as

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Tillich  noted, understanding faith as an ultimate concern was not the opposite of doubt but the embracing of it. Rorty’s rejection of religious awe and receptivity also unnecessarily forecloses another dimension linking the private and the public: the place of alterity and receptivity in his conception of what counts as “human” and meaning. As I read him, Rorty wants to avoid any suggestion of alterity because he interprets this as emanating from something “nonhuman.” But alterity is necessary to make sense of his avowed ideal of empathy, or in his words, “the imaginative ability to see strange people as fellow sufferers” and to see strangers’ pain and suffering as ours (CIS, xvi). So I cannot see why the sense of alterity that Levinas argues is part and parcel of selfhood needs to be interpreted as “nonhuman.” (As I see it, Rorty invokes anything that departs from biologistic basis of life as nonhuman, which of course makes logical sense since he defnes the human fundamentally in biologistic terms.) Rorty’s emphasis on invention and self-making seems to ignore the place of receptivity in human life, a receptivity to the otherness of the world we inhabit and borne, I think, of the awareness of our so-called thrownness.3 Rorty dismisses the desire many humans seem to have “to be overwhelmed by something” as merely the “sublimated form of the urge to share in the power of anything strong enough to overwhelm you” (EHO, 30). Yet at other times, he seems to concede that his preferred form of self-discovery and self-transformation is more like “suddenly falling in love” or “being bowled over by irrational forces” (PSH). I believe the emphasis on self-making (as opposed to self-discovery) comes perilously close to representing a will to power born of the anxiety arising from the absence of control when he identifes with “people who are unable to stand the thought that they are not their own creations” (CIS, 109). To want to shrug off our embodied existence begins to sound to me like the defant individual Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky identifed as stricken with the “Despair of Willing to Be Oneself,” what Dreyfus vividly described as the hopeless attempt “to get back behind our own thrownness.” As Niebuhr observed, “Man is an ironic creature because he forgets that he is not simply a creator but also a creature” and so subject to forces of nature and time beyond his control (Niebuhr 2008, 156). There was a further problem now looming over me in the Iranian prison: what to do with the “truth” or consensus (such as it was) of the society that had imprisoned me. I was still committed to Rorty’s ideals of liberal solidarity and internationalism and content to embrace the ethnocentrism of Western human rights norms as my truth. But because the project of the Islamic Republic was to sacralize the political and the social, I no longer felt confdent in Rorty’s qualifed communitarian option; so juxtaposing one ethnocentric form of life to another—in this case, Western liberal democracy to political Islamism—was beginning to look like a dead end.

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The lesson I took away from the problems of sacralizing politics in Iran was that the problem was not solely about imposing religious beliefs in the public realm but about absolutizing any principle of social cohesion. I felt I needed a vantage point from which to relativize all forms of social organization. This need was not, pace Rorty, I would like to believe, the “desperate hope for a noncontingent and [transcendent] powerful ally…something stronger and more powerful that will hurt the strong” (although I have my moments). Instead, it was simply the insistence on the contingency of any single social consensus or form of life. But Rorty’s downplaying of alterity, thrownness, and receptivity led him surprisingly to endorse the absolutization of a contingent society in ways that contradicted his emphasis on infnite possibilities of social change. Thus in AOC, he welcomes the “opportunity to see [in America] ultimate signifcance in a fnite, human, historical project” and hoped “that utopian America [will] replace God as the unconditional object of desire.” But terms like “ultimate” and “unconditional” sit uncomfortably with his recommendation to shrug off the tension between the infnite plasticity of the social realm and the quest for private perfectionism. By contrast, Niebuhr seemed strikingly accurate when, after defending modern democracy, he observed nonetheless that “[t]o make a democratic society the end of human existence is…dangerous because no society, not even a democratic one, is great enough or good enough to make itself the fnal end of human existence” (Niebuhr 2011, 113). Tillich, a writer Rorty appreciated, likewise had warned against the danger of elevating “something conditioned, a symbol, an institution, a movement [a nation]…to a false ultimacy.” There is also a case to be made, I think, that Rorty’s Darwinian naturalism implied the absolutization also of historical (linear) time, which Niebuhr detected in thinkers such as Mill, Dewey, and Popper: The belief that history is moving towards the disclosure of the whole truth is part of an entire conception of the relation of time to eternity, in which it is assumed that history transmutes itself into eternity, and progressively devours its own fniteness. (Niebuhr 1996) Tillich included in his sights even the basic creeds and scriptures of religions themselves, which, absent the idea of a “false” ultimacy, thereby became idolatrous objects of fnal commitment.

Act Three In the fnal act, I am back in New York, having escaped the worst through a geopolitical negotiation over which I had no control. After a few years’ distance, the worldview I discovered in my moment of crisis—what, using the

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jargon, I call post-metaphysical existential theology—remains one important dimension of my self-understanding. Still, quite apart from the pleasure reading them gives me, I continue to treasure Rorty’s ideas because they never fail to challenge many of my current convictions. Rereading them and revisiting debates around them from the distance of a few years, I continue to fnd new insights in them that I had overlooked in the pressure cooker environment in Iran and which I now seek to incorporate in my ongoing quest for private perfection. Books such as Dick Bernstein’s Ironic Life convinced me to temper some of the stark contrasts that loomed so large during that existential crisis. On closer reading, I found indications that in some ways, Rorty had always been closer to thinkers such as Niebuhr than I had initially thought. For example, when, in 2005 (in the essay “Pragmatism as Romantic Polytheism”), he wrote—surprisingly— that democracy and hermeneutics “can be viewed as alternative appropriations of the Christian message that love is the only law” (PCP, 32) he was echoing a thought he had put forward several years earlier (but that I had missed): that Nietzsche was wrong to have rejected the Christian idea of fraternity because he saw it tied to Platonism. In fact, this should not have come as a surprise given the affnities of Niebuhr’s thought with American pragmatist philosophy including with John Dewey, Rorty’s hero, as Daniel Rice’s study brought out clearly (Rice 1993). Also challenging have been several conversations with the eminent Heidegger scholar Taylor Carman, which have forced me to question my implicit assumption that acceptance of our “thrownness” necessarily leads to a notion of transcendence with theological implications. In other words, I have to think harder about hanging so much of my criticism of Rorty on his reluctance to link Heidegger’s idea of thrownness as the inevitable condition of Dasein (which he appears to endorse) with theological (albeit post-metaphysical) consequences (EHO, 50, 60). The alternative perhaps is to keep the thrownness but relinquish the alterity and the mystery. However puzzling and indeed vexing, I welcome these conundrums that have resulted from my attempt to engage with Rorty’s unique way of seeing things. Still, if in the pursuit of my private perfection—an idea I learned from Rorty—I have had to question and even jettison some of what I had earlier learned from Rorty, I was after all only re-describing his work; this is precisely what he recommended others to do to the exemplars that shaped them. I hope my departures would seem to him, as they do to me, the highest compliment a student can offer a teacher. I intend these refections as just such a tribute.

Notes 1 This is a slightly expanded text of the speech presented at the Second Meeting of the Richard Rorty Society November 22–24, 2019, Penn State University, University Park, Pennsylvania. I would like to thank Professors Richard

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Bernstein and Susan Dieleman and other members of the organizing committee for giving me the opportunity to share these personal refections about the impact Rorty’s ideas had on me. 2 Niebuhr points out how both traditions can be found in the book of Samuel. According to the one, Samuel anointed Saul king at the behest of Yahweh (I Sam. 8:22). According to the other, the desire of the people for a king was “regarded as an affront to God, who was himself king of his people.” 3 A favorite couplet of my wife’s from the Persian poet Rumi illustrates this moment of reciprocity and receptivity thus: “No lover, in sooth, is seeking union without his loved one seeking him” (Jalāl al-Dīn Rumī ̄ and Nicholson 2005, Book 6. para. 4390), which is an echo of “[n]o one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him” (John 6.44), which adds the character of alterity.

Works by Rorty CIS. 1989. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. New York: Cambridge University Press. EHO. 1991. Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers, Volume 2. New York: Cambridge University Press. AOC. 1998. Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth Century America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. PSH. 2000. Philosophy and Social Hope. New York: Penguin Books. PCP. 2007. Philosophy as Cultural Politics: Philosophical Papers, Volume 4. New York: Cambridge University Press. Rorty, Richard. 1998. “A Defense of Minimalist Liberalism.” In Debating Democracy’s Discontent: Essays on American Politics, Law, and Public Philosophy, edited by Anita L. Allen and Milton C. Regan. Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi. 10.1093/0198294964.001.0001. ———. 1999. “The Communitarian Impulse.” In Colorado College. https:// web.archive.org/web/20010304050333/http://www.coloradocollege.edu/ Academics/Anniversary/Transcripts/RortyTXT.htm.

Other Works Jālal al-Dīn Rumī, ̄ and Reynold Alleyne Nicholson. 2005. The Mathnawí of Jalálu’ddín Rúmí: Edited from the Oldest Manuscripts Available with Critical Notes, Translation and Commentary. Cambridge: Trustees of the “E.J.W. Gibb Memorial”. Niebuhr, Reinhold. 1996. The Nature and Destiny of Man: A Christian Interpretation. 1st ed. Library of Theological Ethics. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press. ———. 2008. The Irony of American History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. http://public.eblib.com/choice/publicfullrecord.aspx?p=544070. ———. 2011. The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness: A Vindication of Democracy and a Critique of Its Traditional Defense. University of Chicago Press edition. Chicago; London: The University of Chicago Press. Rice, Daniel F. 1993. Reinhold Niebuhr and John Dewey: An American Odyssey. Albany: State University of New York Press.

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Self-Creation and Community Nietzsche, Foucault, Rorty Daniel I. Harris

Nietzsche wrote that “knowledge works as a tool of power” (Nietzsche 2003, 257). While he was not the frst to link truth with power, Nietzsche’s insistence on their intimacy set the agenda for much interesting philosophy to follow. But there is signifcant ambiguity in Nietzsche’s claim and at least two reasonable ways in which it might be interpreted. Nietzsche might mean that those with power are able to control knowledge, to determine what passes for true, and so to make knowledge a tool of their own power. He might, conversely, be offering a helpful piece of advice: Nietzsche might simply be asserting that knowledge, like anything, should be thought of as a tool for dealing with the world. In this chapter, I discuss these two interpretations and their importance in Richard Rorty’s work. Rorty sees himself as advocating the second of our interpretations and often sets himself against the frst interpretation, which he attributes to Michel Foucault. For Rorty, Foucault represents an aborted engagement with Nietzsche: Foucault reads the critical, destructive element of Nietzsche’s investigations into the contingency of our values and aspirations without reading deep enough to grasp the hope that can also be found in that contingency, the hope that the future, because it is open, might be better than the past. But Foucault, of course, also claims rightful inheritance from Nietzsche, and so we might understand Rorty and Foucault as separated by different visions of what we ought to do with Nietzsche, how we ought to read our quotation. My view is that Nietzsche does offer an important account of truth and power, and more specifcally that we can make sense of the different readings of him offered by Foucault and Rorty by understanding both as, in different ways, mischaracterizing Nietzsche’s account. After showing the initial grounds for both Rorty and Foucault’s reading of Nietzsche, I suggest that the difference between those readings can be accounted for by different answers given to questions concerning community, justifcation, and affrmation, especially the extent to which a person must see herself as embedded in some community if she is to authentically engage in processes of self-creation. Nietzsche, Foucault, and Rorty, then, are each DOI: 10.4324/9781003208150-4

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ethical thinkers in that widest sense that concerns questions of who we ought to be, and each seeks to answer those questions through accounts of self-creation that are distinguished by the style and scope of embeddedness in some community they rely on. Nietzsche’s is a middle-ground position between Rorty and Foucault since he offers an affrmation of community, on grounds that Rorty might accept, without acquiescence to the status quo, a concern for Foucault. Nietzsche aims to place himself in a community but one in part defned by its vigilance in identifying its blind spots, in knowing that it does not always know itself. In particular, I would like to say that Rorty misses the force of Nietzsche’s views on self-creation and the affrmation of community because Rorty mischaracterizes Nietzsche’s perspectivism by construing it along narrative rather than affective or physiological lines. That is, where Rorty conceives of self-creation as a species of literary creation, Nietzsche locates self-creation in the vital, physiological conditions of human life. I begin by considering Nietzsche on truth and power, showing that both Rorty and Foucault attend to certain aspects of Nietzsche’s view while misconstruing others. As both Rorty and Foucault are keen to highlight, Nietzsche is hostile to the distinction between appearance and reality, between the world as it is for us and the world as it is in itself. Instead, Nietzsche’s perspectivism is the view that experience is constituted by perspective, and so it is nonsensical to ask about what reality is apart from some perspective on it. Nietzsche will also write about perspective in the language of human types, which consist in relatively robust and enduring rank-orderings, or social structures, of physiological drives. This rank-ordering gives rise to value judgments and dispositions that function to enable and sustain their type so that values are type-relative “physiological demands for the preservation of a certain type of life” (Nietzsche 1989, 11). Any type-perspective elevates some set of human needs over others and thus instantiates some view about which human needs ought to be valued, some view of who we ought to be. For Nietzsche, truth claims are likewise type-relative: we have the truths we do because of the way they sustain our type. So, while there are truths for Nietzsche, they are truths from or for some perspective. To think otherwise, of a truth without perspective, would be to posit a view from nowhere, or as Nietzsche puts it, an “eye which cannot be thought at all, an eye turned in no direction at all,” However, he continues, “[T]here is only a perspectival seeing, only a perspectival ‘knowing’” (Nietzsche 2006, 87). In a notebook, Nietzsche writes that truth is “not something that’s there and must be found out, discovered, but something that must be made and that provides the name for a process,” (Nietzsche 2003, 155), and since this process of truth-making occurs from within a perspective, truths are perspectival. At this point, we might adopt the second Rortian interpretation of the quotation with which we began. To say that knowledge works as a tool

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of power would be to say that all human interaction with the world is instrumental to an increase in power, where power denotes the ability to live in, predict, and control our surroundings. Furthermore, we deal with the world perspectivally, as the people we are, with the norms and beliefs we in fact have. And so truth, Rorty will say, is simply “what is good for us to believe,” where “us” means some community and its horizons, its perspective (ORT, 22). Rortian communities are those that say, “power is all there is to knowledge—that a claim to know X is a claim to be able to do something with or to X, to put X into relation with something Y” (PSH, 50). Knowledge helps us cope. Nietzsche himself, however, moves from giving an account of perspectivism, truth, and power to advocating for a particular human future involving creators who wield power in such a way as to make others see the world through their type-relative eyes and so, among other things, accept as true in some fnal sense the candidates for truth put forward by the creators. If “every drive wants to be master” (Nietzsche 1989, 14), and types consist in a social structure of drives, then power is a means of sustaining one’s type in a zero-sum contest with other forms of life. Importantly for Rorty, this aspect of Nietzsche’s vision is decidedly illiberal; Nietzsche prizes human excellence and claims that liberalism’s insistence on equality can only be satisfed by undermining the social and political conditions for the production of exemplary human beings. On Nietzsche’s own account, then, it can often appear that exercising power ought to lead to social and political relations in which great human beings put to work the mediocre rest in supporting human excellence. Nietzsche’s is an account that involves the illiberal claim that the vast majority of individuals are valuable merely as means to achieving social and political ends rather than as ends in themselves. Such an account allows us to lend provisional support to the frst interpretation of our quotation, which I have called Foucault’s. Knowledge is what passes for true in discursive practices inseparable from power relations that must elevate some and subjugate others, and so a careful, perhaps dubious, pose toward knowledge is warranted. As Foucault says, this is not to say that “everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous” (Foucault 1983, 231–232). On this reading, to say that knowledge is a tool of power, or that everything is dangerous, would be to say that knowledge is one of the ways in which power takes concrete shape, and power so often entails subjugation. As Foucault writes in an essay on Nietzsche, “Knowledge is not made for understanding, it is made for cutting” (Foucault 1984a, 88). We can see that Nietzsche provides resources for both readings. Rorty is right that Nietzsche demystifes knowledge by making it one of many aspects of the human being’s interaction with her world, but Foucault is right that such demystifcation does not preclude, and perhaps invites, abuse. This abuse might be propagated by discrete agents, as Rorty

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sometimes interprets Foucault, or by the more diffuse and impersonal machinations of power. My view is that much of what separates these accounts rests on different views concerning the extent to which we should, or perhaps must, affrm the community we fnd ourselves belonging to, even as we recognize the ultimate contingency of so belonging. Nietzsche, Foucault, and Rorty each seek to understand the contingency of our commitments, and each puts forward an ideal of self-creation that in some way negotiates that contingency, but their views differ in signifcant ways that can be accounted for by considering the relationship each puts forward between the individual and her community. I’ll consider Foucault, then Rorty, and then situate their views with respect to what I take to be Nietzsche’s. Especially in his later writings, Foucault came to conceive of self-creation as a solitary practice, a way to claim some sovereignty over the self by not allowing it to be completely determined from without. While self-creation involves negotiation with cultural norms and practices, it is fundamentally an individual endeavor. Conceiving of self-creation as external to natural or positive law leads Foucault to seek truths that originate in the self, that are one’s own, and to be dubious toward the externally imposed truths of nature or community. On Rorty’s reading, such a conception betrays a fundamental mistrust of the collective, an unwillingness to place oneself within a community that would serve as a starting point from which one takes on the work of self-creation. Foucault says in an interview, R. Rorty points out that in these analyses I do not appeal to any “we”—to any of those “we’s” whose consensus, whose values, whose traditions constitute the framework for a thought and defne the conditions in which it can be validated. But the problem is, precisely, to decide if it is actually suitable to place oneself within a “we” in order to assert the principles one recognizes and the values one accepts; or if it is not, rather, necessary to make the future formation of a “we” possible, by elaborating the question. (Foucault 1984b, 385) Rorty’s contention is that Foucault’s wariness makes sense only if there is something deep within the human being that ought to be protected from society, and so he thinks Foucault is guilty of an implicit essentialism. On this reading, to conceive of discourse as “a violence that we do to things, or, at all events, as a practice we impose upon them” is to posit a thing that precedes our use or interpretation of it, something essential and so outside the network of relations that, for Rorty, it is all there is (Foucault 1972, 229). For Rorty, on the other hand, we have to cease thinking that there is something that transcends communities, or something essential deep inside human beings, for our politics to get right or safeguard. Human

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communities are instead networks of individuals working together to achieve common ends, along the way creating the standards—epistemic, moral, aesthetic, and so on—that will apply to them. Power is control, but it is control held in common and exercised in pursuit of shared purposes. To be sure, danger attends this conception of power since there is no guarantee that the future will be better than the past, that what is best about us will win out over what is worst. For Rorty, though, this danger is an unavoidable concomitant of conceiving of human communities as beholden to no authority—religious, metaphysical, or otherwise—outside of or prior to themselves. The danger simply cannot be avoided by postulating something outside the workings of power, some touchstone against which to judge our attempts at self- and society-building since no such starting point exists. And so, while we can and should seek to change ourselves and our community, to become newer, different, and better versions of ourselves, Rorty writes, What we cannot do is to rise above all human communities, actual and possible. We cannot fnd a skyhook which lifts us out of mere coherence—mere agreement—to something like “correspondence with reality as it is in itself.” Pragmatists would like to replace the desire for objectivity—the desire to be in touch with reality which is more than some community with which we identify ourselves—with the desire for solidarity with that community. (ORT, 38) For Rorty, we have to start from where we are, with the commitments we have. We have to accept that we have no recourse to a noncircular justifcation of those commitments since any such justifcation would rely on showing that our community’s norms corresponded to some standard that transcended human practice, and this is an impossible and so unattractive goal. But this question of justifcation shows us precisely what separates Rorty from Nietzsche, namely Rorty’s insistence that who we are as individuals and communities is ultimately a question of language and the justifcatory practices that rely thereon. For Rorty, to rise above all human community would be to gain access to justifcatory practices that transcended any community of interlocutors; it would be to see our obligations as toward the world, as Bernard Williams says, “as it is anyway,” rather than to each other (Williams 1978, 65). For Rorty, we are defned by a fnal vocabulary, the words we use to set out our basic hopes, beliefs, and desires. Those who create themselves do so by patching together a new narrative from the extant resources of one’s language. This emphasis on language is what grounds Rorty’s ethnocentrism, the view that we have to see things from and so affrm our own perspective. To be at all, we must be a member of some community and the vocabularies it offers, so there can be no

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noncircular justifcation of any form of life. Rorty’s liberals instead take as a given their embeddedness in liberal democracy, along with the constellation of values and vocabulary that such embeddedness entails. We can only question any one of our commitments against the backdrop of all the others, and so we cannot call everything into question all at once. So, we must see ourselves as importantly embedded in a community and its commitments, including commitments to certain uses of words. Rorty writes, There is no neutral, noncircular way to defend the liberal’s claim that cruelty is the worst thing we do, any more than there is a neutral way to back up Nietzsche’s assertion that this claim expresses a resentful, slavish attitude…. We cannot look back behind the processes of socialization which convinced us twentieth-century liberals of the validity of this claim and appeal to something which is more “real” or less ephemeral than the historical contingencies which brought those processes into existence. (CIS, 197–198) Rorty’s focus on claims, their rational defense, and their validity shows that he misses the force of Nietzsche’s genealogical method, a method that is as much affective as argumentative. For Nietzsche, we can in fact look behind the processes of socialization that have made us who we are. We do this, however, not through argument alone but by charting the developments of perspectives differentiated by their physiological-affective basis. Perspectives are not vocabularies; they are sets of embodied values and practices that only later impact the words we use to describe our situation. Nietzsche writes, From now on, my philosophical colleagues, let us be more wary of the dangerous old conceptual fairy-tale which has set up a ‘pure, willless, painless, timeless, subject of knowledge’, let us be wary of the tentacles of such contradictory concepts as ‘pure reason’, ‘absolute spirituality’, ‘knowledge as such’: – here we are asked to think an eye which cannot be thought at all, an eye turned in no direction at all, an eye where the active and interpretative powers are to be suppressed, absent, but through which seeing still becomes a seeing-something, so it is an absurdity and non-concept of eye that is demanded. There is only a perspectival seeing, only a perspectival ‘knowing’; the more affects we are able to put into words about a thing, the more eyes, various eyes we are able to use for the same thing, the more complete will be our ‘concept’ of the thing, our ‘objectivity’. But to eliminate the will completely and turn off all the emotions without exception, assuming we could: well? would that not mean to castrate the intellect? (Nietzsche 2006a, 87)

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This passage is worth quoting at length because it shows the close connection for Nietzsche between perspective and affect, between knowing and feeling. Schopenhauer looms especially large here and in the Genealogy as a whole since it was Schopenhauer who most stridently identifed the right path for human beings with that path that leads away from the body and from willing and wanting most generally. Salvation for Schopenhauer meant turning away from the will, renouncing all desire, which for Nietzsche amounted to robbing life of its affective charge. Rorty is vague when he discusses perspectives, but it is clear that he understands perspectives in narrative terms, as the source of descriptions of self and the world available to self-creators, and as distinguished by their fnal vocabularies. Since Rorty construes a perspective in narrative terms, it is no surprise that Rorty will say, “To change how we talk is to change what, for our purposes, we are” (CIS, 20). Compare this with Nietzsche’s remark that “We have to learn to think differently—in order, at last, perhaps very late on, to attain even more: to feel differently” (Nietzsche 1997, 60). As Daniel Conway writes, “Rorty’s endorsement of individual self-creation consequently presupposes the (potential) disembodiment of our perspectives; no inalienable affective ties tether our perspectives to the world or prohibit our narrative disengagement from it” (Conway 1991, 108). John Lysaker lingers over this issue in Rorty’s account of self-creation, pointing to a gap that Rorty cannot account for between description and behavior, between how we describe our situation and how we move through it as embodied agents. He writes, After all, we can redescribe ourselves in numerous ways and never change our behaviors. For example, psychoanalysis has had little success in treating phobias whereas behaviorist approaches have fared quite well. No matter how many times and in how many ways I try to tell someone that there is nothing to be afraid of when climbing a ladder, if they suffer from vertigo, they are not going to climb it. Even my climbing will not budge them. What is required is a frst step. They need to experience themselves in the situation and feel safe; redescription cannot, or usually does not, do the trick. The moral here is that to carry out a project of self-creation solely at the level of metaphoric redescription is naively to believe that personal transformation is simply a matter of changing the words we use to describe ourselves. To suppose such, however, is to fall back into the myth that the ego is master in its own house. (Lysaker 1996, 48) To grant so much power to narrative redescriptions of our situation, then, is to rob that situation of its embodied and, hence, affective character.

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An important concern here is that Rorty’s tacit construal of perspective as disembodied represents, ironically, the very sort of philosophical attempt he derides in other contexts: an attempt to base human activity on something pure, unmoved, and disentangled from the real world of human concern. To judge that the ego is master in its own house is to judge, with Descartes, that although human beings are in practice mind and body together, in essence, we are thinking, describing, talking things. For Nietzsche, on the other hand, to really change who one is requires not that one take on a new vocabulary but that one feel differently, that one inhabit a new affective orientation to the world. While both Rorty and Nietzsche think of the self as an experiment, they do so in different ways. Rorty thinks of the experiment as a literary project fueled by the skillful contributions of the literary critic (CIS, 80), while Nietzsche thinks that we simply are the experiment, in our bodies: “We are experiments,” he writes, “let us also want to be them!” (Nietzsche 1997, 457). The consequence of Nietzsche’s emphasis on affect is not just that we should study the affective basis of our commitments if we wish to understand ourselves but also that Nietzsche writes in such a way as to reach his readers at the level of affect. As Christopher Janaway writes of Nietzsche’s genealogical method, “[T]he arousal of emotions by extremely provocative language is a deliberate and well-motivated part of Nietzsche’s strategy,” which “helps us to locate the more genuine basis of our own moral attitudes beneath the level of judgment and rationalization where we might be tempted to place it” (Janaway 2008, 126–127). Nietzsche’s method, then, is partly therapeutic in Lysaker’s sense described earlier, aimed not at a rational demonstration but at changing behavior. For example, Nietzsche intends to inspire feelings of disgust in his readers at his portrayal in GM I of the ways masters treat slaves but also to clue readers in on the feelings of awe and admiration we also feel at displays of power, all as an invitation to recognize the affective ground of our commitments. He wants us to feel horror at, for example, “blond beasts,” but then to refect on the sources of that horror, locating it not in description or argument but in a bred bodily reaction to cruelty (Nietzsche 2006a, 23). Elsewhere, he wants us to feel admiration for and identify with the fgure of the sovereign individual before he systematically undercuts that fgure and in so doing brings the reader’s own felt attachments into question (Nietzsche 2006a, 36). Throughout, Nietzsche is making a case for a certain kind of work we might do on ourselves, but the case is not in the frst place an argument. He tries to stir an affective reaction in his readers that might serve as a catalyst for self-creation. For Nietzsche, then, though work on ourselves is diffcult, and success rare, this is not because we cannot talk ourselves out of our present commitments but because those commitments are embodied in us. In The Gay Science, while asking whether human beings will be able to cope with the demystifcation of human existence wrought by a new scientifc and

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secular worldview, Nietzsche asks not about argument or justifcation but rather, “To what extent can truth endure incorporation?” (Nietzsche 1974, 171). To what extent, that is, can we quite literally embody a different orientation to the world? Change happens slowly because we have to invent new practices that cultivate new affects and work to understand what moves through us when we believe this way or that. “We philosophers,” he writes, are not free to divide body from soul as the people do; we are even less free to divide soul from spirit. We are not thinking frogs, nor objectifying and registering mechanisms with their innards removed: constantly, we have to give birth to our thoughts out of our pain and, like mothers, endow them with all we have of blood, heart, fre, pleasure, passion, agony, conscience, fate, and catastrophe. (Nietzsche 1974, 35-36) Self-creation, then, remains possible so long as we remember the affective ground of our commitments and so do not, as he puts it, “castrate the intellect” (Nietzsche 2006a, 87). We have to affrm community, our present, because it is who we are, in our bodies. But, that doesn’t preclude questioning that community since that work seeks not a noncircular justifcation of a fnal vocabulary but a genealogical unraveling grounded in affect, an account that shows us to ourselves, shows us how we came to occupy our particular perspective, clearing the ground for questioning our commitments and, perhaps, creating new ones. The risk of Rorty’s ethnocentrism, entailed by the centrality of narrative in his account of our self-understanding, is that it leaves communities unaware of their blind spots. Rorty’s liberal is someone for whom cruelty is to be identifed and rooted out so that communities might offer more widely dispersed opportunities for self-creation. But to be unable really and fully to question one’s community diminishes the prospects of identifying new or passed over sites of suffering. This is a problem for which something like Foucault’s project can help. Foucault allows us to see the ways in which practices culminate in the creation of new subjects about whom new truths obtain, in regards to whom new avenues of inquiry may be pursued, and in whom new forms of suffering are made possible. Foucault pays closer attention than Rorty to the hidden excesses and unexpected plot twists of human societies. Such attention ought to be crucial to the spirit of experimentation central to Rorty’s Deweyan heritage. Like Foucault, Dewey calls for deeply historical and empirical analyses to underpin projects of self-creation and democratic-community building (see Dewey 1984). For Dewey, the work of redescribing ourselves must include genealogical investigations into the vocabularies we draw on in such work so that we might carve out some enlarged perspective on our situation from which we can more

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completely and so authentically evaluate which elements of that vocabulary should be maintained, which revalued, which jettisoned. An approach such as Dewey’s, which understands self-creation as deeply tied to extant social and political conditions and institutional arrangements, is diffcult for Rorty to accommodate in light of Rorty’s sharp distinction between the private and public spheres. By consigning self-creation to the private sphere, Rorty risks inviting ignorance or indifference to the inevitable impediments to individual fourishing manifesting in, or exacerbated by, public life. If, as Rorty says, “we have to start from where we are,” if the circularity of justifcation leads to ethnocentrism, then the ethnos in question needs to be open to understanding itself as robustly as possible (ORT, 29). But Rorty too often takes the community as transparent to itself. Marianne Janack has argued that while Rorty distances himself from Descartes’ metaphysical and epistemological views of the human mind, he simply recreates that picture at the level of community (Janack 1998, 204–216). Where Descartes writes, “[N]othing is easier for the mind to know than itself,” Rorty seems to think that nothing is easier for a community to know than itself (quoted in PMN, 253). As Janack writes, for Rorty, “we are transparent to ourselves and the collective we is transparent to its members. Inscrutability is a characteristic of only those who are not we” (Janack 1998, 214). Where Descartes relies on a dualism between mind and body, Rorty instantiates a similar dualism between self and world. For Rorty, there is on the one hand a self that is radically underdetermined by, on the other hand, a world. The private self is understood as a nexus of possible creation disconnected from the concerns of the body or of the body politic. Where the metaphysician leaves the empirical world behind in search of universal truths, Rorty’s literary critic leaves the sociopolitical world behind in search of new, interesting, untethered descriptions. To think that we engage with the world primarily through our beliefs about it is to disconnect the knower from her body and its embeddedness in particular sociopolitical conditions. Rorty wants us to prize liberal democracy for the types of lives it makes possible, for the difference it makes. But if he really thinks this, then he should welcome Foucault’s (and Dewey’s) genealogy as part of what it means for a community to in good faith understand and so wholeheartedly endorse itself. So Rorty needs something like Foucault’s genealogy as a supplement. I say supplement rather than substitute, however, because a willingness to study the deviations of practices, to identify the hidden consequences of intersecting developments in public and private life, is only valuable insofar as we seek to root out the suffering produced, and such a goal makes the most sense in the shadow of an affrmation of the value of the community, the “we,” in question. So what is needed is an affrmation that is not acquiescence, a saying-yes to our starting point that does not prematurely foreclose the possibility

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of becoming something radically new. Something like this middle ground is available in Nietzsche’s approach to questions of identity, community, and affrmation. In discussing the self and its values, Nietzsche points to competing imperatives and asks us to imagine a fgure whose distinctiveness lies in her ability to enact both imperatives despite the tension between them. The tension is between, frst, the imperative to affrm wholeheartedly one’s perspective, and second, to attend to one’s perspective as perspective, and so partial, and so to remain capable of overcoming it. Importantly, one accepts the perspectival character of her commitments not out of resignation but out of an affrmation of life itself in its necessarily perspectival character. As Wolfgang Müller-Lauter writes, Nietzsche calls on us to “achieve this twofold attitude, belief and simultaneous readiness to give up belief…. It would, then, be not only changing assent, surrendering again and again to the varying perspectives and constantly re-solidifying, but simultaneously assenting to the changing itself” (Müller-Lauter 1999, 68; see also Pippin 2010, 113). Nietzsche’s fgure of the overman represents the attempt at successfully harnessing the tension between these two imperatives. The overman imposes his ideal upon the world, makes his perspective count as fnal, or true, in the eyes of others. While it is easy to stop here and see Nietzsche as heralding a megalomaniacal creator, we should instead attend to the fact that Nietzsche pairs the overman’s expressions of power with a recognition of power’s provisional status such that really to have power for Nietzsche is also to give it away, to want not the ossifcation of a given power structure but its overcoming. In a discussion of self-overcoming, Nietzsche writes that the weak yields to the stronger but also that “the greatest gives way, and for the sake of power it risks—life itself” (Nietzsche 2006b, 89). With this conception in hand, we can see that there is something unfair about Rorty’s presentation of Nietzsche’s overman. Consider Rorty as he writes, [A]t…the moments when he is imagining a superman who…will be pure self-creation, pure spontaneity, he forgets all about his perspectivalism. When he starts explaining how to be wonderful and different and unlike anything that has ever existed, he talks about human selves as if they were something called “will to power.” The superman has an immense reservoir of this stuff, and Nietzsche’s own is presumably pretty big. (CIS, 106) Nietzsche, to be sure, provides resources for a view of him as heralding a sophomoric, stereotypically masculine drive for power. However, a more attentive reading of Nietzsche shows that those aspects of his account are held in a productive tension with an opposing drive to dissemble, to

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overcome, and all of this requiring not forgetfulness of perspective but its thorough affrmation. So, in his account of the self and perspective, we see Nietzsche calling for the successful harnessing of competing imperatives. We see something similar in his discussions of community. There, the frst imperative is that we need to affrm the community we are part of. The second is that we also recognize that the shared horizon of any community is partial and is formed through exclusions of other views and the erasure of the views of certain of its members, meaning that any shared horizon will feature blind spots. Thus, we fnd Nietzsche frequently reaching out to community, perhaps only an imagined future one, while at the same time casting doubt on the possibility of its ever really understanding itself. Thus Spoke Zarathustra is subtitled, “a book for all and none,” and tells the story of Zarathustra’s tragic longing for an audience to hear him, for community. Nietzsche opens the Genealogy by insisting that “we are unknown to ourselves, we knowers,” placing himself into a “we” even as he doubts that that “we”—philosophers, psychologists—knows itself (Nietzsche 2006a, 3). And in numerous other places too, in his critique of the will to truth, our attachment to compassion, our merely apparent aversion to cruelty, Nietzsche places himself in a community, in a tradition, even as he claims that that community does not know itself. For Nietzsche, this is just what it is to be human. The spirit of affrmation that undergirds his thought asks that we understand human beings as powerful enough to create the very world that concerns us but limited enough to be fallible in our creation. Since we are imperfect, because we do not know ourselves fully, or see our communities clearly, the work of human beings in expressing power, pursuing knowledge, and creating communities could never be completed. There is always work to do. To attain affrmation precisely on this point, rather than resignation or regret, is to live well. To conclude, my view is that Foucault and Rorty rely on a false dilemma between total transcendence of community and total immanence. Either one refuses to place oneself within a “we” or one places oneself in a “we” whose form of life must simply be affrmed. Nietzsche charts a middle ground because he places himself in communities and affrms those communities, but it is a style of affrmation that requires care and concern in seeking to identify and overcome the shortcomings and blind spots any community must harbor.

Works by Rorty PMN. 1979. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton: Princeton University Press. CIS. 1989. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. New York: Cambridge University Press.

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ORT. 1991. Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers, Volume 1. New York: Cambridge University Press. PSH. 2000. Philosophy and Social Hope. New York: Penguin Books.

Other Works Conway, Daniel W. 1991. “Thus Spoke Rorty: The Perils of Narrative SelfCreation.” Philosophy and Literature 15 (1): 103–110. Dewey, John. 1984. “Individualism Old and New.” In The Later Works of John Dewey, Volume 5, 1929–1930. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Foucault, Michel. 1972. “Discourse on Language.” In The Archeology of Knowledge. Translated by A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon Books. ———. 1983. “On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress.” In Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, edited by H. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1984a. “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.” In The Foucault Reader, edited by P. Rabinow. New York: Pantheon Books. ———. 1984b. “Polemics, Politics, and Problematizations: An Interview.” In The Foucault Reader, edited by P. Rabinow. New York: Pantheon Books. Janack, Marianne. 1998. “Rorty on Ethnocentrism and Exclusion.” The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 12 (3): 204–216. Janaway, Christopher. 2008. “Beyond Selfessness in Ethics and Inquiry.” Journal of Nietzsche Studies 35/36: 124–140. Lysaker, John. 1996. “The Shape of Selves to Come: Rorty on Self-Creation.” Philosophy & Social Criticism 22 (3): 39–74. Müller-Lauter, Wolfgang. 1999. Nietzsche: His Philosophy of Contradictions and the Contradictions of his Philosophy. Translated by D. Parent. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1974. The Gay Science. Translated by W. Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books. ———. 1989. Beyond Good and Evil. Translated by W. Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books. ———. 1997. Daybreak, edited by M. Clark and B. Leiter. Translated by R.J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2003. Writings from the Late Notebooks, edited by R. Bittner. Translated by K. Sturge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2006a. On the Genealogy of Morality, edited by K. Ansell-Pearson. Translated by C. Diethe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2006b. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Translated by A. Del Caro. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pippin, Robert. 2010. Nietzsche, Psychology, and First Philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Williams, Bernard. 1978. Descartes: The Project of Pure Inquiry. London: Pelican Books.

3

Richard Rorty, Ethnocentrism, and Moral Community A Westerner’s Response to FGM John Giordano

The city of Djenné, in Southeastern Mali, lies in the Sahel, an ever-shifting band of sand and soil dividing the arid Sahara to the north from the verdant remainder of the African continent to the south. In the Sahel, wet and dry mingle, as do past and present. The fertile patches of soil that hold vegetation seem to compete with vast stretches of encroaching sand, making possible the natural materials used to build the remarkable organic mud and brick buildings this region is known for. The Great Mosque, built in 1906, the largest adobe-style structure in the world, drew a sizable number of daily visitors to the UNESCO World Heritage Site until Al Qaeda moved into Northern Mali in 2012. Recognizing Djenné as a place of transition not only refers to the land and the manner in which the environment has contributed to local cultural artifacts; historical epochs millennia apart also seem to overlap, or perhaps collide, in a place that at one turn appears ancient and another reveals a modern culture catering to tourists from what philosopher Richard Rorty would call the rich North Atlantic democracies. Visiting Djenné with a group of students from a Boston-area college as part of a study-abroad course centering on African art history proved to be a dizzying experience. The unfamiliar landscape and the ancient feel of the city, once a stop on a trade route that included better-known Timbuktu to the north, offered up a constant array of contradictions that seemed to bend and compress time and space. Large speakers attached to the gray mud-covered walls of the ancient-looking Great Mosque blasting afternoon prayers competed with the roar of a late-model SUV kicking up enough dust to obscure the mosque from sight. As day became night in Djenné, the sounds of the bustling city were replaced with the pulse of dance music emanating from a hotel club on New Year’s Eve, one of a number of modern hotels ringing the area around the mosque and central marketplace, where Malian youth and tourists danced in the new year. Our group thought we would enjoy the festivities and head back to our hotel sometime after midnight; however, those plans changed when DOI: 10.4324/9781003208150-5

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we started talking with some young Malians who were as curious about us as we were of them. Earlier in the day, our group was stunned to see the phrase Boston City tagged graffti-style on a number of buildings across Djenné. Our new acquaintances informed us that Boston City was the name of a group of 15- and 16-year-old young men—one of a number of such groups—whose custom it is to live together fraternity-style as a way to transition out of their family homes. The Malians offered to introduce us to the Boston City teens the next day. As the conversation changed from one subject to another, a group of us settled into a table away from the music for what would become an all-night conversation on the history and culture of Mali and the place of the United States in the world. Somewhere after midnight, amid the pilsner-style bottled beer so common in former colonies and the thumping techno music, the conversation somehow turned to the practice of female circumcision in Mali and other parts of Africa. The American students and I were respectful in the way we voiced the view that such a practice was out of sync with our wider western values. The young Malians, who had the advantage of greater knowledge of our culture than we had of theirs, laid out a clear and thoughtful defense of the practice while acknowledging its negative perceptions in the eyes of others. I don’t recall exactly how long this particular conversation went on for, but long after midnight, the positions taken earlier felt progressively less unequivocal as time went by. I found myself both participating in this conversation and simultaneously watching from the outside a lengthy exchange among “conversational partners” of the sort that Rorty urges us to have with those whose values and practices clash with the sort of “postmodern liberal bourgeois” values he claims we cannot escape as Americans. I aimed to be in Rorty’s sense of the term an authentic conversational partner who listens to another’s story with the hope that “imaginatively identifying” with a perspective very different than my own will reveal a sense of solidarity with a speaker that confrms we are part of the same group—that is, the same global community. Yet my attempt to imaginatively identify with my conversation partners felt like I had landed myself directly in the center of the hornet’s nest of theory’s relationship to practice, an uncomfortable place where pragmatism’s ameliorative orientation may not be as attainable in experience as it is in the pages of a book. I was attuned to the ethnocentric habits that are the result of my acculturation, habits that were urging me to accept the inevitability of my standpoint along with the strengths and limitations of that standpoint, but habits that nonetheless urged me to attempt to express my position and perhaps persuade others as to why female genital mutilation, or FGM, was to be loathed. There was an opportunity to put philosophy into practice and test its usefulness to the development of better social practices, and yet I found myself unsure

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whether I should, or could, do anything more than listen to what my conversational partners had to say. Our group was in Mali studying the visual art and culture of West African tribal groups, and yet a New Year’s Eve encounter with young Malians who seemed to deftly move between their tribal affliations and the cosmopolitan world of the nightclub suggested that we Americans largely lacked such cultural fexibility; we seemed so rigidly positioned in the superiority of our worldview as to miss the complexity of social practices different than our own. As thorny as all this was, such an encounter marked the sort of intercultural exchange American colleges and universities want their students to experience as part of an undergraduate education, and yet, as night slipped into morning, it became more and more clear that the dust would not settle on the issue of FGM—not because those speaking stubbornly held on to their views but because certain practices understood as aberrant can start to become less peculiar when they are encountered in proximity to the people who subscribe to them. As our lengthy conversation trailed off in the morning light, I found myself unable to embrace Rorty’s hope for promulgating what he describes as “a culture which prides itself on constantly adding more windows, constantly enlarging its sympathies…[and] adapting itself to what it encounters” (ORT, 204). This was because accepting FGM as a valid cultural practice was anathema to both my western understanding of what it means to enter into moral community and my conception of human autonomy and the rights and recognitions such autonomy should afford the individual—even if I was in fact willing to stretch my conception of autonomy as deeply intertwined with unfamiliar community values and practices. I want to now say a little more about Rorty’s view of ethnocentrism in relation to my attempt to put into practice his view, following the Humean branch of liberalism, which sees human rights as more of an affair of human sentiment than as a matter of legally sanctioned universal reason. As Rorty would see it, my standpoint as a westerner had led me to believe FGM should be strongly discouraged because it is a cruel practice resulting in human suffering and restricted personal freedom. Therefore, my job as a tolerant westerner is to recognize my commitment to my own incontrovertible local viewpoint. As much as I may want to practice a brand of many-windowed open-mindedness aimed at an imagined global moral community, neither I, nor anyone else, can truly see outside the reference of my community. Rorty claims that one cannot step outside the frame of one’s ethnos, nor should one want to since a western liberal stance potentially embodies the best set of claims we have in a world that is largely composed of cultures that do not subscribe to a western notion of tolerance and the defense of the marginalized in the form of both procedural justice and a commitment to diversity. This position, which Rorty articulates in response to Clifford Geertz’s characterization of Rorty’s

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“anti-anti-ethnocentrism,” aims to address the confict postmodern liberals may fnd themselves in: [W]hen…we fnd ourselves reacting to the Nazis and the fundamentalist with indignation and contempt—we have to think twice. For we are exemplifying the attitude we claim to despise. We would rather die than be ethnocentric, but ethnocentrism is precisely the conviction that one would rather die than share certain beliefs. We then fnd ourselves wondering whether our own bourgeois liberalism is not just one more example of cultural bias. (ORT, 203) Rorty’s pragmatist post-epistemology accepts perspectivalism while also encouraging an interest in vigilant open-mindedness aimed at expanding our embrace of others. Rorty’s insistence that a westerner should recognize the contingency of her epistemological frame is also a clear rebuke of the absolutist’s “skyhook with which to escape the ethnocentrism produced by acculturation” (ORT, 2). For Rorty, embracing ethnocentrism is another way of saying that our social practices are derived from the experiments and accidents of human inquiry rather than meta-cultural ahistorical principles. Thus, such open-mindedness should be balanced with a commitment to the best sort of global society we can imagine, a utopian commitment that entails a careful ambassadorship by which the individual is open to expanding her views of other cultures. This is accomplished by opening up the imagination to unfamiliar stories while trying to convince less-tolerant others to give up their illiberal practices through stories of western life. So for Rorty, the work-around to our western ethnocentrism centers on be[ing] open to encounters with other actual and possible cultures, and to make this openness central to its self-image. This culture is an ethnos, which prides itself on its suspicion of ethnocentrism—on its ability to increase freedom and openness of encounters, rather than on its possession of truth. (ORT, 2) Here we see that ethnocentrism for Rorty stems from the historicist insight that human values, and the practices that align with such values, are forged in the messiness of intercultural exchange rather than ensuing from timeless principles outside human experience. Such practices refect a commitment to moral community and the consensual legal rights and social recognitions that enforce such fellowship. But a confict immediately arises here between the idea that we should both be tolerant of other social practices in order to know who we are and, as Rorty holds,

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commit to an interest in “extend[ing] the reference of us as far as we can” (ORT, 23). Thus, the western “we” becomes the central, unmoving ideal for human dignity, which on the face of it may not be such a bad thing if one considers that, as Rorty notes, the majority of societies around the world are proportionally less tolerant in their values and practices than western states are. While this may be the case, “extending the reference of us” smacks of the sort of expansionist mindset that coheres with the historical colonization of the nonwestern world to Enlightenment thought and values. Rorty wants us to make open encounters with other worldviews central to our own worldview, yet also make it our mission to spread our own worldview as far as we can. Expanding our sense of self, coupled with expanding the western project of human rights through an appeal to emotion and imagination— that is, performing the work of those Rorty calls “the agents of love,” who value diversity, as opposed to the duty of “agents of justice,” who value universality—may appear to embody, from Rorty’s perspective, the attempt to reweave ourselves in the hopes of creating better individual and social practices (ORT, 206). Yet how can such reciprocal reweaving of the belief systems of conversational partners overcome the sort of bias Rorty holds in favor of western values? Even if we are encouraged to add more cultural windows to our worldview, Rorty also tells us that “‘cultural difference’ may soon be obsolete” (2008, 41) because “the process of cultural homogenization…will, with luck, be produced by shared practical concerns over the fate of the world” (2008, 52). Here we see that the forward-thinking Rorty hopes that when cultural differences come in confict with western liberal understandings of morality and justice, the latter will win out. What is evidently missing here, though, is a concern that local customs or cultural expressions would be lost to a utopian culture centered on a western notion of tolerance and justice. The discomfort I experienced during the night’s-long encounter in Djenné highlights for me the diffculty of reconciling this tension in Rorty’s thought. How can we then be open to the practices of other cultures and still try to bring into our orbit those who are not yet accustomed to tolerance for difference and equality? Even if such an ideal eschews essentialist claims for its justifcation, Rorty’s pragmatist-historicist project for imaginative experiments in better and better ways for widening human fourishing felt in the particular context of this night in Mali like a refexive act of neocolonialism designed to blindly and blithely diminish another culture’s values and customs, even if I vehemently rejected the particular custom under debate. Putting Rorty’s concept of sentimental education into practice proved complex since it became clear to me that I wasn’t fully willing to embrace what Clifford Geertz has called Rorty’s “anti-anti-ethnocentrism,” a turn of phrase that Rorty himself seems to embrace as a way to tamp down the sparks of his conception of ethnocentrism. I saw myself in that moment

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of conversational exchange both defending and questioning a western perspective on human autonomy and wider freedoms of the body, but I also found that I resisted what Rorty referred to in his reply to Geertz as “Wet Liberalism,” that is, the problem of rejecting absolutism while questioning one’s own positionality to the point that all worldviews are seen on a level, regardless of each group’s commitment to what we in the west understand as justice and human rights. As Rorty says, the wet liberal attempts to reject her cultural perspective in order to accept others, but to the point that we “become so open-minded, our brains fall out” (ORT, 203). Rorty aims for a process by which one should confdently embrace one’s ethnos while avoiding not only universal claims for rights grounded in something outside our hard-won social practices but also the wet liberal’s well-intentioned tendency to depriviledge her own perspective to the point that she gets stuck in the mud of moral relativity. I can’t say for certain whether my hesitation to eschew FGM did or did not subject me to wet liberalism, but I was increasingly caught between an urge to defend the view that FGM is viscerally wrong and a competing feeling that I couldn’t sit among Malians whose families and communities engage in such a long-standing custom without trying to see it their way. When saying that such practices stood against my community’s conception of freedom, I was following Rorty in focusing my “energies on manipulating sentiments, on sentimental education. That sort of education suffciently acquaints people of different kinds with one another so that they are less tempted to think of those different from themselves as only quasi-human” (1993, 122–123). Note Rorty’s multiple demands here. Sentimental education should, if necessary, not only convince a speaker of another speaker’s human status. A conversational partner’s sentiments may need to be manipulated in order to persuade them to engage in a challenging process aimed at the “self-reweaving and self-correcting” of their “network of beliefs” (PCP, 195). Yet, in even questioning whether or not it is acceptable to cut or remove all or part of a woman’s genitalia, even when international public health policy research encourages westerners to better understand the nuances of the problem by widening their view of FGM with regard to its importance to the expression of a woman’s gender and sexual identity,1 how do I prevent myself from being a wet liberal exhibiting “what Geertz calls, ‘the desperate tolerance of the UNESCO cosmopolitan,’” (Geertz quoted in ORT, 203) and thus plunging into cultural and moral relativism? Refecting on the conficting views I held on this long night in Djenné only further complicates my perspective. The problem is that tolerance and open-mindedness propelled me into a moral morass in which defending cultural differences, even practices as seemingly antithetical to western notions of physical, emotional, intellectual, and political freedom as FGM, seemed to relegate me to a place where I was teetering on accepting acts that I should fnd reprehensible. Such acts grind against the standards

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of my western viewpoint, standards that I believe, with Rorty, are historically contingent and thus lack an ultimate foundation. Above all, FGM conficts with the standards of equality that lead me to think women should be able to control their anatomy, their sexual pleasure. I wonder if all this internal deliberation inadvertently serves to further entrench my western blind spot regarding the superiority of western liberal values and customs. So, I fnd myself wanting to take up Rorty’s call to engage a conversational partner in such a way as to potentially move that speaker to be more like Rorty, or perhaps more like someone like me who may more easily reject the aspects of Rorty’s project of ethnocentrism that allows the postmodern liberal bourgeois global citizen to obscure the visibility of other types of global citizens, even purportedly illiberal ones. And yet, my hesitation to be an unabashed “agent of love,” as Rorty puts it, suggests I am willing to tolerate what I understand to be an intolerable social practice. With it in mind that I never resolved my conficting views in Mali, I want to now fast-forward to a second study-travel experience, this time involving a group of American high school students on a shortterm “youth development” trip to Kenya that included among touristic activities a few days working with Maasai communities on health-related issues. The American group worked with a Kenya-based health-care organization to distribute simple, yet ingenious, water purifcation devices and provide educational workshops regarding personal sanitary practices. Because service-oriented, short-term travel programs, often taking place over semester breaks, are becoming more and more common on college campuses, I was interested in whether this program confronted the debates regarding the intentions and outcomes of sending students abroad with the hope they would accomplish some good for a community in need somewhere in the global south. I carried with me on this trip the unresolved experience of engaging conversational partners in Mali on a controversial topic such as FGM, only to fnd that FGM would almost entirely dominate the conversation in Kenya. The Kenyan health-care organization that the American sponsor of the trip was partnering with supported the education and well-being of girls and young women who fed their communities in order to refuse FGM. Unlike the experience in Mali, conficting views within the American group became apparent almost immediately. While preparing to meet the girls whose conviction to resist FGM led them to run away from their villages, the American students were educated by the Kenyan organization to understand FGM in the way most in the west do: as a brutal, antiquated practice that impacts health and limits the lives of Maasai women. This view, while reasonable with regard to human subjugation as it is understood in the west, misses the complex socio-cultural justifcations of the practice that include standards of beauty, positive gender identity, and the social standing and authority of women. So, while the

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support of girls who refused the practice resulted in human services and education aimed at helping them control their bodies and thus live with the sort of autonomy that prior generations of Maasai women lacked, a palpable discomfort settled on a contingency of the American teens who questioned the assumptions behind the outsider’s role in working with Kenyan medical professionals to convince the Maasai to give up a longheld custom. To complicate the situation even more, another contingency of the American students initially refused to work in the Maasai villages once they grasped in graphic detail what FGM entailed on the grounds that people who truly loved and cared for each other could not engage in such practices. While the majority of the American teens seemed content going along with the expectations put on them, the two smaller groups of students questioned their participation for very different reasons. I personally found myself, on the one hand, deeply questioning the air of white saviorism permeating the partnership—as if white middle-class Americans really had much to offer another culture on the validity of its practices—and, on the other hand, encouraging the reticent American students who had initially refused to participate to challenge themselves in experiencing the culture frsthand in order to understand this controversial practice in the context of wider Maasai culture. Here is the dilemma I felt I faced in Kenya: I believed that FGM was wrong on the level of what I understood about human agency and human fourishing, all while rejecting the idea that Americans had something to contribute to a debate regarding the Maasai’s long-held practices. Yet, this confict was compounded by my interest in encouraging the students to take a more integrative view of the culture, an approach to the experience that I believe ended up revealing to the Americans that the Maasai themselves—in addition to the sorts of positive values, sentiments, and practices that shape families and communities—have a complicated, and often contentious, relationship with the traditional practice of FGM. This was something the nightclub conversation in Mali had not revealed. To some extent, the group was split between those who embraced an unwavering notion of a global moral community and human rights of the sort espoused by the Helsinki Declaration and those who didn’t feel Americans really had anything to offer the Maasai girls, even if all the participants were moved by the girls’ stories and situations. If, as Rorty suggests, the wet liberal is so committed to anti-absolutism, or so open-minded he stops thinking, then what can be said of the contingency of students who seemed to think quite hard on the place of Americans in working with Kenyans to end FGM on the grounds that they didn’t want to perpetuate the sort of missionary mentality that puts white people in the position of saviors whose actions, I would add, potentially reinscribe colonial power structures? I don’t think the desperately tolerant wet liberal label really fts here, as I think Rorty would fnd this contingency’s perspective in line with his commitment to both the

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expansion of self and other and his recognition that the situation may be “just one more example of cultural bias” (ORT, 203). That said, the initial refusal of the contingency of students to engage with villagers who practiced FGM seemed to refect Stanley Fish’s description of the “boutique multiculturalist”—that is, one whose commitment to diversity ends when one’s conversational partners no longer exemplify the sort of values that meet a western conception of morality, rights, or human autonomy. According to Fish, “[t]he boutique multiculturalist will accord superfcial respect to cultures other than his own—a respect he will withdraw when he fnds the practice of a culture irrational or inhumane” (2001, 60). Fish excoriates faculty and students who celebrate the diversity of community partners they work with only to the extent that such diversity refects western liberal values and institutions.2 With regard to the “youth development” experience in Kenya, the group did appear to divide into those who could be viewed as embracing cultural relativity in their refusal to buy into the assumptions around the westerner’s role in stopping FGM, and those who could only embrace diversity as long as the diverse-other conformed to western ethical standards. On Fish’s view, the better sort of faculty or student partner would take what he calls a “strong multiculturalist” view in opposition to such boutique multiculturalism, by which the individual will want to record a deep respect to all cultures at their core, for he believes that each has a right to form its own identity and nourish its own sense of what is rational and humane. For the strong multiculturalist, the frst principle is not rationality or some other supracultural universal but tolerance. (2001, 60) Fish’s preference for the strong multiculturalist over the intolerant boutique multiculturalist suggests that most of those in the mold of Rorty’s conversational partner are not always fully committed to the multiculturalism they espouse. But Fish does not see such community engagement as central to the university’s mission in the frst place; thus, he embraces the strong multiculturalist in order to point out the hypocrisy he sees in boutique multiculturalism and to also defend the view that students and professors should be in the classroom establishing interpretive communities that break down literary texts. Even if the frst contingency of students questioned their role in convincing the Maasai to stop practicing FGM, they didn’t do so because they were espousing the sort of universal tolerance that Fish admires in the strong multiculturalist. Nor were they engaged in uncritical wet liberalism. But they were perhaps saying that white Americans shouldn’t believe anyone was better suited to address the controversy surrounding FGM than Kenyans themselves, especially knowing that Kenyans were grappling with the complexities of changing social practices.

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I think it’s safe to say this discussion shows there isn’t a clear prescription for the dilemma of a westerner’s stance on the issue of FGM, but a brief comment by Rorty encapsulates the sort of ethos he brings to conversations on cultural practices that clash with western values, a comment that, in fact, addresses FGM directly. William Curtis notes in his book, Defending Rorty: Pragmatism and Liberal Virtue, that Leif Carter once asked Rorty to weigh in on the following: I had the fortunate chance, on separate occasions, to ask Richard Rorty and Ronald Dworkin roughly the same question: suppose, while fying over some remote and primitive land, you are forced to parachute out of a crippled plane. You land among people with no experience of western values. Given your “supernaturally” sudden arrival, you are treated with great respect and deference. While waiting for a rescue, you discover that the tribe practices female genital mutilation (FGM). What do you say to persuade them to stop the practice? Dworkin’s answer (I paraphrase both responses) was blunt. “I would tell them the practice was monstrous!” Rorty’s answer was longer. “I would explain that we don’t practice FGM and that we fnd our women are happier. That makes our men happier. Try it, you might like it.” (Carter quoted in Curtis 2015, 87) Compared to Dworkin’s retort, Rorty’s response to Carter predictably centers on an approach to intercultural dialogue across difference that favors a nonjudgmental attitude when engaging a conversational partner on a divisive topic, yet an approach that aims to nevertheless persuade others of the superiority of the western position. His comment to Carter refects the more elaborated appeal Rorty makes to sentimental education in “Justice as a Larger Loyalty.” Here is what we in the West look like as a result of ceasing to hold slaves, beginning to educate women, separating church and state, and so on. Here is what happened after we started treating certain distinctions between people as arbitrary rather than fraught with moral signifcance. If you would try treating them that way, you might like the results. (2010, 443) Rather than espouse, as Dworkin does, a wholesale rejection of the practice in principle, Rorty would urge his hypothetical conversational partner to consider whether individuals, and by extension, broader communities, will fourish when such practices are abandoned. Avoiding the direct accusation that certain practices are reprehensible, Rorty instead encourages others to imaginatively identify with a picture of a

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future moral community that emerges once the practice is abandoned or radically transformed. Rorty urges us to think of ourselves as conversational partners sharing stories of cultural values, customs, and moral commitments aimed at challenging illiberal practices. This recommendation steers clear of imperatives in favor of recommendations for ways to make “procedural justice attractive.” Avoiding Dworkin’s admonishing tone, Rorty fnds that “[a]ll we should do is point out the practical advantages of liberal institutions allowing individuals and cultures to get along together without intruding on each other’s privacy, without meddling with each other’s conception of the good” (ORT, 209). For Rorty, privacy can be afforded to unfamiliar customs and still be enmeshed with the moral community and individual rights; there is widespread acceptance of the “construction of a world order whose model is a bazaar surrounded by lots and lots of exclusive private clubs” (ORT, 209).3 On this point, even if Rorty intends to imagine a “Kuwaiti Bazaar” in which people of morally divergent views can still interact and trade goods, this image is fraught with the western tendency to exert power regarding the unfavorable practices of others, along with the sort of self-entrenchment into comfortable exclusivity that the west has made part and parcel of colonization and globalization. I can’t help but recall the cosmopolitan western-style hotels with their modern conveniences surrounding the buzzing outdoor market of Djenné, the juxtaposition of which only seemed to exacerbate the authority the west grants itself when it believes it has a role in ending customs it abhors while simultaneously cordoning itself off from direct contact with unfavorable practices. I am suggesting that a more critical view would eschew Rorty’s retreat into private enclaves and instead see that conversational partners are obligated to try to understand such customs from the perspective of the people who practice them. Furthermore, taking a critical view beyond that of wet liberalism, boutique multiculturalism, or Rorty’s tolerant-yetexclusive clubs would ask if a custom such as FGM isn’t already internally contested by the culture that practices it, just as western traditions are so often, and so predictably, internally debated. In Kenya, I observed the mothers of the runaway Maasai girls and the health workers who were protecting those girls in a residential school setting speaking with each other with a sense of cooperation and respect. Even though tension regarding FGM seemed to permeate their interactions, they chose to stay at the table with each other. The assumption that westerners should want to enter into a culture to change that culture’s customs misses the possibility that the culture itself is already deliberating new social practices. We can follow Rorty in telling stories of our way of life, not through didacticism or proselytizing but rather by conversing with others and sharing who we believe we are and who we aspire to be. But we can also be self-critical in recognizing that westerners can miss the sort of dialogue

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and debate already practiced by people in societies they deem illiberal— people outside the west who also think about who they are and what sort of better lives they imagine for themselves and their communities.

Notes 1 The Hastings Center Report titled “Seven Things to Know about Female Genital Surgeries in Africa,” compiled by the Public Policy Advisory Network on Female Genital Surgeries in Africa, aims to encourage westerners to take a wider view on FGM. The authors set out to “express our concern about the media coverage of female genital surgeries in Africa and call for greater accuracy in cultural representations of little-known others, and to strive for evenhandedness and high standards of reason and evidence in and future public policy debates” pertaining to FGM (Abdulcadir et al., 2012, 19). The report goes on to suggest that female genital surgeries serve to “enhance female gender identity by removing the bodily signs of masculinity (the visible part of the clitoris as perceived as a protruding penis-like masculine element on the female body” (2012, 22). Furthermore, contrary to a common western view, “[i]ronically, the effect of some antimutilation campaigns in Africa is to weaken female power centers within society and bring women’s lives under the hegemonic control of male religious and political leaders.” The authors urge that “[a] more thoughtful analysis is needed: those who want to ensure that women have a say in the conduct of their lives should support women in their quest for choices about their own bodies and traditions” (2012, 23). 2 While this view seems to refect what was taking place for the students who wanted to avoid contact with the Maasai, Fish’s view should be taken in the context of his wider views on the role of the university. While known for his pragmatist orientation, Fish is also known to ruffe the feathers of academics when he questions the expansion of civic engagement in higher education, a development that he deems antithetical to what he understands as the university’s commitment to delimiting the education of college students to the knowledge domains apart from the real-world context of the problems those knowledge domains grapple with. It is thus unclear if his accusation of boutique multiculturalism is more a recognition of the contradiction of liberal tolerance or a way to fnd fault in new conceptions of the college experience that he fnds dilutes the mission of a college education. 3 The language of “exclusive clubs” also occurs in Rorty’s 1990 essay, “Feminism and Pragmatism” (TP), which serves as a response to the growing body of feminist thought positing the design of separate spaces through which, as Rorty understands them, speakers can “achieve sematic authority.” Rorty sees feminism to demand that “you have to hear your statements as part of a shared practice. Otherwise you will never know whether they are more than ravings, never know if you are a heroine or maniac. People in search of such authority need to band together and form clubs, exclusive clubs” (TP, 223). Rorty would refer to such practices as initially idiosyncratic until integrated into the fabric of society rather than illiberal and thus beyond a western notion of procedural justice in the sense he means regarding the customs of many nonwestern cultures.

Works by Rorty ORT. 1991. Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers, Volume 1. New York: Cambridge University Press.

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TP. 1998. Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, Volume 3. New York: Cambridge University Press. PCP. 2007. Philosophy as Cultural Politics: Philosophical Papers, Volume 4. New York: Cambridge University Press. Rorty, Richard. 1993. “Human Rights, Rationality, and Sentimentality.” In On Human Rights, edited by Susan L. Hurley and Stephen Shute, 111–134. New York: Basic Books. ———. 2008. “Educations and Their Purposes: A Conversation among Cultures.” In Educations and Their Purposes: A Conversation among Cultures, edited by Roger T. Ames and Peter D. Hershock, 41–53. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. ———. 2010. “Justice as a Larger Loyalty.” In The Rorty Reader, edited by Christopher J. Voparil and Richard J. Bernstein, 433–443. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell.

Other Works Abdulcadir, Jasmine, Fuambai Sia Ahmadu, Lucrezia Catania, Birgitta Essén, Ellen Gruenbaum, Sara Johnsdotter, Michelle C. Johnson, Crista Johnson-Agbakwu, Corinne Kratz, Carlos Londono Sulkin, Michelle McKinley, Wairimu Njambi, Juliet Rogers, Bettina Shell-Duncan, Richard A. Shweder, and the Public Policy Advisory Network on Female Genital Surgeries in Africa. 2012. “Seven Things to Know about Female Genital Surgeries in Africa.” Hastings Center Report 42 (6): 19–27. Curtis, William M. 2015. Defending Rorty: Pragmatism and Liberal Virtue. New York: Cambridge University Press. Fish, Stanley. 2001. The Trouble with Principle. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

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Rorty’s Hope of Achieving a Global Civilization Clarence Mark Phillips

Richard Rorty’s talk about “achieving our country,” and of taking pride in ourselves as a necessary part of its achievement, might make one think that Rorty was simply advocating for good old-fashioned nationalism. But Rorty’s point was that, for as long as it lasts, a nation is a work in progress, a project undertaken by all who feel they belong to it for as long as it suits their common purposes. Rather than thinking of a nation as a static entity, with a border secured by an eternally fxed ideology, Rorty believed a nation to be the sum of our collective engagement, the measure of our communal involvement. In a democratic society, the expression “we, the people” always refers to a particular group of individuals—those who happen to be “here now”—who forge a single nation by identifying themselves with others who share their predicament. Rorty happened to live in the United States of America during a time when that nation’s identity was subject to constant revision. Born in the midst of an economic depression, Rorty was aware early on of the political and economic divisions against which his own parents struggled. Shortly thereafter, when Rorty was just in his teens, a second world war taught him the value of a free society, the dangers of tyranny, and the necessity of resistance. America was an imperfect place, albeit one in which improvement was not only possible but encouraged—a nation formed of immigrants, “America” seemed more a name for possibility than the designation of a landmass. The various struggles for civil rights—at their peak when Rorty was in his prime—showed him not only the depth of racial and gender discrimination but also the inequity of his own privilege. All of this enabled Rorty to appreciate the fuidity of American politics, the extent to which individual efforts can reshape collective identities, and the necessarily participatory nature of a democratic state (even for a relatively secluded intellectual whose academic interests seemed far removed from such real-world concerns). What role, after all, has theory in practice? How are the unchanging “truths” of philosophy to affect the contingencies of thoroughly temporal lives?

DOI: 10.4324/9781003208150-6

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Rorty’s famous linguistic turn—not only toward language but away from the traditional yet newly veiled aspirations of analytic philosophy—would have been less surprising had those who esteemed Rorty for his analytical skills been more aware of his appreciation of Aristotle’s anti-Platonic account of human reason. For, according to Aristotle, “rational animals” are only able to reason because of their physiology— i.e., due to the way matter happens to be confgured at a particular place and time. For Aristotle, reasoning is a thoroughly physical process, an activity ultimately undertaken for the good of the animal itself. To this way of thinking, reasoning is a verbal process (a physical activity), rather than a name for a substantive entity—“Reason”—(an essentially fxed, nonphysical “mind” or “soul”). Rorty’s dissertation “The Concept of Potentiality” shows both his concern with the essentialism necessary to the rationalist projects of epistemology and metaphysics and its effects on contemporary thought. His astute comparison of the residual Platonism in Aristotle’s notion of “potential” (δυναμις), with subsequent iterations throughout the history of Western philosophy, indicates that he was already suspicious of the essentialism pervading analytic attempts to formulate a complete philosophy of language. Rorty rightly understood that the notion of potentiality is inextricably linked to the essential nature of a thing: that its “essence” determines its potential, and that the two are, in effect, different ways of saying “the same thing.” Rorty’s intention at this stage was to highlight the problem posed by the concept of potentiality, one that he believed pervaded all of Western thought. “In particular, it is argued that an Aristotelian δυναμις is simply a substance considered in relation to another substance, and that any interpretation of δυναμις as a half-way house between being and non-being is misguided” (Rorty 1956). This was of course also a problem for Aristotle since he saw no way to abandon essential natures without giving up on the project of objective knowledge altogether. So, even at the time of the linguistic turn, Rorty was already aware of a serious problem with the whole of traditional philosophy: how to talk about things without the fxity that leads to a Platonic realm of forms? How to reason without becoming a rationalist? Encountering the work of early pragmatists enabled Rorty to see that the problem was a matter of how philosophers were thinking about human cognition. Rather than meanings having essentially fxed natures, pragmatists like Peirce and James were describing meaning in terms of effectiveness, in terms of the actual differences they make. As James famously noted, It’s astonishing to see how many philosophical disputes collapse into insignifcance the moment you subject them to this simple test of tracing a concrete consequence. There can be no difference anywhere that doesn’t make a difference elsewhere—no difference in

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abstract truth that doesn’t express itself in a difference in concrete fact, imposed on somebody, somehow, somewhere, and somewhen. (James 2000, 27) And it certainly wasn’t lost on Rorty when James pointed out immediately after that, “[T]here is absolutely nothing new in the pragmatic method. Socrates was an adept at it. Aristotle used it methodically” (James 2000, 27). For it was Aristotle’s contention that there can be no noncausal reasons—no purely theoretical or nonphysical causation—that made the fxed notions of essences and potentialities so problematic in the frst place: for they run counter to everything else in Aristotle’s description of people as a species of animal. After all, if our ability to reason is produced by our physiology, why include anything nonphysical? Why make the psyche of our species alone unlike everything else in the world? All Rorty needed to do then was to modify Aristotle’s empiricism by adding the pragmatist notion that actions are a species of events (those involving human deliberation) in order to transition to the “radical empiricism” of James. Indeed, Peirce’s initial use of the Greek term “pragma” would not have seemed revolutionary had a Platonic ghost not haunted our otherwise physical machinations for over 2,000 years. For, despite Aristotle’s early insights, it was not until the implications of Darwin’s contention that mental phenomena evolved from other physical phenomena that the scales fnally fell from our eyes. As Dewey pointed out, once we adopt Darwin’s bottom-up way of thinking about all things biological (including human thought), interest shifts from the wholesale essence back of special changes to the question of how special changes serve…concrete purposes; shifts from an intelligence that shaped things once for all to the particular intelligences which things are even now shaping; shifts from an ultimate goal of good to the direct increments of justice and happiness that intelligent administration of existent conditions may beget and that present carelessness or stupidity will destroy or forego. (Dewey 1910, 342) Rorty’s appropriation of a pragmatist conception of human thought—as having evolved with the rest of life and evolving with it still—enabled him to leave aside the age-old quandaries that continued to plague many of his colleagues and to shift his attention more to the actual events of his time—to those of the polis. In his academic pursuits, Rorty’s growth became ever more entwined with that of his country. Having moved away from the traditional philosophical concerns of metaphysics and epistemology, he grew ever more focused on the political implications of American pragmatism. No longer seeking to escape the contingencies of his own time, Rorty began more

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and more to seek solidarity with those beyond the confnes of traditional academia. Having dispelled the notion of what Peirce called our “glassy essence” (by means of which people might be thought to “mirror” the world around them) and having characterized the discipline of philosophy’s own physicality as “a kind of writing,” Rorty began to describe various philosophies and ideologies as merely “talk about” one topic or another and of academic and theoretical endeavors as forms of “cultural politics.” After all, if there is no difference in kind between theory and practice—if, as Aristotle suggested and Darwin confrmed, the former grows out of the latter, and theorizing is but part of an action’s development—then our concern becomes which practices to adopt, which courses of action to pursue. Our (always ethnocentric) concerns become, What shall we do? Which courses of action should we take? Why (not)? And who shall we count among “us”? In his account of everything involved in the process of Achieving Our Country, Rorty praises those who come to the aid of others in times of need, who fght against fascism, who form labor unions, and who organize protests in the public interest. A lifetime of observing such things caused Rorty to think of “America” as another name for hope, as an expression of human aspiration. Citing visions of America like that of Walt Whitman, Rorty increasingly used his rhetorical skills to inspire those who may have grown jaded or complacent about the democratic process, who may have lost sight of the forward-looking nature of the American experiment. Having freed himself from the constraints of static “forms and essences,” Rorty consistently nudged his fellow citizens to think of their current endeavors as Whitman once had done of his, as works always in progress: “I shall use the words America and Democracy as convertible terms,” said Whitman, describing America (in his Democratic Vistas) as “flling the present with greatest deeds and problems, cheerfully accepting the past [and counting] for her justifcation and success…on the future” (Walt Whitman 1871, 3–4). For Rorty, America’s exceptionalism consisted not in its past success but in its ability to address its own shortcomings, to draft amendments toward a brighter future. The pride he felt for his country was directed above all at its exceptional ability to change, to improve, or—as his hero John Dewey so vaguely put it—to “grow.” For, as Dewey saw it, “democracy is a way of life…faith that the process of experience is more important than any special result attained.” Much like the blind process of evolution itself, democracy has no particular cultural form to which it aspires—rather, it is “the sole dependable authority for the direction of further experience…so has to call into being the things that have not existed in the past” (Dewey 1976, 391–394). For Rorty, fgures such as Whitman and Dewey remind us not of a past for which we ought to be nostalgic and to which we seek to return but of a future we may yet hopefully create.

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While it is possible to spend one’s life fruitfully in the ivory towers of academia, avoiding more overt political engagement in favor of bickering and infghting often handicaps those with the most valuable insights. For that reason, Rorty disparaged what he called “the cultural left” for flling journals with cynical critiques of societal issues without suggesting any useful alternatives. Harkening back to an era when the Left was more engaged in political reform, Rorty encourages those of us who seek a better future to practice what we preach, to use our theoretical insights not to win praise from the few who care about intellectual squabbles but to inform public policy and better apprise the electorate about possibilities of which they may be unaware. The goal should not be to prove that the contentions of the Left are unquestionably true but to work toward the amelioration of questionable conditions (through what Rorty often referred to as “piecemeal nudges”). Things today may not be perfect— but then, we should never expect them to be—that is, precisely, what makes the future so promising. And while we should be tolerant of those who approach things differently than we do, that tolerance need not be infnite. If the pen proves not to be mightier than the sword, it may be time to try out other tools. Alluding to such unfortunate (but necessary) struggles as the Good War of the 1940s, Rorty’s contention that speech acts are no different in kind than more overtly public acts means that if one tool fails to do the trick, we must employ (and perhaps yet devise) more effective ones. Just as Woody Allen once quipped with respect to the Nazis who threatened an end to Western Democracy, “a satirical piece in the Times is one thing, but bricks get right to the point,” we academics who sit sullenly by on the sidelines, necessarily engaged in the details of study, do ourselves and our fellow citizens a disservice if we pretend to be above the fray of daily politics. For, when the next committee on “unAmerican” activities arrives at the door, our lack of involvement only proves our guilt. Rorty’s description of “philosophy as cultural politics” doesn’t simply mean that philosophers are just one more group of citizens at the round table of human deliberation and discourse; rather, it means that all deliberation and discourse is physical, cultural, and, so, inescapably political. We are always engaging one another politically (if only because our assertions and contentions are always taking the place of others, occupying what limited time our biology allows). Our philosophies—our “talk about” various issues—are always jostling for the limited space and time in a constant marketplace of ideas, are all part of the variation and selection of cultural evolution, all part of the democratic process. Just allow that all talk is material, as Rorty did, and the political nature of any and every assertion comes immediately to the fore. We rational—and so, political—animals have then only to decide which of our various contentions best serve our present and future needs (and which of those needs is most important to the greatest number of the animals about which we are concerned). Like James’s belief that pragmatism

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is an extension of the utilitarian desire to improve overall welfare, Rorty’s hope of broadening the circle of our concern—those with whom we identify, and so about whom we care—might eventually be a way of extending the borders of our country to include everyone alive today. For, if a political state (a polis) consists of a relationship between those who identify themselves with one another through a common cause, then there is in principle no reason for drawing fxed political borders at all. Indeed, one of the things we understand better today than we did at the founding of the United States is the genetic relationship we have with everyone on Earth. Darwin’s realization that different peoples around the world all share a common ancestry has caused us to reassess our thinking about our affliation with people whose most recent evolution was geographically separate from our own. Though he did not understand the details of genetics, the similarities we all share caused Darwin to rethink the connection between various groups of people (similarities that are now causing us to reassess the distinction we’ve traditionally made between ourselves and “others,” between “us” and “them”). For we now know that there is an unbroken line connecting everyone alive today with those who came before us, having migrated out of Africa to every habitable place on Earth. As a result, we are now better able to understand that there is only “us” and that the only people ever referred to as “them” are those with whom one disagrees about one thing or another, about things whose importance pale in comparison to those which unite us. The American motto of e pluribus unum (out of many one) is what unites James’s pluralism, Dewey’s instrumentalism, and Rorty’s desire for solidarity. Each of them realized that unity was not a matter of uniform compliance but of cooperative individualism. Like the ideal of America as “a great melting pot,” American pragmatists sought to make diversity the source of our collective strength—and in so doing, to make the ideal a reality (and, ideally, for as many people as possible). Currently, there are roughly eight billion rational animals on Earth. Because of Darwin (and Mendel), we now know that each of these animals is a cousin of ours, each of which shares not only the same genome but all of the behavioral characteristics that go with it. We have also learned that there is no more land on the planet for our species to expand into, that the days of manifest destiny are now behind us, and that all such forays in the future will have to turn either down into the oceans or out into space. So, the notion that we might cordon off a plot of land—call it, say, “America”—and reserve it for only a select group seems less and less tenable these days (especially since many parts of the planet lack a suffcient amount of water or arable land to accommodate those on the other side of the wall). While we may all have started off in Africa, much of its northern half (as well as large swaths of the Middle East) is growing ever more inhospitable to large populations. And given the increasing warmth of the planet, we can only expect those conditions to worsen, forcing more

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and more people to seek refuge in the same way their/our ancestors did. But those in search of better living conditions today run into political barriers that are determined as much by economics as geography. While America’s Statue of Liberty still bears the inscription, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore, send these, the homeless, the tempest-tost to me” (from Emma Lazarus’s “The New Colossus,” 1883; Lazarus 2014), the country that still bears the name “America” no longer seems to want them. While our own ancestors had only to keep moving until they found land unclaimed by anyone else, those seeking wide open spaces today have nowhere new to turn. Attempts to move to North America from the South—or from Africa and the Middle East to Europe—are met with a great deal of resistance, with membership in a particular nation-state taking precedence over our common humanity. And those of us in wealthier countries, much like the sidelined academics, miss the implications for both democracy and the future of our species as a whole if we think we might remain unaffected simply by acting aloof and pretending to be uninvolved. Prior to the evolution of civil society, people lived in what is sometimes referred to as “a state of nature” (the implication being that civil society, like human minds and all of the artifce they produce, is somehow “unnatural”). The materialist-minded philosopher Thomas Hobbes famously depicted that the pre-civil state as “a war of all against all” (bellum omium contra omnes; Hobbes 1642, Ch. 1 and 1651, Ch. 14) in which our concern for self-preservation prevented us from cooperating with one another. And given the combination of a rapidly increasing population and fewer habitable environments, we may yet return to such a state. But that same adaptive goal of self-preservation also drives us toward ever greater collaboration since (as Hobbes also noted) we can collectively accomplish things that are impossible for any particular individual. As the classical pragmatist Socrates pointed out to his own contemporaries, it is better for the long-term interest of each individual to work together with others than to create an atmosphere in which each is distrustful of everyone else. Walling oneself off from others only limits one’s chances of long-term survival; erecting barriers between groups simply prevents the mutual support required by all life on Earth. Darwin himself recognized that cooperation is produced by the same evolutionary process that drives competition and that groups that cooperate will succeed where those that do not fail. Rorty was well aware of the effects such egocentricity and elitism can have on democracy. While discussing Edward Luttwak’s book The Endangered American Dream, he cautions that members of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported.

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Clarence Mark Phillips Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers—themselves desperately afraid of being downsized—are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefts for anyone else. At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking for a strongman to vote for—someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots…. He will be a disaster for the country and the world. People will wonder why there was so little resistance to his evitable rise. Where, they will ask, was the American Left? (AOC, 89–91)

Many Americans (including those on the Left, which Rorty considered the “party of hope”) have largely abdicated their role as members of a democratic state, some of whom have fallen for assurances that a particular leader might return their country to its former glory. But a democracy cannot be made great by a single individual since its very nature is public rule. We who would let others take the reins of our state have no right to bemoan its ruin—indeed, at that point, we no longer have a state to call our own at all. Just as Pericles once told the Athenians, “We do not say that a man who takes no interest in politics is a man who minds his own business; we say that he has no business here at all” (Thucydides 1954), so Rorty criticizes Leftists who moan the blues but take no action. For, his point—like that of Pericles’s and all defenders of democracy before him—is that politics is not a merely cerebral activity; rather, one must care enough to act, to fght against those who pose a danger to our common purpose and to fght for our collective welfare.1 After all, when America was young, it was a series of European colonies. Its strength was born from a windfall of natural resources deftly controlled by an amalgam of human cultures. Like ancient Greece, America may seem to have wrought its own existence ex nihilo, but just as the Macedonians, Phoenicians, and Minoans all contributed to what would become the world’s frst democratic state, so all the cultures of Europe (as well as enslaved cultures from Africa and displaced indigenous cultures in North America) collectively generated the “beacon of hope” that became the United States of America. Yet if that beacon is to bring hope in the future, it cannot shut itself off from the rest of the world. And, just as we still draw inspiration from the golden age of Greece although that age has long passed, so there will always be an inspirational page in history from America’s glory days, even if those days are behind us now. This is where Rorty’s notion of America as political hope comes in. For, if America is still to serve as some kind of beacon in the future, it will be as a human ideal, not as a landmass, as an example of global democratic unity, and not as a separately gated community. As Rorty’s own death

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reminds us, nothing lasts forever (be it a great intellectual or nation-state). The United States has been one of the most fortunate confgurations of abundant resources and cultural innovation in all of human history. But there is no longer room for the sort of expansionism those glory days allowed. We must now share space not just with our fellow Americans, but with all our human relations. But will they adopt our ways, or will we adopt theirs? If we remember that our ways came in part from them and that theirs have come in part from us, then many of the worries about our impending family reunion can be allayed. If we remember that the achievements that most typify “America” were born of combinations impossible elsewhere, then the new combinations made possible by a truly global civilization will make the United States proud to have been part of the mix. For, neither the hope that once beckoned people to America nor the ideals for which the United States was once famous were produced solely by the four percent of the world’s population that currently live behind its walls. We Americans today were produced by the infuence of those who came before us, and we are bound both to them and to the rest of the people on Earth by ties that walls simply cannot obstruct. For, not only are all of the world’s “foreigners” and “immigrants” members of a single family tree, but they also share the same existential predicament of how best to cope on a planet in the middle of space with limited resources and rapidly increasing needs. Not only are political borders ineffective against problems exacerbated by environmental change, but they also hinder our exchange of ideas, thereby stifing the innovation emblematic of what used to be called “the American way.” Pretending that national identity could take precedence over biological necessity epitomizes the sort of dogmatic ideology from which thinkers from Socrates to Rorty have tried to liberate us, the kind of behavior which anyone following Darwin should expect to be short-lived. Such narrow-minded nationalisms illustrate why people are better off adopting Rorty’s suggestion of broadening our circle of concern as widely as possible: because, despite all of our disfunction and petty bickering, this large circle of people constitutes the only actual family we will ever have. If we want to identify with what Rorty loosely referred to as “Something Large,” we could do no better than to identify ourselves with the rest of the natural world. And if it is protection we seek, we have already got the greatest natural defense against an otherwise inhospitable universe: a biosphere whose preservation concerns us all. In short, why waste our limited time and resources fghting the only people who are in this precarious situation with us? Why not acknowledge our common heritage— and our common plight—and let our collective concerns determine our public policy? Why not work together—as a global democracy—with the only people in the world who can actually help us? Shortly before he died, Rorty was asked about his views on the subject of “the holy” (a topic we assume the elderly and the dying take more

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seriously). Rorty replied that his sense of the holy was bound up with the hope that someday his remote descendants would, “live in a global civilization in which love is pretty much the only law” (Habermas 2007). As simplistic as that might sound, it is perhaps the only way our species can ensure its own long-term survival. For, unless we acknowledge everyone here as “one of us,” recognizing each of them as an integral part of our general welfare, we may instead expect a Hobbesian future of constant confict. And it was Rorty’s main project—of helping us to relinquish ideological foundations—that proves to be the most important component in the process of removing the antagonisms between us. For once we think of our utterances not as “really true” but as more or less effective ways of engaging with one another, we can more readily adopt democratic deliberation as the most viable means of doing what is best for us all. Acknowledging our common biology allows us to treat ideologies not as contenders to some theoretical throne but as viewpoints in a genuinely global democracy. By doing so, we are better able to (as Rorty puts it), “keep the conversation going.” For it allows us to treat one another as kin, to care about each other in the way we would expect any species alone in the cold to behave. In one sense, his suggestion—that love be pretty much the only law—rings like a secular version of the commandment to love our neighbor as we do ourselves. Yet it is basically what he meant by suggesting that we replace the “vertical” with the “horizontal”: that we give up the project of grounding our cares and woes in something extra-human and, instead, express those cares and concerns directly to our fellow humans. It’s also one of the reasons he considered Dewey his hero: because what Dewey considered “holy” was what he called our “common faith”: not faith in a particular ideology but in the relations between people. For Dewey, what was most “sacred” was not a particular place, effgy, or emblem, but the goods that develop through our relations with one another. To Dewey’s way of thinking, this makes democracy the expression of our faith, the way we voice our involvement in, and identifcation with, the community around us.2 As he said at the end of his book, A Common Faith, The ideal ends to which we attach our faith…assume concrete form in our understanding of our relations to one another and the values contained in these relations. We who now live are parts of a humanity that extends into the remote past…. Ours is the responsibility of conserving, transmitting, rectifying and expanding the heritage of values we have received that those who come after us may receive it more solid and secure, more widely accessible and more generously shared than we have received it. Here are all the elements for a religious faith that shall not be confned to sect, class, or race. Such a faith has always been implicitly the common faith of mankind. (Dewey 1934, 87)

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As Rorty never tired of pointing out, such a post-Darwinian pragmatism leads us away from talk about theory as different in kind from practice—and so away from talk of absolute claims about Truth or God—and toward political talk about what to do today and tomorrow. Once we understand the implications of being on a planet in the middle of nowhere, the only issue we all need to address is what we collectively hope to do about it. While it is possible to think of Rorty as suggesting an increased pride in the nation-state of “America,” it is much more in keeping with his appreciation for Whitman and Dewey to think of him as advocating for “America” as a synonym for democracy generally. Just as Rorty points out that “for both Whitman and Dewey, the terms ‘America’ and ‘democracy’ are shorthand for a new conception of what it is to be human” (AOC, 18), so he came to see “Americans” as those who aspire to individual freedom and the collective solidarity necessary for its propagation. Used in this sense (verbal, rather than nominative, as a way actively engaging with the world, rather than a club of exclusive membership), “America” becomes whatever we all choose to make of it. In this pragmatically ideal sense, those called “Americans” no longer need to be located in a particular place—any more than “idealists” or “freedom fghters” do. In this sense, Rorty is referring to what Whitman called “the Americans of all nations” (Whitman 1855, 5)—i.e., those whose hope for a better future knows no geographical borders. As Rorty once mused, our “cumulative piecemeal reforms might someday produce…more widely distributed powers of decision making. They might also, given similar reforms in other countries, bring about an international federation, a world government” (AOC, 105). Looking forward to what the fedgling nation-state of America might become, Whitman once said, “for our new world, I consider far less important what it has done, or what it is, than for results to come” (Whitman 1871). In the future to which we now look forward, “our new world” may be a completely global civilization, one in which the only law is that we show concern for our collective welfare, that we “love our neighbor” as an integral part of our own world, as part of an extended family which—due to increased cooperation—may one day exist for all of our remote descendants. Unlike nationalisms of old, the pride we may one day take in human civilization is one in which our common faith in one another is stronger than our individual fears, one in which “the public” not merely has priority over “the private” but becomes the priority of the private. After all, Rorty’s reason for prioritizing the public over the private is not merely due to its being “a mortal god” (“Something Large” we erect over us), or because it outlasts all of its individual constituents, but because it is the cultural environment of every individual, the very milieu in which “we the people” fashion our sense of self. We derive “our moral identity, at least in part, from our citizenship,” Rorty rightly contended, “we raise questions about our individual or national identity as

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part of the process of deciding what we will do next, what we will try to become” (AOC, 97 and 11). This sort of pragmatic idealism illustrates the mutual dependence “we the people” have on one another, the extent to which the private is bound up with the public, the ties which bind our individual aspirations to our common good. This is The American Dream for those who, like myself, hope that the United States of America will someday yield up sovereignty to what Tennyson called “the Parliament of Man, the Federation of the World.” For such a federation will never come into existence unless the governments of the individual nation-states cooperate in setting it up, and unless the citizens of those nation-states take a certain amount of pride (even rueful and hesitant pride) in their governments’ efforts to do so. (AOC, 3) With suffcient faith in democracy, “we the people” may achieve Rorty’s hope of a global civilization, shaping a future we necessarily share into something in which we all can take pride.

Notes 1 AOC can be seen as a longer, more specifc version of Marx’s admonition (in the 11th of his Theses on Feuerbach) to philosophers not just to interpret the world but also to change it. Though Rorty takes issue with Marxist ideologies, his point here could be summarized in the slogan, “Leftists of America, Do Something!” 2 James, too, wrote that “democracy is a kind of religion” (James 1987, 109).

Works by Rorty AOC. 1998. Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth Century America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rorty, Richard. 1956. Dissertation: “The Concept of Potentiality.”Yale University.

Other Works Dewey, John. 1910. The Infuence of Darwin on Philosophy and Other Essays in Contemporary Thought. New York: Henry Holt and Company. ———. 1934. A Common Faith. New Haven: Yale University Press. ———. 1976 (1939). “Creative Democracy: The Task Before Us.” In John Dewey: The Later Works, 1925–1953, Vol. 14, edited by Jo Ann Boydston, pp. 224– 230. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Habermas, Jürgen. 2007.“Philosopher, Poet, and Friend.” Sign and Sight, December 16, 2007. http://www.signandsight.com/features/1386.html. Originally published in German in Süddeutsche Zeitung, June 11, 2007. Hobbes, Thomas. 1998 (1642). De Cive. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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———. 2017 (1651). Leviathan. New York: Penguin Classics. James, William. 1987. Essays, Comments, and Reviews. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. James, William. 2000 (1907). “What Pragmatism Means.” In Pragmatism and Other Writings. New York: Penguin Press. Lazarus, Emma. 2014. “The New Colossus.” In The Poems of Emma Lazarus: Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic, Vol. 1. New York: Dover. Thucydides. 1954. History of the Peloponnesian War. New York: Penguin Books. Whitman, Walt. 1855. Leaves of Grass. Self-Published. ———. 1871. Democratic Vistas. Washington, DC: Library of Congress.

Part II

Imagination, Care, and Virtue

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Imagination as a Social Virtue Santiago Rey

The concept of imagination has a long and complicated history. Virtually no major philosopher, including Aristotle, Hobbes, Kant, and Hegel, has avoided refection on one or other aspects of this fascinating dimension of human existence. This long and distinguished history, however, is not the concern of this chapter, not even as it informs Rorty’s rich conception of imagination. Indeed, as with most of the concepts in Rorty’s toolbox, his understanding of imagination is highly original and idiosyncratic, less the result of traceable direct infuences than the product of intense curiosity and philosophical craftsmanship—a talent for ironic redescription, as Rorty himself would put it in CIS. Although we can agree that the concept of imagination is practically absent from Rorty’s work until his turn from philosophy to cultural politics in the 1980s, the truth is that the seeds of his conception are there to be found across his entire output, already noticeable in his early metaphilosophical refections— for instance, in his distinction between philosophy-as-proposal versus philosophy-as-discovery in the introduction to The Linguistic Turn. Thus, what we are after is to be found in the midst of a constellation of related notions that emerge and subside alternatively, some of which will sound familiar to the seasoned Rortyan, others perhaps not so much: edifcation, redescription, inverse hermeneutics, reweaving, irony, poetry, experimentation, abnormal (revolutionary) discourse, breaking the crust of convention, continuing the conversation, expanding logical space, etc. Entangled in this family of words, the careful observer will detect one of the deepest tensions in Rorty’s thinking, one that has been pointed out by friendly and hostile critics alike, the oscillation between romanticism and pragmatism or, if one wants to get combative, between aestheticism and social responsibility. Rivers of ink have fowed condemning Rorty’s supposed irrationalism, and it is not my purpose to rehearse or endorse those familiar lines of criticism here; on the contrary, I wish to gather the ingredients of a pragmatic conception of imagination, one that effectively situates Rorty within the continuum of the philosophical tradition he did so much to enliven. DOI: 10.4324/9781003208150-8

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Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom There is an intriguing link between Rorty’s unwavering defense of imagination and his lifelong romance with fowers, particularly wild orchids. The phrase “let a thousand fowers bloom” has become a catchphrase that encapsulates Rorty’s championing of imagination and his view of a world where novelty replaces the quest for foundations and absolutes. Flowers stand for something important, something precious, a sense of wonder accompanied by aesthetic bliss—in the words of Nabokov, those “states of being where ecstasy is the norm” (Nabokov 1980, 313). In “Trotsky and the Wild Orchids,” the reader fnds a moving portrait of a young boy struggling to harmonize the demands of social justice with the deep pleasures derived from “private, weird, snobbish, incommunicable interests” (PSH, 6)—a struggle motivated by an existential need for identity and self-affrmation, a sense of self. To “hold reality and justice in a single vision,” a phrase he came across in Yeats (PSH, 7), became Rorty’s obsession, leading him to a life of philosophical adventures and unfulflled expectations, eventually giving up on his attempt to weave the universal and the idiosyncratic together and settling for a rather dichotomous view that strictly demarcates the private from the public. Orchids are numinous, uncommon, and known only to a chosen few, like Robert Louis Stevenson’s recollection of the bull’s-eye lanterns of his childhood in Scotland, a testimony that James would incorporate in his 1900 essay, “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings.” What James found so remarkable about Stevenson’s reminiscence is its ability to capture the tingle and excitement of reality, the feeting pleasures that make a life signifcant. The essence of this bliss—writes Stevenson—was to walk by yourself in the black night, the slide shut, the top-coat buttoned, not a ray escaping, whether to conduct your footsteps or to make your glory public,—a mere pillar of darkness in the dark; and all the while, deep down in the privacy of your fool’s heart, to know you had a bull’s-eye at your belt, and to exult and sing over the knowledge. (James 1977, 632–633) Orchids stand for many things in Rorty’s work—novels, poems, some philosophical texts, birds, and landscapes. Rorty’s insatiable reading habits are well documented, and as he famously stated in one of his interviews, it was books rather than people that made him tick. But not all fowers are the same, and even a kid botanist must have some criteria of classifcation. Aside from the obvious esotericism, Rorty’s orchids have curious transformative properties, the ability to nurture life with new signifcance, like Stevenson’s lanterns. Nowhere is this more fully expressed than in CIS, where Rorty presents his account of irony and redescription,  two

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sister notions that form the backbone of his understanding of imagination. The ironist is someone who realizes that “anything can be made to look good or bad by being redescribed” (CIS, 73), and, more importantly, she is eager to modify, modulate, and, in some fortunate cases, even radically alter her fnal vocabulary. There is an implicit Deweyan strand in this conception of imagination, one that ties novelty with praxis, creating a pragmatic feedback loop that keeps Rorty’s aestheticism from running amok. This bears some explanation. One of the main pillars of Dewey’s conception of experience is the idea that intelligence is idle when not contributing to the “enlarged use and enjoyment of ordinary things” (Dewey 1958, 6), a view that is at least congenial with many things Rorty says about the value of redescription, irony, and poetry for life. The exercise of imagination, Dewey writes in his 1910 classic on education How We Think, “is not a fight into the purely fanciful or ideal, but a method of expanding and flling in what is real” (Dewey 1997, 311). And 15 years later, in Experience and Nature, in what appears to be a totally unrelated discussion, Dewey celebrates imagination as it “terminates in a modifcation of the objective order, involving a dissolution of old objects and the forming of new ones” (Dewey 1958, 220). The point is clear enough: imagination, far from being a “frictionless spinning in a void,” feeds back into experience, expanding the possible and effectively becoming an organ of enrichment. What I’m claiming here is that Rorty’s exaltation of imagination is both aesthetic and moral, something that is perhaps obscured by his provocative rhetoric in CIS, where he makes it sound as if the project of self-creation was some sort of cocoon-building enterprise, shutting off oneself from the world of our peers—all bliss and no interaction. But this appearance is deceiving: yes, Rorty’s orchids are the main components of what we might call his sense of self, that array of little idiosyncrasies that we hold close to our hearts and to which we always recoil in times of grief and disorientation. But it is here that Rorty the existentialist, the “anguished existentialist adolescent” (Bernstein 2016, 129)—to be faithful to his own words—converges with Rorty the unruffed pragmatist, the hunter of novelty, not for novelty’s sake but for the expansion and enrichment of human experience. At the end of the day, as the notion of Bildung indicates—a concept that Rorty enthusiastically endorses in PMN and later drops—self-creation and self-decentering are two sides of the same coin—we shape ourselves through the confrontation with different “modes of feeling the whole push” (James 1977, 44), ascending from the particular to the universal, to use Humboldt’s somehow more bloated terminology. This peculiar mixture of centrifugal and centripetal forces acting simultaneously on the self is key to understanding Rorty’s later endorsement of imagination as a means to fnding redemption from egotism and the type of moral blindness that so much preoccupied James. Rorty read

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voraciously not to fortify the walls of his self but to shatter them, or like Carlos B. Gutiérrez, the Colombian philosopher likes to put it, at least to peep through the fence of one’s own identity, counting on having the good luck of catching the glimpse of a stranger—or even better, oneself becoming a stranger in the eyes of others (Gutiérrez 2017, 28). Here we see that Rorty’s steadfast defense of imagination is underpinned by a powerful ethical motivation, the conviction that acquainting oneself with different ways of being human is the closest we will ever get to something like redemption: The work in question is that of enlarging oneself. That requires being ready to be bowled over by tomorrow’s experiences—to remain open to the possibility that the next book you read, or the next person you meet, will change your life. (Rorty 2010, 392) Rorty speaks of the power of the novel as a literary genre to achieve this kind of dislocation of our prejudices and preconceptions, opening up the opportunity to get in touch with the “variety of human life and the contingency of our own moral vocabulary” (Rorty 2010, 393). Gadamer and the philosophical tradition that preceded him had a word for this, Erfahrung. To have an experience is to undergo a process of self-transformation, the reversal of our expectations when confronted with what is alien and different. It seems that receptiveness to experience is something we must cultivate; it requires being open to constant disappointments, to the realization that our fnal vocabularies are not as exceptional as we thought they were. There is pain and suffering in this realization, and there are good reasons for that. As Gadamer writes in Truth and Method, “Experience involves many disappointments of one’s expectations and only thus is experience acquired…. Only through negative instances do we acquire new experiences, as Bacon saw. Every experience worthy of the name thwarts an expectation” (Gadamer 2004, 350). Rorty wanted to have his fnal vocabulary rattled by novelty; he craved those moments when imagination shattered the crust of convention and a new way of coping with “the blind impresses”1 surfaced. His was a thirst for novelty and bliss but also for empathy and the overcoming of insensitivity—a deep urge to connect.2 If it wasn’t so paradoxical we could call his position “moral aestheticism,” but maybe we should just stick to common usage and call it pragmatic fallibilism. Moreover, what this aspect of his thought reveals, is that in spite of his relentless critique of traditional forms of empiricism, there is a sense in which Rorty himself remained an empiricist at heart, an existential empiricist to be more precise, or perhaps something more exotic, a literary empiricist, someone who looked for in poems and novels what others fnd in perceptual

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experience and worldly transactions—namely, that sense of constraint and over-againstness that Peirce called “secondness.”

The World as a Social Poem Up to this point, we have seen Rorty’s view of imagination from the side of its effects, the peculiar way it enhances our experience by expanding and enriching the way we cope with the world and with each other. But there’s also a story about the inner workings of imagination that can be extracted from his writings, a picture that, once again, goes against the grain of familiar accusations of irresponsible romanticism or narcissistic hedonism. The dominant story—let’s call it the “standing on the shoulders of geniuses” narrative—goes something like this: there are great heroes of imagination that have forever changed the course of history with their novel metaphors and redescriptions, more or less giving birth to the meaningful space the rest of us, grateful benefciaries, inhabit. But there is an alternative account, perhaps less operatic and spectacular, but more realistic and frmly grounded in the human condition: imagination as the result of human cooperation, a social and collective achievement. If the frst narrative is pervasive throughout Rorty’s work after PMN and up to the late ’90s, the second begins to gain strength as we approach his turn from philosophy to cultural politics in such writings as “Grandeur, Profundity, and Finitude” (2004); “Philosophy as a Transitional Genre” (2004); and “Pragmatism and Romanticism” (2005), all written within the last decade of his life. Indeed, what all these pieces reveal is Rorty’s tempering of his earlier romanticism in the direction of the types of social considerations that are so vital for the tradition of classical American pragmatism. In a telling fragment of his reply to Brandom in Rorty and His Critics, Rorty admits that his heroic portrayal of imagination runs the risk of distorting the phenomena altogether. He writes, Brandom is right in stating that I have been in danger of over-romanticizing novelty by suggesting that great geniuses can just create a new vocabulary ex-nihilo. I should be content to admit that geniuses can never do more than invent some variations on old themes, give the language of the tribe a few new twists. (Rorty 2000, 188) Of course, this idea of imagination as a social achievement follows from Rorty’s deconstruction of subjectivity in CIS where, with the help of Nietzsche, Freud, and Harold Bloom, he presents a view of the self as a “tissue of contingencies rather than an at least potentially well-ordered system of faculties” (CIS, 32). After the dismount of subjectivity, we can no longer see imagination as an individual faculty, in the model of a light bulb that blinks in our mind every time we feel creative; this spark view is

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too Cartesian to ft Rorty’s Wittgensteinian and Sellarsean post-ontological picture of the mind with its essentially intersubjective and public structure. The invention of new vocabularies is something we achieve together, a feat of the many. Yes, there are great geniuses who come up with novel words and metaphors, new redescriptions that hold the promise of a different world, but until these promises are integrated and fulflled in the social continuum, they remain idle fantasies. As Rorty poignantly puts it in his “Universalist Grandeur, Romantic Depth, Pragmatist Cunning,” “[N]o inspired poet or prophet can argue from the source of his inspiration to the utility of his enlargement of our sense of what is possible” (Rorty 2004, 137). The birth of poetry, of a new orchid, is something to rejoice about and celebrate, certainly, but it is only the frst step of a long and arduous process that requires equal amounts of inspiration and perspiration, of adaptability and hard work. Nowhere is this process of imagination better depicted than in Rorty’s engagement with feminism in his 1990 Tanner Lecture at the University of Michigan, where he discusses what he considers to be one of the crucial social movements of the twentieth century.3 In a dialogue with the work of Catharine MacKinnon and Marilyn Frye around the issue of whether feminism would be better served by dropping its realism and universalism, Rorty goes deeper than he ever had before into the nuts and bolts of his view of imagination as a social achievement, providing the details that were missing from his initial and somehow more sketchy accounts. The key passage deserves to be quoted in full: Individuals—even individuals of great courage and imagination— cannot achieve semantic authority, even semantic authority over themselves, on their own. To get such authority you have to hear your own statements as part of a shared practice. Otherwise you yourself will never know whether they are more than ravings, never know whether you are a heroine or a maniac. People in search of such authority need to band together and form clubs, exclusive clubs…. To sum up: I am suggesting that we see the contemporary feminist movement as playing the same role in intellectual and moral progress as was played by…lots of other clubs which were formed to try out new ways of speaking and to gather the moral strength to go out and change the world. For groups build their moral strength by achieving increasing semantic authority over their members, thereby increasing the ability of those members to fnd their moral identities in their membership in such groups. When a group forms itself in conscious opposition to those who control the life chances of its members, and succeeds in achieving semantic authority over its members, the result may be its ruthless suppression. But it may also happen that, as the generations succeed one another, the masters, those in control, gradually fnd their conceptions

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of the possibilities open to human beings changing. For example, they may gradually begin to think of the options open to their own children as including membership in the group in question. The new language spoken by the separatist group may gradually get woven into the language taught in the schools. Insofar as this sort of thing happens, eyes become less arrogant and the members of the group cease to be treated as wayward children, or as a bit crazy (the ways in which Emily Dickinson was treated). Instead, they gradually achieve what Frye calls “full personhood” in the eyes of everybody, having frst achieved it only in the eyes of fellow members of their own club. (Rorty 1990, 30–31) Rorty is referring here to the expansion of logical space through the exercise of the imagination, a transformation that depends on the joint efforts of countless individuals fghting together against oppressive and unjust vocabularies. In turn, this idea of enlargement of the possible is related to Rorty’s constant emphasis on semantic innovation and poetic playfulness, in Frye’s words a sort of firtation with meaninglessness—dancing around a region of cognitive gaps and negative semantic spaces, kept aloft only by the rhythm and momentum of my own motion, trying to plumb abysses which are generally agreed not to exist. (Frye 1983, 154) This describes yet another dimension of Rorty’s account of the imagination, his advocacy of experimentation and what in PMN he calls the inverse of hermeneutics, a suggestion as bold as enigmatic but that ultimately can be traced back to Rorty’s endorsement of Kuhnian themes, and more specifcally, the notion of abnormal or revolutionary discourse. An inverse hermeneutics is “the attempt to interpret our familiar surroundings in the unfamiliar terms of our new inventions” (PMN, 360), an effort that depends on the invention of new words and creative misuses of language, both deliberate and accidental. This dovetails nicely with Rorty’s view of edifcation in PMN, precisely the word he uses to navigate the semantic space between Bildung and education. Edifying discourse, Rorty tells us, “is supposed to be abnormal, to take us out of our old selves by the power of strangeness, to aid us in becoming new beings” (PMN, 360). The museum of the imagination is full of curious artifacts: alongside the works of our most cherished poets, scientists, and social reformers, we fnd all the weirdness we often associate with madness, from spectacularly useless inventions to scientistic treatises about soap bubbles and beyond.4 Although Rorty’s Darwinian picture of imagination tends to privilege those abnormal artifacts that achieve “semantic authority” over the whole tribe, there is an undercurrent in his writings

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that speaks of those less fortunate poetic creatures that are born to be forgotten. That is a story that remains to be told. The main difference between genius and madness is not the same that separates the true from the false; rather, according to Rorty, it is a distinction that sets apart those metaphors that are accepted by the community from those that are rejected. To be imaginative, as opposed to being merely fantastical, one must do something new and be lucky enough to have the novelty adopted by one’s fellows—incorporated in their ways of doing things…. People whose novelties we cannot appropriate and utilize we call foolish, or perhaps insane. Those whose ideas strike us as useful we hail as geniuses. (PCP, 107) The relevant criteria of selection are social through and through, which is a remainder of Wittgenstein’s point that the idea of a private language is not so much false as incoherent, and the same goes for poems and all other artifacts of the imagination: “Every poem, to paraphrase Wittgenstein, presupposes a lot of stage-setting in the culture, for the same reason that every sparkling metaphor requires a lot of stodgy literal talk to serve as its foil” (CIS, 41–42). No social interaction, no imagination; no imagination, no orchids. Rorty’s mature conception of imagination as a multidimensional social process—both synchronically and diachronically complex— is part of his late turn to a more Deweyan position, a reinforcement of themes that were there, in his work, from the very beginning.5 Another way of considering this shift is by seeing it in terms of the transit between an elitist conception of imagination—the combination of aestheticism on the one hand and the great solitary geniuses narrative on the other—and a democratic one, where the success of an act of imagination ultimately depends not on the inherent beauty of its form but on the ability of the members of a community to adopt and integrate novelty into their lives, something that requires effort, time, and good luck. Once again, it’s possible to trace elements of this conception all the way back to Rorty’s early adoption of Kuhnian themes and his endorsement of Freud’s and Bloom’s de-divinization of the poet, but what is unique to this last period is his insistence on the social dimension of imagination, the fact that orchids of the relevant kind need to be taken care of, not only contemplated. They are, after all, socially useful fowers.6

Notes 1 This is a reference to Philip Larkin’s poem “Continuing to Live” (1954). 2 “I would have lived more fully if I had been able to rattle off more old chestnuts—just as I would have if I had made more close friends” (PCP,  131).

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This moving confession points to the deep existential urge behind Rorty’s romanticism, his need to fnd some sort of communion with the world and with others, mostly through his engagement with prose and verse. In her lively reply to Rorty’s lectures, Nancy Fraser celebrates the fact that “this is the frst time, in this era of postwar professionalized American philosophy, that a renowned male philosopher has elected to address the subject of feminism and indeed to make it the subject of a major philosophical address” (Fraser 1999, 259). See Boys (1959). As Christopher Voparil points out, “Rorty’s earliest essays demonstrate the extent to which pragmatist issues and perspectives are present in his work from the outset” (Voparil 2010, 14). Rorty’s fnal take on the imagination sounds remarkably Deweyan with its emphasis on the social and the concrete, the embeddedness of poetic expansion in the human continuum of practices and institutions. In one of his last papers he claims, “We should try to think of imagination not as a faculty that generates mental images but as the ability to change social practices by proposing advantageous new uses of marks and noises” (PCP, 107). This comes as close as you can get to Dewey’s own conception of pragmatism and of intelligence, a view that was encapsulated by Sidney Hook when he defned pragmatism as “the theory and practice of enlarging human freedom in a precarious and tragic world by the arts of intelligent social control” (CP, 69–70).

Works by Rorty PMN. 1979. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton: Princeton University Press. CP. 1982. Consequences of Pragmatism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. CIS. 1989. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. New York: Cambridge University Press. PSH. 2000. Philosophy and Social Hope. New York: Penguin Books. PCP. 2007. Philosophy as Cultural Politics: Philosophical Papers, Volume 4. New York: Cambridge University Press. Rorty, Richard. 1990. Feminism and Pragmatism. The Tanner Lectures on Human Values. University of Michigan. https://tannerlectures.utah.edu/_resources/ documents/a-to-z/r/rorty92.pdf ———. 2000. “Response to Robert Brandom.” In Rorty and his Critics, edited by Robert Brandom. Malden: Blackwell Publishing. ———. 2004. “Universalist Grandeur, Romantic Depth, Pragmatist Cunning.” Diogenes 51 (2): 129–140. ———. 2010. “Redemption from Egotism: James and Proust as Spiritual Exercises.” In The Rorty Reader, edited by Christopher J. Voparil and Richard J. Bernstein. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell.

Other Works Bernstein, Richard J. 2016. Ironic Life. Cambridge: Polity Press. Dewey, John. 1958. Experience and Nature. New York: Dover Publications. ——— 1997. How We Think. New York: Dover Publications.

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Fraser, Nancy. 1999. “From Irony to Prophecy to Politics.” Michigan Quarterly Review 30 (2): 259–266. Frye, Marilyn. 1983. Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory. New York: Random House. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 2004. Truth and Method. New York: Continuum Books Gutiérrez, Carlos B. 2017. Obras Reunidas, Volumen II. Comprensión, Escucha Y Pertenencia. Ensayos Sobre Heidegger Y Gadamer. Bogotá: Ediciones Uniandes James, William. 1977. The Writings of William James. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Nabokov, Vladimir. 1980. “On a book entitled Lolita.” In Lolita. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Boys, C. V. 1959. Soap Bubbles, Their Colours and the Forces which Mould Them. New York: Dover. Voparil, Christopher J. 2010. “Introduction.” In The Rorty Reader, edited by Christopher J. Voparil and Richard J. Bernstein. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell.

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Can Trees Care? The Overstory and Rorty’s Ideal of Inspirational Literature Ben Roth

In “The Inspirational Value of Great Works of Literature,” Richard Rorty describes awe and enthusiasm, which he takes to be the traditional values of literature, as being overtaken by knowing theorization (AOC, 125–140). Following sociology, which began in political activism but was converted into a jargonized social science, and philosophy, in which the “charisma, genius, romance” of a Whitehead has been displaced by Ayer’s “logic, debunking,” and dryness, Rorty takes literary studies to be making itself irrelevant to the wider culture (AOC, 128–129). Great works of literature have inspirational value: “these works make people think there is more to this life than they ever imagined” (AOC, 133). Rorty describes a traditional kind of literature professor, one who initiated new generations into seeing literary texts in this way, as a dying animal, being killed off by the rise of theory and its disenchanting mindset: “Knowingness is a state of soul which prevents shudders of awe. It makes one immune to romantic enthusiasm” (AOC, 126). Viewing works of literature as cultural products, as knowing theorization does, “gives understanding but not hope, knowledge but not self-transformation” (AOC, 133). In his pluralistic manner, Rorty thinks we need both and so advocates for inspirational literature against these trends. Rorty’s larger project in Achieving Our Country1 is to describe the way in which what he calls the Reformist Left, grounded in the possibility of national pride and exemplifed by Dewey and Whitman, has been displaced by a cynical and pessimistic Cultural Left (again his term) that feels insurmountable shame in response to America’s history: “They associate American patriotism with the endorsement of atrocities: the importation of African slaves, the slaughter of Native Americans,” and, in what will be the most important example here, “the rape of ancient forests” (AOC, 7). This Cultural Left is incapable of the kind of patriotism Rorty thinks is necessary to truly advocate for progressive politics, and its members fnd “Dewey and Whitman childlike, naïve, and dangerous” (AOC, 32).

DOI: 10.4324/9781003208150-9

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Against the emphasis on agency and hope in the work of Dewey and Whitman, Rorty describes not just literary studies but also contemporary novels as embodying the “rueful acquiescence in the end of American Hopes,” as positioning us as mere “spectators” (AOC, 4, 9). His central example is Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, and he names other novels that he sees as traffcking in the idea that corporate conspirators and their government lapdogs have all the real power. “In America, at the end of the twentieth century, few inspiring images and stories are being proffered,” he writes. “[M]ost descriptions of what America will be like in the twentyfrst century are written in tones of either self-mockery or self-disgust” (AOC, 4). In Nightmare on Main Street, Mark Edmundson2 relatedly describes, on the one hand, what he names Gothic pessimism, descended from Poe, as reigning in American culture, while, on the other hand, the legacy of thinkers like Emerson and Whitman as having devolved into “facile transcendence” (1997, xv), where political progress comes about not through commitment and agency but magic or coincidence, as in Forest Gump (69ff). We are thus left with no real models of hope. Rorty and Edmundson’s jeremiads have long struck me as true descriptively. Indeed the prevalence in contemporary American fction of a banal dystopianism on the one hand and the facile transcendence of book-club books and Oscar-bait flms on the other seems only to have increased in the last two decades. When I frst read Rorty and Edmundson, however, I found their valorization of Whitman as a model untenable. Whitman and anything descended from him seemed to me unbearably mawkish— embarrassingly overwrought and sentimental—rightfully overtaken by a more knowing and cynical literature. For a long time, I could imagine no work playing the inspirational role they ascribed to a healthy literature—until I read Richard Powers’s The Overstory. Here I analyze how, though it risks a certain mawkishness as well, Powers’s novel avoids it and successfully overcomes Edmundson’s dialectic of pessimism and facile transcendence to inspire hope in the way Rorty thinks great literature can and should. The novel not only portrays a cadre of characters who, in a nihilistic age, believe in something more than themselves but also thematizes—against the trees they care about—this distinctive ability that we as humans have to care, understood in broadly Heideggerian terms: our being is at stake for us, and we identify with certain possibilities rather than others. As we will see, reading the novel in this way is perhaps contrary to Powers’s own intentions to expand the moral community to include trees but helps us to see why it should extend to all beings who can care. The Overstory, which won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize, begins with an epigraph from Emerson and early invocations of Thoreau and Whitman, positioning it squarely in the tradition that Rorty and Edmundson mourn as largely lost (Powers 2018, 5, 8). Its characters’ lives are all, in one way

Can Trees Care? 83 or another, tied to trees: one grows up in the shadow of a rare remaining chestnut; another survives being shot down over Vietnam when a tree breaks his fall, going on to become a kind of modern-day Johnny Appleseed; and one is an iconoclastic tree scientist. Their lives become intertwined as they join protests and occupations in the Pacifc Northwest to try to save old-growth forests, some of them eventually turning to environmental terrorism and martyrdom. On the face of it, The Overstory would seem to be a political novel about environmental destruction and our inadequate response to climate change, but I would suggest that taken as such it fails. Though Powers’s cast of main characters is willfully diverse—an artist, a veteran, a lawyer, a scientist, a Chinese-American engineer, a paraplegic Indian-American video game designer, a psychology graduate student, and a mystic—none of them, in their specifcs, read as Republicans.3 Loggers and police are among the few, and then only very minor, characters included who one can imagine as voting for the GOP in its early twenty-frst century instantiation. They are given such lines as, “My timber job pays for your welfare checks. Get the hell out of the road!” (231) and “EARTH FIRST! WE’LL LOG THE OTHER PLANETS LATER” (239) or portrayed applying pepper spray directly to protestors’ eyes and genitals. As a political novel, it would fail, as the claims of half of the American polity are simply ignored or shallowly mocked rather than represented, mediated between, or weighed and critiqued. As a political novel, The Overstory fails, yet it does not fail: therefore it isn’t a political novel. Nor is the novel effective read more specifcally as one of protest. It does not really even attempt to motivate action or win new adherents, preaching instead to the already converted. The message it preaches is not a hopeful one, however. Rather, climate change and deforestation are presented fatalistically: “Humankind is deeply ill. The species won’t last long. It was an aberrant experiment. Soon the world will be returned to healthy intelligences, the collective ones. Colonies and hives” (56). Elsewhere, a character apologizes to a bear for intruding on its territory, saying humans will soon make themselves scarce through extinction (38), and others say that the planet will be left, after us, to the trees (90). Here one sees a strange subversion of Rorty’s ideal of inspiration: at least in moments such as these, the novel’s hopes are invested not in us humans but rather in the idea that nature will outlive our mistakes. This is a frst move that the novel makes in order to avoid the potential mawkishness of Whitmanian optimism: by embracing one form of cynicism, it avoids another. Hope for trees is possible if we give up hope for ourselves. Or, better put, we have to bracket our human concerns in order to really see what might matter for or to trees. Many reviewers have suggested that the real protagonists of The Overstory are not its human characters but its trees, that it is an attempt

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to tell a story from trees’ perspective, according to their timescale. Barbara Kingsolver, for example, writes, Using the tools of story, [Powers] pulls readers heart-frst into a perspective so much longer-lived and more subtly developed than the human purview that we gain glimpses of a vast, primordial sensibility, while watching our own kind get whittled down to size. (2018) Reading the novel, however, Kingsolver’s claims simply don’t seem to me to be true. It is very much a conventional (human) character-driven story, operating through the thick portrayal of their biographies and psychologies, intentions and actions. Powers himself says he aspired to tell a different kind of story but saw it as out of his reach: If I could have managed it, I would have tried to write a novel where all my main characters were trees! But such an act of identifcation was beyond my power as a novelist, and it probably would have been beyond the imaginative power of identifcation of most readers. (Hamner 2018) The novel invokes a sci-f story in which aliens land on earth and attempt to communicate with us, but they move so much faster than us, operate on such a different timescale, that we seem unresponsive, and they end up harvesting human beings as apparently nonsentient statues of meat (Powers 2018, 97, 487). The analogy between human beings in the story and trees in our world is obvious—perhaps trees just react to things too slowly for us to recognize—but The Overstory is told wholly from the human perspective, not that of trees. Comparison here to another of Powers’s novels, Galatea 2.2, is illuminating. Powers is one of the most science-literate of American novelists; he has taken on such topics as genetics, virtual reality, computer programming, and bird migration, and almost all of his novels feature a scientist among their most prominent characters. Notably, however, he has never verged into speculative science fction. Galatea 2.2 comes closest, in imagining the development of artifcial intelligence beyond any current capabilities. But it remained realistic enough to merit a fan letter from no one less than Daniel Dennett (Dennett 2008). In that novel, Richard Powers, the token humanist at a research institute, falls in with a scientist, and they make a bet as to whether they can train a neural network to pass comprehensive exams in English literature. Though they fail, the machine does achieve a certain uncanny lifelikeness. In The Matter of High Words, Robert Chodat sketches a reading of Galatea 2.2: rather than suggesting that artifcial intelligence (AI) can’t do what we do, the novel suggests—through the portrayal of its human characters’

Can Trees Care? 85 increasing uncertainty and disorientation in life—that we can’t do what we think persons can (2017, 55ff).4 Powers doesn’t ultimately care about AI; what the comparison reveals is about us and that perhaps thinkers like Hubert Dreyfus and Charles Taylor are overconfdent about just how understandingly situated we really are in the world. The Overstory is a kind of rewriting of Galatea 2.2, comparing not humans and AI but humans and trees. Whereas Galatea 2.2 defates our intelligence, The Overstory infates that of trees. The Overstory is full of speculations about the inner lives of trees. Not only its characters but the novel itself (in free indirect style) frequently helps itself to intentional, agential language with respect to trees. Thoreau, knocking a harvest of chestnuts out of their branches, is described as feeling that “he is casting rocks at a sentient being, with a duller sense than his own, but still a blood relation” (Powers 2018, 5). “Plants,” it is said, “are willful and crafty and after something, just like people” (114). One character claims to hear trees scream in pain (32), another, after a near-death experience, to follow their directions. Yet another asks why a tree broke his fall and saved his life, thus conceiving of it as being able to act on reasons (84). Most prominently, the tree scientist in the novel is based on Suzanne Simard, who did groundbreaking, but initially rejected, research on how trees are social—how, in the thick language Simard and the novel use but about which I’ll raise doubts momentarily, they communicate with and care for each other. Powers’s tree scientist writes a popular book titled The Secret Forest, which is a version of Peter Wohlleben’s real The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate. In her afterword to that book, Simard writes, “We have learned that mother trees recognize and talk to their kin, shaping future generations” (Wohlleben 2016, 249).5 Wohlleben uses intentional, agential language on almost every page. For example, “When you know that trees experience pain and have memories and that tree parents live together with their children, then you can no longer just chop them down and disrupt their lives” (xiv). The Overstory takes over all of this language and more into its ruminations on trees. Rorty is both sympathetic to and skeptical of attempts such as this to expand the moral community. In “Justice as a Larger Loyalty,” he suggests we think not in terms of universal moral obligations, but loyalty to an expanded in-group, for example, “the loyalty to all those who, like yourself, can experience pain—even the cows and the kangaroos—or perhaps even to all living things, even the trees” (PCP, 45).6 At the same time, however, Rorty is skeptical that human beings can give up their more parochial attachments. The task of mediating between these two impulses is then not to reveal our parochial attachments as irrational but rather to extend them, by making us see animals or trees—or at least more human beings—as suffciently like us such that we not only can and

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should but also do care about them. This is a role that story can serve and one that The Overstory is surely specifcally meant to: “The best arguments in the world won’t change a person’s mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story” (Powers 2018, 488). Rorty writes that in thinking about whether to include something in the moral community, our reactions to “borderline cases depend on the liveliness of our imagination” (PMN, 191). Story, much more than argument, engages and expands the imagination. One certainly worries that there aren’t good arguments, grounded in theory and reasons, for extending intentional language to trees as Wohlleben, Simard, and the novel do. Do trees “experience pain,” or are they merely harmed? Do they “have memories” or just respond differently in the face of repeated stimuli? Even those of us unqualifed to criticize Wohlleben’s and Simard’s scientifc work can raise these sorts of conceptual questions. Wohlleben writes, “If [trees] can identify [insect] saliva, they must also have a sense of taste” (2016, 9). But pH paper can “identify” acidity or baseness, and we don’t suppose it has a sense of it. A thermostat is programmed to do certain things in response to temperature, but we don’t suppose it is sentient. Pressed on just these issues in a recent interview, Simard dodges the crux of the question. The interviewer points out that we categorize a phenomenon such as berry color and what birds fnd attractive evolving together “differently than we do the alarm calls squirrels give when a hawk approaches, or the conversation you and I are having right now,” and asks, “Where in that spectrum do plant communications fall?” Simard replies, Right in there. And we’re prisoners of our own western science; indigenous people have long known that plants will communicate with each other. But even in western science we know it because you can smell the defense chemistry of a forest under attack. Something is being emitted that has a chemistry that all those other plants and animals perceive, and they change their behaviors accordingly. (Kiem 2019) The distinction between responsiveness to stimuli and intentional action is simply elided. For Rorty, intentionality is not irreducible in any special way, so it is cheap to ascribe it beyond the human. But the fip side of such a claim is to ask exactly what the cost is and whether we devalue agential language through overextension.7 Powers is well aware of such issues. In a TEDtalk style speech, his tree scientist says, We scientists are taught never to look for ourselves in other species. So we make sure nothing looks like us! Until a short while ago, we didn’t even let chimpanzees have consciousness, let along dogs or

Can Trees Care? 87 dolphins: only man could know enough to want things. But believe me: trees want something from us. (Powers 2018, 353–354) The suggestion is that our fears of anthropomorphic projection have inhibited our abilities to see when there are genuine continuities between ourselves and the rest of nature.8 Insofar as literature, according to Rorty, plays an inspirational role by allowing us to “think there is more to this life than [we] ever imagined” (AOC, 133), perhaps worries about overextending agency and intentionality to trees are a red herring. But I want to suggest that The Overstory ultimately plays the inspirational role it does by retaining— against Powers’s own likely loyalties—a kind of human exceptionalism. The novel portrays an unusually impassioned set of characters, people willing to risk far more than most for their beliefs. But it is by placing these characters alongside trees and the question of whether they too can care that the novel becomes such a remarkable inquiry into what care itself is. While research like Simard’s into the way that trees emit and register scents when attacked by predators, or reroute resources through shared root systems, is fascinating, it does not show that, for trees, “live” is a transitive verb, that they, like us, live a life, that their being is at issue for them, that they exist in a space of possibilities, projecting toward the future—in short, it doesn’t show that they care, Heidegger’s one-word term (Sorge), midway through Being and Time, for our way of existing.9 We take a stand on who we are, identifying with purposes that give meaning to actions done for their sake.10 These abilities stand out as distinctive when set beside other beings—trees—that can do some things similar but not fully the same. A tree might reroute resources to others in its grove, even to those that grew from its seeds specifcally rather than others. But, despite using the word and invoking all its connotations, Simard and Wohlleben don’t give us any reason to think that a tree can or is identifying thereby with the role of mother in the way that a person making a sacrifce for her children does, bequeathing those actions with special meaning.11 Though Heidegger was one of the lodestars of his later thinking, Rorty would disapprove of the way I am invoking Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein—roughly, an individual human person12—as defned by care. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity begins with Rorty positioning himself alongside historicist thinkers who “have denied that there is such a thing as ‘human nature’” and insist that “socialization, and thus historical circumstance, goes all the way down” (CIS, xiii). If this is so, then the expansion of the moral community cannot be extended even to all human beings—much less to animals or trees—via a theoretical appeal to a shared nature. “In my utopia,” Rorty writes, “human solidarity would be seen not as a fact to be recognized by clearing away ‘prejudice’ or

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burrowing down to previously hidden depths but, rather, as a goal to be achieved” (CIS, xvi). Solidarity is not a truth to be revealed, but a task to pursue. One of Powers’s characters echoes the thought, stressing the lack of grounding for care: “Dorothy doesn’t mind skipping the author’s philosophies to get to those moments when one character, often the most surprising, reaches down inside herself and is better than her nature allows” (Powers 2018, 208). Another: “Philosophy and other fne distinctions can’t help them now” (344). Rorty writes of solidarity that “[i]t is to be achieved not by inquiry but by imagination, the imaginative ability to see strange people as fellow sufferers” (CIS, xvi). I am suggesting that, against possible appearances and Powers’s likely intentions, The Overstory doesn’t help us to imagine trees as fellow sufferers but rather helps us see other human beings as our fellows in their ability to care in a way that surpasses plants. Rorty would criticize this move as the hopeless impulse of philosophy to generalize across the contingencies of culture and history. But Rorty’s quick denials of human nature can themselves read like the shibboleths of a certain contingent cultural confguration, when historicism and the linguistic turn were perhaps overextended, unleveling all claims of generality into difference. In the later twentieth century, thinkers became especially anxious about the many ways in which false theories of human nature have been deployed hegemonically. But the fact that this has been done countless times does not itself prove human beings share nothing distinctive. Heidegger’s account of Dasein as defned by care—that is, its own being as at stake for it, thrown into a contingent world without its say or choosing but forced to take responsibility for itself by identifying with one set of projected possibilities rather than others—walks the fne line of avoiding false overgeneralization on the one side while, on the other, avoiding retreat into such abstraction as to be utterly indistinct. Rorty sees Heidegger as deeply attuned to the pitfalls of the history of metaphysics, seeking to “work within a fnal vocabulary while somehow simultaneously ‘bracketing’ that vocabulary—to keep the seriousness of its fnality while letting it itself express its own contingency” (CIS, 112). Inspiring as he fnds this as a private, aestheticist project, Rorty takes it to fail as a bit of theory—that is, as making general claims that truly describe all human beings. “Heidegger seems seriously to have thought, when he was writing Being and Time, that he was carrying out a transcendental project, namely giving an accurate list of the ‘ontological’ conditions of the possibility of merely ‘ontic’ states,” Rorty writes. “He seems genuinely to have believed that the ordinary states of mind and life plans of nonintellectuals were ‘grounded’ on the ability of people like himself […] to have spectacularly different anxieties and projects” (CIS, 110). Here, however, Rorty arguably latches too strongly onto the wrong part of Heidegger’s analysis of what it is to be human, accusing Heidegger of “project[ing] his own problem” onto Dasein generally “by

Can Trees Care? 89 identifying ‘guilt’ (in a deep ‘ontological’ sense) with the fact that one had not created oneself” (CIS, 109).13 If we stress the human ability to care instead—as reading The Overstory helps us to do—we have a better candidate for a general, yet still distinctive and not hegemonic, conception of what it is to be human. If one is allergic to the phrase “human nature,” it could well be replaced with Sartre’s “human condition,” which of course follows Heidegger. Heidegger’s existential analysis of Dasein identifes, if Heidegger is right, a structure that holds of all persons. This structure can, and is, flled out in its specifcs differently by different individuals in different cultures and historical epochs—but the abstract structure remains there. This can be true, if more subtly, even when one holds human beings to be historical (as both Heidegger and Rorty do): we are all essentially historical, even if we fnd ourselves in different specifc histories. Whether the abstract and universal level or the specifc and diverse one is more relevant to an inquiry will depend on what that inquiry is. Our nature, or condition, will be determinative of certain things and not others. This appeal I have made to Heidegger’s notion of care ascribes a possible unity to our understanding of what it is to be human that Rorty denies—not only because he thinks there is no way to referee between different fnal vocabularies but also because he ascribes a deep split to our orientation in the world. Infamously, Rorty holds us to be divided beings, with nothing necessarily uniting our roles in the public and private realms. Those of us who are (like him) liberal just fnd that we are: “Why are you a liberal? Why do you care about the humiliation of strangers?” (CIS, 87). For Rorty, there is no ultimate justifcation that answers these questions, no reason that one can appeal to that would bind others. One of Powers’s characters embodies these tensions, thinking, “Don’t stand out; you have no right. No one owes you a thing. Keep small, vote mainstream, and nod like it all makes sense. Yet here she is, asking for trouble. Acting like what she does might matter” (Powers 2018, 240). Opposed to a public liberalism where our concern for the practical consequences of cruelty overrides theoretical concern for justifcation, in our private lives, we can acknowledge this groundlessness. Those who do are, in Rorty’s term, “ironists” (himself again included) and can develop the artistic and theoretical vocabularies that allow us to create ourselves as we will, even as we understand that such vocabularies are contingent and that we cannot ultimately justify them to others. According to Rorty, “There is no way to bring self-creation together with justice at the level of theory” (CIS, xiv). We can simply be public liberals and private ironists, and Rorty recommends giving up feeling any need to unite the two. Again, I have long found these claims to be descriptively true but normatively dissatisfying. Rorty accurately describes my own split orientation to the world, but I fnd myself unable to give up on the hope that this divide can be bridged, either by being able to justify liberalism and thus feeling obligated to invest my private concerns in it or by fully embracing, with an

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ironic quietism, the consequences even in public life of our groundlessness. The Heideggerian account I’ve quickly invoked in this chapter suggests how care underlies and begins to unify the split roles of public liberalism and private irony. My cares bind me, but they cannot be universalized, cannot be forced on others. If someone does not care about cruelty, there is no argument that I can make that reveals why they should. “But doesn’t it bother you when others suffer unnecessary pain and humiliation? Aren’t you concerned it could then be turned against you?” Someone can always (and many in fact do) shrug in the face of such appeals. Care is neither exactly responsive nor unresponsive to reasons. Rather, it is more accurately described as responsive to attention. This is where The Overstory succeeds as a novel. Not only does it direct our attention as readers to the plight of trees and the environment, inviting us to care more about them, but it also directs our attention to the very phenomenon of care, allowing us to understand it better. Along these lines, one might think that the way to unify our public and private roles is to foster a culture of attention and to rethink politics not as rationally referring between different constituents’ claims but mediating our various contingent cares. Powers’s achievement with The Overstory can be put in perspective by comparing it to what I take to be the less successful but similar projects of two of his more famous contemporaries: Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom and David Foster Wallace’s last, unfnished novel The Pale King. Freedom is concerned with what possibilities for larger meaning remain in cynical, nihilistic times. It ends with the establishment of a sanctuary for songbirds, fortifed by netting against murderous housecats. Anyone familiar with Franzen’s personal essays in The New Yorker knows that he cares deeply about birds, indeed perhaps more than he does about people—on this issue above all others, he is no ironist. One would think that the project of expanding the moral community to include birds would be easier than expanding it to include trees. But it seems to me that Franzen fails where Powers succeeds—not because of anything essential about his object but rather for tonal reasons. Whereas Powers’s novel is written in loving tones, ascending into poetic expression more often than it descends into cynicism, Franzen is by natural talent a satirist, even if he has tried to restyle himself into a grand Tolstoyan chronicler of human sentiment in his more recent work. His most successful novel, The Corrections, ruthlessly exposes the hypocrisies of its characters (while diagnosing the larger societal causes of them), even if it fnally allows them some sliver of redemption. Freedom fails because, in a novel about gentrifers and creative workers who perform some level of awareness of their entitlement exactly to cover over their deeper obliviousness to it, the impulse to create a bird sanctuary seems something that should be mocked, not suddenly celebrated as pure. The Pale King is centrally concerned with boredom, with the way that inhabitants of the contemporary world—especially those in certain kinds of cubicle-bound jobs—are relentlessly confronted by it, and with the

Can Trees Care? 91 diffculties of giving others our moral attention and compassion.14 One character in the novel is capable of such concentration that he seems to, or perhaps really does, foat, both when auditing complex tax returns and listening to a coworker relate her problems (Wallace 2011, 485). Critics have rightly connected The Pale King to Wallace’s commencement speech “This Is Water,” in which he argues that we can come, should we so choose, to see most any experience “as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fre with the same force that lit the stars” (2009, 93).15 Leslie Jamison perfectly captures in miniature the divide between facile transcendence and knowing cynicism in contemporary culture when she describes Wallace’s speech as “the one that everyone fnds inspiring except the people who think it’s unbearably trite and fnd it pathetic that everyone else is so inspired by it” (2019, 54). Wallace’s gambit in The Pale King is to suggest that we have the ability to make even the most tedious of tasks deeply meaningful. Here is a perfect test case for Rorty’s claim, in reference to the contingencies of our fnal vocabularies, “that anything can be made to look good or bad by being redescribed” (CIS, 73). It seems to me that Wallace ultimately fails, however. In a key scene in the novel, another future IRS auditor mistakenly stumbles into an accounting lecture and, enraptured by the Jesuit professor, is converted from “wastoid” to contributing member of society. “Gentleman, you are called to account,” the lecturer proclaims (Wallace 2011, 233).16 The line attempts to transcend its pun into the grand suggestion that even something as banal as accounting can be a calling, a vocation. Wallace sets the stakes unreachably high here: against Rorty, not everything can be made signifcant17 and, against Wallace, not everything should. Powers, by taking the more plausible, but still fraught and challenging, object of trees, succeeds where Wallace does not. If one thinks that ours are cynical, nihilistic times—another way of putting Rorty’s claims about knowningess and Edmundson’s about pessimism—then The Overstory stands out as an exemplary case of literature’s ability to inspire. It does not merely portray a group of characters who continue, despite these cultural trends, to care deeply about something beyond themselves and their narrow self-interest. Rather, in developing the comparison between these human characters and the trees they sacrifce so much for—thereby forging their identities and fnding signifcance in their lives in a way we don’t have reason to think trees can—it thematizes in depth this distinctive human ability to care. Between that which we can provide binding reasons for and the brute givens of experience, care and attention are moral phenomena themselves deserving of more careful attention.

Notes 1 A text that has received a great deal of renewed attention in that many readers take it to have predicted something like the rise of populism and Trump. 2 Rorty and Edmundson were colleagues at the University of Virginia just before the time of these books and prominently acknowledge each other in them.

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3 Ray Brinkman, the intellectual property lawyer, and Dorothy Cazaly, his partner, are perhaps an exception to this, introduced as examples of the dictum: “They’re not hard to fnd: two people for whom trees mean almost nothing” (64). Though they are converted, they never join the protests; rather, their main function is to allow Powers to include ruminations on the question of whether trees should have legal standing (e.g., 247ff). 4 Chodat was one of Rorty’s last students at Stanford. 5 As this article was going to press, Simard’s own book, Finding the Mother Tree, was just being published. 6 See also CIS, 196. 7 Rorty embraces Bjorn Ramberg’s distinction between attributing intentionality to something in order to predict its behavior and conceiving of it as responsive to norms by inviting it into the moral community (Brandom 2000, 351–377). It seems even harder to imagine trees as responsive to norms as having intentions, however. 8 Contrarily, the novel also acknowledges Praeidolia, “the adaptation that makes people see people in all things” (Powers 2018, 393–394). 9 Heidegger 1962, 225ff. I play fast and loose with the distinction between Heidegger’s ontological sense of care and the ordinary phenomenon we are all familiar with, as I take ordinary instances of care to both be possible because of the ontological structure that is Heidegger’s focus and to be the ontic evidence for it. 10 Note that the appeal here is not to the more familiar notions of consciousness, sentience, or free will, all of which Heidegger avoids as loaded with dubious assumptions. 11 In a 1929–1930 lecture course where Heidegger starts to turn away from the anthropocentrism of Being and Time, he describes stones as “worldless,” animals as “poor in world,” human beings as “world-forming,” and asks, “In what way should life, the animality of the animal, and the plant-character of the plant be made accessible to us?” (1995, 176, 179). In the 1947 “Letter on Humanism” he writes, “Of all the beings that are, presumably the most diffcult to think about are living creatures, because on the one hand they are in a certain way most closely akin to us and on the other are at the same time separated from our ek-sistent essence by an abyss” (1993, 230). 12 If there are other beings who are thrown and projecting, and whose own being is at stake for them, in a world and alongside others, etc. (i.e., if all the details of Heidegger’s existential analysis hold true of them as they do us), they too would be Dasein. Being a human being, or possessing subjectivity, are not what is essential, which is why Heidegger avoids all of those familiar terms. 13 This is controversial, and somewhat domesticating, but I take Division One of Being and Time and the existential analytic there to be basically descriptive of the essential structures of Dasein’s being. I then take Division Two to begin to normatively advocate for a particular (if still extremely abstract) form of existing. I thus think that one can go along with the frst division but depart from the details of the second, so one needn’t place as much emphasis on ontological guilt as Rorty does in interpreting Heidegger. 14 Chodat lays out the ways in which Wallace engages, infuenced by the work of his philosophy professor father, with the Deweyan tradition in “The Advanced U.S. Citizenship of David Foster Wallace” (2017, 237–303). Wallace stole the title “Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature” for one of his stories (in Oblivion), though it has never been clear to me what, if any, connection is supposed to be signaled to Rorty. 15 I think critics are wrong to take “This Is Water” as the skeleton key, as they increasingly do, to Wallace’s earlier work as well.

Can Trees Care? 93 16 In what might be an allusion to this scene, Powers has one of his characters, who confuses actuarial science and accounting (2018, 145), walk out of a grandiose lecture (“Insurance is the backbone of civilization,” the lecturer at one point says), called by trees and their greater importance (160). 17 There are again Heideggerian grounds for this claim: against Sartre’s subjective notions of choice and meaning, Heidegger stresses that we fnd ourselves within certain possibilities of signifcance—i.e., certain cultural practices and traditions we didn’t choose.

Works by Rorty PMN. 1979. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton: Princeton University Press. CIS. 1989. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. New York: Cambridge University Press. AOC. 1998. Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth Century America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. PCP. 2007. Philosophy as Cultural Politics: Philosophical Papers, Volume 4. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Other Works Brandom, Robert, ed. 2000. Rorty and His Critics. Oxford: Blackwell. Chodat, Robert. 2017. The Matter of High Words. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dennett, Daniel. 2008. “Astride the Two Cultures: A Letter to Richard Powers, Updated.” In Intersections: Essays of Richard Powers, edited by S.J. Burn and P. Dempsey, 151–160. Champaign: Dalkey Archive Press. Edmundson, Mark. 1997. Nightmare on Main Street. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Hamner, Everett. 2018. “Here’s to Unsuicide: An Interview with Richard Powers.” Los Angeles Review of Books, April 7, 2018. https://lareviewofbooks.org/ article/heres-to-unsuicide-an-interview-with-richard-powers/. Heidegger, Martin. 1962. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper. ———. 1993. “Letter on Humanism.” In Basic Writings, Revised and Expanded Edition. Edited by David Farrell Krell. New York: Harper. ———. 1995. The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics. Translated by William McNeill and Nicholas Walker. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Jamison, Leslie. 2019. Make It Scream, Make It Burn. New York: Little, Brown and Company. Kiem, Brandon. 2019. “Never Underestimate the Intelligence of Trees.” Nautilus, 77, Oct. 31, 2019. Kingsolver, Barbara. 2018. “The Heroes of This Novel Are Centuries Old and 300 Feet Tall.” New York Times, April 9, 2018. Powers, Richard. 2018. The Overstory. New York: Norton. Wallace, David Foster. 2009. This Is Water. New York: Little, Brown and Company. ———. 2011. The Pale King. New York: Little, Brown and Company. Wohlleben, Peter. 2016. The Secret Life of Trees. Translated by Jane Billinghurst. Vancouver: Greystone Books.

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Richard Rorty on the “Too Sane” David E. McClean

Alan Wolfe, in his very useful 2009 book, The Future of Liberalism, wrote, Committed to the proposition that culture offers us human beings no escape from our evolutionary destiny, sociobiologists go out of their way to show that the cultural practices and customs that appear to elevate what is human about us—romantic love, responsibility for future generations, artistic creation, and of course, religion itself—are little more than survival strategies. Moral conduct…is, as [Steven] Pinker puts it, “an innate part of human nature”: it is a by-product rather than a product, an accident of natural forces rather than a humanly created cultural practice. Evolutionary theorists just cannot come out and say that human nature is purposive because that might imply that people make deliberate choices, and if people make deliberate choices, their behavior cannot be so easily predicted by forces more powerful than themselves. We have, it would seem, freed ourselves from a supernatural power only to fnd ourselves enslaved to a natural one. (Wolfe 2009, 44) A few paragraphs later, Wolfe refers to the New York Times’s columnist David Brooks, suggesting an overlap between the sociobiologists’ view just described and Brooks’s own view as a political conservative: The usually perceptive pundit, David Brooks, who presents a conservative point of view in newspapers and television, is therefore correct to view evolutionary biology as supporting the political positions of people on the right end of the political spectrum…. [Brooks] does appreciate the extent to which the idea that we are a species incapable of improving upon what nature bequeaths to us undermines the case for progressive reform, or, indeed, for any attempt to use that artifcial method called “society” to improve the human condition. DOI: 10.4324/9781003208150-10

Richard Rorty on the “Too Sane” 95 [Quoting Brooks here]… “From the content of our genes, the nature of our neurons and the lessons of evolutionary biology, it has become clear that nature is flled with competition and conficts of interest,” Brooks writes in one of his New York Times columns. [Quoting Brooks again, Wolfe goes on]: “Status contests come before humanity, and are embedded deep in human relations.” For Brooks, biology really is destiny [Brooks again]: “Human beings operate according to preset epigenetic rules, which dispose people to act in certain ways. We strive for dominance and undermine radical egalitarian dreams. We’re tribal and divide the world into in-groups and out-groups.” (Wolfe 2009, 46) Brooks wishes, it seems, to argue that nature goes all the way down. It is therefore to indulge in fantasy to think we can shove or tug ourselves, as humans, in a direction that our nature does not incline us to go, and, on this view, it actually inclines us toward dominance rather than toward larger loyalties and more mutual aid. Wolfe sees this so-called science of determinism for what it is, and so a few pages later, he writes, For all the appeals to science in these works of self-incapacity, there is very little scientifc proof. Evolutionary psychology is highly speculative, at least when it comes to the role culture plays in social reproduction.1 (Wolfe 2009, 49) Yet the easy conclusion that we are at the mercy of our genes, or of epigenetic rules, and that we are destined to divide the world—as in the famous Robbers Cave Experiment or as Nazi political theorist Carl Schmitt believed—into in-groups and out-groups, or “friends” and “enemies,” is diffcult to overturn.2 That easy conclusion has taken center stage once again as we note the various recent shifts rightward toward nationalism, from Hungary to Brazil, and from France to the United States. In his acclaimed book, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning, Timothy Snyder, Richard C. Levin Professor of History at Yale University, writes, Hitler’s views of human life and the natural order were total and circular. All questions about politics were answered as if they were questions about nature; all questions about nature were answered by reference back to politics. The circle was drawn by Hitler himself. If politics and nature were not sources of experience and perspective but empty stereotypes that exist only in relation to each other, then all power rested in the hands of he who circulated the clichés. Reason was replaced by references, argumentation by incantation.

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David E. McClean The “struggle,” as the title of [Hitler’s] book gave away, was “mine”: Hitler’s. The totalistic idea of life as struggle placed all power to interpret any event in the mind of the author. (Snyder 2015, 8)

Snyder continues: Because Hitler’s worldview required a single circular truth that embraced everything, it was vulnerable to the simplest of pluralisms: for example, that humans might change their environment in ways that might, in turn, change society. If science could change the ecosystem such that human behavior was altered, then all of his claims were groundless. Hitler’s logical circle, in which society was nature because nature was society, in which men were beasts because beasts were men, would be broken…. [Hitler saw Germany’s push for technological dominance] as a fulfllment of nature’s common struggle, not as a violation of its laws. Technical achievement was proof of racial superiority, not evidence of the advance of general scientifc understanding. “Everything that we today admire on this earth,” Hitler wrote, “the scholarship and art, the technology and inventions, are nothing more than the creative product of a few peoples…” No race, however advanced, could change the basic structure of nature by any innovation. Nature has only two variants: the paradise in which higher races slaughter the lower, and the fallen world in which the lower races deny higher races the bounty they are due and starve them when possible. (Snyder 2015, 9–10) Richard Rorty had no use for any form of deterministic thinking, whether in the form of epigenetic rules or Hitlerian claims that we can never rid ourselves of the beast within, the beast that is apt to be, and sanctioned to be, red in tooth and claw since that is its natural state. For Rorty, Godsurrogates, such as the ones described by Wolfe, Brooks, and Hitler, come in many other varieties—dialectical materialism, the Freudian “unconscious,” and genes and epigenetic rules that determine the fates of individuals, societies, and civilizations, and which reduce all human life and all human culture to no more than a struggle to “survive” in the most basic sense of the word. Yet Rorty was aware that the facile and easy reductionist explanation of human psychology and social intercourse seemed to be diffcult to displace, very much like the concept of race or the belief in the incapacity of women for politics. For many, it appeals to the desire to boil down the complexity of the world to a few simple and manageable bites that we take as ultimate or foundational truths, with which we can create a few generalizations about other human beings that allow us to manage

Richard Rorty on the “Too Sane” 97 our lives and the dangers that they, those other human beings, supposedly represent. For these persons, there must be an essence to things, something that is the taproot of the multiplicity of human encounters and creations, a basic, irresistible principle that can’t be ignored. Political and social conservatives tend to see this irresistible principle in something called “human nature,” which is supposedly given scientifc support in the speculative conclusions of evolutionary biology/psychology (which conclusions are to be taken seriously because they come, after all, out of biology and psychology departments rather than humanities departments) and which are only content when Ravel’s “Bolero,” Beethoven’s “Eroica,” Carpeaux’s “Ugolino,” and Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” are understood as no more than convoluted alleyways and sideroads for the successful transmission of genes—or are by-products rather than intentional spiritual products of culture and civilization (or are by-products rather than ars gratia artis or ars gratia homines). As Rorty saw it, while human beings can no more break free from their basic genes-based desire for continued life, we, as rational animals, need not think of ourselves as determined by them or answerable to them in a way that reduces us to a few predicates, caught up with forces of cause and effect rather than reasons for acting or refraining from action— reasons often based upon complicated cultural value commitments that, sometimes, have little to do with somatic survival. Rorty rejected the notion that we are fated to engage in a base animal struggle, and he replaced the notion of struggle against the world with the notion of an ongoing, open-ended project of self-creation. He referred to the successful human being not as one who struggles against others but as he or she who is engaged in a lifelong project of weaving and reweaving a self out of his or her continual engagements with the natural world, other people, and cultural productions and artifacts. The notion that one is responsible (to oneself) to engage in this project of self-creation—a ceaseless project, unto death—is at the heart of political liberalism and its more narrowly focused philosophical cousin, libertarianism. There is no essential self that you fnd through a project of seeking, but there are nonessential selves that you cobble together through the process of self-creation and reinvention.

Liberals: The “Too Sane” While conservatives such as Brooks and fascists such as Hitler are captured, to varying degrees, by the notion of a human essence from which none can break free (which entails a view of the world as an authority that dictates our paths rather than sets various conditions for them), Rorty was well aware of liberals’ own tendency toward a different kind of error—i.e., the fantasy of steady progress toward a more egalitarian society, a fantasy that for some was borrowed from Hegel who told us

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that world history was but progress of the consciousness (“spirit”) of and toward freedom.3 In the chapter in CIS titled “The Last Intellectual in Europe: Orwell on Cruelty,” Rorty wrote, addressing Orwell’s 1984 character O’Brien, O’Brien, the well-informed, well-placed, well-adjusted intelligent, sensitive, educated member of the Inner Party, is more than just alarming. He is as terrifying a character as we are likely to meet in a book. Orwell managed, by skillful reminders of, and extrapolations from, what happened to real people in real places—things that nowadays we know are still happening—to convince us that O’Brien is a plausible character-type of a possible future society, one in which the intellectuals had accepted the fact that liberal hopes had no chance of realization. Our initial defense against this suggestion is that O’Brien is a psychologically implausible fgure. In this view, the only torturers are insensitive, banal people like Eichmann, Gardus, and Paduck. Anybody who has O’Brien’s “curiously civilized” way of settling his spectacles, just couldn’t have the intentions O’Brien professes. O’Brien is a curious, perceptive intellectual—much like us. Our sort of people don’t do that sort of thing. Orwell showed us how to parry this initial defensive move when he said of H.G. Wells that he was “too sane to understand the modern world”…. Orwell was priding himself on having the imagination to see that history very well might not go the way he wanted it to go, the way Wells thought that it was bound to go. One can see the point of saying that Wells was “too sane” by imagining an optimistic Roman intellectual living under the Antonines and occupied with charting the progress of humanity from the beginnings of rational thought in Athens to his own enlightened time. He happens to get hold of a copy of the recently collected and edited Christian Scriptures. He is appalled by the psychological implausibility and moral degradation of the fgure called “Jesus,” for the same reasons that Nietzsche was later to be appalled. When told by an imaginative friend that efforts to emulate this fgure may permeate empires larger than Rome’s, and may be led by men “who consider themselves enlightened and progressive,” he is incredulous. As his friend remarks, he is too sane to grasp the possibility that the world may swerve. (CIS, 184) In these passages, Rorty was sending us a warning. He had, elsewhere, warned us against God-surrogates which included genes and epigenetic rules that supposedly had the power to rob us of our agency, of our capacity to reweave new selves out of old ones. He warned us against construing human beings as “essentially” animals caught up in a constant

Richard Rorty on the “Too Sane” 99 struggle against others and for our survival, as Hitler had construed human beings. And in these passages from CIS, he is warning us that the discourses and narratives by and through which we navigate the world, and the events they produce, may be very different than what we imagine. The horrors and upheavals of the twentieth century, and for that matter of the twenty-frst, may serve to remind us that we must not be lulled into or otherwise adopt a view that is driven by the assumption that “such and such can’t happen, for it is too evil, too weird, or too out of joint with the way things are,” or, as regards politics, to call upon the title of Sinclair Lewis’s prescient book, that “it can’t happen here.” At best, such views should be received as childish—at worst, they should be received as a historicist, irresponsible, and perhaps complicit in the occurrence of the unimaginable thing that supposedly “can’t happen,” whether “here” or “there.” But it is one thing to warn us that the world may swerve and against the dangers of being too sane to believe it and another to try to manage the swerves intelligently so that they may be a bit more predictable and a bit less damaging. In my view, progressives/liberals are sometimes complicit in both the creation and the severity of these swerves, and far less oblivious and less innocent as regards their approach and unfolding than we would like to think. We in fact, at least at times, cocreate the conditions for the swerves by truncating or disallowing respectful dialogue with those with whom we disagree—i.e., in our failure to do something else that Rorty admonished us to do: keep the conversation going. Keeping the conversation going does not mean keeping collections of monologues going, where we are talking past one another, sometimes in clouds of self-certainty, sanctimony, and censoriousness. Keeping the conversation going requires that we stretch ourselves by means of the cultivation and employment of social imagination and the virtue of magnanimity to see the good in the other’s lifeworld, sentiments, political commitments, metaphysics, or religious convictions. We are, often, so eager to be right and so ensconced in our own echo chambers that we fail to fashion what Rorty in one essay called a “wishy-washy consensus”4 that will allow us to continue our strivings, together and despite our differences, the alternative being that we conduct ourselves so as to weaken or sever the ties that bind us into a single political community. The fashioning of the wishy-washy consensus that Rorty was referring to when he used that phrase concerned abortion, but it could concern other issues with which we disagree with our fellow citizens—the level of federal spending, the size of the military, or the regulation of commerce, to name but a few. And fashioning such consensus does not mean merely fashioning a modus vivendi, although it certainly entails or at least does not exclude that, but it also means humbling ourselves before another fnite, fallible human being whose views just might be our own one day, as we too may swerve.

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I don’t agree with the evolutionary biologists that biology goes all the way down, but I do believe it goes down pretty damned far and that there are tugs and shoves toward general types of behavior. Not all human nature talk is illicit or nonsensical. This to me seems sophomoric to say, yet it, apparently, has to be said. Likewise, I don’t agree with Rorty when he says that “socialization…goes all the way down” (CIS, 185), though it goes down pretty damned far—down, at least, to where it starts to bump up against those tugs and shoves, the tugs and shoves of raw drives for sex, food, physical security, and membership simpliciter. Rorty—who at least once, in a reply to philosopher Raymond Boisvert, admitted that he overstated his case5—seems, in his writing, to fetishize and overstate human malleability, just as the evolutionary biologists fetishize and overstate the power of molecules to dictate our fates. If that is so, then the Rortyan liberal and the Brooksean conservative might be able to fnd some common ground if they step away from their respective reductionisms. In doing so, they might be able to acknowledge the utility of the others’ general point of view, and they might make it less likely for both leftist and reactionary fantasies to lead to wild pendulum swings and swerves in the public culture and in our politics. The Brooksean conservative would have to admit that while human perfectibility (a notion that is a bugbear for conservatives) may be a bridge too far, interesting and benefcial improvements in habits and social institutions are a relatively common occurrence in the liberal “West,” just as it is elsewhere. The old conservative saw that castigates liberals for believing in human perfectibility becomes a canard or straw man, and the only criticism that can remain concerning liberals is that we tend to be a bit too optimistic about the possibility for shaping liberal souls to do the right thing absent external coercion. Conversely, the Rortyan liberal would come to understand that the “fesh” does have a tendency to tug and shove and that prudence requires that this be acknowledged. With these commonsensical concessions made, a new discourse—a sagacious discourse—becomes possible. Cosmopolitan fantasies get tamed by recognizing the necessary work of local civil society institutions, embedded in particular histories and cultural milieus, as political philosopher and political theorist Chris Brown insists is necessary for any kind of tenable cosmopolitanism to emerge (a view shared by, among others, Michael Sandel, Amitai Etzioni, Charles Taylor, and Alasdair MacIntyre).6 Likewise, nationalist fantasies get tamed by conservatives fnally recognizing all the ways that our cultures are bricolages cobbled together out of others, with none being “pure,” for purity is a hallucination induced by an insuffcient grasp of temporality, complexity, and social intercourse (a point driven home repeatedly by cosmopolitan philosophers such as Kwame Anthony Appiah and Martha Nussbaum). In the hands of the crazed revolutionary or rabid reactionary, it is a dangerous hallucination indeed.

Richard Rorty on the “Too Sane” 101 We would do well, and avoid some of the radical swerves, if we spent more time listening and less time monologuing; more time assuring our interlocuters that they are being heard, and less time preening about the rightness or righteousness of our positions; more time extending a little mercy and leeway, and less time keeping our countrymen on various “hooks”; more time acknowledging our common values and less time dividing the country up into coastal urban elites and heartland fyover states. This is not an easy thing to do, especially in the present moment, but there are examples that show us that it is possible, even if the goal is not total agreement or aufheben. We are caught up in a moment (a dangerous moment), here in the United States, in which we are, as the journalist Carl Bernstein said recently, in the midst of a “cold civil war” in which getting saddled or branded as one of the enemies happens with far too much alacrity.7 There are also many skirmishes taking place behind each of the battle lines, in the camps themselves—on the left, between those who are “woke” and those “boomers” who are supposedly still slumbering, for example; on the right, between those who are for the utter outlaw of abortion and those who make room for at least some exceptions. Both “capitalism” and “socialism” are, in the various trenches, dirty words, words that have become weaponized.

The Sagacious Turn Calling upon Rorty’s nominalist preferences, I think we would do well to drop some of the words we use in these cultural and political wars, battles, and skirmishes—words like “socialism” and “capitalism” and perhaps even “diversity” and “security,” even where our general political commitments abide. We do that by coming to recognize that these words have become too saddled with misunderstanding and so have become more trouble than they are worth. We do that by making what I shall call the sagacious turn, a turn that the early pragmatists foresaw as the best way to move an open society forward and which Rorty, unfortunately, construed and reframed as a turn that could only happen by moving away from ontotheology and metaphysics. With an eye toward psychology, shared values, and utility, the sagacious turn is a turn toward functionalism and practical outcomes and calls for us to use theoretical commitments as mental organizers and checks on the consistency of our policy proposals rather than as fnal arbiters. The slate of weaponized words that are so often deployed and which are, too often, rooted in theories as fnal arbiters, might best be replaced by a series of questions and assertions, questions and assertions that are very much in the spirit of Rorty’s hope (as well as James’s and Dewey’s before him) that we can create and deepen solidarity and “fraternity” across difference. The questions might include these: how can we have better and more honest markets that allow more people to have a piece of the pie? Which of our

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citizens would you abandon to the vicissitudes of human existence and which saved from those vicissitudes? At what point have I paid enough in taxes to avoid the charge of freeriding? These sorts of practical and functionalist questions would replace the ongoing and now hackneyed critiques of “capitalism,” “globalism,” “nationalism,” and “neoliberalism” (etc.) utilizing Marxist or critical theory or libertarian or conservative lenses.8 As for the assertions, they might include these: we’d be better off making sure reentering former felons get to drop the stigmas of their past so that they can participate as full citizens in society; we’d be better off if we stopped looking at Muslims and atheists as kinds of human beings rather than as people committed to different kinds of metaphysical experiments; selling thousands of haircuts and selling thousands of cell phones, and the private ownership of the businesses that are responsible for such sales, are to be construed as something illicit or morally questionable only when they create externalities and social dislocations that are not remedied. These assertions would replace or at least get deployed pari passu with assertions such as, “America is a racist society,” and “We need to pursue social justice more intentionally.” The questions and assertions are not set forth as a proposal to abandon theory but rather to ground it in practical considerations. Sagacity is not the same as any of the aforementioned -isms. Sagacity, as is the case with Rorty’s notion of “fraternity,” isn’t something about which one can cobble together a philosophical theory. It is something that one can attempt to practice. Those who practice it are not “sages” in any highfaluting sense; they are merely people who are trying to understand the human condition frst as it is and then as we wish it to be; to understand both the limitations on and the possibility of change; to understand the existential pressures of being human and the psychological, spiritual, and material needs of people in view of our natural condition; and who seek to suggest that we move toward forming as much consensus as is possible under the circumstances, over the long-term, based on what Brandom called “the game of giving and asking for reasons.” Sagacity does not seek to create believers or atheists; or to cut the world into historicists, on one side, and metaphysicians, on the other; or into commonsensical materialists and utilitarians, on the one hand, and ontotheologians, on the other. It seeks to create comity, fraternity, empathy, and solidarity as we all travel on toward our deaths. Sagacity is not self-righteous, but rather it prefers persuasion and conversation over aspersions, scarlet-lettering, and humiliation. It forgives what Rorty called “honest mistakes” on the part of our leaders and public servants rather than consigning those leaders to the fames of public ridicule and banishment. It prefers improvement to the pursuit of fantastic perfection and utopias. It recognizes that none of us can be perfectly sagacious, but it holds that our decisions, votes, and policies will be wiser if we, collaboratively, implement the preceding perspectives and attitudes.

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Jack, the Dog For me, Rorty remains one of the sages of the twentieth and twenty-frst centuries, and his insights, even when he has overstated his case, continue to effervesce in my mind as I survey the current state of American politics and human social intercourse more broadly. This notion of people being “too sane” (too unimaginative, too self-certain, too psychologically immature) to grasp that the world may swerve is an important piece of wisdom bequeathed to us by a philosopher very well aware of the contingencies of history. It is also a clever way to express the idea of that contingency. Indeed, Rorty’s style—his way of framing and explicating the virtues of liberalism—matters, for it creates, at least for many of us who have been his students and serious readers, a hospitable feld that makes pleasant the idea of revisiting his texts. In his essay, “Grandeur, Profundity, and Finitude,” in his fnal volume of papers, PCP, Rorty takes a jab at the romantics. He wrote, The romantic often tells us that what is needed is authenticity rather than argument, as if the fact that she has had a new idea were enough to exempt her from the responsibility of explaining the utility of that idea. (PCP, 86) In that same spirit, let me suggest that Rorty himself did not fully deliver. He was right that the world may swerve, but it is not enough to remind us of this fact. As professional or just citizen historians, we have an obligation to better understand those conditions or ideas that led or may lead to the swerve and then to employ “the method of intelligence,” as Dewey put it, to engage in the critical projects of political risk management that might make those swerves less severe, and less deadly, and if we’re lucky, to avoid the bad swerves—such as the swerve toward Nazism or Trumpism—altogether. I want to suggest that philosophers and other intellectuals can do this by stepping outside of the frames of discourse that lead to the weaponization of words and ideas, such as just sketched, reclaiming the old notion that the primary production of philosophy is, or at least can be, sagacity. It is, I believe, sagacity that led Rorty to write, [F]or pragmatists intellectual and moral confict is typically a matter of beliefs that have been acquired in the attempt to serve one good purpose getting in the way of beliefs that were developed in the course of serving another good purpose. (PCP, 81) Moral confict need not be seen as one side signing up with the angels and the other signing up with the demons. I believe we can teach our

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fellow citizens (after we frst teach ourselves) that this is the best way to understand such matters as environmental protection, abortion, criminal justice, commerce, and military spending rather than seeing the attendant issues as a zero-sum political game in which one good must be sacrifced on the altar of the other. Not too long ago, I was visiting a client (I consult to certain businesses, as well as teach philosophy), whom I shall call “Sam,” in a town in Idaho, just outside of Boise. Sam established his business in Idaho after migrating there from a southern state, where he was born and was raised. He told me, while we were just chatting about our lives during a break in our business meeting, that his father taught him to hunt with both a bow and a long gun, mostly elk and deer as I recall, and he was also an avid fowler. As he related his background to me, I withheld my own views about these activities, not only because he was a client, and I was worried about losing fees over moral and political differences, but because I genuinely understood and respected the lifeworld he had come to cherish as a boy and then as a man. I visit Sam’s part of the country often, to go hiking and to shoot pictures rather than deer. Sam’s was the same lifeworld Aldo Leopold (one of my heroes) was raised in, after all. Anyway, Sam offered to buy me lunch, and we hopped into his extended-cab Ford F-150 pick-up. As I got in the cab, I imagined a buck bleeding out in the bed—a saddening thought. Sam asked me what I wanted to eat, and I told him that I was an easy date, that most anything would do, but that I am a vegetarian. He didn’t ask why, and I didn’t tell him. He simply said that he was a fan of Indian food. “Me too,” I said, and we agreed on a local Indian restaurant where having a satisfying vegetarian lunch would be easy. During our drive to the restaurant, Sam’s wife called, and he put her on speaker. “Hey babe, how’s it going?” he asked, not informing her that he was driving with a passenger. She told him that she had to take off from work again because Jack, their aging hunting and birding dog, was bleeding from his urinary tract because of an infection, though he was unable to actually urinate, and so the vet had to catheterize him until the infection was cleared out. I saw Sam wince, and I could see how much he loved Jack and was pained by this news. Every semester, in my ethics class at Rutgers, at least two lectures are devoted to animal welfare and animal rights, and when I saw the compassion Sam had for Jack, I empathized instantly. But it did, of course, occur to me that his compassion for Jack did not extend to the likely scores of other animals which he had caused to die undoubtedly painful deaths since he was a boy. But there was no point in expressing that thought at that moment; no point in berating him for not being “woke” by my lights. Rather, when his wife hung up, I took out my cell phone, and when we came to a red light, I showed him the picture of my own dog, Pip, (which my fellow PETA members would prefer that I refer to as

Richard Rorty on the “Too Sane” 105 my “animal companion,” to remove the notion of ownership), and I told him that not long ago, I was in my bathroom sobbing at the news that Pip might not make it through the night because of an autoimmune disease that had been triggered somehow. We both talked about how deeply we loved our dogs. Then I asked him about his guns and bows, and I told him that I own a 20-gauge shotgun (I didn’t tell him that I never fred it, though I had fred others) and that I was an expert marksman when I was an ROTC cadet at Fort Knox and that my son, Nick, wanted to take up archery, and I asked if he had any ideas about what equipment Nick should buy. Later, in the restaurant, while I was eating my dahl and lentils, Sam volunteered, quite out of the blue, “You know, I didn’t vote for Trump.” I didn’t express my deep antipathy for Mr. Trump, though it was rising in my throat like lava in a volcano. But this was not the time for eruptions. I replied, simply, “Me neither,” and took another sip of my water, and Sam and I went on to discuss Jack and Pip and his business and places to visit in Boise. The possibility for a further conversation was thus preserved, rather than blocked, for I got the impression that we genuinely liked each other. At least for the moment, we both saw a piece of ourselves in the other and neither had cause to believe that the other was irredeemable, that one of us had signed up with the angels, the other with the demons.

Notes 1 This critique of evolutionary psychology was proffered very compellingly and much earlier by philosopher Mary Midgely in her book Evolution as Religion (2002). 2 Carl Schmitt (2008), The Concept of the Political (Expanded Edition). University of Chicago Press. Originally published in 1932. 3 G.W.F. Hegel (2012 [1837]), Philosophy of History. Mineola, New York: Dover Publications; Reissue edition. 4 Richard M. Rorty (1998), “A Defense of Minimalist Liberalism,” in Democracy’s Discontents: Essays on American Politics, Law, and Public Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press). 5 See Rorty's "Reply to Boisvert" (Rorty 2010). 6 Chris Brown (2010), “Cosmopolitanism, World Citizenship and Global Civil Society,” in Practical Judgement in International Political Theory: Selected Essays (United Kingdom: Taylor Francis Group), 207. 7 Chris Cuomo interview of journalist Carl Bernstein (March 2, 2019), at https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2019/03/02/carl-bernstein-trump-coldcivil-war-sot-cpt-vpx.cnn, accessed November 1, 2019. 8 John Dewey, one of Rorty’s intellectual heroes, was aware of the nettlesome nature of some of our words. In his essay “Search for the Public,” in The Public and Its Problems (1927), Dewey wrote, “The concept of the state, like most concepts which are introduced by ‘The,’ is both too rigid and too tied up with controversies to be of ready use. It is a concept which can be approached

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by a fank movement more easily than by a frontal attack. The moment we utter the words ‘The State’ a score of intellectual ghosts rise to obscure our vision.” Indeed, and so it is with the words listed here, and there are more than a few others.

Works by Rorty CIS. 1989. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. New York: Cambridge University Press. PCP. 2007. Philosophy as Cultural Politics: Philosophical Papers, Volume 4. New York: Cambridge University Press. Rorty, Richard. 1998. “A Defense of Minimalist Liberalism.” In Debating Democracy’s Discontents: Essays on American Politics, Law, and Public Philosophy, edited by Anita L. Allen and Milton C. Regan Jr. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2010. “Reply to Boisvert.” In The Philosophy of Richard Rorty, edited by Randall E. Auxier and Lewis Edwin Hahn, 572–573. Chicago: Open Court.

Other Works Brown, Chris, ed. 2010. “Cosmopolitanism, World Citizenship and Global Civil Society.” In Practical Judgement in International Political Theory: Selected Essays. United Kingdom: Taylor Francis Group. Dewey, John. 1927. The Public and Its Problems. New York: Henry Holt & Company. Hegel, G.W.F. 2012 [1837]. Philosophy of History. Mineola, New York: Dover Publications. Midgely, Mary. 2002. Evolution as a Religion. London: Routledge. Schmitt, Carl. 2008 [1932]. The Concept of the Political. Expanded Edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Snyder, Timothy. 2015. Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning. New York: Tim Duggan Books. Wolfe, Alan. 2009. The Future of Liberalism. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

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Scientifc Method and Moral Virtues Stéphane Madelrieux

This chapter belongs to what Chris Voparil has called the third wave of Rorty-Dewey interpretation (Voparil 2014). The purpose of this new wave has been to fnd deeper connections and productive differences between the two pragmatist philosophers rather than faulting Rorty for having systematically misunderstood Dewey’s thinking. The need for a new method in philosophy is undoubtedly the second most contested issue between Rorty and Dewey, the frst being the central role given to the idea of experience.1 On the face of it, familiar readers of Dewey would have good reason to be suspicious of Rorty’s attempt to put forward a “pragmatism without method” (ORT, 63). They would fnd the very idea preposterous that Dewey’s experimentalist pragmatism could be improved if we were to dissociate it from any move to promote the experimental scientist “as a model for the rest of culture” (ORT, 64). Indeed, if Dewey’s whole project had been about transferring the experimental method, which accounts for the successes of modern science, to the resolution of moral problems and value conficts, Rorty’s reading may be seen as betraying the core of Dewey’s pragmatism. Furthermore, if one recalls that frst and foremost, pragmatism was not a philosophical doctrine for Peirce and James but a method for making philosophical doctrines clear, Rorty’s proposition would imply a radical departure from classical pragmatism in general. However, in this chapter, I intend to stress the continuity between Dewey’s project and Rorty’s ethics by making two main points concerning the relationship between the scientifc method and moral virtue. The frst consists of downplaying the importance of method in classical pragmatism in order to make room for the more general idea of “attitude,” which is more adapted to Rorty’s way of thinking. The second consists of asserting that for both Dewey and Rorty, the philosophical value of the scientifc method, which must be encapsulated in the pragmatist attitude, is primarily ethical and cultural.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003208150-11

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From Method to Attitude in Classical Pragmatism Peirce, James, and Dewey believed that above all, pragmatism should be identifed with a philosophical method rather than any specifc outcomes, such as philosophical doctrines and concepts, including the theory of truth. Peirce indeed writes that pragmatism “is merely a method of ascertaining the meaning of hard words and of abstract concepts. All pragmatists of whatsoever stripe will cordially assent to that statement” (Peirce 1998, 400). Nevertheless, method is not a fnality for the classical pragmatists, who defne their pragmatic method in terms of attitudes and ways of thinking. By making this distinction between attitude, method, and doctrine, they do not propose to radically dissociate method from any material content, nor do they suggest advocating a general philosophical attitude that exists independently from any specifc rules and procedures of method.2 They do however insist on the primacy of method over doctrine, and the primacy of attitude over method. In their eyes, the pragmatic value of any doctrine and any method resides in the intellectual attitudes, dispositions of mind, and general ways of thinking that such doctrines and methods incarnate and propagate. This is why Peirce’s distinction between science and other enterprises is not based on any particular theory or method but on the attitude of the scientist, which Peirce characterizes as “the will to learn” and as never being “satisfed with what you already incline to think” (Peirce 1998, 48).3 The scientifc method is superior to what he calls the method of tenacity, the method of authority, and the a priori method because the scientifc method encourages us to question what we are already of a mind to think. Its value is not based on any intrinsic cognitive quality it might possess: it is good only insofar as it embodies the will to avoid blocking the road of learning by prematurely fxing our beliefs and protecting them from the surprises of experience. Dewey also saw the dangers of adhering to the level of method alone, as this ignores the more general attitude and spirit needed to breathe life into method. The frst diffculty is that there is no such thing as the experimental method in science containing a specifc set of rules and procedures that can be applied to any object whatsoever and thus be transferred to philosophical inquiries. In opposition to methodological reductionism or monism, Dewey claims that every scientifc inquiry has to employ the method appropriate to its subject matter so that there are as many methods as there are subjects. His proposal to transfer the experimental method to the resolution of human problems should not be read as a positivistic attempt to bring philosophy and human sciences into the fold of natural sciences by considering the method of experimental physics as the one true cognitive method. Rather, as he explains, the word “method” is italicized as a precaution against a possible misunderstanding which would be contrary to what is intended. What

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is needed is not the carrying over of procedures that have approved themselves in physical science, but new methods as adapted to human issues and problems, as methods already in scientifc use have shown themselves to be in physical subject matter.4 (Dewey LW 16, 379) Far from seeing this extension as a way to reduce human science to natural sciences, for Dewey, it is a development of the methods of natural sciences and a growth that frees these methods from the restrictions necessitated by the specifc constraints of physical objects. This continuous extension of methods from nature to human experience is not to be confused with their identity, as it allows for “such modifcations, of course, as the subject itself entails” (Dewey MW 3, 166). By and through such an extension, the meaning of “experimental method” and “science” would themselves be changed, enlarged, and enriched—they would acquire a human signifcance, hence making them available for everybody, and not only the trained scientist.5 If all experimental sciences do not share a single rule of method or a specifc procedure that would be a necessary and suffcient condition for them to be termed a science, they do nevertheless share what the pragmatists have referred to as an experimental “spirit” or “attitude.” Dewey’s project was thus to draw on the experimental attitude of natural sciences in order to frame distinctive methods that can be adjusted to the specifcities of human problems as opposed to mechanically applying the procedures of experimental physics to these same problems. For such a project there has to be a distinction between experimental methods and experimentalism as an attitude. More precisely, this distinction should arise because of the very project of extension itself. The need to carry over scientifc method into human matters allows us to dissociate specifc methods from the general attitude and frees this attitude from its restricted applications to physical matters: it is now made available for other uses. By extending natural scientifc methods into methods for solving human problems, science is made into an attitude and hence will not be identifed with any specifc procedures. There is a second danger that justifes the distinction between method and attitude, and interestingly, the reason for this distinction is particularly well set forth by Dewey in his revised edition of How We Think from 1933—the version that Rorty would go on to preface for the Collected Works edition in a text elaborating on his idea of a “pragmatism without method.” The 1909 edition of How We Think was where Dewey frst introduced what he would thereafter refer to as the scheme of inquiry, which structures every act of refective thinking in a series of fve pedagogical steps: “(i) a felt diffculty; (ii) its location and defnition; (iii) suggestion of possible solution; (iv) development by reasoning of the bearings of the suggestion; (v) further observation and experiment

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leading to its acceptance or rejection” (Dewey MW 6, 236–237). Some 30 years later, this chapter would form the core of his Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (Dewey 1938; LW 12). If one could pinpoint a text where Dewey seems to want to determine a universal algorithmic method, that were it to be followed step by step, would warrant the cognitive assertibility of its conclusion on any given subject matter, this would be the text. Indeed, Rorty has this exact text in mind when he writes, “‘Logic’, conceived as Dewey conceived of it, is a subject not worth developing” (Rorty 1985, 41). However, when faced with what he considered as mechanical interpretations of his scheme of inquiry, Dewey, in the revised edition of How We Think, stresses that there is nothing sacred about the fve steps. There are certain cases where steps may be left out, others expanded, two telescoped together, etc. Generally speaking, we should not talk about successive steps that are external to each other. An act of refective thinking, like a refex action, is more of a circuit than an arc, so the steps are closer to being aspects of a single whole where each aspect stimulates and determines the others. To present each aspect as a rule complete in itself would be contrary to the very idea of refective thinking: “no set rules can be laid down in such matters. The way they are managed depends upon the intellectual tact and sensitiveness of the individual” (Dewey LW 8, 207). It is important to recall that the book was written to introduce the logic of inquiry to educators. When a child only learns to apply the steps from the scheme of inquiry to any problematic situation as if the steps were a succession of rigid rules that must be followed, refection is lost. The child would not learn how to think—i.e., s/he would not acquire good habits of refection. A method is not suffcient in itself, as there is always the possibility of its rules being applied mechanically rather than refectively and intelligently. Intelligence and refection should therefore not be identifed with any specifc method but with a certain way of using any method or rule. From this point of view, scientifc methods are on a par with doctrinal bodies of knowledge: they are resources to be used by a person-in-situation. If a student learns a new method without adopting the refective attitude that would enable him or her to apply its rules and procedures intelligently to a particular situation rather than applying them mechanically and externally without regard to the specifcity of the situation, s/ he would block the road to his or her learning (intellectual growth) as much as a student who learns information by rote from a textbook. The introduction of a laboratory into schools is thus far from suffcient to ensure that students acquire a scientifc attitude, as such an attitude does not automatically spring from the sole use of scientifc instruments and techniques. Learning is not just doing; it is doing in a certain way, and this way allows the student to continue to learn: [A] student may acquire laboratory methods as so much isolated and fnal stuff, just as he may so acquire material from a text-book. One’s

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mental attitude is not necessarily changed just because he engages in certain physical manipulations and handles certain tools and materials. (Dewey MW 6, 75) The attitude Dewey talks about is a complex system of intellectual dispositions, such as open-mindedness, integrity, and eagerness for learning new things, all of which are listed in the revised edition of How We Think. These dispositions must be taught to students over and beyond any specifc methods and subject matter, not only because their greater generality makes them useful in other situations but also because students will henceforth be able to correct the methods and doctrines they have already acquired. Indeed, how should a given method be revised if there is no existing disposition to improve it and to turn each of its applications into an experiment that tests its worth? Therefore, dispositions of experimental attitude prevent the method and its rules from becoming a new dogma. Instead of teaching the fve steps from the scheme of inquiry, an educator should aim to shape and develop these general habits of mind: What can be done, however, is to cultivate those attitudes that are favorable to the use of the best methods of inquiry and testing. Knowledge of the methods alone will not suffce; there must be the desire, the will, to employ them (…). If we were compelled to make a choice between these personal attitudes and knowledge about the principles of logical reasoning together with some degree of technical skill in manipulating special logical processes, we should decide for the former. (Dewey LW 8, 136) This last sentence is the closest Dewey will come to proposing a pragmatism without method. Let me rephrase it this way: take care of the experimental attitude, and the methods will take care of themselves.

Scientifc Method without Scientism I believe that the above distinction between method and attitude already helps to smooth out certain divergences between Rorty’s overall orientation and Dewey’s project. We should frst note that “Pragmatism without method” was not intended as a direct objection to Dewey’s idea of logic but as an objection to Sydney Hook’s interpretation of Dewey’s work. The essay was frst published in a volume in honor of Hook, whereupon a “spirited correspondence” developed between the two once Rorty had criticized “the scientistic, method-worshiping side of Dewey” (ORT, 17) given preeminence by Hook. Hook’s emphasis on logical method was in part due to the philosophical context of the time: Hook “saw logical

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empiricism (…) as having a lot in common with Deweyan pragmatism. Like his friend Ernest Nagel, he hoped that a shared respect for natural science might permit some sort of alliance between the two philosophical movements” (Rorty 1995, 40). As a philosopher trying to overcome the shortcomings of logical positivism, Rorty saw this alliance as a weakening rather than a strengthening of pragmatism’s radical perspective. However, the philosophical climate had changed since the 1940s, and the scientistic pretention of logical positivism was being challenged by the internal development of its history, culminating in Kuhn and Feyerabend’s criticisms of the idea that an ahistorical scientifc method could account for scientifc progress. It was also being challenged from the outside by what Rorty saw as a convergent movement within continental philosophy that led to Heidegger and Derrida’s contestation of Husserl’s plan to make philosophy a rigorous science because of their “contempt for the very idea of method” (EHO, 85) being used as a technological means to “enframe” thinking. From this perspective, Paul de Man is to Derrida what Hook is to Dewey: he turns deconstruction into the supposedly correct method for interpreting literary texts instead of embracing it as a therapeutic project for overcoming the binary oppositions of the metaphysical tradition. Rorty’s fear that such a literary method would “freez[e] the historical process of successive reinterpretations by exhibiting the structure of all possible interpretation” (CP, 93) echoes his other fear that applying an ahistorical scientifc method as a template for all rational inquiry to moral problems would “freeze” the imaginative cultural changes capable of making our future different from our past (ORT, 68). Rorty’s attempt to “de-methodize Dewey” (Saatkamp 1995, 53) can hence be understood as a way of resisting Hook’s interpretation in order to maximize the differences between pragmatism and logical positivism just as he had dissociated Derrida from de Man. Nevertheless, we may be grateful to Rorty for endeavoring to separate Dewey’s pragmatism from positivism and yet be wary of his efforts to dispense with the idea of method, as he does “indeed, fnd this notion pretty useless” (Saatkamp 1995, 92). In order to defend Rorty’s point of view here, we should pay attention to the fact that he makes no ahistorical claim about the idea of method. He does not criticize the concept itself because no concept has a fxed and essential meaning apart from its uses. He does however wish to dispense with the prevalent foundationalist application in philosophy of the idea of method. Scientistic philosophers apply the idea of method in a foundational way when they try to isolate ahistorical principles that, if followed, would automatically confer rationality on an inquiry and would thus be the only true path to reality. Notwithstanding, as no concept determines its own application, there is only a historical contingent connection between the idea of method and the idea of philosophical

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foundations, and hence nothing intrinsic to the meaning of method preventing a nonfoundationalist use of it. My contention is that the classical pragmatist’s notion of experimental attitude is precisely what enables a nonfoundationalist conception of method. First, as we have already seen, Dewey does not use “method” in an essentialist way as if we could unify all scientifc enterprises and demarcate them from nonscience due to the presence of some ahistorical methodological principles. Rorty writes, Dewey shared with Aristotle the idea that there was something called “science” which had a nature. Kuhn, I think, has freed us from that notion, and has let us see the various sciences as no more species of a single genus, united by a “method”, than are the fne arts. (Rorty 1985, 41) This however is not true. We have seen that according to Dewey, science is not unifed by a single methodological rule, and furthermore, science, like natural species, is still in the process of growing and has no fxed essence. Extending the method of natural sciences to encompass human problems is something that can, and should be carried out creatively instead of simply applying ready-made, fxed methodological principles invented for other objects of inquiry. Second, Dewey’s use of the idea of method is not foundational, as he does not conceive method as providing us with antecedent principles, which if followed would guarantee the rationality of the result. Rorty rightly noticed that “the whole point of Dewey’s experimentalism in moral theory is that you need to keep running back and forth between principles and the results of applying principles” (ORT, 68). Moreover, and as we have seen, the rationality of any inquiry does not reside in the application of principles that would be rational in themselves and by themselves, but in the way those principles are used. Hence, what Dewey frequently calls the method of intelligence can never “look like an algorithm” (ORT, 68). Science is not a “rule-governed procedure” (Saatkamp 1995, 95) but frst and foremost an intellectual attitude that should prevent scientifc rule-governed procedures from being followed dogmatically—i.e., unscientifcally. Third, if Rorty is willing to dispense with the word “method” for being historically too closely associated with a foundationalist way of thinking, he does not reject the idea of a more general attitude. The most effective point he makes is that “method” in Dewey’s writings is ambiguous, as it is often used to mean something as general as an experimental attitude or something as specifc as techniques and procedures. We have seen however that if Dewey had to choose between a general attitude of mind and technical logical procedures, he would choose the former. Rorty is on the

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exact same page: he prefers a fexible attitude of mind to the idea of a fxed, isolated method: If one takes the core of pragmatism to be its attempt to replace the notion of true beliefs as representations of “the nature of things” and instead to think of them as successful rules of action, then it becomes easy to recommend an experimental, fallibilist attitude, but hard to isolate a “method” that will embody this attitude. (ORT, 66) In his preface for How We Think, Rorty also dissociated the global idea of method into a bad part, which refers to a fxed set of rules, and a good part, which refers to the intellectual dispositions that Dewey recommended as constitutive of the experimentalist attitude: To resolve it Dewey would have to fnd some sort of middle ground between a well-defned procedure—a method in the sense of a set of directions for what to do next, something like a recipe—and a mere recommendation to be open-minded, undogmatic, critical, and experimental.6 (Dewey LW 8, 13) Rorty dismisses the “useless” notion of method by separating it into the two useful notions of general attitude and technical procedure, along with the philosophical promotion of the experimental attitude as being consistent with pragmatism. This separation is in line with Dewey’s own thinking, even if “method” was for him a useful blanket term because it is a helpful reminder that any inquiry requires both general dispositions and special techniques. The dispositions stop the techniques from becoming mechanically-applied algorithms, while the techniques themselves “are the channels through which these attitudes operate to the best advantage” (Dewey LW 8, 136). In any case, Rorty’s proposal is not a correction of a foundationalist scientist relapse on the part of classical pragmatists but the continuation of their efforts to ascend from doctrine to method and from method to attitude. I would call this movement an “ethical ascent” because as well as being intellectual habits of thinking, the dispositions in question are also moral virtues.

Scientifc Inquiry and Moral Virtues The distinction between the many rules and procedures specifc to any practice (scientifc practices included) and the general dispositions of mind that constitute the “experimentalist attitude” shifts the focus from epistemology to ethics. In his second edition of Ethics (completed just before revising How We Think), Dewey had already presented these same

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habits of inquiry in terms of moral personal dispositions—traits of character to be cultivated.7 Rorty, once again, concurs: “[S]cientifc method” is a name for an unfndable middle ground between a set of virtuous habits (the ones which Gouinlock says make up “rationality”) and a set of concrete, teachable techniques (…). So I conclude that when it comes to what Gouinlock calls “rationality as a trait of character” we shall never have anything remotely like a set of algorithms, but only some epistemic analogue of Aristotelian phronesis. (Saatkamp 1995, 93–94) Moreover, Rorty maintains the pragmatist idea that the natural scientist can be a model for the rest of culture, without supposing that s/he should serve as an epistemic model as if s/he had devised the one true method of representing a non-human reality that should be applied to human moral problems. S/he can or must be a moral model, as s/he embodies the moral virtue of persuasion and the practice of unforced agreement. From a cultural point of view, modern science is exemplary for having been one of the frst human activities to have institutionalized anti-authoritarian practices and habits of conversation between its members. In short, science is exemplary in our culture, not as a model of cognitive representation but as one of democratic solidarity:8 [“Rational”] means a set of moral virtues: tolerance, respect for the opinions of those around one, willingness to listen, reliance on persuasion rather than force (…) the habits of relying on persuasion rather than force, of respect for the opinions of colleagues, of curiosity and eagerness for new data and ideas, are the only virtues which scientists have (…) the only sense in which science is exemplary is that it is a model of human solidarity. We should think of the institutions and practices which make up various scientifc communities as providing suggestions about the way in which the rest of culture might organize itself. (ORT 37–39) There are thus two ways of understanding the project of extending the method of natural sciences to human problems. Positivism corresponds with the scientistic interpretation according to which the rest of culture should adopt the exact same method, in terms of specifc techniques and procedures, that has been devised by natural sciences to cope with nonhuman nature. Nevertheless, pragmatism defends the ethical interpretation according to which “the rest of culture should exemplify the moral virtues characteristic of the empirical scientist—openness, fexibility, an experimental attitude toward everything” (ORT, 46).9

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This moral point of view was Dewey’s ultimate reason for defending the exemplary role of science in culture. While the scientifc revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries has deeply transformed our conception of nature and humanity and has had a lasting impact on our technological development, its major practical result, claims Dewey, is a moral one. It produced a revolution in our general ways of thinking, which introduced a new type of character—the anti-dogmatic and experimentalist temper—as well as a new kind of conduct—the conduct of inquiry. This new character and conduct, which are contingent and might never have appeared in human history, demonstrate the emergence of a new moral self composed of the complex set of dispositions and habits that are exemplifed in the conduct of inquiry. As Dewey observes, We have been considering science as a body of conclusions. We have ignored science in its quality of an attitude embodied in habitual will to employ certain methods of observation, refection, and test rather than others. When we look at science from this point of view, the signifcance of science as a constituent of culture takes on a new color (…). The chief reason for calling attention to them is the proof they furnish that in some persons and to some degree science has already created a new morale—which is equivalent to the creation of new desires and new ends. The existence of the scientifc attitude and spirit, even upon a limited scale, is proof that science is capable of developing a distinctive type of disposition and purpose (…) Why don’t a great many more persons have this attitude? The answer given to this challenge is bound up with the fate of democracy (…) the future of democracy is allied with the spread of the scientifc attitude. (Dewey LW 13, 165–168) This moral reading of the scientifc revolution casts an entirely different light on Dewey’s project, which now shows strong points of agreement with Rorty’s intention to “modulate philosophical debate from a methodological-ontological key into an ethical-political key” (ORT, 110). First, Dewey did not set out to elaborate a specifc method for social and moral inquiry that would be inspired by the method of natural science; his primary goal was rather to derive from the conduct of scientifc inquiry the morality that is immanent to it, in the form of those epistemic virtues that the scientist embodies. This means that, in contrast to the foundationalist understanding of the project of extension, the logic of inquiry is not a morally and politically antecedent or neutral instrument that would be used as a fulcrum to solve moral and political problems in a rational way. On the contrary, the conduct of inquiry already exhibits a moral commitment to solve problems, whatever these are, in a nonauthoritarian way, as no source of authority exterior or superior to the continuum of

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inquiries itself is acknowledged. The scientifc method Dewey refers to is therefore not a morally and politically neutral instrument. Second, there is no other ethics than this ethics of inquiry: all that is required for moral progress to be possible is for the moral virtues of inquiry to be adopted. The refective dispositions are the one prerequisite for criticizing and reconstructing all our habitual/customary ways of believing and living. The aim of moral philosophy is not to elaborate a body of moral truths but to habituate people to adopt such permanent refective dispositions toward their own habitual ways of life. For Dewey, the ultimate aim of moral philosophy was thus to enable everybody to adopt a moral character, which is not defned in any substantive way but only in terms of second-order habits and dispositions of refection (cf. Dewey LW 6, 162–166; Madelrieux, 2020). Any doctrine that claims to have already reached moral certainty, and hence professes certain defnitive moral truths and methodological principles, would be intellectually and morally wrong because it would instill bad habits of thinking in moral refection—the sorts of habits that may be said to defne the dogmatic character as opposed to the pragmatist attitude. Conversely, there is no special epistemic virtue other than the social and ethical virtues associated with refection. The virtues of inquiry are democratic virtues. The method of democracy, as Dewey repeatedly claimed, is the method of intelligence. This equivalence between science and democracy would have no meaning except for the “ethical ascent” that transforms intellectual virtues into moral virtues (Rorty’s identical claim is that there is no special epistemic rationality other than these moral virtues—no episteme apart from phronesis). In short, there is just one set of virtues in all human practices: the anti-authoritarian virtues of the anti-dogmatic temper. Finally, the question of the relation between science and nonscience is an institutional and political problem rather than an ontological and epistemological problem. For Dewey, the division between science and the rest of culture is the distinction between, on the one hand, a small group of people—scientists—who, in the conduct of their specifc activities, have already tried to adopt and institutionalize this moral attitude and, on the other hand, the vast majority of people (which includes the scientists in their other spheres of activity) who still rely on authoritarian methods. This limitation is all the more restrictive in that science, as a social activity embedded in the networks of other social activities, such as economic activities, where the experimental attitude is less signifcant, is not entirely free to fully develop its anti-authoritarian character. Dewey’s main project was hence to democratize the moral virtues and habits of mind which had been displayed by natural scientists since the sixteenth century: Science itself means the adoption of a certain attitude, the experimental attitude, of a searching, inquiring mind which accepts conclusions only on the basis of evidence. This experimental attitude of mind has

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There is no ontological divide between science and nonscience, just as there is no dualism between nature and human experience. The only division is a cultural one that is socially and historically constructed: [A] situation in which the fundamental dispositions and ends of a few are infuenced by science while that of most persons and most groups is not so infuenced proves that the issue is cultural. The difference sets a social problem. (Dewey LW 13, 167) Dewey’s faith in education was based on the idea that changing the objective arrangements and institutions of schools would provide the best social and intellectual environment for future generations to adopt the personal anti-authoritarian virtues that make both science and democracy come alive. Beyond its theories and specifc methods, science is, or should be above all, like democracy—i.e., a mode of associated life. We could further push the comparison between Rorty and Dewey by entering into the details of the dispositions and by restating their differences regarding this new common ground. We could, for instance, pay attention to the relative role of science and literature in Rorty’s thinking, and his willingness to “poeticize” rather than “scienticize” culture (cf. Rorty ORT, 110). However, I believe that such differences will similarly be downplayed if “to scienticize” is understood in an ethical pragmatist way rather than an epistemological positivist way. For Rorty after all, “from physics to poetry,” culture is a “single, continuous, seamless activity in which the divisions are merely institutional and pedagogical” (ORT, 76). The aim of this chapter has been to show that Rorty’s “pragmatism without method” does not constitute a betrayal of Dewey’s fundamental project of extension, provided we keep in mind both Rorty’s wariness toward the more positivist interpretations of Dewey’s thinking and Dewey’s own ethical understanding of modern experimental science. In a way, all classical pragmatists were concerned by the possibility of converting the experimental method of science into a new dogma that would block the road of inquiry. This is why they imagined that such a method would embed personal dispositions of self-criticism and self-correction. Dewey’s social project of extension was only concerned with generalizing the melioristic dispositions, which were blithely brought into existence with the advent of the modern scientifc revolution to all areas of culture. If I were to put this project in a Rortyan key, I would say that Dewey wanted to consider science as cultural politics.

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Notes 1 It was a major point of contention raised by Sleeper in the symposium Consequences of Pragmatism (see Sleeper 1985, and Rorty 1985 for his replies). See also the volume Rorty and Pragmatism: The Philosopher Responds to His Critics, especially the two essays by Thelma Z. Levine and James Gouinlock with Rorty’s responses (Saatkamp 1995, 37–53, 72–99). 2 For more on this tri-distinction between doctrine, method, and attitude, with a special application to James’s will to believe, cf. Madelrieux (2007). 3 On the distinction between method and attitude in Peirce’s conception of science and philosophy, cf. De Waal (2001, 42–43, 59 and 2013, 102–107) and Anderson (2006, 244–245). 4 The common abbreviations will be used to refer to Dewey’s work: MW or LW (Middle Works or Later Works), volume number, page. 5 See, for instance, his clarifcation of the importance of science for education in Dewey (MW 6, 74–75, 77–78). 6 Cf. also Rorty (PCP 192–193). 7 Compare the list in How We Think (LW 8, 136–138) to the previous one in Ethics (LW 7, 256–259). For earlier formulations, cf. Dewey (MW 5, 363– 379) and (MW 9, 180–186). 8 This point is well made in Tinland (2019). 9 Cf. also Rorty (ORT, 61) and (PSH, 36). On the centrality of virtue for understanding Rorty’s liberalism, cf. Curtis (2015).

Works by Rorty CP. 1982. Consequences of Pragmatism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ORT. 1991. Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers, Volume 1. New York: Cambridge University Press. EHO. 1991. Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers, Volume 2. New York: Cambridge University Press. PSH. 2000. Philosophy and Social Hope. New York: Penguin Books. PCP. 2007. Philosophy as Cultural Politics: Philosophical Papers, Volume 4. New York: Cambridge University Press. Rorty, Richard. 1985. “Comments on Sleeper and Edel,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 21 (1): 39–48.

Other Works Anderson, Douglas. 2006. Philosophy Americana. Making Philosophy at Home in American Culture. New York: Fordham University Press. Curtis, William. 2015. Defending Rorty, Pragmatism and Liberal Virtue. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. De Waal, Cornelius. 2001. On Peirce. Belmont: Wadsworth. ———. 2013. Peirce: A Guide for the Perplexed. London and New York: Bloomsbury. Dewey, John. 1976–88. John Dewey: The Middle Works, 15 vols. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. ———. 1981–91. John Dewey: The Later Works, 17 vols. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

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Madelrieux, Stéphane. 2007. “Can We Secularize the Will to Believe?,” Rivista di Storia della Filosofa Anno LXXII, Nuova Serie (3): 493–512. ———. 2020, “Moral Holism and the Pragmatist Character.” In John Dewey’s Ethical Theory. The 1932 Ethics, edited by R. Frega and S. Levine, 44–59. New York and London, Routledge. Peirce, Charles. 1998. The Essential Peirce. Selected Philosophical Writings, volume 2 (1893–1913), edited by The Peirce Edition Project. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Saatkamp, Herman J., ed. 1995. Rorty and Pragmatism: The Philosopher Responds to His Critics. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press. Sleeper, Ralph W. 1985. “Rorty’s Pragmatism: Afoat in Neurath’s Boat, but Why Adrift?” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 21 (1): 9–20. Tinland, Olivier. 2019. “Richard Rorty: La Science Comme Représentation et Comme Solidarité,” Archives de Philosophie 82 (3): 541–566. Voparil, Christopher. 2014. “Rorty and Dewey Revisited: Toward a Fruitful Conversation,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 50 (3): 373–404.

Part III

Engagements with Moral Philosophy

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Talking with the Better-Looking Animals Richard Rorty on Moral Status Paul Showler

Moral Status and Moral Individualism While almost everyone thinks that it makes sense to talk of wronging a person, few people think that it makes sense to talk of wronging an inanimate object. When Smith smashes Jones’s Ford in a ft of rage, we tend to think that they wronged Jones rather than the Ford. Many contemporary philosophers appeal to the concept of moral status in order to draw a principled distinction between entities to whom we have direct moral obligations and those toward which we do not. As Mary Anne Warren explains, To have moral status is to be morally considerable, or to have moral standing. It is to be an entity towards which moral agents have, or can have, moral obligations. If an entity has moral status, then we may not treat it in just any way we please; we are morally obliged to give weight in our deliberations to its needs, interests, or well-being. Furthermore, we are morally obliged to do this not merely because protecting it may beneft ourselves or other persons, but because its needs have moral importance in their own right. (Warren 1997, 3) While it is usually uncontroversial that most adult human beings possess moral status, disagreement arises when one considers so-called marginal cases, such as nonhuman animals, fetuses or infants, human beings with severe cognitive disabilities, ecosystems, or machines displaying intelligence. Many philosophers who discuss these issues aim to state and to justify the grounds for moral status.1 That is, they aim to specify a set of characteristics, the possession of which confers direct moral consideration. Some writers hold that complex cognitive or emotional capacities—such as autonomy (Kant 1997/1785) and/or self-awareness (Tooley 1972)—confer moral status. Others argue that a less complex (and presumably more widespread) capacity is suffcient, such as sentience (Singer 2009), consciousness (Shepard 2018), having interests (DeGrazia 1996, DOI: 10.4324/9781003208150-13

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2008), or being the subject of a life (Regan 1983). In some cases, the potential for these capacities is taken to confer moral status (DiSilvestro 2010). Finally, there are those who maintain that an entity can possess moral status if it stands in particular biosocial relations to humans (Kittay 2005). Although there are signifcant differences between these proposals, many of them share a commitment to a view called moral individualism. This is the idea that “how an individual may be treated is to be determined, not by considering his group memberships, but by considering his own particular characteristics” (Rachels 2005, 173). Underlying moral individualism is the thought that prejudice and discrimination involve an irrational valuing or devaluing of individuals because of their group membership. This leads individualists to specify a set of nonmoral properties that can provide agent-neutral reasons for certain forms of moral treatment, independently of the groups to which those entities who possess those properties belong (McMahan 2005). Moral individualists tend to operate within what I shall call an implicit realist metaethical stance. This involves a set of commitments associated with what Sharon Street has called realist theories of value, according to which “there are at least some evaluative facts or truths that hold independently of our evaluative attitudes” (Street 2006, 110). Many writers take it for granted that an adequate account of the grounds of moral status will identify a set of properties or relations that confer moral status independently of the practices or evaluative stances that moral agents happen to take. According to this view, questions about the social and cultural contexts in which moral status is conferred are not typically seen as philosophically important. The individualist’s commitment to attitude independence leads them to prioritize rational persuasion as the goal of theorizing about moral status. If an entity’s having moral status depends on attitude-independent facts about it, then it seems plausible that the philosopher’s role is to determine what those facts are and to derive from them principles that can guide ethical decision-making. In adopting this stance, many authors downplay or entirely discount the importance that emotions, sentiments, empathy, and imagination bear in relation to moral status attribution. For moral individualists, failure to attribute moral status in the right way is to be regarded as a failure of rationality rather than as a defciency of imagination or empathy. In suggesting that these commitments represent the default position in the discussions about moral status, I do not deny that there are important exceptions. Philosopher Elizabeth Anderson has argued for a kind of value pluralism with respect to debates about animal welfare, animal rights, and environmentalism. She warns against misleading oversimplifcations about the complexities of human and nonhuman lives and urges philosophers to consider the social and historical relationships within

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which it makes sense to attribute rights in the frst place (Anderson 2004, 280, 289). Another philosopher who rejected the moral individualist’s attitude-independent conception of moral status was Bernard Williams. Arguing against the coherence of the notion of “the cosmic point of view” from which our practices are supposed to have (or fail to have) some sense of ultimate importance, Williams insisted that all of our judgments must be understood and evaluated from our own “human” perspective (Williams 2006, 137). Similarly, several philosophers infuenced by Wittgenstein have criticized moral individualism on the basis of a kind of radical contextualism, according to which the meaning of moral concepts and obligations are inextricably bound up with the practices, standpoints, and forms of life within which they operate (Chappell 2011; Crary 2010; Diamond 1978). My concern in this chapter is not to directly challenge any particular view of moral status or to mount an argument against moral individualism more generally. Rather, I hope to draw attention to a plausible yet overlooked alternative for thinking about these issues. The primary aim of this chapter is to reconstruct an account of moral status that can be found in the work of Richard Rorty. First, I sketch the details of this Rortyan view by showing how it emerges out of two components of his thought: a position called psychological nominalism, which he derived from Wilfrid Sellars, and the account of solidarity, which he developed in CIS. Second, I argue that Rorty’s account is best understood as an expressivist approach to moral status. By this I mean, roughly, that rather than ask what moral status is (or what intrinsic or relational properties properly ground it), Rorty begins by examining the role that the concept plays within our discursive practices—especially in terms of our moral ones— and fnds that it does not perform a straightforwardly fact-stating or descriptive function. In this respect, I think that Rorty’s account of moral status closely aligns with the work of contemporary authors like Huw Price and Simon Blackburn who have drawn attention to some important affnities between pragmatism and expressivism.2 Finally, I conclude by considering some strategies that a proponent of this Rortyan conception of moral status might adopt in response to the likely objection that this position results in a form of subjectivism that precludes substantive criticism of our moral practices.

Rorty’s Account of Moral Status Some philosophers argue that moral status comes in degrees such that the extent to which an entity’s interests ought to be taken into consideration varies in accordance with its having some trait or capacity.3 Others understand moral status as a threshold concept, meaning that all entities who meet some set of conditions ought to be granted equal moral status. A related notion is that of full moral status, which is meant to capture the

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idea that there is a class of entities to whom all moral agents have a suite of stringent and equally applicable moral obligations.4 According to the reconstructed account that I am proposing, Rorty’s work can accommodate these intuitions. First, it suggests that the extent to which something or someone has moral status can be a matter of degree. Second, it specifes a minimal threshold, above which all entities will have moral status (even if only to a limited extent). And third, Rorty’s position can make sense of the notion of full moral status, albeit in a way that differs radically from the standard individualist proposals. My strategy for explaining his view will be to begin with his minimal conception of moral status before turning to his account of full moral status. Finally, I will argue that these serve as two ends of a spectrum. Minimal Moral Status What I shall call Rorty’s minimal conception of moral status is connected to his defense of Wilfrid Sellars’s psychological nominalism, which—in bumper-sticker form—is the idea that “[a]ll awareness…is a linguistic affair” (PMN, 182). In the fourth chapter of PMN, Rorty responds to the worry that this view fails to account for the existence of what Herbert Feigl calls “raw feels”—that is, the kinds of nonlinguistic, subjective experiences that we typically attribute to babies or baboons. The move he makes, following Sellars, is to begin with a distinction between awareness-as-discriminative-behavior on the one hand, and what could be called awareness-as-sapience on the other. Neither sense of awareness is a matter of some “added ingredient” or involves the illumination of some inner light bulb. Rather, both kinds of awareness are best understood as statuses that emerge as the result of a set of shared attitudes of participants engaged in norm-governed sociolinguistic practices (PMN, 187). On the one hand, someone counts as sapient to the extent that she successfully wields concepts, which requires that she is a player in the game of giving and asking for reasons. On the other hand, whether some entity is aware in the sense of being able to reliably respond to its environment also depends on a linguistic community’s preparedness to take a particular stance toward that entity—a matter of their treating it as though it were aware. This is not only true of thermostats and photoelectric cells, but it is also the case with creatures like babies and baboons to whom we attribute sentience or feelings (but with whom we are unable to converse). Of course, we often do draw distinctions between (nonlinguistic) sentience and “mere responsiveness,” but for Rorty, this distinction is still best explained as a function of our attitudes rather than as a discovery about facts concerning those entities. Rorty’s minimal conception of moral status, I claim, emerges out of his discussion of what we are doing when we attribute sentience. In particular, it emerges when he considers the difference between the stance

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we take toward creatures to whom we attribute sentience and the stance we take toward creatures whom we regard as “merely responding.” Like many other philosophers, Rorty recognizes that our sense of moral obligation toward certain creatures is often accompanied by the fact that we attribute sentience to them. But it is his explanation of this connection that makes Rorty’s view a radical and interesting departure from philosophical common sense. As he puts it, [M]oral prohibitions against hurting babies and the better looking sorts of animals are not “ontologically grounded” in their possession of feeling. It is, if anything, the other way around. The moral prohibitions are expressions of a sense of community based on the imagined possibility of conversation, and the attribution of feelings is little more than a reminder of these prohibitions. (PMN, 190, my emphasis) In treating moral prohibitions as expressions of a sense of community, Rorty is making a claim about what we are doing when we attribute moral status. When we refrain from (or insist upon) treating entities in certain ways—that is, in taking ourselves to have obligations toward them—we are not thereby responding to some intrinsic property they have. Rather, we are expressing our imaginative capacity to regard those entities as conversational partners. It is this capacity that explains both why we tend to attribute moral status to certain creatures, but not to others; as well as the fact that we tend to attribute sentience to the former.5 Again, from the perspective of philosophical common sense, this may seem like a bizarre view. So it is, perhaps, ftting that Rorty illustrates it with a bizarre example. That we tend to attribute moral status and sentience to some creatures on the basis of our ability to imagine conversing with them is, he thinks, illustrated by Western cultures’ differential treatment of pigs and koalas. Pigs, as Rorty explains, rate much higher than koalas on intelligence tests, but pigs don’t writhe in quite the right humanoid way, and the pig’s face is the wrong shape for the facial expressions which go with ordinary conversation. So we send pigs to slaughter with equanimity, but form societies for the protection of koalas. (PMN 1979, 190) Although this passage was written over forty years ago, recent events suggest that Rorty’s cultural assessment still carries some weight. In 2019, wildfres ravaged Australia, killing or displacing millions of nonhuman animals. As the catastrophe made headlines around the world, it was arguably the images of desperate, thirsty koalas that captured most vividly the public’s attention. And while these images were instrumental in

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galvanizing widespread donations for animal rescue efforts, it is not as though they generated serious public concern for the livestock slaughtered for human consumption every year—which far exceeds the number of fauna affected by the fres. Rorty’s account provides an explanation of this phenomenon: our moral concern for the koalas is rooted in our imaginative capacity to regard them as conversational partners. This capacity, in turn, is facilitated by their humanoid features. Our culture’s comparative lack of moral concern for other creatures—such as pigs— stems from our comparative inability to imagine talking to them. At frst glance, there seem to be several obvious objections to Rorty’s account. On the one hand, it is plausible to assume that many people attribute sentience to koalas (and perhaps even to pigs as well), along with the accompanying moral prohibitions against harming them, without ever having imagined what a conversation with such creatures would be like. On the other hand, it is conceivable that someone (a lonely farmworker, say) who spends a considerable amount of time talking to nonhuman animals might have no qualms about sending them to the slaughterhouse. Therefore, “imagined conversation” seems to be neither a necessary nor a suffcient condition for conferring moral status. Moreover, there are examples that seem to complicate Rorty’s pig-koala contrast. For instance, suppose it was somehow agreed to be the case that dogs look less humanoid than pigs. Given that, at least in North America, the former do seem to be afforded a higher degree of moral status, this realization would suggest that Rorty’s claim about a correlation between facial shape and conversability is empirically false. These objections miss important nuances of Rorty’s position. First, the point is not that attributing moral status to animals requires actually imagining a conversation with them. It only requires conversation to be an imaginative possibility. I will say more about this later in the chapter. Second, just because a person would be willing to kill and consume a creature with whom they could imagine a conversation, this does not entail that they would thereby afford that creature no moral status. So far, I am only claiming that this aspect of Rorty’s position provides a minimal conception of moral status. That is, Rorty’s claim only requires that the lonesome farmworker would afford the livestock a modicum of moral concern. Finally, while the possibility of imagined conversation may turn out to be most likely in those cases in which, as Rorty’s example suggests, creatures do look especially humanoid, surely this is only one salient and contingent psychological factor among many.6 For instance, the fact that most people (at least in North America) tend to spend more time around dogs than pigs might explain the greater ease with which they could imagine conversing with a canine (and hence their greater readiness to extend moral concern to dogs). Still one might wonder: What are the limits of imagined conversation? If attributions of minimal moral status are a function of our imaginative

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capacities, then couldn’t anything come to have moral status, at least in principle? These questions suggest that Rorty’s view is at best too permissive and at worst entails that moral status attributions are simply a matter of whim. One way to assuage the latter worry is to emphasize that there are constraints on what can be imagined. On Rorty’s Sellarsian account, the possibility of imagined conversation goes hand-in-hand with being able to take the intentional stance. To imagine one’s interlocutor speaking, one must be able to attribute to her a host of beliefs, desires, intentions, and presumably interests. One’s ability to take this kind of stance will, in turn, be conditioned by one’s background beliefs. In particular, it will likely be infuenced by what we know about the creature whose moral status is in question. These factors are, of course, contingent and subject to historical and cultural variation, but they provide constraints nonetheless. What Rorty’s view does rule out is the possibility of shedding one’s background beliefs and values in order to arrive at some perspective that would allow one to decide to whom one has moral obligations as such. Another way of putting this point is to note that it is entirely consistent with Rorty’s view that one’s ability to imagine conversation with a nonhuman animal is—at least to some extent—shaped by one’s beliefs about that creature’s physiology. Where he departs from the moral individualist is in rejecting the idea that such beliefs could ever supply a privileged set of normative reasons, which are binding for any and every agent. One advantage of Rorty’s minimal conception of moral status is its fexibility. By construing minimal moral status attributions as contingent upon our attitudes and practices, his account makes good sense of the fact that such attributions are subject to cultural and historical variation. It allows, for instance, that a culture that adopted animistic beliefs might attribute moral status to aspects of the natural environment without having to conclude that its participants are somehow irrational or mistaken. In this respect, Rorty’s view appears to be consistent with conclusions defended by several environmental philosophers and conservationists, according to which inanimate aspects of the natural environment have moral status (Taylor 1986; Warren 1997). At the very least, Rorty’s position does not rule this conclusion out on a priori grounds. There is, after all, nothing incoherent about imagining a conversation with a river or a mountain. Full Moral Status If this were the whole story, Rorty’s account of moral status would be, at best, incomplete. This is because it would not account for the fact that many of those who are willing to attribute moral status to koalas typically insist that they are justifed in their preferential treatment of humans. That is, it leaves us with neither an account of full moral status nor an account of how moral status might be a matter of degree.

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I want to suggest that Rorty’s account of solidarity can be of help here. Philosophers have typically viewed solidarity as grounded in some shared human essence. On the thoroughly historicized, contingent view of language, selfhood, and community that Rorty endorses, there is simply no space for this idea—although he is happy to admit that it has played an important role historically in producing desirable social change. Rather, drawing from Sellars’s notion of “we-intentions,” Rorty understands solidarity toward others as a matter of one including them within the scope of a “we”—to be able to see them as “one of us” (CIS, 190–191).7 Including others within the scope of a “we” is tantamount to identifying with a group, and it is the totality of such identifcations that comprises a person’s moral identity (CIS, 45). Many people, of course, identify with a multitude of indefnite and changing communities throughout their lives. That these identifcations occasionally confict is a signifcant source of moral dilemmas (PCP, 45). Although I do not think that he ever puts it in exactly these terms, I want to suggest that Rorty viewed the strength of these identifcations as a matter of degree, which depends on the robustness of the narrative description under which an agent comes to pick them out. That is to say, the more concrete and detailed of a story that a person is able to tell regarding their identifcation with some group, the greater the strength or force of that identifcation; and consequently, the greater the ability of that identifcation to produce and sustain obligations. This is why Rorty thinks that simply viewing someone as “a fellow human being” will always be a weaker and less convincing explanation of the basis for one’s moral obligation to them than a thicker or more “local” description such as a family member or a compatriot (CIS, 191). According to this view, to have “full moral status” is to be included within the most robust description of a “we” with which a person currently identifes. Such an identifcation is not “ontologically grounded” but depends on the available vocabulary within which a person can describe or narrate her relationships with others. As Rorty puts it, “[F] eelings of solidarity are necessarily a matter of what similarities and dissimilarities strike us as salient, and that such salience is a function of a historically contingent fnal vocabulary” (CIS, 192). Insofar as these narrative identifcations depend on both a person’s contingent imaginative and emotional capacities, Rorty’s account of full moral status parallels his account of minimal moral status. As I mentioned earlier, these views form two ends of a spectrum: at one end, it is the possibility for imagined conversation that determines the minimal sense in which one is capable of including something or someone within the scope of a “we.” In many cases, these imaginative possibilities will be very dim, allowing for felt identifcations that will only be describable in the vaguest or thinnest of available terms. Consequently, in this picture, we should expect such identifcations to generate relatively weak obligations. But as one’s ability

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to imagine conversation becomes increasingly determinate—perhaps to the extent that this ability is no longer imaginary—it becomes possible for one to offer increasingly richer and more detailed descriptions of one’s relationships to that something or someone. This increased possibility, in turn, carries with it the potential for relatively stronger identifcations and, hence, stronger obligations.

Rorty as Expressivist Having reconstructed Rorty’s account of moral status, I now want to say why I think that it is helpfully understood as a form of expressivism. Expressivists aim to show that some domains of language, while initially appearing descriptive or representational, are better understood as performing some other function—such as voicing attitudes or commitments.8 The Rortyan account sketched in this chapter denies that attributions of moral status are best understood as claims purporting to accurately represent aspects of the world. Instead, it attempts to explain the role that the concept of moral status plays within discursive practices by showing how it functions to express the attitudes and imaginative capacities of moral agents. With this in mind, Rorty’s account of moral status can be restated as follows: Minimal Moral Status: To attribute minimal moral status to an entity is an expression of one’s ability to imagine it as a conversational partner. On the one hand, attributing moral status requires successfully taking the intentional stance toward that entity—being able to attribute to it beliefs and desires. On the other hand, this capacity opens up the potential for including that entity within the scope of a “we.” As one’s ability to narrate one’s relationship to this “we” increases in detail, so too does one’s felt sense of attachment to its members, and hence, so increases one’s sense of obligation. Full Moral Status: To attribute full moral status to an entity is an expression of one’s having included it within the maximally descriptive “we” with which one identifes. It is worth emphasizing that these formulations leave open determinations of what or who has moral status. In this respect, this Rortyan framework is better understood as directed at the question of what we are doing (often implicitly) in attributing moral status than as offering a decision procedure for discerning the scope of our obligations. Moreover, this position departs in several ways from the moral individualist’s implicit realist metaethical stance that I characterized earlier. First, to

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accept Rorty’s view is to reject the idea that an entity can have moral status independently of the moral attitudes of moral creatures. Attributions of moral status, for Rorty, are not so much the result of properly identifying and responding to the properties that entities possess as they are a consequence of our having settled into a contingent set of attitudes and affections. Second, Rorty’s position affords a central place to imagination and moral sentiments insofar as these capacities are implicated in the kinds of narrative identifcations that form the basis of one’s moral identities. Finally, Rorty’s account of moral status is closely connected to a conception of moral progress construed in terms of making rather than fnding. In the fnal chapter of CIS, after explicitly connecting moral progress to increased solidarity, Rorty goes on to explain that “the right way to construe this story is as urging us to create a more expansive sense of solidarity than we presently have. The wrong way is to think of it as urging us to recognize such a solidarity as something that exists antecedently to our recognition of it” (CIS, 196). One advantage of playing up the expressivist dimension of Rorty’s account of moral status is that doing so provides a perspective from which the metaphysical economy of his account can be seen as a theoretical virtue. For Rorty, there is no need to settle questions about what moral status really is or whether there are “moral status facts.” Similarly, his view explains what we are doing when we attribute moral status to others while avoiding substantive metaphysical commitments about, for instance, personhood or potentiality. In this respect, Rorty’s view is a form of naturalism that renders moral status no more mysterious than the human attitudes and basic psychological capacities (such as empathy or imagination) of which it is an expression. Another advantage of construing Rorty’s position in this way is that doing so can avail its proponents of the argumentative resources that expressivists have developed. This is especially important, given the kinds of objections that Rorty’s view would be likely to face. For example, moral individualists are likely to balk at the attitude-dependent nature of Rorty’s account of moral status. A likely objection is that his position threatens to result in a kind of subjectivism, which leaves us unable to engage in moral argument or cultural criticism. Given an implicit realist stance, an entity has moral status insofar as it possesses morally relevant properties capable of providing agent-neutral reasons for treating it in certain ways rather than others. An adequate theory should help us fgure out what these relevant properties are. From this perspective, it is diffcult to see how Rorty’s suggestion (i.e., that we understand attributions of moral status as expressions of our imaginative or sentimental capacities) could allow for agents to be mistaken about the entities to which they owe direct moral consideration. This seems to render people’s views about the scope of their moral obligations immune from rational criticism. Benjamin Sachs, for instance, writes that “purely expressive

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locutions about moral status have no place in theoretical reasoning about the ethics of marginal cases. Once we start engaging in such speech acts, we have given up on theory and taken up rhetoric” (Sachs 2011, 99).9 While a detailed treatment of these issues is beyond the scope of this chapter, I believe that there are several lines of response available to the Rortyan who aims to defend the conception of moral status outlined earlier. One direct strategy would be to insist that Rorty’s view does allow for reasoned disagreement about moral status, as well as substantive ways of criticizing moral practice. In shifting attention to our capacity for imagined conversation as the locus of our attributions of moral status, Rorty does not thereby deny the need for or possibility of justifcation when it comes to disagreements about the scope of our obligations or the need for enlarging the circle of moral concern. For example, moral agents can criticize themselves and others on the basis of a lack of imagination, empathy, or even consistency. What the view does not allow is any appeal to the moral individualist’s notion of “status-conferring properties.” This is all in keeping with Rorty’s metaphilosophical anti-authoritarianism— which enjoins us to abandon the idea that human beings must “humble themselves before something non-human” (Rorty 1999, 6). Another, more indirect reason to be optimistic about Rorty’s view of moral status, is that it appears to be better supported by moral psychology than are forms of moral individualism. As Monsó and Grimm have argued, traditional forms of moral individualism tend to rely on a set of rationalistic assumptions that look implausible in light of empirical evidence (Monsó and Grimm 2019). Increasingly, research suggests that emotions and imagination play an indispensable role in moral judgment and deliberation (Damasio 1997; Johnson 2014), that obligations are closely related to and depend upon our sense of identifcation with groups (Tomasello 2020), and that our self-understanding and (moral) identities depend in important ways on our narrative self-understandings (Schechtman 2014). As I have presented it, Rorty’s account of moral status affords an important place to these facets of moral life.

Conclusion Rorty is sometimes criticized for attempting to walk away from philosophy or for failing to offer any positive contribution to current debates. In this chapter, I hope to have shown that these sorts of concerns are deeply misguided. I have suggested that Rorty’s work contains resources for reconstructing a compelling yet overlooked account of moral status that is worthy of serious consideration within contemporary debates. I have also argued that this position is best understood as a kind of expressivism and outlined some advantages that come along with interpreting Rorty in this way.

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Notes 1 For helpful overviews of the different perspectives in these debates, see Warren (1997) and Jaworska and Tannenbaum (2014; 2018). 2 See, especially, Price (2013), Macarthur and Price (2007), and Blackburn (2013). 3 For a detailed discussion of this idea, see DeGrazia (2008). For an argument against the idea that moral status comes in degrees, see Harman (2003). 4 According to Jaworska and Tannenbaum, the idea that all human beings (including infants and cognitively impaired persons) have full moral status is widespread enough to be considered the “commonsense view” (Jaworska and Tannenbaum 2018). 5 Other authors have made a closely related point about attributions of personhood. As Timothy Chappell explains, “[W]e do not look for sentience or rationality or self-awareness in a creature as a test to decide whether or not that creature counts as a person. It is the other way round. Having once decided, on other grounds, that a creature is a person, we know that this makes it the kind of creature that is likely to display sentience, rationality, self-awareness, and the rest of the personal properties. Hence, we look for displays of these properties from the creature” (Chappell 2011, 7). See also Schechtman (2014, 113–114). 6 Rorty writes, “To be humanoid is to have a human face, and the most important part of that face is a mouth which we can imagine uttering sentences in synchrony with appropriate expressions of the face as a whole. To say, with common sense, that babies and bats know what pain and red are like, but not what the motion of molecules or the change of seasons is like, is just to say that we can fairly readily imagine them opening their mouths and remarking about the former, but not the latter” (PMN, 189). 7 Rorty is drawing from the theory of practical reasoning that Sellars develops in Chapter 6 of Science and Metaphysics (Sellars 1968). 8 For a defense of metaethical expressivism, see Blackburn (1998). 9 In a similar vein, Caroline Arruda has argued that metaethical expressivists are incapable of making sense of disagreements about moral status (Arruda 2018).

Works by Rorty PMN. 1979. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton: Princeton University Press. CIS. 1989. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. New York: Cambridge University Press. PCP. 2007. Philosophy as Cultural Politics: Philosophical Papers, Volume 4. New York: Cambridge University Press. Rorty, Richard. 1999. “Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism.” Revue Internationale de Philosophie 53 (207): 7–20.

Other Works Anderson, Elizabeth. 2004. “Animal Rights and the Values of Nonhuman Life.” In Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions, edited by C. Sunstein and M. Nussbaum, 277–298. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Arruda, Caroline. 2018. “Why Moral Status Matters for Metaethics.” Journal of the American Philosophical Association 4(4): 471–490. Blackburn, Simon. 1998. Ruling Passions: A Theory of Practical Reasoning. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 2013. “Pragmatism: All or Some?” In Expressivism, Pragmatism and Representationalism, edited by Huw Price, 67–84. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chappell, Timothy. 2011. “On the Very Idea of Criteria for Personhood.” The Southern Journal of Philosophy 49 (1): 1–27. Crary, Alice. 2010. “Minding What Already Matters: A Critique of Moral Individualism.” Philosophical Topics 38 (1): 17–49. Damasio, Antonio. 1997. Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. New York: Avon Books. DeGrazia, David. 1996. Taking Animals Seriously: Mental Life and Moral Status. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2008. “Moral Status As a Matter of Degree?” Southern Journal of Philosophy 46 (2): 181–198. Diamond, Cora. 1978. “Eating Meat and Eating People.” Philosophy 53(206): 465–479 DiSilvestro, Russell. 2010. Human Capacities and Moral Status. New York: Springer. Harman, Elizabeth. 2003. “The Potentiality Problem.” Philosophical Studies 114: 173–198. Jaworska, Agnieszka, and Julie Tannenbaum. 2014. “Person-Rearing Relationships as a Key to Higher Moral Status.” Ethics 124 (2): 242–271. ———. 2018. “The Grounds of Moral Status.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta. URL = . Johnson, Mark. 2014. Morality for Humans: Ethical Understanding from the Perspective of Cognitivie Science. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Kant, Immanuel. 1997/1785. Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, edited and translated by Mary Gregor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kittay, Eva Feder. 2005. “At the Margins of Moral Personhood.” Ethics 116(1): 100–131. Macarthur, David and Huw Price. 2007. “Pragmatism, Quasi-Realism, and the Global Challenge”. In New Pragmatists, edited by Cheryl Misak. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McMahan, Jeff. 2005. “Our Fellow Creatures.” The Journal of Ethics 9: 353–380. Monsó, Susana, and Herwig Grimm. 2019. “An Alternative to the Orthodoxy in Animal Ethics? Limits and Merits of the Wittgensteinian Critique of Moral Individualism.” Animals 9(12): 1057. Price, Huw. 2013. Expressivism, Pragmatism and Representationalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rachels, James. 2005. “Drawing Lines.” In Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions, edited by Cass R. Sunstein and Martha Craven Nussbaum, 162–174. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Regan, Tom. 1983. The Case for Animal Rights. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Sachs, Benjamin. 2011. “The Status of Moral Status.” Pacifc Philosophical Quarterly 92: 87–104. Schechtman, Marya. 2014. Staying Alive: Personal Identity, Practical Cocerns, and the Unity of a Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sellars, Wilfrid. 1968. Science and Metaphysics: Variations on Kantian Themes. New York: Routledge and K. Paul. Shepard, Joshua. 2018. Consciousness and Moral Status. New York: Routledge. Singer, Peter. 2009. “Speciesism and Moral Status.” Metaphilosophy 40 (3–4): 567–581. Street, Sharon. 2006. “A Darwinian Dilemma for Realist Theories of Value.” Philosophical Studies 127: 109–166. Taylor, Paul. 1986. Respect for Nature: A Theory of Environmental Ethics. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Tomasello, Michael. 2020. “The Moral Psychology of Obligation.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 43(e56): 1–58. Tooley, Michael. 1972. “Abortion and Infanticide.” Philosophy & Public Affairs 2(1) (Autumn, 1972): 37–65 Warren, Mary Anne. 1997. Moral Status: Obligations to Persons and Other Living Things. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Williams, Bernard. 2006. “The Human Prejudice.” In Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline, edited by A. W. Moore. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

10 Rortyan Ethics Zim Zuming to Maturity Richard Gilmore

“He is trying to get a game going.” (CIS, 133) —Rorty on Derrida

I Wittgenstein once remarked to Norman Malcolm that “a serious and good philosophical work could be written that would consist entirely of jokes” (Malcolm 1985, 29). Here is a joke: Two people are sitting in a café. One says to the other, “Why do you stay with that sadist?” The other person replies, “Beats me?” This joke can be read in two ways. In so far as it is read as normalizing male violence on women, it is grossly unacceptable. It can also be read, however, as undermining the entire Kantian moral project. Jokes require a community, a conversation, as well as create community and conversation. Jokes have the power to be profoundly immoral but also profoundly moral. I take the representative moral fgure for Rorty to be the “liberal ironist.” The fundamental imperative for the liberal ironist is to ameliorate suffering. What that means is, contra the Kantian imperative to universalize, the Rortyan imperative is to listen. If we accept Rawls’s idea of a “reasonable pluralism,” an idea Rorty endorses, as a moral starting point, and a foundational assumption of democracy, then what is called for is not treating everyone the same but responding to each according to their own individual needs and desires. Rorty has, among other selfdescriptions, described himself as an existentialist (PMN, 361ff.). Rorty seems to have in mind primarily the existentialism of Sartre, but he is critical of Sartrean existentialism as being too “essentialist,” by which I understand as too nihilist. Simone de Beauvoir presents an existentialism that is not nihilist at all but is quite positive and entails a very specifc ethics, which she calls “the ethics of ambiguity.” The central feature of this ethics is what Beauvoir calls “allowing disclosure.” What Beauvoir describes as “allowing disclosure” I will discuss in terms of “zim zuming,” which has some advantages over “allowing disclosure” beyond the DOI: 10.4324/9781003208150-14

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fact that it is a much catchier slogan. It is an idea that is quite useful for making sense of Rorty’s moral imperative, to make space for the voice of the other in order that the suffering of the other can be heard, responded to, and ameliorated. In this way, I make space for others to constitute themselves, and they make a space for me to constitute myself. Listening, therefore, becomes a fundamentally moral and creative activity. A potential of jokes is that they can work explosively on assumptions, presumptions, and prejudices. This, it seems to me, is what lies behind Wittgenstein’s remark. For Wittgenstein, so much of philosophy is composed of exactly assumptions, presumptions, and prejudices about what “must” be the case, and I take that “must” as a metaphysical “must,” and that jokes have this powerful capability of reorienting our thinking. Rorty is a bit of a joker, although he does not actually tell a lot of jokes, but his goal is very much about reorienting our thinking. Jokes do and do not work like an argument. They work like an argument insofar as they compel a new way of thinking about something. They are not like an argument insofar as they do not use a sequence of premises that generate a conclusion, although, in the structure of setup and punch line, a non-sequitur reveals a sequitur that compels a kind of assent. An interesting feature of jokes, as Ted Cohen has argued in his book, Jokes: Philosophical Thoughts on Joking Matters, is that the point of a joke is to build community, a goal shared by Rorty. Two features of jokes identifed by Cohen are, frst, that they are “devices for inducing intimacy” (Cohen 1999, 4), and second, that they provide “relief from certain oppressions” (Cohen 1999, 10). These are both ends shared by Rorty. The joke about the two friends talking explodes the whole Kantian tradition of an ethics based on universalization. The assumption, presumption, and prejudice that the joke explodes is specifcally that there is some kind of “natural” or universal sexual relationship and that sadomasochism is, therefore, not natural and not universalizable, and yet, there are people, it seems quite obvious, who enjoy, I guess I will say, sexual games of pleasure and pain. The oppression, then, is precisely the result of a universalizing ethics. The relief from oppression is the shared new intimacy of understanding that for different folks, different strokes. This is the idea of what Rawls calls “reasonable pluralism.” I, personally, fnd “reasonable pluralism” a very diffcult position to embrace. It is, I suppose Rorty would say, the philosopher in me. My frst impulse upon encountering the idea of “reasonable pluralism” was to come down hard on the “reasonable.” Since, in my opinion, most people are not reasonable, the pluralism that “reasonable pluralism” constrains me to recognize would be quite limited, specifcally, limited to things people like me like to do. Rorty directly addresses this interpretation of the “reasonable” part of “reasonable pluralism.” Rorty acknowledges that Rawls’s A Theory of Justice lent itself to the sort of reading I frst gave to it, with the apparent emphasis on “reason” as a kind of neo-Kantian universalism.

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But, Rorty says, “Rawls’s writings subsequent to A Theory of Justice have helped us realize that we were misinterpreting his book, that we had overemphasized the Kantian and underemphasized the Hegelian and Deweyan elements” (ORT, 185). In a different essay, “Justice as a Larger Loyalty,” Rorty distinguishes three uses associated with “reason”: “the reasonable,” “the rational,” and “practical reason.” The use that Rorty reads into “reasonable pluralism” is the use as “practical reason.” Rorty says of Rawls’s use of practical reason”: “Practical reason for Rawls is, so to speak, a matter of procedure rather than of substance—of how we agree on what to do rather than of what we agree on” (PCP, 51). Now “reasonable pluralism” seems to be very diffcult indeed. It constrains me to cooperate, to compromise, to listen to other peoples’ opinions about things, to accept different forms of life, and to agree to the procedures that can thereby sustain a real pluralism. That seems like a lot to ask. Why should I? I should if I aspire to be a “liberal ironist,” and I do so aspire. Rorty defnes the liberal ironist in CIS as follows: I borrow my defnition of “liberal” from Judith Shklar, who says that liberals are the people who think that cruelty is the worst thing we do. I use “ironist” to name the sort of person who faces up to the contingency of his or her own most central beliefs and desires—someone suffciently historicist and nominalist to have abandoned the idea that those central beliefs and desires refer back to something beyond the reach of time and chance. Liberal ironists are people who include among these ungroundable desires their own hope that suffering will be diminished, that the humiliation of human beings by other human beings may cease. For the liberal ironist, there is no answer to the question “Why not be cruel?”—no noncircular theoretical backup for the belief that cruelty is horrible. (CIS, xv) Rorty is inviting us to be this very diffcult, counterintuitive thing, and he offers no reasons why we should try to become such a thing, such a person. Why should we become such a person? If Rorty is not going to give us any reason, any “noncircular theoretical backup for the belief,” what force does Rorty’s case have? When I was in elementary school, there was a thing we did during recess. One, or usually two, boys would start to walk around the playground, arms around each other’s shoulders. They would start to chant, “Who wants to play AARR-MMY? Who wants to play AARR-MMY?” Other people who wanted to play army would run over, put their arm around one of the boys and start to chant along “Who wants to play AARR-MMY?” Et cetera until there were enough people to

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play army, and then we would start to run around shooting at each other. This, it seems to me, is about what Rorty has. He is walking around academia chanting, “Who wants to play LIBERAL IRONIST? Who wants to play LIBERAL IRONIST?” That is, what Rorty is offering is something like an Aristotelian fnal cause; or, better, a Peircean “developmental teleology” (Peirce 1931-58, 6.156); or even a Deweyan “end-in-view” (Dewey 1939, 43), a thing that moves by attraction rather than force. What Rorty is offering, in his fgure of the “liberal ironist,” is a redescription, a redescription of what it looks like to be a morally responsible person. It is a redescription and not an argument. And yet, it has a profoundly compelling attraction that functions like an argument and even looks like an argument. The frst step of the (faux) argument is axiomatic but axiomatic in a completely contingent, nonuniversalizable way. The frst premise of the (faux) argument is that cruelty is bad. Rorty expects us to agree with this frst premise but not because cruelty is bad. Where do “we” get this idea from? Well, one of the explanations that Rorty gives involves quoting Rawls explaining where we get our concept of justice from: These writings [Rawls’s later writings, after A Theory of Justice] make more explicit than did his book Rawls’s metaphilosophical doctrine that what justifes a conception of justice is not its being true to an order antecedent to and given to us, but its congruence with our deeper understanding of ourselves and our aspirations, and our realization that, given our history and the tradition embedded in our public life, it is the most reasonable doctrine for us. (ORT, 185) For Rawls and for Rorty, it is just a contingent historical fact about us, at this time in history, that we tend to think that cruelty is a bad thing. If you do not think that cruelty is a bad thing, then Rorty has no argument to convince you that cruelty is, essentially, in fact, a bad thing. He just has a redescription, and, his redescription is opposed to argument. On the other hand, if you agree with Rorty that cruelty is a bad thing, then there is an argument, and it is quite a powerful one that one must be an ironist. The argument for being an ironist is that any form of dogmatism, any form of non-historicist insistence on Truth, results in cruelty. Faute de mieux, that leaves us with irony, with being an ironist, or, more specifcally, a “liberal ironist.” The liberal ironist must accept, therefore, Rawls’s notion of “reasonable pluralism,” where “reasonable” just means agreeing to public procedures for resolving public conficts. The “must” is not a metaphysical must but only a consistency “must.” If you are committed to avoiding being cruel, and to ameliorating cruelty in the world around you, then, to be consistent, you must be liberal in your acceptance of other ways of

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being human, and ironic with respect to your own way of being human. This, it seems to me, is just to affrm Sartre’s description of the central idea of existentialism in “Existentialism as a Humanism” that “existence precedes essence” (Sartre 2007, 22). Rorty explicitly refers to himself as doing something like existentialism in the fnal chapter of PMN entitled “Philosophy without Mirrors.” He refers, for example, to “our ‘existentialist’ intuition that redescribing ourselves is the most important thing we can do” (PMN, 358–359). He says, “To sum up this ‘existentialist’ view of objectivity, then: objectivity should be seen as conformity to the norms of justifcation (for assertions and for actions) we fnd about us” (PMN, 361). In a footnote referring explicitly to Sartre, he says, The utility of the “existentialist” view is that, by proclaiming that we have no essence, it permits us to see the descriptions of ourselves we fnd in one of (or in the unity of) the Naturwissenschaften as on par with the various alternative descriptions offered by poets, novelists, depth psychologists, sculptors, anthropologists, and mystics. (PMN, 362) Two things are worth noting about Rorty’s references to existentialism. One is that in every reference, Rorty includes inverted commas that function as scare quotes around the term “existentialism.” I take it that the intent is to distance himself to some degree from existentialism. I think he thinks of himself as a pragmatist, not as an existentialist, even as he agrees with the core existential idea that existence precedes essence. The other thing to note about Rorty’s version of existentialism is his defationary description that “‘Existentialism’ is an intrinsically reactive movement of thought, one which only has a point in opposition to the tradition” (PMN, 366). This is a very typical Rortyan move, and the one that I think most frustrates people about Rorty’s anti-philosophy philosophy, that even as he seems to acknowledge some philosophical value, some theory, in this case, existentialism, he undoes that acknowledgment with a defationary remark that seems to take away all hope of any future philosophical use for the theory. But Rorty does have an “aim” for philosophy, a future for philosophy in PMN. He says, To see keeping a conversation going as a suffcient aim of philosophy, to see wisdom as consisting in the ability to sustain a conversation, is to see human beings as generators of new descriptions rather than beings one hopes to be able to describe accurately. (PMN, 378) This claim of an “aim” for philosophy, the aim of keeping the conversation going, becomes, for me, the core of Rorty’s ethics. Even the goal

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of “reasonable pluralism” is nonsensical without the additional idea of the desire to keep the conversation going. Some reasonable pluralism is required to have a conversation. No reasonable pluralism, no conversation. Both reasonableness and pluralism are required for a conversation. Without reasonableness, there is just shouting or silence. Without pluralism, there is nothing to say, nothing to talk about. Rorty concludes his essay “Heidegger, Contingency, and Pragmatism” with several references to the importance of being able to “hear.” He begins with a quote from Dewey describing his utopia of the future, and then Rorty makes the claim that “Dewey was as aware as Heidegger of the danger that we might lose the ability to hear in the technological din” (EHO, 47). He continues this thought on the importance of being able to hear, taking it in a somewhat surprising direction. If one asks what is so important about the ability to hear, the ability to have a sense of the contingency of one’s words and practices, and thus of the possibility of alternatives to them, I think Dewey’s and Heidegger’s answers would overlap. They both might say that this ability, and only this ability, makes it possible to feel gratitude for and to those words, those practices, and the beings they disclose. (EHO, 48) Rorty describes being able to “see yourself-in-the-midst-of-beings as a gift rather than an occasion for the use of power” (EHO, 48). In The Ethics of Ambiguity, Beauvoir presents to us a clear existential ethics. It is sophisticated, it is psychologically complex, and it can be used to serve Rorty’s purposes quite well. Her word “ambiguity” is already a stand-in for Rorty’s word “contingency,” so that is a good start. Beauvoir’s ethics can be summed up in two words: “allow disclosure.” She quotes Sartre’s Being and Nothingness to introduce this idea: “Man, Sartre tells us, is ‘a being who makes himself a lack of being in order that there might be being’” (Beauvoir 1997, 11). Beauvoir’s gloss on this description from Sartre is that the result of this making a lack of oneself is that “being is disclosed” (Beauvoir 1997, 12). For Beauvoir, everything of human importance is linked to the idea of allowing disclosure, our ethical goodness, our freedom, our authentic selves, our being present in the world, our joy, all derive from allowing disclosure. The two alternative attitudinal stances are, wanting to be, which is very much Sartre’s “useless passion,” and wanting to allow disclosure of being, which is Beauvoir’s own liberation from Sartre’s pessimism. This is how Beauvoir puts it: “There is an original type of attachment to being which is not the relationship ‘wanting to be’ but rather ‘wanting to disclose being.’ Now, here there is not failure but rather success” (Beauvoir 1997, 12). This success she associates, in the same paragraph, with “joy.”

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I want to connect Beauvoir’s idea of ‘allowing disclosure’ with the idea of the zim zum from the Lurianic Kabbalah. I frst encountered the idea in Harold Bloom’s book Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism (Bloom 1982, 72–90). The zim zum is the divine contraction. God, wanting to create, but being everywhere, needed space for his creation to occupy. To create the space, He contracted his being in order that there might be being. He zim zumed. I like the concept of the zim zum because it makes the allowing of disclosure a creative act. There is a paradox at the core of this creative act: one becomes, one creates oneself, by self-contracting. The fundamental choice, the way of freedom, is, ironically, not to impose your being but to contract your being. As Beauvoir says, The drama of original choice is that it goes on moment by moment for an entire lifetime, that it occurs without reason, before any reason, that freedom is there as if it were present only in the form of contingency…. Every man casts himself into the world by making himself a lack of being; he thereby contributes to investing it with human signifcation. He discloses it. And in this movement even the most outcast sometimes feels the joy of existing. They manifest existence as a happiness and the world as a source of joy. (Beauvoir 1997, 40–41) Beauvoir continues, “The reward for these spontaneous qualities issues from the fact that they make signifcances and goals appear in the world. They discover the reasons for existing. They confrm us in the pride and joy of our destiny as man” (Beauvoir 1997, 42; my emphasis). In her hierarchy of people, what she calls the “sub-man,” is at the bottom. At the top of the hierarchy is the artist. This hierarchy is, in part, developmental. One grows through the stages, and the only way to achieve the next step in the hierarchy is through “self-transcendence,” and the only way to self-transcend is to zim zum. The “sub-man,” who affrms no values, self-transcends when he (using Beauvoir’s gendered language) accepts and affrms the ready-made values imposed by his society. Not much of a self-transcendence but a step. The step makes him a “serious man,” for whom all the values are set, a man is a man, a woman a woman, a father a father, a woman a wife. The temptation is always not to zim zum. The reason is fear. The fear is a fear of ambiguity, that the ambiguity may overwhelm. Beauvoir describes it as “a fundamental fear in the face of existence, in the face of the risks and tensions which it implies” (Beauvoir 1997, 42). The solution is, in spite of the fear, to zim zum. To zim zum is just to be honest with oneself. It is to acknowledge that things are ambiguous, that pluralism abounds. If the “serious man” zim zums, he acknowledges that a man may not be simply a man, nor a woman a woman, not even a wife. All values seem to come into question.

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The “serious man” self-transcends into, interestingly enough, nihilism, the acknowledgment of the evident pluralism leads him to reject all values. And so on through adventurous man, passionate man, to fnally, the artist, who has, what Beauvoir calls, “the aesthetic attitude.” Beauvoir says, Art reveals the transitory as absolute; and as the transitory existence is perpetuated through the centuries, art too, throughout the centuries, must perpetuate this never-to-be-fnished revelation. Thus, the constructive activities of man take on a valid meaning only when they are assumed as a movement toward freedom; and reciprocally, one sees that such a movement is concrete: discoveries, inventions, industries, culture, paintings, and books people the world concretely and open concrete possibilities to men. (Beauvoir 1997, 80–81) This sounds very Rortyan to me. To just seal the deal, here is a fnal quotation from Beauvoir: To will that there be being is also to will that there be men by and for whom the world is endowed with human signifcations. One can reveal the world only on a basis revealed by other men. No project can be defned except by its interference with other projects. To make being “be” is to communicate with others by means of being. (Beauvoir 1997, 71; my emphasis) Beauvoir’s claim here seems to me to be echoed in Rorty’s claim, “To see keeping a conversation going as a suffcient aim of philosophy, to see wisdom as consisting in the ability to sustain a conversation” (PMN, 378). A reasonable pluralism of projects interfering with one another will call for a continual zim zuming and a continual, ongoing conversation. Rorty does not generally make explicit jokes, but he is, as I claimed earlier, quite a joker. The second appendix in Rorty’s AOC begins with an epigraph from Horace’s epistles, book one, epistle six (2001). The title of the chapter is “The Inspirational Value of Great Works of Literature.” The epigraph is given in Latin and then translated by Rorty. The Latin is “Nil admirari prope res est una, Nimici,/Solaque quae posit facere et servare beatum.” I will supply, frst, a translation by the highly praised translator David Ferry: “The way to be happy and stay so, Nimicius, is:/ Never to be bowled over” (Horace 2001, 29). Here is Rorty’s translation: “To stand in awe of nothing, Nimicius, is practically the only way to feel really good about yourself” (AOC, 125). This is not the irony of “the sort of person who faces up to the contingency of his or her own most central beliefs and desires” but the complex irony of Socrates. Horace clearly thinks that not ever being “bowled over” is a good thing. Rorty quotes

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him, takes inspiration from him, by reading him as saying the very opposite, that not ever being “bowled over” is a bad thing. This is a redescription. It is confrmed as a redescription a few pages later when Rorty refers approvingly to Goethe’s claim that “the ability to shudder with awe is the best feature of human beings” and contrasts it with “knowingness” (AOC, 129), which I take to be a version of Beauvoir’s “seriousness,” which is a very bad thing. I take it that Rorty is making a sort of joke. It takes a second look to get Rorty’s meaning, to see that it is a redescription, and when one does, if one is me, one fnds it immensely amusing even as I fnd it confounding. Can you do that kind of thing with Horace? Is Rorty some kind of dummy? Does he not know what Horace is saying? My impulse, then, is to want to read more Rorty. I want to fnd some more of these redescriptions that work like a joke. I like jokes. I want to play that game. “Who wants to play—liberal irony”!

II There are, at least, two criticisms of a Rortyan ethics based on the liberal ironist. One is leveled against Rorty by others, most notably, Richard Bernstein. The other is acknowledged by Rorty himself. The frst criticism derives from Rorty’s claim that “anything can be made to look good or bad by being redescribed” (CIS, 73). The other is that redescriptions, the primary means by which cruelty is to be ameliorated, can be a source of cruelty. As Rorty says, Ironism, as I have defned it, results from the awareness of the power of redescription. But most people do not want to be redescribed. They want to be taken on their own terms—taken seriously just as they are and just as they talk. The ironist tells them that the language they speak is up for grabs by her and her kind. There is something potentially very cruel about that claim. (CIS, 89) Rorty concludes the paragraph, “Redescription often humiliates” (CIS, 90). Here is Bernstein’s critique of the frst source of criticism, the idea that anything can be redescribed to appear good or bad: My point is to challenge Rorty’s claim that he has given a more attractive redescription of liberalism. On the contrary, Rorty actually describes one of the most dangerous and virulent tendencies of liberalism—the conviction that anything can be made to look good or bad by redescription. For this is just the mentality that possessed our political leaders during the Vietnam war and the sordid Watergate affair. What happens to liberal democracy when those who have the

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In an article by Brad Frazier entitled “The Ethics of Rortian Redescription,” Frazier refers to this as “AC,” Rorty’s “‘anything claim’” (Frazier 2006, 463). Bernstein uses the Vietnam War and Watergate as examples of the insidiousness of the AC, but Frazier throws in, along with Bernstein’s arguments, those by Michele M. Moody-Adams, who uses Hitler and Stalin (Moody-Adams 1994, 214–215; quoted in Frazier 2006, 463–464) as examples of the dangers of the AC, and Jean Bethke Elshtain, who says that, not in quite these words, but essentially, if she were to affrm the AC then, “I would make myself loathsome” (Elshtain 1992, 206; quoted in Frazier 2006, 465). I take it she would be loathsome to the self she is, which does not affrm or acknowledge the AC so that what she is really saying is that Rorty and his philosophy, that he can assert his philosophy, is loathsome to her. It is my impression that Rorty is more or less loathsome to a lot of philosophers. Frazier, in his article, seeks to defend Rorty’s AC from these criticisms. As Frazier says, I argue that, when properly construed, the claim that anything can be made to look good or bad by being redescribed does not express a fippant attitude toward morality. Rather, for Rorty, it is related to the possibility of self-creation through redescription, the promotion of tolerance and imaginative identifcation with others, and the morality of confict. (Frazier 2006, 461–462) This is an admirable line of defense for Rorty’s AC, but Frazier also has some criticisms of Rorty, criticisms that are artfully framed, but, in their own way, all too familiar. Frazier has two primary criticisms. First, he says, “I do think that Rorty needs to sort out more the implications of his avowed commitment to truthfulness for his account of redescriptions.” And second, Rorty should drop altogether the metaphor of place from his positing of a private-public split in the lives of ironists. Instead he should adopt the alternative notion of “responsibilities to self” and “responsibilities to others,” which he sometimes uses, as a permanent replacement for this metaphor. (Frazier 2006, 462) As he himself claims, Frazier is arguing against Bernstein’s, MoodyAdams’, and Elshtain’s reading of Rorty’s AC. I fnd his arguments convincing, and yet, I want to suggest, there is something wrong with his

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whole approach that is refected in the fact that he is arguing, as well as in the nature of his particular objections and criticisms of Rorty’s position. The problem, and its solution, I want to say, has nothing to do with argument. Rorty is not arguing for the AC, or, for that matter, for the liberal ironist. As Rorty explicitly says, I am not going to offer arguments against the vocabularies I want to replace. Instead, I am going to try to make the vocabulary I favor look attractive by showing how it may be used to describe a variety of topics. (CIS, 9) He is doing something very different from arguing, so different, in fact, that any attempt to argue for his position or against others who misunderstand it or critique it is misconceived from the outset. Rorty says, “[T]he opposite of irony is commons sense” (CIS, 74). Another way to say that is that the antithesis of the ironist, the ironist’s greatest Other, is the earnest person. What the earnest person and the commonsense person have in common is an inability to achieve suffcient detachment from their own beliefs to see an issue from another’s perspective. In this regard, I read Frazier as being much closer to Bernstein, Moody-Adams, and Elshtain than he is to Rorty. The earnest person, the nonironist, the “liberal metaphysician,” is irony-blind. I take Bernstein, MoodyAdams, Elshtain, and even Frazier to be expressing a deep suspicion about the nature of irony, in general, and of the self-proclaimed ironist, in particular. Rorty acknowledges the legitimacy of this suspicion. To return to and enlarge on the passage from Rorty with which I began this section, there is something right about the suspicion which ironism arouses. Ironism, as I have defned it, results from awareness of the power of redescription. But most people do not want to be redescribed. They want to be taken on their own terms—taken seriously just as they are and just as they talk. The ironist tells them that the language they speak is up for grabs by her and her kind. There is something potentially very cruel about that claim. For the best way to cause people long-lasting pain is to humiliate them by making the things that seem most important to them look futile, obsolete, and powerless. Consider what happens when a child’s precious possessions— the little things around which he weaves fantasies that make him a little different from other children—are described as “trash,” and thrown away. Or consider what happens when these possessions are made to look ridiculous alongside the possessions of another, richer, child. Something like that presumably happens to a primitive culture

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There are several things to notice about this passage. First of all, Rorty is not constructing an argument so much as engaging in acts of imagination. Sure the nonironists, who love their own beliefs as true, are suspicious of the ironists, who talk like there is no such thing as truth, just as a young boy who loves his bauble as His, is suspicious of those who would take His bauble from him or seem to have even better baubles. The bauble most beloved by most philosophers is philosophy, and philosophy is nothing if not about the appearance versus reality distinction, and Rorty, the ironist, raises some questions about that distinction That raises the hackles on philosophers, some to the point of loathing. A second thing to notice is the use of a technique to convey information to people about certain relationships that those people do not recognize. This technique goes back, at least, to Heraclitus. B is to A as C is to B (or D; Fränkel 1974, 214–228). An adult person is to God as a child is to an adult person. The foolish are to the wise as the asleep are to the awake. The nonironist is to the ironist as the nonintellectual is to the intellectual, as the poor child and his bauble are to the rich child and his bauble. Another way of framing the issue is to invoke Wittgenstein’s concept of “seeing-as.” If you see only the duck in the duck/rabbit, then any talk of a rabbit will seem either dishonest or crazy. The problem with failing to see the unseen aspect is that, if you do not see it, and no one around you sees it, it is unlikely that you ever will see it. If there is anything like a Truth that Rorty affrms, it is that anything can be infnitely redescribed. That would be the unseen rabbit that the nonironists do not see. What one needs in order to learn to see the unseen aspect is to be around people who see the aspect that you do not see and to pay attention to how they talk about that unseen thing. At some point, it is to be hoped, there will be a “dawning of the aspect,” as Wittgenstein describes it. At that point then you too can talk about the aspect. For me, the best formulation of the B is to A as C is to B (or D) is that the nonironist is to the ironist as an immature person is to the mature person. This is a metaphor that Rorty himself uses. It is implied in the passage that is quoted earlier with the reference to the child, but Rorty makes it even more explicit elsewhere. In his essay, “Freud and Moral Refection” Rorty says, “Maturity will, according to this view, consist rather in an ability to seek out new redescriptions on one’s own past—an ability to take a nominalistic, ironic, view of oneself” (Rorty 1986, 9). What is wrong with Frazier’s defense of Rorty? My frst critique is that he argues. To construct an argument is to appeal to some tertium

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quid that transcends our respective positions and compels assent. “You have to agree with me!” is a spoken or unspoken premise of every argument. My second critique is the same as the frst. The conviction that Rorty “needs” to clarify his position vis-à-vis “truthfulness” and “responsibilities” sounds to me like more tertium quids, more earnestness, more metaphysics. There remain two fnal issues to clarify. First, if Rorty does not argue and does not appeal to metaphysics, then how will he convince anyone to be a liberal ironist? To answer this question I will, ironically, invoke Aristotle. Aristotle distinguishes between effcient causality and fnal causality. Effcient causality causes by force. Final causality causes by attraction. Argument is always an attempt to compel assent by force, by, as it were, effcient causality. Rorty presents us with the liberal ironist as an object of attraction, a way of being, a way of talking that is maximally, I won’t say self-aware, but maximally complex, and maximally compassionate. It is a potential way of being that had not been described, at least not as fully or as clearly as Rorty describes it, before Rorty described it. It is at least one answer to the unanswered question posed by Nietzsche: what is beyond good and evil? What is beyond good and evil is precisely the liberal ironist. The fnal issue that needs to be addressed is, how does one tell who is the more mature one and who is the less mature. Immaturity, like hubris, is invisible to the one who is in that condition. Maturity is also relational, like size in the Phaedo: compared to some I am the less mature, compared to others, the more mature. How does one tell who is the more mature? There is, I think, only one answer. Only in an ongoing conversation will it emerge who has the larger, the more complex, hence better able to accommodate more perspectives, hence better point of view. Signs of maturity emerge in conversation. Do philosophy. Keep the conversation going.

Works by Rorty PMN. 1979. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton: Princeton University Press. CIS. 1989. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. New York: Cambridge University Press. ORT. 1991. Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers, Volume 1. New York: Cambridge University Press. EHO. 1991. Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers, Volume 2. New York: Cambridge University Press. AOC. 1998. Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth Century America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rorty, Richard. 1986. “Freud and Moral Refection.” In Pragmatism’s Freud: The Moral Disposition of Psychoanalysis, edited by Joseph H. Smith and William Kerrigan, 1–27. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

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Other Works Beauvoir, Simone de. 1997. The Ethics of Ambiguity. Translated by Bernard Frechtman. Secaucus, NJ: Citadel Press. Bernstein Richard J. 1993. The New Constellations: The Ethical-Political Horizons of Modernity/Postmodernity. Cambridge: MIT Press. Bloom, Harold. 1982. Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism. New York: Oxford University Press. Cohen, Ted. 1999. Jokes: Philosophical Thoughts on Joking Matters. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Dewey, John. 1939. Theory of Valuation. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Elshtain, Jean Bethke. 1992.“Don’t Be Cruel: Refections on Rortyian Liberalism.” In The Politics of Irony: Essays in Self-Betrayal, edited by Daniel W. Conway and John E. Seery, 1–27. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Fränkel, Hermann. 1974.“A Thought Pattern in Heraclitus.” In The Pre-Socratics: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Alexander P. D. Mourelatos, 214–228. New York: Anchor Press. Frazier, Brad. 2006. “The Ethics of Rortian Redescription.” Philosophy & Social Criticism 32 (4): 461–492. Horace. 2001. The Epistles of Horace. Translated by David Ferry. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Malcolm, Norman. 1985. Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir. New York: Oxford. Moody-Adams, Michele M. 1994. “Theory, Practice, and the Contingency of Rorty’s Irony.” The Journal of Social Philosophy 25: 209–227. Peirce, Charles Sanders. 1931–58. Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, edited by C. Hartshorne, P. Weiss (volumes 1–6), and A. Burks (volumes 7–8). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Citation by volume and paragraph number. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 2007. Existentialism Is a Humanism. Translated by Carol Macomber. Hartford: Yale University Press.

11 When Is Desire Dangerous? The Conversation Leading from Nietzsche’s “Delicate Boundary” to Rorty’s “Poeticized Culture” James Hersh Introduction Nietzsche’s claim that tragic art serves as a constraint on liberal cruelty initiated a 150-year-long conversation on the relationship between the artistic imagination and human cruelty. This conversation leads from Nietzsche’s notion of a “delicate boundary” (Nietzsche 1872/1967) through James Hillman’s dictum that “without ‘imaginal understanding’ [the realization of image qua image] we may expect killing” (Hillman 1978, 115), through the urging of Judith Shklar that we make the reduction of cruelty the frst priority of current political liberalism (1984), and culminates in Rorty’s call for a redescription of liberalism as a “poeticized culture” (CIS, 29, 53, 65, 67–69). That is, to come full circle, this conversation concludes that a genuine liberalism is one that links Nietzsche’s warning regarding “delicate boundaries” to Shklar’s call for reducing cruelty. This linking is a central achievement of Rorty’s Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. I hope to make this link explicit by showing not only that “drawing a delicate boundary” is one of the activities of a Rortyan “liberal ironist” but also that it constitutes a central feature of Rorty’s aim to “tailor” philosophy to the demands of democracy (Rorty 2010, 242), to what Keith Topper calls the “politics of redescription” (Topper 1995, 8). Nietzsche provided a metaphor (“a delicate boundary”) that has gone largely unnoticed, but a metaphor which, if heeded, would deepen current understanding of when desire becomes dangerous and likely to produce cruelty. This understanding is crucial to the possibility of actually reducing cruelty. That is, if we agree with Shklar and Rorty that reducing cruelty is the frst priority of current liberalism, we are pragmatically obligated to think more deeply about the role of Nietzsche’s warning in fulflling that obligation.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003208150-15

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Nietzsche’s “Delicate Boundary” In his opening to The Birth of Tragedy (1872), Nietzsche issued a warning: But we must also include in our image of Apollo that delicate boundary [jene zarte Linie] which the dream image must not overstep lest it have a pathological effect (in which case mere appearance would impose upon us as crude reality). (Nietzsche 1872a, 35) Apollo’s temporary enemy is, according to Nietzsche’s scheme, Dionysus, a god who destroys, in the interest of an ecstatic original unity, the individual forms (spontaneous images like those in dreams) of Apollonian creation. According to this formula, these opposed “art instincts” (Apollo and Dionysus) reconcile by means of the invention of Greek tragedy, which “rendered ineffective… the horrible witches’ brew of sensuality and cruelty” (Hofstadter and Kuhns, 1964, 503) which had characterized the pre-Tragedy Dionysian cult. With this claim that tragic art serves as a constraint on literal cruelty, Nietzsche initiates the conversation on the relationship between the artistic imagination and human cruelty. Both Apollo and Dionysus are dangerous, Nietzsche says, but in his opening, he stresses the danger of not including the “delicate boundary” in “our picture of Apollo.” That stress is what most concerns us here. Such “Apollonian” individual forms, if unconstrained, can impose themselves on the literal world in dangerously cruel actions. These forms therefore must be corralled on one side of an intellectual boundary by a line that separates them as images from the objects which they represent. By calling this boundary “delicate” (in both the Kaufmann and Fadiman translations) Nietzsche suggests it is routinely violated. Common sense says blithely that the imagined/real distinction is so obvious that it doesn’t deserve our attention, but if we take that approach, we are likely to forget how the intensity of desire can blind and lead us to act cruelly. Read Nabokov’s Lolita. Nietzsche’s initiation of the conversation on dangerous desire and cruelty is doubly important because he adds to the metaphor of “a delicate boundary” the idea that the possibility of reducing cruelty is tied to our “picture” of the poetic imagination.

James Hillman’s “Imaginal Understanding” The late psychologist, James Hillman, a century after Nietzsche’s warning regarding dangerous and “pathological” cruelty, issued a similar warning of his own in a psychological context: “Without imaginal understanding, we can expect killing” (Hillman 1978, 115). Hillman was not a Platonist,

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but his idea had its inspirational source in Plato’s eikasia, the lowest mental state of Socrates’ Divided Line (The Republic, Book Six). Hillman was referring to what Jacob Howland has called “the power to apprehend images [which] involves seeing the image as an image, and not confusing it with the original of which it is an image” (Howland 2004, 129, my emphasis). Earlier, in 1957, Jacob Klein called Platonic eikasia “the ability to see the original through the image…a kind of double seeing,” citing a source for this double seeing in Sophocles (Klein 1965, 115). Failing to “see double” in this sense, in other words, renders desires dangerous; in Platonic terms, it is to be locked in a Cave of ignorance, separated from Justice and the Good. For Hillman, unlike Plato, there is no way out of this Platonic Cave. He does not believe in two worlds, a literal world and an imaginary world; there is no Platonic “tunnel” leading out of the Cave of our everyday experience into the sunlit knowledge of an absolute, foundational reality. Hillman’s term “imaginal” is his own neologism, intended to remind his readers that their images are real in a “poetic” way and in the same world as their lived experience. His concern, like Nietzsche’s, is the pathology that arises from a failure to grasp that images are images, but he worries about falling into an ontological dualism. Hillman’s concern is the psychological danger that can result when a literalizing ego loses touch with the poetic imagination. Hillman’s full passage from which I quoted earlier is the following: Without (imaginal) metaphorical understanding, everything is only what it is and must be met on the simplest, most direct level. Everything is a call to action, and the ‘hero’ [the literalizing ego] is there to realize himself in a reality that serves his literal notion of it. A view of reality that does not recognize other views is of course delusional…the delusion is self-divination, the perspective of the human ego as the superior, indeed the only, actuality. The rest is not real. Without imaginal understanding, we may expect killing. (Hillman 1978, 115) Hillman died in 2011. A couple years before he died, I sent him a copy of a book on Rorty I had just published, introducing him to some of Rorty’s ideas. In response, he wrote in his last letter to me, I was delighted to fnd the Rorty way of looking at Rawls, for this idea of the “poetic” does indeed strike a chord…belief, unfortunately, refuses to subject itself to doubt (irony) and I just don’t see how monotheism can resolve itself. The Jewish tradition of multiple ways of grasping the truth (Midrash) seems best to me. (Hillman 2010, private correspondence)

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However, because of his psychological focus and low regard for traditional philosophy (one of his last lectures was titled “Beauty and Justice: Why Myth Trumps Philosophy”), Hillman overlooked, like Nietzsche, the question regarding how “imaginal understanding” and “drawing the delicate boundary” speak to political liberalism. That is, both Hillman and Nietzsche miss the political implications of their warnings.

Judith Shklar’s “Putting Cruelty First” The beginning of that connection between drawing delicate boundaries and political liberalism emerged, six years after Hillman’s The Dream and the Underworld, in the writing of Judith Shklar, with her observation that, except for Montaigne and Montesquieu, “Philosophers rarely talk about cruelty” (Shklar 1984, 1). Crucially, she added to the conversation we are considering that because “cruelty is the worst thing we do” (44), it ought to be made the primary focus of our current political liberalism. She got what Nietzsche and Hillman missed (what she called “the liberalism of fear” and the need for cruelty in the public vocabulary of justice), but she herself, as far as I know, missed the warnings they had made. One of the many things that makes CIS such a breakthrough is the way Rorty joined these two conversational streams, the Nietzsche/Hillman stream and the Shklar stream, streams that previously had been deaf to each other. I know of no mention in Shklar’s writing of Nietzsche’s “delicate boundary” or of its connection to dangerous desire and human cruelty. Perhaps she missed Nietzsche’s early comments on cruelty because of his anti-liberalism; we don’t expect him to be thinking about cruelty as a political problem. Her concern was rather that philosophers have so little to say about cruelty…and virtue has certainly claimed more of their attention…historians, dramatists, and poets in verse and prose have not ignored these [ordinary] vices, least of all cruelty. It is to them we turn for illumination.” (Shklar 1984, 1) And, we can add to this her tribute, “Montaigne is the hero of my book [Ordinary Vices]…. He put cruelty frst, and it is from him that I have learned just what follows from that conviction” (Shkalr 1984, 1–2). What follows, she maintained, was that we ought to make reducing cruelty the priority of liberalism for our time. In The Liberalism of Fear, Shklar writes, “What liberalism requires is the possibility of making the evil of cruelty and fear the basic norm of its political practices and prescriptions. The only exception to the rule of avoidance is the prevention of greater cruelties” (Shklar 1989/2018, 30). In CIS, Rorty heeded Shklar’s advice,

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citing her defnition of a “liberal” (CIS, 74, 146). Her full statement of this defnition is as follows: It seems to me that liberal and humane people, of whom there are many among us, would, if they were asked to rank the vices, put cruelty frst. Intuitively, they would choose cruelty as the worst thing we do. (Shklar 1984, 43) In this light, consider the anguish reported by the Me-Too and Black Lives Matter movements, the white supremacy horror of Charlottesville, the Jerry Sandusky sexual assault case at Penn State in 2011–2012, the multiple sexual assaults at Stanford, Harvey Weinstein, Jeffrey Epstein, Bill Cosby, and the rest of our current catalogue of “the worst thing we do.” If this is the case, she asked, why are we so hesitant to talk about it? This is tantamount to a suggestion that we are failing to reduce cruelty because we don’t talk about it. So she changed the conversation, saying, Montaigne’s concentration on cruelty is, of course, diffcult to endure. That is why we are just as evasive when we talk about cruelty as were our philosophical ancestors. When cruelty is mentioned we immediately say “sadism,” which is a pathological condition, just as Aristotle chose to discuss brutishness. Even more often we dodge cruelty by gravely arguing about whether human aggression is innate or hereditary, or learned and conditioned by the environment. Presumably one of these alternatives gives us some hope that cruelty might abate eventually, though why this should be the case is far from clear. I suspect that we talk around cruelty because we do not want to talk about it. That might merely be intellectual cowardice, but I do not think so. (Shklar 1984, 44) It may be the same reason why so many people are hesitant to read Lolita; it is uncomfortable to be in the space of dangerous desire. Rorty pushed this discomfort into the space of liberal irony. Shklar defnes cruelty as “the powerful inficting suffering on the weak” and as “the willful inficting of physical pain on a weaker being in order to cause anguish and fear…a wrong done to another creature, not an offense to God” (Shklar 1984, 8). “To put it frst places one irrevocably outside the sphere of revealed religion” (Shklar 1984, 9). For her, asking the question of when desire becomes dangerous is a question connected to the abandonment of metaphysics. This fts well with Rorty’s preference for “the ontological priority of the social”; as Voparil explains, quoting Rorty “‘the arena of cultural politics’ means

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a sphere in which no authority other than society over itself, including ‘God, or Truth, or Reality…can trump the fruits of democratic consensus’…authority is frmly only within the human social realm” (Voparil 2011a, 135).

Rorty’s Poeticized Culture (i) The Rortyan Triangle: Joining Nietzsche’s Delicate Boundary with Shklar’s Putting Cruelty First In CIS, Rorty offered up a “triangle” of concepts (contingency, irony, and solidarity) that cohere in a way that dramatically advances the conversation on dangerous desire and its threat to liberal democracy. Rorty’s ideas are the frst that allow us to picture Nietzsche’s warning in relationship to Shklar’s desire to make reducing cruelty liberalism’s greatest concern. Consider this equilateral triangle (Figure 11.1):

The apex of this triangle is the appropriate place for solidarity because it represents Shklar’s call for “putting cruelty frst.” Solidarity is what Rorty calls the result of public political vocabulary, and it stands in opposition to the private space of the vocabulary of self-creation. By putting solidarity at the top, I do not mean to suggest that Rorty sees it as in some way ranked higher in importance over contingency or irony in their role in self-creation but perhaps he wants to balance their importance. As Lior Erez says, “Rorty refuses to choose between self-creation and solidarity” (Erez 2013, 193–208). Keith Topper explains the difference this way: [The public side] is the realm not of idiosyncrasy and aesthetic invention but of “solidarity” and [what Wilfrid Sellars called] “we intentions.” Here the highest virtues are those of the public citizen, the

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person engaged in common public discourse about ways to minimize cruelty, achieve social justice, and extend human solidarity. (Topper 1995, 957–958) Acknowledging the contingency of one’s beliefs is a characteristic of Rorty’s “liberal ironist,” but according to Rorty, it is a characteristic that requires merely that the liberal ironist be “commonsensically nominalist and historicist” (CIS, 87). The activities associated with Rortyan irony are much more personal, continuing, dramatic, and fnal-vocabulary altering and as a consequence constitute a more profound infuence on reducing cruelty. I locate the drawing of delicate boundaries in the lowerright corner of the Rortyan Triangle, as only one of irony’s activities. Irony is not only for reducing cruelty but also has other uses associated with idiosyncratic self-creation. These other uses are represented by the many arrows leading off in directions other than along the line toward solidarity. These other arrows ensure that our picture of poeticized culture cannot claim to hold the public and private spheres, as Rorty says, channeling Yeats, “in a single vision” (CIS, xiv). But it is along this side of the Rortyan Triangle connecting irony to solidarity that Nietzsche’s warning regarding dangerous desires has its deepest impact. In Take Care of Freedom and Truth Will Take Care of Itself, Rorty concedes that “at some point the public and private vocabularies interact with each other” (Rorty 2006, 50). Compare this concession with Christopher Voparil’s comment that because the private imagination is the creative engine of the new metaphors and novel vocabularies his project invites, some transaction between private and public seems necessary. This idea…remains largely unresolved in Rorty’s thought.” (Voparil 2010, 41) Although separate, an “interaction” exists between them. Part of the reason the issue is unresolved is that we have not had a detailed look at Nietzsche’s warning in the context of Shklar’s urging that we put cruelty frst. Rorty’s poeticized culture hints at this in the way that the problem of dangerous desire and cruelty are implied as a focus for Rortyan irony. It is the question of dangerous desire that forces the interaction of irony and solidarity. (ii) The Triangle’s Right Arm: How Radical Doubt as an Activity of Irony Reduces Cruelty With the three concepts (contingency, irony, and solidarity) Rorty hopes to give us a picture of the possibility of actually reducing cruelty while simultaneously protecting idiosyncratic self-creations from political obligations. Taken together, this triangular arrangement constitutes what

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Rorty calls a “poeticized culture.” He offers the following hints of what might constitute a redescription of current political liberalism: We need a redescription of liberalism as the hope that culture as a whole can be “poeticized” rather than the Enlightenment hope that it can be “rationalized” or “scientized”…. A poeticized culture would be one which would not insist that we fnd the real wall behind the painted ones, the real touchstone of truth as opposed to touchstones which are merely artifacts. (CIS, 65) A liberal utopia would be a poeticized culture. (CIS, 65) Such a culture would … agree with Dewey that “imagination is the chief instrument of the good.” (CIS, 69) This poeticizing of culture returns the conversation to Nietzsche’s warning, a move suggested by the urging of Shklar that we put reducing cruelty frst. This merging is one of the central achievements of CIS, and it is due to the fact that desires are rendered less dangerous by a poeticizing process that entails our being aware of the imagistic nature of images, by what Hillman calls “imaginal understanding” and Klein calls “double seeing.” In Rorty’s poeticized culture, imaginal understanding is an activity carried out by “intellectuals” (perhaps more modestly described as an “intellectual activity”) that occurs in the province of ironic redescription. How, then, do we make sense of Rorty’s wish for the public-private distinction when he also concedes on at least one occasion, “I don’t think private beliefs can be fenced off; they leak through, so to speak, and infuence the way one behaves toward other people (...) I don’t think the two are synthesizable; but that doesn’t mean that the one doesn’t eventually interact with the other” (Rorty 2006, 50). They bump up against one another but can never be viewed as commensurable parts of a whole. This interaction is represented by the two arrows on the right side of the Rortyan Triangle. But frst, we need to consider the baseline of the Rortyan Triangle and the relationship between irony and contingency. The very title of CIS tells us that for Rorty, contingency and irony are not the same, that what Rorty gives us is a triangular relationship between contingency, irony, and solidarity rather than a linear relationship between solidarity and contingency/irony. Michael Bacon explains Rorty’s contingency-irony distinction this way: An ironist and a simple anti-foundationalist are not the same.… Radical doubt continues for an ironist (the frst and second

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conditions of the Rortyan defnition). The ironists, Rorty says, would be the intellectuals of “the ideal liberal society.” Mere anti-foundationalists would not be intellectuals; they would be “common-sense nominalistic-historicist.” (Bacon 2005, 404) In other words, ironists are thinking about details that mere anti-foundationalists ignore. It is important that we consider this distinction between irony and contingency in the context of Nietzsche’s delicate-boundary warning. This is because perpetrators of cruelty usually lack an understanding of an image as an image and how such understanding would alter the contents of a Rortyan fnal vocabulary from literal to poetic. Mere acknowledgment of contingency would still allow for this lack.

Lolita: The Gold Standard Example of “Delicate Boundary” Failure Consider one of Rorty’s own examples of approaching cruelty in CIS, Humbert Humbert’s (hereafter “HH”) explanation of what he calls “nymphetology” in the opening of Nabokov’s Lolita: Now I wish to introduce the following idea. Between the age limits of nine and fourteen there occur maidens who, to certain bewitched travelers, twice or many times older than they, reveal their true nature which is not human, but nymph (that is, demoniac): and these creatures I propose to designate as “nymphets.” (Nabokov 1955/1991, 16–17) HH claims that as a genuine “nympholept” he is able to pick out the nymphets in a photo of Girl Scouts. Nabokov provides us here with what I consider to be the “gold standard” description of Nietzschean delicate-boundary failure. But it is Rorty who lets us know the full price of irony by changing the conversation from Nietzsche’s ontological distinction between dream images and “crude reality” to a distinction between descriptions. Here, Rorty borrows from Donald Davidson’s one-world-with-multiple-descriptions approach (Davidson 2005, 185–219). For HH’s desire to become less dangerous, he would have to redescribe “nymphets” in a way that poeticized them, for example by saying something like, “It’s as if they were real.” As Rorty says, “Ironism, as I have defned it, results from awareness of the power of redescription” (CIS, 89). Those who lack imaginal understanding in ways that result in delicate-boundary failures describe situations differently than those who possess such understanding. Their descriptions can be a portent of cruelty to come. The possibility of actually reducing cruelty (an activity

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of solidarity) requires redescriptions that are poetic and nonliteral (an activity of irony but not necessarily of contingency). Acknowledging contingency is headed in the right direction with its acceptance of nominalism, but its thinking stops too soon. The demands of liberal democracy include irony because irony, by drawing a delicate boundary, is a requisite for reducing cruelty. Drawing a delicate boundary is an activity of Rortyan redescription. For HH to be less dangerous, his fnal vocabulary must affrm that there are no nymphets in the real world, or perhaps to express the problem more clearly so as to avoid ontology, he must affrm that there are no nymphets in a world described as literal. As long as HH believes there are nymphets in the world (and mere contingency allows for that possibility), his desire is dangerous. We can picture HH claiming that nymphetology is a contingent cultural artifact while also believing that nymphets exist as actual persons. Even though he says their “true nature…is not human” (Nabokov 1955/1991, 16), he affrms that “between the age limits of nine and fourteen there occur maidens”(16). He fails to draw the needed boundary. He must poeticize “nymphets” if his desire is to become less dangerous. Nabokov gives us an HH who has no poetry, a person who would have no place in a Rortyan “poeticized culture.” HH’s comment that he “had safely solipsized Lolita” (Nabokov 1955/1991, 60) is an act of Rortyan irony, although only incipiently. It entails his radical doubting of the only Lolita he had known and of the way in which he made Lolita into a “smaller size” to ft his fantasies. He admits, “I simply did not know a thing about my darling’s mind” (284); instead, he had described her in the physical terms that Nietzsche called “crude reality.” His focus had been on bodily details like “the slightly feline outline of her cheekbones, the slenderness of a downy limb” (17). If he had been an all-out Rortyan ironist, he would have considered different descriptions, not real and unreal Lolitas. The impediment to such considerations was the intensity of his desire, and this intensity proved a powerful distraction that did not allow for what Rorty claimed was a more “intellectual” move. But this intellectual move concerns the poetic imagination and its images. Because of this, HH remains dangerous to her, as the novel lets us know. HH only begins a process that must be more radical and continuing; such an ongoing process is the opposite of madness and pathology, the key to reducing cruelty. Nymphetology and its ontological assumptions had marked the limit of HH’s world. Rortyan irony would have added poetry to that world, just as it had for Nabokov. The possibility of this safer, expanded world is a central feature of a Rortyan poeticized culture. In that rare moment of imaginal understanding when HH says that he had “safely solipsized” her,” we are aware that he is only hoping to have achieved that understanding. He fails to convince us that he had pulled Lolita into the enclosed “safe” space of his own imagining. In Nietzschean

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terms, the fact that he will later rape her reveals clearly how “delicate” that boundary separating the nymphet image of his own imagining from the actual, person, Lolita, truly is. Pathology is lurking close by. HH only begins a process of Rortyan irony but he does not follow through on it because he lacks the necessary intellectual powers and is distracted by the intensity of his lust. His doubting is not a continuing doubting. This is how his desires become dangerous. Drawing such a boundary requires an intellectual activity that is ongoing, more thorough…an activity that distinguishes irony from a mere acknowledgment of contingency. This is because HH, for example, could acknowledge the contingency of his belief in nymphetology without simultaneously acknowledging that he himself had produced it. He could say, for example, that his fascination with nymphets was merely a product of his culture and its historical conditions. He does as much when he mentions the role that “nymphets” played in so-called more enlightened times and cultures when young girls were subjected to marriage. It is only by thinking through the concept of “solipsizing” that he can begin to own responsibility for his cruelty; acknowledging fve years after the rapes that he had failed to follow through on this “owning” eventually drives him mad. The radical doubt, in this case, includes doubting that his contingent historical conditions can be blamed for the cruelty. In this way, the impact of acknowledging contingency is mild in comparison to the more demanding implications of full-blown irony. Nevertheless, there is no guarantee that irony supplies the intellectual prowess that can always face up to intense desire. Rortyan poeticized culture is merely possible.

Irony’s Public Role Therefore, I am on the side of those who, like Michael Bacon and William Curtis, see the possibility of a public role for ironic self-creation. Bacon argues that ironic redescription can play a social role. The ironist’s wholehearted commitment to redescription is well-suited to the concern to avoid cruelty, since that concern necessitates a preparedness to redescribe. A liberal society is one that is committed to eradicating cruelty by uncovering unnoticed instances, something that requires redescription, even if that redescription is experienced by some as cruel. (Bacon 2005, 404) Curtis qualifes this claim, adding that Rorty fails to distinguish between two different types of irony in CIS: the milder type presented in the frst half of CIS, a virtue liberal ironist, someone who is “aware of contingency of consciousness…and is tolerant, adaptable, and just” (Curtis 2015, 30) and, second, “the more active and radical mental habit that

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‘ironist intellectuals’ exhibit” (ibid.), the type presented in the last half of CIS as “an intellectually restless, seemingly neurotic character” (Bacon 2019). John Pettigrew sees the same two types in CIS, fnding the second type to be a “romantic” sort or a “pure” ironist, what Bacon calls “a caricature of nihilistic subjectivity” (Bacon 2005, 103– 134). The second type, according to Pettigrew, is not much interested in social questions. On this point, I disagree with the preference Pettigrew holds for the frst type of Rortyan ironist, the sort who fall short of the “radical and continuing doubts” of Rorty’s “intellectuals.” Rorty says nonintellectuals would not be ironists: “In the ideal society, the intellectuals would still be ironists, although the non-intellectuals would not” (CIS, xv, 87); they “would see themselves as contingent through and through, without feeling any particular doubts about the contingencies they happened to be” (ibid.). Rorty calls this sort the mere “commonsensical non-metaphysicians” (CIS, xv, 87) who merely grasp contingency, the sort that Pettigrew calls the “moderate” form of Rortyan ironist (Pettigrew 2000, 104 and 107). Voparil uses this distinction in an attempt to clarify Rorty’s publicprivate distinction: Distinguishing these two senses of irony as distinct points on a spectrum makes it possible to reconcile the apparently conficting statements in CIS about the importance of irony for liberal citizens, on the one hand, and claims that irony is “an inherently private matter,” [Rorty CIS, 87] on the other. (2016) But Voparil is correct when he leaves “is” out of the quotation since Rorty actually says, “Irony seems inherently a private matter” (my emphasis, CIS, 87), leaving open the possibility that the second neurotic sense of irony is demanded publicly in order to actually reduce cruelty. That is, I claim that it is the 150-year-long conversation on cruelty that necessitates our looking more closely into the possible public role of Rorty’s second sense of irony for purposes of redescription, that the frst mild sort that merely understands contingency and lacks radical doubting is not up to the task of being fully committed to liberal democracy’s frst concern for our time: an effective reduction of cruelty. Rorty, without being fully clear, puts his fnger on the full implications of Shklar’s claim. His chapter on Lolita appears in the second half of CIS, the half in which the more extreme form of irony appears. Rorty’s account, his choice of “seems” over “is,” is not explicit, but it allows us to harbor the possibility of a public role for irony of the second type. It is Shklar’s urging us to make reducing cruelty the frst priority of current liberalism that changes the equation regarding a public role for the second kind of irony. Lolita lets

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us know intimately and uncomfortably the heroin-like effects that acts of cruelty can produce; Nabokov takes us behind the scenes and into the pathologies of some of the real-life narratives of the Me-Too movement. He situates us in the sort of tortured “restless” psychological spaces that characterize HH’s temperament, his “anxieties,” “neurosis,” “romanticism,” and “nihilistic subjectivity” that are the by-products of the cruel “pleasures” he exacts upon Lolita. The frst type of irony includes “civic virtues” that make one “tolerant, adaptable, and just” (Curtis 2015, 30) and the mere acknowledgment of contingency characterized by the mild, even-tempered type of irony are not suffcient to the task of effectively reducing cruelty. That task demands the diffcult work of redescription that only radical and continuing doubts make possible. For HH to have become less cruel, less dangerous in his desires, he would have had to go where Nietzsche claimed the Classical Greeks went, to the drawing of a “delicate boundary” where the artistic imagination cordons off its undangerous space. A natural question that arises from this ironist-type debate concerns whether Nabokov’s desire to have “no moral in tow” weighing down the possibility of his art’s aesthetic fight is enough of a desire to place him in Curtis’s and Pettigrew’s second category. Does Nabokov have no moral end in writing Lolita? If we base our response only on Nabokov’s stated aesthetic aims in the afterword to the novel (Nabokov 1955/1991, 314– 315, and Rorty CIS, 159–164), then the quick answer is that he has no “moral in tow.” But, by my lights, Rorty rescues Nabokov from the label “nihilistic subjectivity” by claiming that a fction like Lolita can “interact” with the public vocabulary of justice and thereby have a positive impact on solidarity. This can be more easily seen when we regard Lolita, as we just have, in the context of Nietzsche’s delicate boundary warning. Lolita is a virtual how-to-manual regarding what can be avoided by means of delicate boundary drawing. Seen this way, the novel itself serves as Nabokov’s “public” contribution to solidarity, while at the same time serving as an example of his own self-creation. Michael Williams calls Rorty’s description of irony as radical doubt skepticism under a different name (Williams 2003, 61–80). But Bacon claims Williams misses pragmatism’s distinction between skepticism and fallibilism: “Our beliefs have roots in contingent and therefore fallible practice, but that’s no reason to be skeptical about either” (Bacon 2019, no page numbers provided). Williams sees Rorty’s early-career epistemological concerns re-emerging in the Eighties and undermining his own theoretical concerns in CIS, particularly when it comes to radical and continuing doubt. However, because so many of us readily acknowledge the “obvious” contingent constraints on our beliefs, as we approach irony, we are more likely to acknowledge fallibility without being skeptical and to acknowledge skepticism without admitting fallibility. An example of such a belief would be the claim made by Shklar and Rorty that reducing

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cruelty should be the chief concern of current liberal democracy. Another example would be Nabokov’s drawing a delicate boundary by the very creation of his fction. An ontological distinction is suggested between the image of Lolita the character and any actual 12-year-old girl, but this distinction does not necessarily collapse into a skeptical confusion that might make desire dangerous. The radical doubting of Rortyan irony is necessitated by the fact that a perpetrator of cruelty like HH must maintain over time the distinction between an image (nymphet) and the person or object which that image represents (Lolita). Richard Bernstein, in Bacon’s account, offers an optional response to Williams’s position: Instead of describing the ironist as “having radical and continual doubts” (which suggests some sort of existential angst)…Rorty would have been clearer…if he had simply said that the ironist knows that her fnal vocabulary is the result of all sorts of historical contingencies and that other contingencies generate other fnal vocabularies. (Bernstein 2016, 47) But Bacon objects, “Bernstein here reduces irony to nominalism and historicism, rendering it safe from skepticism…he therefore misses irony as it is tied to self-creation” (Bacon 2019, no page numbers provided). Bernstein, in Bacon’s view, is reducing irony to contingency and leaves out of his account how someone like Nabokov might be creating himself while he is simultaneously offering a redescribed vocabulary with the purpose of reducing cruelty. For me, the possibility of reducing the cruelty of someone like HH demands something more radical than a mere acknowledgment of the contingency of his nymphetology; as I said earlier, his doubting must choose between ontological questions like whether nymphets are real, questions which should lead eventually to his drawing a delicate boundary between imaginary nymphets and actual girls, and more Rortyan-type questions regarding possible redescriptions of the person who is the object of desire. The latter approach might settle on the Davidsonian notion of one world with alternative descriptions (“anomalous monism”; Davidson 2005, 184–200). An HH who had read and genuinely engaged CIS, emerging as a Rortyan ironist, would be a less dangerous HH with a different fnal vocabulary. He would not be the victim of a skepticism that rendered his desire more dangerous. Such skepticism would dangerously leave the question of whether Lolita is a nymphet hanging in the air. The Rortyan ironist, in contrast, would possess the poetic understanding characteristic of Rortyan poeticized culture. This is how heeding both Nietzsche’s warning regarding delicate boundaries and Shklar’s insistence on prioritizing the reduction of cruelty pragmatically changes the nature of liberalism’s demand.

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Conclusion In 1872, Nietzsche issued a warning concerning dangerous desires, cruelty, and the possibility of constraining both by the drawing of a “delicate boundary” between the imagined and the real. In 1978, Hillman, inspired by Plato’s acknowledgment of a mental state that sees an image as an image, updated Nietzsche’s warning, paraphrasing in psychological terms the connection between dangerous desire and a lack of “imaginal understanding.” In 1984, Shklar, inspired by the importance Montaigne and Montesquieu placed on cruelty, advocated making the reduction of cruelty political liberalism’s highest priority. Rorty’s achievement in 1989 was to merge for the frst time these two lines of thought. By making it possible to include Nietzsche’s warning in his profle of a liberal ironist and thus to combine that warning with Shklar’s admonition, Rorty offered us a clearer path for “tailoring a philosophy” (Rorty 2010, 242) to the most pressing demand of current liberalism: the reduction of cruelty.

Works by Rorty CIS. 1989. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. New York: Cambridge University Press. TP. 1998. Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, Volume 3. New York: Cambridge University Press. PCP. 2007. Philosophy as Cultural Politics: Philosophical Papers, Volume 4. New York: Cambridge University Press. Rorty, Richard. 2006. Take Care of Freedom, and Truth Will Take Care of Itself. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. ———. 2010. The Rorty Reader, edited by Christopher J. Voparil and Richard J. Bernstein. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell.

Other Works Bacon, Michael. 2005. “A Defense of Liberal Ironism.” Res Publica 11 (4): 403–423. ———. 2019. “Rorty, Irony, and the Consequences of Contingency for Liberal Society.” URL = https://www.academia.edu/30441037/Rorty_irony_ and_the_consequences_of_contingency_for_liberal_society Bernstein, Richard J. 2016. Ironic Life. Cambridge: Polity Press. Curtis, William. 2015. Defending Rorty: Pragmatism and Liberal Virtue. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Davidson, Donald. 2005. Truth, Language, and History. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Erez, Lior. 2013. “Reconsidering Richard Rorty’s Private-Public Distinction.” Humanities 2 (2): 193–208. Hillman, James. 1978. The Dream and the Underworld. New York: Harper & Row. Hofstadter, Albert and Richard Kuhns, eds. 1964. Philosophies of Art and Beauty. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Howland, Jacob. 2004. The Republic: The Odyssey of Philosophy. Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books. Klein, Jacob. 1965. A Commentary on Plato’s Meno. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Nabokov, Vladimir. 1955/1991. The Annotated Lolita, edited by Alfred Appel, Jr. New York: Random House. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1872a. “The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music.” In Basic Writings of Nietzsche, edited and translated by Walter Kaufmann, 15–144. New York: Viking. ———. 1872b. “The Birth of Tragedy.” In Philosophies of Art and Beauty: Selected Readings in Aesthetics from Plato to Heidegger, edited by Albert Hofstadter and Richard Kuhns, 496–554. Translated by Clifton P. Fadiman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Pettigrew, John. 2000. “Lives of Irony: Randolph Bourne, Richard Rorty, and a New Genealogy of Critical Pragmatism.” In A Pragmatist’s Progress? Richard Rorty and American Intellectual History, edited by John Pettigrew, 103–134. Oxford: Rowman & Littlefeld Publishers. Shklar, Judith N. 1992. The Faces of Injustice. New Haven: Yale University Press. ——— 1984. Ordinary Vices. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. ——— 1989/2018. The Liberalism of Fear (El Liberismo del miedo). Barcelona: Herder Editorial. Topper, Keith. 1995.“Richard Rorty, Liberalism, and the Politics of Redescription.” The American Political Science Review 89 (4). Voparil, Christopher J. 2010. “General Introduction.” In The Rorty Reader, edited by Christopher J. Voparil and Richard J. Bernstein, 1–52. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell. ——— 2011a. “Reading Rorty Politically.” FILOZOPHIA 66 (10): 963–970. ——— 2011b. “Rorty and Brandom: Pragmatism and the Ontological Priority of the Social.” Pragmatism Today 2 (1): 133–143. ——— 2016. “Rorty and James on Irony, Moral Commitment, and the Ethics of Belief.” William James Studies 12 (2): 1–27. Williams, Michael. 2003. “Rorty on Knowledge and Truth.” In Richard Rorty, edited by Charles Guignon and David R. Hiley, 61–80. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Part IV

Re/Interpretations of Rorty

12 Speaking for Oneself Stolen Vocabularies and Imposed Vocabularies Susan Dieleman

In CIS, Richard Rorty writes, [P]ain is nonlinguistic. It is what we human beings have that ties us to the nonlanguage-using beasts. So victims of cruelty, people who are suffering, do not have much in the way of a language. That is why there is no such thing as the “voice of the oppressed” or the “language of the victims.” The language the victims once used is not working anymore, and they are suffering too much to put new words together. So the job of putting their situation into language is going to have to be done for them by somebody else.1 (CIS, 94) This is the kind of passage that has given feminist (and other) critics of Rorty reason to pause. As Christopher Voparil notes, “[C]alling for others to put the experience of marginalized groups into language” entangles Rorty in “the problem of speaking for others,” a problem that tends to reinforce, rather than undermine, existing hierarchies (Voparil 2011, 120). It also explains why Nancy Fraser claims she detects in “Feminism and Pragmatism,” published shortly after CIS, an important shift in Rorty’s work: she thinks the latter essay “explodes” the oppositions characteristic of Rorty’s previous work between “the public and the private, the community and the individual, the political and the aesthetic” (Fraser 1991, 262). We get in “Feminism and Pragmatism” an account where those who are suffering are able to use language to express themselves and therefore to draw attention to their own suffering. In this chapter, I investigate whether and to what extent “Feminism and Pragmatism” should be seen as a departure from CIS in relation to the idea of speaking for oneself. Though this will not address all the various concerns laid out by critics like Fraser, I hope that the admittedly charitable interpretation of Rorty’s position I offer in this chapter helps lay to rest the particular concern that Rorty thinks members of oppressed groups cannot speak for themselves. More specifcally, I suggest we can DOI: 10.4324/9781003208150-17

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read Rorty’s claim that those who suffer are unable to “put new words together” as being a very specifc claim about the way pain and humiliation can take away a person’s ability to possess or create a vocabulary. Read this way, “Feminism and Pragmatism” is less of a departure than it might otherwise seem; there is no reason to believe that, in CIS, Rorty thinks members of oppressed groups, simply by virtue of that membership, are incapable of speaking for themselves. To read CIS and “Feminism and Pragmatism” together in this way requires connecting Rorty’s interpretation of George Orwell’s 1984 offered in Part III of CIS to his views about the (causal) relationship between the world and (human) vocabularies, a task I take on in Section 1. In Section 2, I relate this reading to Rorty’s claim in “Feminism and Pragmatism” that feminists can create new, nonandrocentric vocabularies. I argue that, in CIS, Rorty is interested in the person who lacks a fnal vocabulary because it has been taken from them through experiences of pain and humiliation; in “Feminism and Pragmatism,” he is interested not in the person who lacks a fnal vocabulary but whose fnal vocabulary has been imposed on them. I expect that the interpretation I offer provides new avenues for exploring how hierarchical relationships shaped by multifarious forms of power play a role in shaping individuals’ and groups’ ability to possess and create fnal vocabularies.

1. Humiliation in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity It is by now a familiar refrain that Rorty thinks novels are a valuable tool in the pursuit of social progress.2 Novels, he contends, are particularly good at helping readers see previously unfamiliar others as similar to themselves in morally relevant ways. The most morally inspiring novels are those that offer detailed descriptions of people we don’t currently think of as members of our moral community, and, in so doing, provide an opportunity to redescribe them, and ourselves, anew. In CIS, Rorty considers many such books, books that detail the suffering of others we might not otherwise notice.3 Books relevant to liberal hope (i.e., to reducing cruelty) can be distinguished into books that “help us see the effects of social practices and institutions on others” and books that “help us see the effects of our private idiosyncrasies on others” (CIS, 141). Here, we can see the difference between writers like Dickens and writers like Nabokov offered in the introductory chapter. Writers like Dickens, Rorty suggests, detail the “kinds of suffering being endured by people to whom we had previously not attended” (CIS, xvi); they help the liberal reader become less cruel by offering (fctional) detailed descriptions of how people suffer under social practices and institutions she takes for granted. Writers like Nabokov detail “what sorts of cruelty we ourselves are capable of” (CIS, xvi); they help the liberal reader become less cruel by offering (fctional) detailed descriptions of how they themselves can be cruel through their

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pursuit of private projects of self-creation. Seeing how it is possible to be cruel provides the opportunity for self-redescription—a task enabling the liberal reader to create a less cruel version of herself. In the group of books he thinks detail the ways we become cruel by taking for granted existing social practices and institutions, Rorty includes books like Friedrich Engels’s Condition of the Working Class in England, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables, Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness, and Richard Wright’s Black Boy, as well as “the reports of muckraking journalists and government commissions” (CIS, 141). These books “serve human liberty” (145); their focus is on ending cruelty. They redescribe states of affairs to highlight the ways they cause people—especially people unlike ourselves—to suffer. Thus, they highlight what “we” have in common with “them”—namely, our shared ability to suffer. In the group of books Rorty thinks detail the ways in which the pursuit of private perfection can be cruel, Rorty includes Georg Eliot’s Middlemarch, Charles Dickens’s Bleak House,4 Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, and George Orwell’s 1984. When it comes to these sorts of books, Rorty is interested in how, by identifying with particular characters, a reader might learn how their own private obsessions can cause pain and humiliation to others. In passing, he references two characters: Mr. Causaubon in George Eliot’s Middlemarch, who ignores his wife in favor of his own scholarly interests, even though she had married him because of those interests, and Mrs. Jellyby in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, who is so obsessed with her charitable work in Africa that she ignores her family at home. Rorty thinks that readers who identify with these characters will see in themselves the ways that they similarly can be cruel. He writes, “By identifcation with Mr. Causaubon in Middlemarch or with Mrs. Jellyby in Bleak House, for example, we may come to notice what we ourselves have been doing” (CIS, 141). The goal, of course, is to change one’s self-description as a result, in order to become less cruel. As Alan Malachowski puts it, Rorty “thinks that in reading what skillful writers have to say about such blindness [to the suffering of others] we will be helped to avoid unwittingly displaying anything like it ourselves” (Malachowski 2002, 119). Books by Nabokov and Orwell demonstrate that efforts to create private vocabularies can lead people to be cruel; they show “how our attempts at autonomy, our private obsessions with the achievement of a certain sort of perfection, may make us oblivious to the pain and humiliation we are causing” (CIS, 141). Both Nabokov and Orwell, he claims, have cruelty as their central topic, and both write about cruelty “from the inside”—from the point of view of the person being cruel (146). Nabokov hopes that the reader will notice that they themselves are like Humbert; both the character and the reader fail to notice Lolita’s pain. As Rorty puts it, “The reader, suddenly revealed to himself as, if not hypocritical, at least cruelly incurious, recognizes his sembable, his brother, in Humbert”

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(CIS, 163). Similarly, in the last third of 1984, Rorty contends that Orwell hopes the reader will see the possibility of becoming O’Brien. Rorty reads Orwell as suggesting that becoming O’Brien is possible, and this possibility—the possible future in which you become O’Brien—prompts a self-redescription away from that possible future.5 Noticing pain and suffering is paramount for the liberal reader, and the best way to notice pain and suffering is to read books that offer a detailed account of it. Through reading, she will “become aware of all the various ways in which other human beings whom [she] might act upon can be humiliated” (CIS, 92). The sort of pain and suffering inficted on Winston by O’Brien in 1984 suggests that the world has a particular causal power over us, which is the power to leave language users without a vocabulary. A key feature of Rorty’s anti-authoritarian project is his rejection of the traditional, metaphysical view that suggests that the “world out there” or “human nature as such” has the power to impose on us a particular vocabulary or “language game.” While it is the case that the world does cause us to be justifed in holding a particular belief within a language game, it does not cause us to adopt one game rather than another. As he notes, “The world can, once we have programmed ourselves with a language, cause us to hold beliefs. But it cannot propose a language for us to speak. Only other human beings can do that” (CIS, 6). The language game or vocabulary one fnds oneself using is an entirely human affair. While sentences within language games are not chosen by us, the language games themselves are. This is what Rorty means when he claims that languages—and thus truth, which is a property of sentences—are made rather than found. Though to claim that we “choose” a language game is still too strong. Following Kuhn, Rorty contends that the move from one language game to another is a gradual, evolutionary, largely unpredictable affair, one that often results from centuries of humans “muddling through” in an attempt to fnd vocabularies that make it possible to better cope with the environment in which we fnd ourselves. Yet as Winston’s experience demonstrates, the world “can blindly and inarticulately crush us” and “mute despair, intense mental pain, can cause us to blot ourselves out” (CIS, 40). This is the point Rorty is making in the passage quoted at the beginning of this chapter. He is drawing attention to the idea that there are certain forms of pain and humiliation that can deprive a person of the ability to tell a coherent story about their lives; the powers of description and redescription are taken away from them. They are “so racked by pain as to be unable to learn a language” (CIS, 35–36).6 This sort of “mute despair” and “intense mental pain” is captured in Rorty’s characterization of Winston in 1984. Winston’s suffering at the hands of O’Brien reminds us that human beings who have been socialized…share a capacity which other animals lack. They can all be given a special

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kind of pain: they can all be humiliated by the forcible tearing down of the particular structures of language and belief in which they were socialized (or which they pride themselves on having formed for themselves). (CIS, 177) Humiliation, therefore—“making the things that seemed most important” to a person “look futile, obsolete, and powerless” (CIS, 89)— involves rending a person’s fnal vocabulary, making it so that they can no longer use the language they once did to understand who they are. Moreover, they are left incapable of possessing or creating any vocabulary at all. Winston wanting the rats to “chew through Julia’s face rather than his own” is a belief he “cannot weave a story around” (CIS, 178). Winston’s previous self-description, one where his love for Julia was one of the things most important to him, was shattered because that love is now powerless; it no longer plays the role it once did in his fnal vocabulary. Of course, in stealing a person’s fnal vocabulary, one is also tearing apart that person’s self. If selves are nothing but “incarnated vocabularies” or “centerless webs of beliefs and desires,” and the narratives one uses to make sense of themselves are torn apart, then so is the self (CIS, 88). Thus, in CIS, Rorty is drawing attention to a distinctive form of humiliation through which a person becomes “incapable of having a self because she becomes incapable of weaving a coherent web of belief and desire” (CIS, 178). Because Rorty defnes this kind of humiliation as a rending of a person’s fnal vocabulary—and thus of their self— the humiliated person can no longer make sense of themselves or their experiences; they are, according to Rorty, incapable of explaining their humiliation to someone else. The pain and suffering they experience cannot be put into words because the victim is, like Winston after having been tortured by O’Brien, “no longer able to use a language or be a self” (CIS, 179). The person who has experienced this kind of pain and humiliation is a person who fnds themselves in a position where the story they have been telling about themselves—about who they are—no longer makes sense. For Rorty, the world can cause us to be justifed in holding a belief once a particular vocabulary or language game has been adopted. The problem for someone like Winston, who has suffered immense pain and humiliation, is that he has no vocabulary whatsoever, and thus the world cannot justify any of his beliefs. The issue is not that any particular statement like “two plus two equals fve” is true or false, but rather that he has no vocabulary he can use to even adjudicate the truth of this proposition. There is no longer a language game in which “Winston loves Julia” can be made true or false. This is why Winston’s situation needs to be put into words by someone else. Rorty claims that the “liberal novelist,

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poet, or journalist” is best suited to this task (CIS, 94). This is because the author—someone like George Orwell—still has a vocabulary, which is necessary for making sense of the truth or falsity of any particular claim. From outside Winston’s pain and suffering, they can articulate what’s happened to him.

2. Oppression in “Feminism and Pragmatism” In the previous section, I showed that Rorty’s claim in CIS that authors must speak on behalf of victims of cruelty refers specifcally to those individuals who have suffered a distinctive kind of pain and humiliation, where their fnal vocabulary—and thus, their selves—have been stolen from them. But if this reading is correct, what should we make of Rorty’s claim that there is no such thing as “the voice of the oppressed” or “the language of the victims”? If Rorty thinks that pain and humiliation are what take away an individual’s ability to use language, then in saying that “the oppressed” have no ability to use language, he must believe that “the oppressed” suffer this same kind of immense pain as do individuals who have been subject to the sort of humiliation Winston suffers. That is, Rorty’s mention of “the oppressed” in the same passage suggests that those who are oppressed are in the same position as Winston in 1984 and thus must have someone to speak on their behalf—a position that rightly makes feminists (and others) wary. As noted earlier, some commentators have suggested that “Feminism and Pragmatism” marks a signifcant shift in Rorty’s thinking, wherein he comes to hold that the oppressed can speak for themselves. Christopher Voparil argues, for example, that Rorty’s essay “marks a revision of his earlier stance in Contingency” (Voparil 2011, 121), and Nancy Fraser, thinks that this essay “explodes” the oppositions found in Rorty’s earlier work. Voparil usefully glosses Fraser’s reading of “Feminism and Pragmatism,” and captures the point I am interested in addressing, when he writes that Fraser identifes in this essay [“Feminism and Pragmatism”] an important shift away from the conception of social change that dominates Contingency, where the private, novel metaphor-generating capacity of strong poets obsessed with the ‘anxiety of infuence’ is the sole locus of agency, with victims of oppression, as we have seen, needing someone to put their experience into language for them. As a result of his engagement with a variety of feminist perspectives, Rorty reconceives linguistic innovation in collective, political terms, thus paving the way for broad-scale social movements to struggle against dominant constellations of meaning. (Voparil 2011, 122)

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While I think that some carelessness in Rorty’s writing justifes this reading, I also want to suggest that we can reconcile his views in CIS and “Feminism and Pragmatism” by noting that, in the former, he is interested in the person whose ability to use a vocabulary is stolen from them, whereas in the latter, he is interested in the person who retains the ability to use a vocabulary, albeit one that has been imposed upon them. That is, the difference between CIS and “Feminism and Pragmatism” refects not so much a shift in Rorty’s philosophical commitments as it does a shift in focus from the fairly narrow phenomenon of stolen vocabularies to that of imposed vocabularies and, more specifcally, imposed vocabularies in which a group is oppressed. In “Feminism and Pragmatism,” Rorty writes, “In our society, straight white males of my generation—even earnestly egalitarian straight white males—cannot easily stop themselves from feeling guilty relief that they were not born women or gay or black” (TP, 224). Rorty suggests that this guilty relief arises in part because those who are privileged can calculate the “socioeconomic disadvantages” of being born a member of a despised group. For example, in the United States, straight, cis men do not have to worry about walking alone at night for fear of sexual violence; white men and women do not have to worry about being pulled over for fear of police violence. If they are refective, these white men and women will experience relief for not having these worries, and they might even feel guilty for experiencing this relief. It is unfair and unjust, they might realize, that they are able to walk alone at night or interact with the police without fear, while others are not. However, this guilty relief is not just an awareness of the sorts of benefts one gains—and the sorts of disadvantages one avoids—if one is a member of a privileged group rather than a despised group. It is also, Rorty contends, a “sort of instinctive and ineffable horror” (TP, 224) at what it would have been like to be born “one of them”—i.e., black or gay or a woman. A person who experiences this “instinctive and ineffable horror” might shudder at the thought of being a member of one of these despised groups; there is nothing that would be more degrading. This is because to be a member of one of these groups would mean one is less than human.7 This notion of “guilty relief” fnds its way into another paper of Rorty’s, published two years later: “Human Rights, Rationality, and Sentimentality.” There, he notes “there are three ways in which we paradigmatic humans distinguish ourselves from borderline cases” (TP, 167). The frst is to distinguish between true humans and pseudo-humans as animals. The second is to distinguish between true humans and pseudohumans as children. The third is to distinguish between true humans and pseudo-humans as nonmale. There are “simple” ways of excluding women (and men who do not live up to the ideals of masculinity) from true humanity: “for example, using ‘man’ as a synonym of ‘human being’.

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As feminists have pointed out, such usages reinforce the average male’s thankfulness that he was not born a woman, as well as his fear of the ultimate degradation: feminization” (TP, 169; emphasis added).8 He cites MacKinnon’s suggestion that “for most men, being a woman does not count as one way of being human” (TP, 169). On Rorty’s view, to be a paradigmatic human is not to have some “essence,” like Reason or a share in God’s image, that nonhumans lack. Rather, it is to be grateful that one has had the good fortune to be born into a group that has had the power to defne itself, to dictate the rules of a culture’s language game, to become “masters.” These are the descriptions that shape society and its institutions, as well as what it means to count as “one of us.” Thus, a paradigmatic human—or what Rorty calls in “Feminism and Pragmatism” a “full-fedged person”—is “a matter of double negation: it is not to think of oneself as belonging to a group that powerful people in that society thank God they do not belong to” (TP, 224). In other words, to be a full-fedged person in a given society is to be grateful that you are not one of “them”—one of those people you’d rather not be.9 In CIS, Rorty writes, “[T]he force of ‘us’ is, typically, contrastive in the sense that it contrasts with a ‘they’ which is also made up of human beings—the wrong sort of human beings” (CIS, 190). Of course, to have a society of “masters and slaves” or of humans and pseudo-humans is not inevitable. The ineffable horror men feel at the idea of having been born a woman, or cis people feel at the idea of having been born trans, may one day simply no longer be the sort of reaction they have. Rorty writes, “At some point in the development of our society, guilty relief over not having been born a woman may not cross the minds of males, any more than the question ‘noble or base-born?’ now crosses their minds” (TP, 224). If men no longer feel this guilty relief, it will be because both men and women have “forgotten the traditional androcentric language” used to defne women or trans people as, at best, only differently human (TP, 224). This happens, Rorty thinks, when a new fnal vocabulary replaces the old, when the traditional androcentric language is replaced by a new language—not one that better represents reality but instead offers an alternative set of metaphors and, thus, an alternative set of practices. It results when “the linguistic and other practices of the common culture have come to incorporate some of the practices characteristic of imaginative and courageous outcasts” (TP, 224). These outcasts seek to create new metaphors to get out from under the fnal vocabulary that has been imposed upon them. Any writer who engages in redescription will do so because they feel anxiety or discomfort with the fnal vocabulary into which they’ve been socialized; ironic redescription is “if not intrinsically resentful, at least reactive. Ironists have to have something to have doubts about, something from which to be alienated” (CIS, 88). When it comes to feminism, the fnal vocabulary that has been imposed on women, and against which they are reacting, is an androcentric fnal vocabulary.

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In “Feminism and Pragmatism,” Rorty looks at the work of feminist thinkers like Catharine A. MacKinnon, Marilyn Frye, and Adrienne Rich, whose efforts embody the attempt to gain “semantic authority” over themselves as women, to come up with new terms to defne themselves and, in so doing, create their moral identities.10 In suggesting that what feminists are doing is helping women “create a moral identity as women,” what Rorty means is that the androcentric fnal vocabulary has no space for a unique moral identity for women (TP, 210). This fnal vocabulary can only conceive of women as either having the same moral identity as men or else having the moral identity men have given them (as ladies rather than as women).11 Thus, in creating a new self-description, feminists are proposing new truth candidates; they are expanding the existing logical space of moral deliberation. Rorty urges that we regard this as a process of self-creation rather than self-discovery. As he puts it, “[W]e have to think of gays, blacks, and women inventing themselves rather than discovering themselves, and thus of the larger society as coming to terms with something new” (TP, 225). Rorty builds on Adrienne Rich’s recommendation of lesbian/feminist separatism, suggesting that a separate space for women, where they can work out these new self-descriptions, will prove valuable; such spaces help individuals “test out” their own metaphors on others: “To get such [semantic] authority you have to hear your own statements as part of a shared practice. Otherwise you yourself will never know whether they are more than ravings, never know whether you are a heroine or a maniac” (TP, 223). The reason a person attempting to gain semantic authority over herself might think she is a “maniac” (and the reason others might think the same) is because she is “firting” with meaninglessness. The very idea of gaining semantic authority requires stepping outside the prevailing fnal vocabulary that has been imposed on you in order to construct a new one. In a patriarchal society, semantic authority belongs to men; men have semantic authority over themselves and over women. Both men and women have been socialized into this prevailing fnal vocabulary, and only some of us, Rorty thinks, are likely to have both the courage and the imagination required to step back from this imposed vocabulary to challenge it by presenting an altogether novel alternative: Injustices may not be perceived as injustices, even by those who suffer them, until somebody invents a previously unplayed role. Only if somebody has a dream, and a voice to describe that dream, does what looked like nature begin to look like culture, what looked like fate begin to look like a moral abomination. For until then only the language of the oppressor is available, and most oppressors have had the wit to teach the oppressed a language in which the oppressed will sound crazy—even to themselves—if they describe themselves as oppressed. (TP, 203)

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In short, unless someone is courageous and imaginative enough to offer an alternative description, only the prevailing fnal vocabulary will be available to make sense of one’s experiences. Everybody inherits a fnal vocabulary; this is just what it means to be socialized into a community. Some people (women, for example) inherit a fnal vocabulary that sees them as merely pseudo-human. Most women will accept it or, at most, feel uncomfortable or anxious about it. Some women—a very few women—will try to slough off that inherited fnal vocabulary by creating their own fnal vocabulary instead. Of course, in the prevailing, androcentric fnal vocabulary, the idea that women are oppressed—and the idea that men’s and women’s roles in a patriarchal society are historically contingent rather than tracking what they’re really like—will sound like nonsense. Moreover, from the perspective of an androcentric vocabulary, the idea that women could have a different role—one they created for themselves—would also sound like nonsense. It isn’t until the metaphors that create that role catch on that there will emerge a prevailing fnal vocabulary that sees women as fully human rather than only pseudo-human. In short, women will not be full persons until they, and the prevailing fnal vocabulary, describe them as such. This forces Rorty into a position where he has to admit that pragmatists, like himself, see personhood as a matter of degree, not as an all-or-nothing affair, something evenly distributed around the species. We see it as something that slaves typically have less of than their masters. This is not because there are such things as “natural slaves” but because of the masters’ control over the language spoken by the slaves. (TP, 220) In short, without control over your own language, you have less personhood than you otherwise would have. In a thoroughly patriarchal society, women are only able to describe themselves in the prevailing, androcentric language; there are no other options available. It isn’t until more options are made available—resulting in an expansion of the space required for moral deliberation—that the prevailing fnal vocabulary can be forgotten and women will be, according to that fnal vocabulary, full persons. Yet note that in a society structured by hierarchical relations—where men are grateful not to have been born women, for example—both the dominant and the oppressed groups are able to use language. They can avail themselves of the prevailing fnal vocabulary to understand themselves and their world. This contrasts with the point Rorty makes in CIS, where he is interested in ways that the world “can blindly and inarticulately crush us” and “mute despair, intense mental pain, can cause us to blot ourselves out” (CIS, 40). Appreciating this distinction helps us see that the kind of oppression with which Rorty is concerned in “Feminism

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and Pragmatism” differs from the sort of cases he takes up in CIS. If the pain someone experiences is so immense that they become altogether incapable of language, then they lack personhood. The humiliated person, like Winston, must be spoken for because he has no language whatsoever. He isn’t given a “slave” vocabulary—he is rendered language-less. However, women (and slaves, and blacks, and gays)—those whom Rorty discusses in “Feminism and Pragmatism”—have more personhood than Winston because they at least have the fnal vocabulary they have inherited through socialization. Feminists who seek to create a new moral identity for women as women have selves that are “split” because they are caught between two fnal vocabularies, but they still have selves. Thus, women, because they are oppressed, are diminished, but they are not negated. And because they are not negated, they are able to speak for themselves. This marks the difference between a vocabulary that is stolen and one that is imposed. In short, the oppressed of whom Rorty speaks in “Feminism and Pragmatism” are not subject to the sort of pain and humiliation that Winston is—the sort of pain that renders a person incapable of making sense of her life in a coherent narrative. An additional point that lends weight to this reading is that, even in CIS, Rorty does think that, at least sometimes, some members of oppressed groups can speak for themselves. For example, he identifes at least two writers engaged in just this task. One is Radclyffe Hall, whose 1928 novel The Well of Loneliness redescribed “sexual inversion” as a natural state rather than a disorder or perversion. Another is Richard Wright, whose 1945 autobiographical novel Black Boy redescribed American society as racist. This suggests that the oppressed do not suffer in the way Winston does. On this reading, then, “Feminism and Pragmatism” is not a departure, but instead an illustration of what is involved in, and how diffcult the task can be of, speaking for oneself as a member of an oppressed group.

Notes 1 A version of this chapter was presented in 2019 at Cambridge University as part of the conference Philosophy, Poetry, and Utopian Politics: The Relevance of Richard Rorty. Thanks to audience members there for their helpful feedback, as well as to Paul Showler for his input on this iteration. 2 See Voparil (2012) for an overview of Rorty’s turn to the novel as “the characteristic genre of democracy, the genre most closely associated with the struggle for freedom and equality” (EHO, 68). 3 Rorty claims that all of the books discussed in CIS are books that “supply novel stimuli to action” for the liberal ironist reader. These books “suggest… that one must change one’s life (in some major or minor respect)” (CIS, 143). 4 Because Dickens wrote about “concrete cases of particular people ignoring the suffering of other people” he was “able to speak as ‘one of us’—as the voice of one who happened to notice something to which the rest of us could be counted upon to react with similar indignation as soon as we notice it” (EHO, 79).

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5 Rorty notes that this is a particular issue for intellectuals: “Orwell managed… to convince us that O’Brien is a plausible character-type of a possible future society one in which the intellectuals had accepted the fact that liberal hopes had no chance of realization” (CIS, 183). 6 He references Elaine Scarry’s idea that depriving someone of language, and thereby of “a connection with human institutions” creates “mute pain” (CIS, n12, 36). 7 Rorty also suggests that this horror helps create a “sense of moral abomination.” Rorty’s example—though he mentions it only briefy—is intercaste marriage (CIS, n41, 224). 8 Rorty’s use of the term “degrading” here is insightful, I think; to be a woman (or a feminized man) is to be downgraded from full human or person to less than. In the prevailing patriarchal fnal vocabulary, a woman fails at being a full human or person. 9 Presumably, Rorty’s liberal utopia would be a society where everyone is a “paradigmatic human” or a “full-fedged person.” 10 It’s worth noting that Rorty is not interested in whether or how MacKinnon or Frye or Rich are themselves creating new re/descriptions (though they do). He is more interested in their recognition that this is how social progress occurs. 11 See Dieleman (2011; 2021) for a further exploration of the difference between women’s moral identity resembling men’s versus women’s moral identity created by men. Works by Rorty CIS. 1989. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. New York: Cambridge University Press. EHO. 2007. Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers, Volume 2. New York: Cambridge University Press. TP. 1998. Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, Volume 3. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Other Works Dieleman, Susan. 2011. “The Roots of Rorty’s Philosophy: Catharine A. MacKinnon.” Pragmatism Today: The Journal of the Central-European Pragmatist Forum 2 (1): 123–132. ———. 2021. “Tinkering with Truth, Tinkering with Difference: Rorty and (Liberal) Feminism.” In The Cambridge Companion to Richard Rorty, edited by David Rondel, 179–200. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fraser, Nancy. 1991. “From Irony to Prophecy to Politics: A Response to Richard Rorty.” Michigan Quarterly Review 30(2): 259–266. Malachowski, Alan. 2002. Richard Rorty. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Voparil, Christopher. 2011. “Rortyan Cultural Politics and the Problem of Speaking for Others.” Contemporary Pragmatism 8(1): 115–131. Voparil, Christopher J. 2012. “Rorty and the Democratic Power of the Novel.” Eurozine. November 21, 2012. https://www.eurozine.com/rorty-and-thedemocratic-power-of-the-novel/

13 Pragmatism and the Tragic Sense of Death Bryan Vescio

And must thy world die with thee, life’s familiar pattern made new and thine? Do the anvils and the forges of thy soul ring for the dust and the wind? Antonio Machado (translated by Allen Josephs) Most academic essays still scrupulously avoid the personal, or else they invoke it only to deny it, erasing the distinction between public and private by insisting that “the personal is the political.” The subject of my chapter requires that I do neither. As I write, it has now been more than a decade since the death of my teacher, my mentor, and, for the brief time I was privileged to know him, I would almost presume to say my friend, Richard Rorty. This is not to say that I knew him well enough or long enough to justify writing a full-fedged tribute, and others of more signifcance in his life and the academic world he left behind have done so admirably. But even a passing glance at anything I have written makes it obvious that I continue to reckon with the various provocations that have been his legacy for me. This chapter necessarily refects more directly than most the impact of his inspirational voice and its genuinely tragic loss on me. Although I draw on Rorty’s pragmatism yet again in this chapter, I will not suggest that pragmatism offers any comfort for this loss; rather, I will suggest that the loss I feel illuminates an important dimension of pragmatism itself. One of the most persistent criticisms of pragmatism has been that it leaves no room for genuine tragedy in the world. Sidney Hook begins his essay “Pragmatism and the Tragic Sense of Life” by recounting how the reception of pragmatism as early as its origins in the late nineteenth century made what he considered to be this deep misunderstanding of it inevitable, and he still felt the need to defend his philosophy from this charge when he published his essay in 1974. The charge has been revived in recent decades in works by Cornel (West 1993) and Raymond (Boisvert 1999), prompting further defenses by writers like Eddie (Glaude 2008). The heart of the defense against an insuffciently tragic perspective, both DOI: 10.4324/9781003208150-18

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for Hook in 1974 and for Glaude more than 30 years later, has been to recall pragmatism’s emphasis on the confict of goods necessitated by its insistence on the contingency of the world and of human life—the idea that choosing some good inevitably means neglecting or rejecting another. But for these writers, one thing that decidedly cannot be a source of genuine tragedy in pragmatism’s vision of the world is death. Hook is particularly insistent on this point, and it is quite surprising to fnd Rorty himself largely echoing this sentiment in one of the last works he published before his own death. This is surprising, I maintain, because the idea that death is genuinely tragic provides crucial support for his highly original but controversial conception of the aesthetic life. Specifcally, the sense in which death should be seen as tragic for pragmatists helps motivate his aesthetic of experimentation with fnal vocabularies in service of idiosyncratic individuality and therefore helps answer critics like Richard Shusterman. One reason for denying the tragic implications of death for pragmatists is a deep discomfort friends and foes of pragmatism alike feel toward a key component of Rorty’s version of it: his valorization of the private, sometimes even over the public. Thinking of death as tragic, I will argue, both clarifes and justifes the role of this most innovative feature of Rorty’s pragmatism. As eager as Hook is to fnd a tragic sensibility in pragmatism in his famous essay, he seems equally eager to deny that the phenomenon of death can be tragic in any real sense for pragmatists, stating fatly “that death as such is not a tragic phenomenon and that its presence does not make the world and our experience within it tragic” (Hook 1974, 12–13). One reason for this, he suggests, is that death, like sickness and old age, the other two experiences that led Buddha to renounce the life of the fesh, is merely a visitation of nature upon humanity, whereas for Hook “the tragic is a moral phenomenon” (10). He even notes that “death must sometimes appear as a benefcent release not an inconsolable affiction” (12). But he strongly implies that the most important reason that pragmatists cannot consider death tragic is because doing so entails a longing for immortality and permanence that defes pragmatism’s emphasis on contingency and change. He acknowledges his title’s allusion to Miguel de Unamuno’s book The Tragic Sense of Life, which he dismisses as a “hysterical lament that man is not immortal” (9). Later in his essay, he fnds a more proximate target for this critique when he ruefully observes that a preoccupation with death “has become so fashionable today among some European existentialist philosophers that their philosophy seems to be more a meditation upon death than upon life” (11). Again, for Hook, existentialism ultimately “expresses little more than a fear of death and a craving for immortality” (11). “Agony over death,” he writes, “strikes me as one of the unloveliest features of the intellectual life of our philosophic times—and certainly unworthy of any philosophy which conceives itself as a quest

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for wisdom” (11–12). Having begun his essay by touting pragmatism as “a distinctively American philosophy” declaring independence from its culture’s “colonial dependency on Europe” (3), Hook is clearly arguing that the future of this philosophical revolution depends on renouncing a European insistence on the tragic implications of death. The argument against Hook’s view that death cannot be tragic for pragmatists is fairly straightforward, even obvious. It arises from one of the most important statements in all of pragmatist thought, John Dewey’s suggestion in Reconstruction in Philosophy that “growth itself is the only moral end” (Dewey [1926]1957, 177). This statement is, of course, just the moral consequence of the avowal of contingency and change that Hook rightly fnds central to pragmatism. Yet it underscores rather than denies the tragic implications of death. For whatever else can be said of death, it cannot be called a vehicle for growth—rather, it is the ultimate end of growth. From this point of view, to consider death tragic is not to renounce pragmatism’s acceptance of contingency and change but to embrace it. To lament the onset of death is not to mourn over the loss of permanence but to mourn over lost opportunities for further growth. Moreover, Dewey’s conception of growth as the only moral end makes death an unquestionably moral phenomenon, contrary to Hook’s suggestion. And while Hook is surely right to point out that death is something to be welcomed under certain circumstances, that in no way entails that death is not usually or even always tragic. In the same way that we are often forced to choose the greater good among conficting goods—the central tenet in Hook’s argument for pragmatism’s tragic vision—so we must also sometimes opt for the lesser tragedy among competing tragic outcomes. To be sure, death is far from the only source of tragedy in human life for a pragmatist; the confict of goods cited to defend pragmatism’s tragic vision in both Hook’s essay and Glaude’s book In a Shade of Blue must also be a strong contributor (Glaude 2008). But pragmatism’s tragic sense of life would seemingly require an equally tragic sense of death. It is somewhat curious, then, to fnd the leading proponent of pragmatism in recent decades echoing Hook’s refusal to attribute real tragedy to death. In one of the very last pieces he wrote, a brief essay for Poetry magazine entitled “The Fire of Life,” Richard Rorty bravely and poignantly confronts his own impending death after his diagnosis of pancreatic cancer (Rorty 2007). While he denies that the philosophical works that he has read provide him with any comfort in the face of death, he echoes Hook’s association of the tragic sense of death with a yearning for permanence when he notes that he has “no quarrel with Epicurus’s argument that it is irrational to fear death, nor with Heidegger’s suggestion that ontotheology originates in an attempt to evade our mortality” (Rorty 2007, 130). Rorty does claim that he has found some comfort in poetry, however, and the lines he quotes imply this same attitude toward death.

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First, he quotes Swinburne giving thanks “that no life lives forever” (130). Then he quotes a poem in which Landor says of “the fre of life,” “It sinks, and I am ready to depart” (130). In another very late work, a reply to J. B. Schneewind in the collection The Philosophy of Richard Rorty, Rorty seriously qualifes his famous conception of the “liberal ironist,” admitting that it confates “the unruffed pragmatist and the anguished existential adolescent” (Rorty 2010, 506). He goes on to say, “I made it sound as if you could not be an antifoundationalist and a romantic self-creator without becoming a Sartrean, ever conscious of the abyss” (506). While Rorty developed a reputation over his career for building bridges between Anglo-American and Continental traditions in philosophy and has often been notably sympathetic to the existentialism Hook denounces,1 at the end of his life Rorty seems to have settled on Hook’s allegedly American rejection of the tragedy of death. But if a tragic sense of death is, as I have suggested, an important corollary of pragmatism in general, it is even more crucial to Rorty’s version. Specifcally, it helps to clarify and justify his highly original conception of aesthetics and the aesthetic life, which has been roundly criticized by pragmatists, such as Richard Shusterman, who are more sympathetic to Dewey’s philosophy of art. Shusterman sums up one aspect of Rorty’s aesthetic in his book Pragmatist Aesthetics by writing, “Rejecting traditional moral theory on the grounds that we have no common essence but are products of random and idiosyncratic contingencies, Rorty urges the conclusion that we must create ourselves and must do so by selfenriching aesthetic redescription” (Shusterman 2000, 246). This is the quest of the fgure Rorty describes as the “ironist” in CIS. But the other feature of Rorty’s aesthetic is personifed by the “strong poet,” for whom aesthetic redescription must result in an original or wholly unique self. As Shusterman puts it, “Aesthetic self-creation, for Rorty’s strong poet, must be strikingly novel and distinctive” (Shusterman 2000, 253). One of Shusterman’s critiques of Rorty’s aesthetic is that he fnds the quests of the ironist and the strong poet to be incompatible. The reason he thinks this is because he associates the motivations of the ironist with a conception of the self he derives from Rorty’s essay “Freud and Moral Refection” (EHO), which characterizes Freud’s picture of the psyche as containing incompatible “quasi-selves.” Shusterman takes the point of irony to be incoherence, a quest for “maximized spawning of alternative and inconsistent vocabularies and narratives of the self, which aims to deconstruct any stable self into a changing, growing multiplicity of selves or selfdescriptions” (Shusterman 2000, 248). He concludes that “to abandon the notion of a frmly distinctive self, one that is not continuously supplanted by endless redescription in new vocabularies acquired from others, is to render the prospect of distinctive self-creation problematic at the least” (248). Shusterman’s other criticism is that even this notion of uniqueness or distinctiveness in self-creation is suspect because it is only

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“the misguided product of our deeply entrenched liberal ideology and romantic aesthetics” (255). Both of these criticisms misunderstand the motivations for Rorty’s aesthetic in ways that can be remedied by attributing a tragic sense of death to his pragmatism. Elsewhere, I have criticized Shusterman’s own aesthetic for following Dewey in embracing a formalist fetishization of unity.2 But Shusterman’s clearest mistake in his criticisms of Rorty involves his misunderstanding of Rorty’s conception of the self. The most common description of the self in Rorty’s work is not as an incoherent assemblage of inconsistent quasi-selves but as a centerless web of beliefs and desires, understood, of course, as sentential attitudes.3 “Centerless” here means not incoherent—obviously, a web has to hang together to count as a web—but rather without any essential unifying principle. What this means is that any part of the web, from the interior to the periphery, can be rewoven at any time, though not all of it at once. The “quasi-selves” Rorty describes in his Freud essay are aberrations, places where the web hangs together too loosely, and he follows Donald Davidson in characterizing them as both problems to be treated by therapy and opportunities for change— but only insofar as they are put into dialog with one another (Davidson 1982). Rorty’s self—whether an ironist or not—always strives for coherence, not because coherence is itself a source of value but because it is a condition of being a self. The motives of the ironist and the strong poet are, for Rorty, ultimately the same: growth and change. Irony has its source, for Rorty, in the worry that the vocabulary in which one has been taught to express one’s deepest beliefs and desires is the wrong one, the possibility of having been “initiated into the wrong tribe, taught to play the wrong language game” (CIS 75). The strong poet, in words Rorty borrows from Harold Bloom, begins from a “horror of fnding himself to be only a copy or a replica” (CIS 24). Both hope to get themselves out from under the vocabularies into which they have been born, to create themselves by creating distinctive vocabularies of their own. The ironist seeks out new vocabularies not for the sake of incoherence or disruption, but rather because each time she creates a new vocabulary, she fnds that it, too, bears what Philip Larkin calls the “blind impress” of some tribe or another, so she must try again. At each stage, she can only revise or reweave a part of her web, not the entirety of it, so there is never the radical disruption in the continuity of the self that Shusterman fears. Nor is there any inconsistency between the ironist and the strong poet: they merely embody two aspects of the same quest for growth—a negative, reactive movement alternating with an affrmative, creative movement— in the direction of ever-greater distinctiveness. But why begin this quest for novelty or distinctiveness in the frst place? It is here that a tragic sense of death can help rescue Rorty’s aesthetic from Shusterman’s reductive charge of mere bourgeois individualism. Rorty famously begins his chapter on “The Contingency of Selfhood” in

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CIS with a reading of a poem by Philip Larkin. According to Rorty, the poem is about the fear of death, but he points out that no one actually fears death per se; rather, we can only fear a concrete loss. The concrete loss in Larkin’s poem, Rorty suggests, is “his idiosyncratic lading-list, his individual sense of what was possible and important”: “That is what made his I different from all the other I’s. To lose that difference is, I take it, what any poet—any maker, anyone who hopes to create something new—fears” (CIS 23). Although the problem is especially acute for the poet and the artist, it is a problem for all human beings. One way of understanding what Rorty is getting at here is to think of the question of why I should exist in terms of the question of what would be tragic about my death—what makes one’s death tragic is also what gives a point to one’s life. But most of what is lost when we die can be readily replaced, even our public accomplishments like our contributions to social justice. Someone else could always do those things as well as we could. The question of what is tragic about death is the question of what is lost when we die that cannot be replaced, that can only exist as long as we do. And for us and those who know us, the answer can only be the hard-earned web of idiosyncratic associations that comprises our unique ways of seeing, feeling, and thinking about the world and the prospect of that web’s continued growth. Rorty was hardly the frst to suggest that artists tend to have a stronger fear of dying than the rest of us, but his aesthetic explains how their urge to justify their lives by creating richer, more deeply unique selves—by reweaving the more intransigent, interior parts of their webs that Rorty calls “fnal vocabularies”—can result in powerfully original works of art. But even for those whose uniqueness lies in the more peripheral sections of their webs, the vast majority of our friends and loved ones, this uniqueness is what we mourn when they die. On Rorty’s conception of the self, no two webs of belief are alike, so all our deaths are tragic. In spite of Hook’s dismissal, Rorty’s tragic sense of death is instructively similar to the basis for Unamuno’s tragic sense of life. While Rorty departs dramatically from Unamuno’s prescription of religious consolation, his aesthetic is in fact a secularized, pragmatist response to the same tragic condition Unamuno diagnoses. It is indeed a tragic sense of death that animates Unamuno’s tragic sense of life: he identifes “the longing not to die” as “the affective basis of all knowledge and the personal inward starting-point of all human philosophy” (Unamuno [1921]1954, 36). When he invokes the longing for immortality, though, it is as a yearning not merely for permanence but rather for the indefnite extension of consciousness: “And all this tragic fght of man to save himself, this immortal craving for immortality…, all this is simply a fght for consciousness” (13). And that consciousness seems to be the same thing Rorty has in mind when he talks about an individual’s

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distinctive web of belief. Unamuno makes this clear when he discusses an individual’s aversion to becoming someone else: Everyone defends his own personality, and only consents to a change in his mode of thinking or of feeling in so far as this change is able to enter into the unity of his spirit and become involved in its continuity; in so far as this change can harmonize and integrate itself with all the rest of his mode of being, thinking and feeling, and can at the same time knit itself with his memories. (Unamuno [1921]1954, 9–10) This idea of continuity through change within the self is consistent with the idea of a self as a centerless web of beliefs, and although Unamuno places the emphasis on continuity, he also anticipates the motivation of both the ironist and the strong poet when he cites as the appropriate response to the tragedy of death the necessity “of making ourselves irreplaceable, of not meriting death, of making our annihilation, if it is annihilation that awaits us, an injustice” (278). And as for Rorty, that irreplaceability can only take the form of that distinctive web of belief rather than any social role one might play: “Another might fulfll my function in society? Yes, but it would not be I” (11). Far from violating the spirit of pragmatism, Unamuno’s tragic sense of life begins in something like pragmatism in his disavowal of abstract theory in favor of lived, particular experience. “The real starting point” of all philosophy, he tells us, is “the practical not the theoretical” (Unamuno [1921]1954, 29), and he sounds strikingly like John Dewey when he says, “While men believe themselves to be seeking truth for its own sake, they are in fact seeking life in truth” (23). Ultimately, of course, Unamuno departs from pragmatism when he suggests that the only appropriate response to the tragic nature of life is to reach out toward the absolute, to affrm a God that underwrites our own personal immortality. One reason he goes wrong in this way is because he makes the desire for immortality not just a practical condition of human life but its essence, embracing Spinoza’s doctrine that “the endeavour wherewith everything endeavours to persist in its own being is nothing but the actual essence of the thing itself” (7). For a pragmatist, the inevitability of death is only one contingent fact about human beings among many, a practical necessity of human life rather than a metaphysical condition of it, and that is why its tragedy can often be tempered by even greater but equally contingent tragedies. But the effort to keep alive the prospect of absolute permanence is also where Unamuno betrays his own tragic vision. In making the leap from a perpetual desire for continuity to a faith in ultimate permanence, Unamuno ultimately allows tragedy to give way to comedy, and that is why his book gives the last word to the tragicomedy of the Quixote. Rorty’s pragmatist

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aesthetic, on the other hand, which fully embraces contingency without the consolations of essentialism or foundationalism, is actually truer to the tragic sense of both life and death than Unamuno’s. To affrm the tragic nature of an individual’s death as both Unamuno and Rorty do is to affrm the value of the private self. What prevents critics of Rorty who are otherwise sympathetic to pragmatism from appreciating Rorty’s tragic sense of death and its accompanying aesthetic is that they tend to harbor deep reservations about his distinction between the public and private, and especially his willingness to value the latter at least as much as the former. One of the primary grounds on which Shusterman rejects Rorty’s view of the aesthetic life is “its excessively privatized character” (Shusterman 2000, 255), and he argues against it by claiming that “the private self that Rorty wants to create and perfect is always already the product of a public feld; it is always already social and must be so as soon as it has a language for its private thoughts” (255–256). Setting aside the fact that Shusterman confuses the public with the social—an error Dewey explicitly warns against in The Public and Its Problems4 (Dewey [1927]1988)—the private self that Rorty envisions is not that inviolable inner sanctum of the mind envisioned by Descartes, nor is it the untranslatable idiom disavowed by Wittgenstein. The holistic web of beliefs and desires Rorty has in mind is social through and through because it is linguistic through and through—a view Shusterman’s own aesthetic renounces.5 What makes the private self private is not that it is inaccessible to others but simply that it is not and need not be shared. Precisely because they are what make us different from one another, our private selves are what we primarily admire or despise in one another in life, and they are what we primarily mourn in death. Again, to say that an individual’s death is a source of tragedy is not to say it is the only source. Large-scale public tragedies like war and slavery might well make the tragedy of a single death pale by comparison. Yet even if there are larger and smaller tragedies, the smaller ones remain tragic. For Rorty, the distinction between public and private is that between our duties to eliminate one another’s suffering and activities that are simply irrelevant to those duties, and in CIS, he declares his intention “to treat the demands of self-creation and of human solidarity as equally valid” (xv). Yet there is some truth in Shusterman’s claim that Rorty privileges the private. In his response to Robert Brandom in the volume Rorty and His Critics, Rorty concedes that our most pressing moral duty is to relieve one another’s suffering, but he then goes on to write, But if asked why that is our duty, I think the best answer is that we want everybody to be able to lead a specifcally human life: a life in which there is a chance to compose one’s own variations on old themes, to put one’s own twist on old words, to change a vocabulary by using it. (Rorty 2000, 189)

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In the light of his tragic sense of death, the activities of the private self are not merely idle dreaming but are perhaps the most serious business of life itself.6 And if, as Dewey says, growth is the only moral end, the kind of democratic society recommended by pragmatists should value these activities of private self-creation alongside the activities of public solidarity. Robert Brandom makes just this point in his own essay in Rorty and His Critics: There is no reason that the vocabulary in which we conduct our public political debates and determine the purposes toward which our public political institutions are turned should not incorporate the aspiration to nurture and promote its citizens’ vocabularytransforming private exercises of their vocabularies. (Brandom 2000, 178) Apart from Brandom’s endorsement, though, Rorty fnds himself almost alone among pragmatists in recommending this promotion of the private. In his response to Schneewind in The Philosophy of Richard Rorty, he concedes that his distinction between the public and the private fails to add much to John Stuart Mill’s distinction between the two (Rorty 2010, 506). But his tragic sense of death and its attendant conception of the aesthetic life conceives of the private not just as a space of negative freedom, as Mill does, but as a positive source of value. This idea could well be considered Rorty’s most original contribution to pragmatist thought. The classical pragmatist who comes closest to anticipating Rorty’s affrmation of the value of the private is William James. In the frst of his essays on pragmatism, James famously characterized the works of great philosophers not as impersonal systems but as revelations of just the kinds of private selves Rorty had in mind: The books of all the great philosophers are like so many men. Our sense of an essential personal favor in each one of them, typical but indescribable, is the fnest fruit of our own accomplished philosophic education. What the system pretends to be is a picture of the great universe of God. What it is,—and oh so fagrantly!—is the revelation of how intensely odd the personal favor of some fellow creature is. (James [1907]1981, 19) Unamuno begins his book by echoing this sentiment, once again anticipating Rorty’s aesthetic of idiosyncratic individuality. He writes,“Philosophy is a product of the humanity of each philosopher, and each philosopher is a man of fesh and bone who addresses himself to other men of fesh and bone like himself” (Unamuno [1921]1954, 28).7 What James refers to as “the personal favors” of philosophers and what Rorty would likely call their “fnal vocabularies,” Unamuno calls their “inner biographies”:

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“The inner biography of the philosophers, of the men who philosophized, occupies a secondary place. And yet it is precisely this inner biography that explains for us most things” (Unamuno [1921]1954, 2). And this realization that philosophers fnally aspire to the kind of aesthetic value Rorty advocates leads him to a conclusion Rorty also reached early in his career: “It behooves us to say, before all, that philosophy lies closer to poetry than to science” (2).8 It is ftting that Rorty turned to poetry once again at the very end of his life since his most important and lasting contribution to philosophy is likely to be his aesthetic of private idiosyncrasy, born of his tragic sense of death. For reasons that Unamuno describes, Rorty should in no way be faulted for inconsistency in deemphasizing his tragic sense of life in his fnal works. He was, after all, a man of fesh and blood, and in the face of death, he could only make his peace with it in the way his inner biography dictated—by embracing the sense of fnitude and contingency that provided the energy behind all his works—in the same way that Unamuno could only make his peace with the world by retreating to the religion of his youth.9 But for those of us left behind, the tragedy of Rorty’s death is the loss of what is most distinctive in his consciousness, and I have argued that what is most distinctive about Rorty’s pragmatism is precisely his willingness to embrace a tragic sense of death. Today, Rorty is most often remembered and lauded as a “public intellectual” because we live in an era that judges the achievements of all its intellectuals by their public aspirations. But someday the liberal arts and humanities might come to play a different role in our culture, and the insistence on their public relevance that has dominated the last half-century might fade. If that happens, Rorty’s work would experience the renaissance it deserves, and he would fnally be recognized and respected as the twentieth century’s most important philosopher of the private self.

Notes 1 See, for example, Rorty’s association of the concept of irony with Sartre’s notion of the “meta-stable” in CIS (73). 2 See Chapter 2 of my book Reconstruction in Literary Studies: An Informalist Approach (2014; 49–73). 3 See, for example, “The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy,” where Rorty defnes “the human self as a centerless web of historically conditioned beliefs and desires” (ORT, 192). 4 Dewey writes, “The distinction between private and public is thus in no sense equivalent to the distinction between individual and social, even if we suppose that the latter distinction has a defnite meaning” (Dewey [1927]1988, 244). 5 Against what he labels Rorty’s “hermeneutic universalism,” Shusterman urges a Deweyan aesthetic that holds that “neither we nor the language which admittedly helps shape us could survive without the unarticulated background of prerefective, non-linguistic experience and understanding” (Shusterman 2000, 128). Interestingly, Unamuno shares Rorty’s emphasis on

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the dependence of consciousness on language, saying of reason, “It owes its origin, perhaps, to language. We think articulately—i.e., refectively—thanks to articulate language, and this language arose out of the need of communicating our thought to our neighbors. To think is to talk with oneself, and each one of us talks with himself, thanks to our having had to talk with one another” (Unamuno [1921]1954, 25). Unamuno anticipates Rorty on this point, too, when he argues that even the ostensibly “irrelevant” activities of the mind answer to our practical purpose of expanding and extending consciousness: “Even the knowledge that appears to be most theoretical—that is to say, of least application to the nonintellectual necessities of life—answers to a necessity which is no less real because it is intellectual, to a reason of economy in thinking, to a principle of unity and continuity in consciousness” (Unamuno [1921]1954, 15). Unamuno was undoubtedly inspired by this passage from the frst of James’s lectures, and he mentions James in his book. On the other hand, he condemns James’s third lecture, which criticizes scholasticism, as “the weakest thing in all the work of the famous American thinker” (Unamuno [1921]1954, 81). See Rorty’s essay “Philosophy as a Kind of Writing: An Essay on Derrida” in (CP, 90–109). Rorty helpfully provides a fairly thorough description of his own inner biography in the essay “Trotsky and the Wild Orchids” (PSH).

Works by Rorty CP. 1982. Consequences of Pragmatism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. CIS. 1989. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. New York: Cambridge University Press. ORT. 1991. Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers, Volume 1. New York: Cambridge University Press. EHO. 1991. Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers, Volume 2. New York: Cambridge University Press. PSH. 2000. Philosophy and Social Hope. New York: Penguin Books. Rorty, Richard. 2000. “Response to Robert Brandom.” In Rorty and His Critics, edited by Robert B. Brandom, 183–190. Oxford: Blackwell. ———. 2007. “The Fire of Life.” Poetry (November 2007): 129–131. ———. 2010.“Reply to Schneewind.” In The Philosophy of Richard Rorty, edited by Randall E. Auxier and Lewis Edwin Hahn, 506–508. Chicago: Open Court. Other Works Boisvert, Raymond D. 1999. “The Nemesis of Necessity: Tragedy’s Challenge to Dewey’s Pragmatism.” In Dewey Reconfgured: Essays on Deweyan Pragmatism, edited by Casey Haskins, 151–168. Albany: SUNY Press. Brandom, Robert B. 2000.“Vocabularies of Pragmatism: Synthesizing Naturalism and Historicism.” In Rorty and His Critics, edited by Robert B. Brandom, 156– 183. Oxford: Blackwell. Davidson, Donald. 1982. “Paradoxes of Irrationality.” In Philosophical Essays on Freud, edited by Richard Wollheim and James Hopkins, 289–305. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Dewey, John. (1926) 1957. Reconstruction in Philosophy. Revised edition. Boston: Beacon. Dewey, John. (1927) 1988.” The Public and Its Problems.” In John Dewey: The Later Works, 1925–1953, Volume 2, edited by JoAnn Boydston, 235–372. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Glaude Jr. Eddie. 2008. In a Shade of Blue: Pragmatism and the Politics of Black America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hook, Sidney. 1974. “Pragmatism and the Tragic Sense of Life.” In Pragmatism and the Tragic Sense of Life, 3–25. New York: Basic Books. James, William. (1907) 1981. Pragmatism, edited by Bruce Kuklick. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing. Shusterman, Richard. 2000. Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art. Second edition. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefeld Publishers. Unamuno, de Miguel. (1921) 1954. The Tragic Sense of Life. New York: Dover. Vescio, Bryan. 2014. Reconstruction in Literary Studies: An Informalist Approach. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. West, Cornel. 1993. “Philosophy and the Sense of the Tragic.” In Keeping Faith: Philosophy and Race in America, 107–118. New York: Routledge.

14 The Importance of Words Ironism, Liberalism, and the Private/Public Distinction Federico Penelas

Liberal political philosophy has always placed at the center of its concerns the issue of the limitation of public speech precisely because of the importance that it gives to defending freedom of speech. Already in the early history of modernity, Spinoza wrote his famous A TheologicoPolitical Treatise, which consists mainly of detailed argumentation in defense of freedom of speech. As a necessary argumentative counterpart, he defnes precise criteria to identify the occasions when limitations on speech may be justifed. The Spinozian justifcation was strictly bound to identifying verbal acts that would break the public contract. On the other hand, in contemporary political liberalism, Rawls’s work has dealt, among other things, with offering arguments in favor of the neutrality of the state, which stresses the duty of citizens (especially legislators) to, in certain circumstances, moderate their discursive potential when it comes to justifying publicly their political beliefs (Rawls 1993). Richard Rorty’s work has revealed itself, especially since the late 1980s, as a defense of a liberal utopia sustained by a certain private/public distinction. Recently, from different interpretations of the essay “Redemption from Egotism,” it has been argued that Rorty himself either rejected that distinction (Doran 2017, 79–95) or reconfgured it from the concept of “self-enlargment” (Llanera 2016). Rorty himself, in one of his last texts, was explicit in abandoning the distinction (Rorty 2010a). In this text, I intend to defend the distinction in purely Rortyan terms, based on how we should understand the notions “fnal vocabulary” and “ironism.” The “liberal ironist” is the type of intellectual fgure that emerges within the context of the Rortyan assumption of the connection between antirepresentationalism and liberalism. To characterize the ironist attitude, Rorty introduces the notion of “fnal vocabulary.” With this expression, Rorty alludes to the “set of words which they [human beings] employ to justify their actions, their beliefs, and their lives” (CIS, 73). This vocabulary is “fnal” in two respects: on the one hand, the user can only argue in favor of the use of said words in a circular way; on the other hand, it is those words that set the limits of communication. DOI: 10.4324/9781003208150-19

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An ironist is, according to Rorty, someone who fulflls three conditions: (1) She has radical and continuing doubts about the fnal vocabulary she currently uses, because she has been impressed by other vocabularies […]; (2) she realizes that arguments phrased in her present vocabulary can neither underwrite nor dissolve these doubts; (3) insofar as she philosophizes about her situation, she does not think that her vocabulary is closer to reality than others. (CIS, 73) Rorty states in his three conditions that ironists, besides acknowledging the contingency of their own vocabulary, require a permanent will to redescribe it so as to overcome the kind of acculturation they were subject to, given that “the ironist spends her time worrying about the possibility that she has been initiated into the wrong tribe” (CIS, 75). This kind of observation requires, to my judgment, some clarifcations that are rarely made, even by Rorty himself, which I believe allow us to overcome some criticisms and misunderstandings. First of all, we should observe what usually goes unnoticed: Rorty refers to “fnal vocabulary,” not to “a set of basic beliefs.” It is about the words that we consider important, not about the propositions that work as a limit to our justifcatory practices (although such propositions may involve, in fact, the terms of the fnal vocabulary).1 The link to the words in such a vocabulary involves qualitative aspects, especially affective ones, which are overlooked if we only consider sets of beliefs.2 Words, in their materiality, are a crucial part of what constitutes us; they are, for example, the ones that give us protection. This has been highlighted by Rorty himself in the aforementioned “Redemption from Egotism,” in which he recognizes the exaltation that words (as opposed to narrative totalities) provoke when we feel like being bowled over by the sheer rhetorical or poetic power of one’s favorite passages. Such passages play the role that their favorite passages in sacred scripture play for the religious. They become mantras, and reciting them brings very present help in time of trouble. (Rorty 2010b, 404–405) This is the power that, in Rorty’s fnal days, on the brink of death, made him—the great promoter of the moral power of the novel—acknowledge that “[n]ot just imagery, but also rhyme and rhythm were needed to do the job. […] Compared to the shaped charges contrived by versifers, even the best prose is scattershot” (Rorty 2007, 131). These observations about Rorty’s concept of “fnal vocabulary” allow us to disregard any purely epistemological interpretation of ironism and

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thus respond to certain criticisms formulated against it that depend on such interpretations. One of the more recent of such criticisms can be found in J. Schneewind’s excellent text “Rorty on Utopia and Moral Philosophy,” in which he accuses Rorty of committing some sort of category mistake when portraying the ironist. In Schneewind’s own words, But if the ironist does not expect convergence on fnal vocabularies, why does she feel doubt about hers? Peirce says that the disagreement of others tends to make us doubt our own views, but that is when we are looking for the fxed beliefs we took to be good candidates for truth. The ironist is not looking for truth in choosing a fnal vocabulary. She is creating, not discovering. What is the point of doubt here? (Schneewind 2010, 492) Rorty himself accepts his critic’s point and avers that his past descriptions about the fgure of the ironist seem to picture him as someone who “is merely indulging, histrionically, in what Peirce called ‘make-believe’ doubts—doubts which […] never bear on practice” (Rorty 2010a, 506). I believe that in this instance Rorty gives up to soon. Only if the fnal vocabulary is interpreted as a set of basic beliefs can the use of the word “doubt” when characterizing the ironist be interpreted as a catalyst for inquiry in the Peircean sense of the word. This “doubt” produced by the impact of other vocabularies, which is presented as constitutive of ironism, must not be seen that way but, rather, as the experience of the loss of importance of inherited words. Bjørn Ramberg has stated a similar point when arguing against stances like Schneewind’s, which he assimilates to those of Michael Williams, who links ironism to skepticism (Williams 2003).3 What Ramberg states is that the Rortyan stance can be read in consonance with the one held by Jonathan Lear; they both allude to an “experiential irony,” which must be assimilated neither to doubt nor to nostalgia for absolutist times. Experiential irony is, then, a state of alert that makes way for a state of openness to new vocabularies (Ramberg 2014). However, this point should be further specifed because if the emphasis on the idea of alert is not accompanied by a reminder that such alert is toward words and not beliefs, it may give way to an epistemological interpretation. This is because the cautionary use of “truth” is described by Rorty precisely as an alert in relation to the possibility of encountering new audiences for which our justifcatory practices become ineffcient.4 If we fail to interpret it in terms of lexicon, ironism could result in mere fallibilism. As it may become even clearer once I explain why Rorty thinks of irony as potentially cruel, the best way to understand irony is as the result of a break in the importance given to the fnal vocabulary we acquired. The idea of importance plays a crucial role here, and I take it from considerations

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made by Harry Frankfurt in his classic “The Importance of What We Care About” (1998). According to Frankfurt, inquiry about importance is part of a branch completely distinguishable both from epistemology and from ethics. If the former deals with what to believe and the latter with how to behave, in the sense of facing “the problem of ordering our relations with other people,” the third branch is the one that deals with the question of what to care about given that “we are interested in deciding what to do with ourselves and because we therefore need to understand what is important or, rather, what is important to us” (Frankfurt 1998, 80–81). If we follow Frankfurt’s train of thought regarding the concepts of importance and of what we care about, it is my understanding that it is even clearer that these are the concepts by which we can capture the kind of link established between a subject and her fnal vocabulary and, thus, the kind of experience implied in the breaking of such a link. As Frankfurt states, A person who cares about something is, as it were, invested in it. He identifes himself with what he cares about in the sense that he makes himself vulnerable to losses and susceptible to benefts depending upon whether what he cares about is diminished or enhanced. (Frankfurt 1998, 83) So, the ironist must be seen as someone no longer able to completely identify herself with the set of words that used to shape the horizon of what was important for her. She is not someone who doubts; she is someone who is no longer herself. Moreover, when Rorty defends his claim that fnal vocabularies are fnal because it is not possible to argue for them in a noncircular way, what this indicates is that this argumentative limit is given “when doubt is cast on the worth of these words” (CIS, 73; my emphasis). The doubt, I insist, is not at the epistemic level observed by Schneewind; it is a crisis in terms of importance. The superfcial approaches to the Rortyan notion of “fnal vocabulary” are usually concentrated in the “defnition” already presented (“set of words which they [human beings] employ to justify their actions, their beliefs, and their lives”), paying special attention to the words “justify” and “beliefs.” The weight of the other relevant words in the defnition (“actions” and “lives”) is usually forgotten and, above all, the rest of the Rortyan characterization of the idea of “fnal vocabulary” is often overlooked: These are the words in which we formulate praise of our friends and contempt for our enemies, our long-term projects, our deepest selfdoubts and our highest hopes. They are the words in which we tell, sometimes prospectively and sometimes retrospectively, the story of our lives. (CIS, 73)

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This characterization seems to leave no doubt of the inadequacy of limiting the relevance of fnal vocabularies only to the epistemic terrain. So, since Rorty insists that what constitutes us as a person is to be “incarnated vocabularies,” the ironist could be understood as the one who is not merely crossed by the reversal of the values about the importance of the inherited lexicon, but the one who faces that reversal and consequently lives, in a non-neurotic way, the personal identity crisis that critical distance with her tradition imposes. This appeal to the “importance of words” is my way of articulating Richard Bernstein’s interpretation of our link with the fnal vocabularies in nonepistemic but existential terms (Bernstein 2016, 14–53). There are different roads available for those who live through a crisis over their vocabulary. Rorty deals specifcally with one of the ways to confgure oneself as an ironist once the crisis over the importance of our fnal vocabulary begins. For Rorty, the most interesting ironist fgure is the one that was revealed to him by his friend Harold Bloom: the fgure of the strong poet. A strong poet is someone who suffers from distress over infuence, distress vis-à-vis the “horror of fnding himself to be only a copy or a replica” (Bloom 1997, 80). In Rorty’s own words, The fear in which Bloom’s poets begin is the fear that one might end one’s days in such a world, a world one never made, an inherited world. The hope of such a poet is that what the past tried to do to her she will succeed in doing to the past: to make the past itself, including those very causal processes which blindly impressed all her own behavings, bear her impress. Success in that enterprise—the enterprise of saying “Thus I willed it” to the past—is success in what Bloom calls “giving birth to oneself.” (CIS, 29) In his theory of poetry, Bloom categorizes several ways of carrying out the poetic revisionism that enables us to deal with the distress about infuence. The one that he calls kenosis seems to adjust more appropriately to the kind of ironist Rorty is thinking of. For Bloom, “kenosis […] is a breaking-device similar to the defense mechanism our psyches deploy against repetition compulsions; kenosis is a movement towards discontinuity with the precursor” (Bloom 1997, 14). Consequentially, the ironist characterized by Rorty is the one who carries out a process of self-creation insofar as she engages in an exercise of revision of inherited vocabularies in order to build her own vocabulary. The Bloomian-Rortyan ironist is not, then, an intellectual who, by accepting the contingency of all vocabularies and by distrusting her own inherited vocabulary, puts into question the very idea of developing a fnal lexicon. An ironist with such qualities would be the one who, in her detachment, reveals her nostalgia of an ahistorical vocabulary in which to shelter. On the

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contrary, on Rorty’s model, the ironist/strong poet grants the utmost importance to developing her own vocabulary. The ironist’s tool is none other than redescription, which includes metaphor as its most effcient trope. In the Rortyan project, this ironist/strong poet must be able to blend into the expectations of a liberal democratic society. We should bear in mind that in CIS, Rorty states only one condition to explain the meaning of being a liberal. This defnition, which he takes from Shklar, reads as follows: a liberal is someone for whom cruelty is our worst deed.5 However, the fgure of the liberal ironist appears to Rorty himself as problematic, and it is in his solution to this problem where most of his detractors’ misunderstandings lie. There is a certain kind of ironist, Rorty suggests, whose distrust toward liberal politics stems from the fact that the ironist’s basic attitude is the search for autonomy, and this search is reactive. Ironists experience alienation from society, which in turn leads them to seek an estrangement from their own process of acculturation. Attending to that, Rorty introduces his distinction between private and public language. This distinction refers to the possibility of distinguishing uses of different vocabularies by virtue of the ends for which they were developed. Self-creation is the goal of ironist private vocabularies, whereas the goal of public liberal vocabularies is to eliminate cruelty. This split is presented as a response to the impulse of turning ironism into the designer of social goals, thus misunderstanding the role of the liberal state. But there is another reason for this distinction between public and private languages: the liberal critique of ironism. The main objection Rorty presents to the fgure of the liberal ironist is his assertion that redescription (the power of which is claimed by any ironist) implies a form of cruelty and, as a consequence, is incompatible with liberalism. In Rorty’s own words, [M]ost people do not want to be redescribed. They want to be taken on their own terms- taken seriously just as they are and just as they talk. The ironist tells them that the language they speak is up for grabs by her and her kind. There is something potentially very cruel about that claim. For the best way to cause people long-lasting pain is to humiliate them by making the things that seemed most important to them look futile, obsolete, and powerless. (CIS, 89) Rorty is well aware that freedom can be cruel, and it is because of this that he suggests limiting certain forms of redescription to the private sphere. According to him, we need to distinguish between redescription for private and for public purposes. For my private purposes, I may redescribe you and

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everybody else in terms which have nothing to do with my attitude toward your actual or possible suffering. […] But as I am a liberal, the part of my fnal vocabulary which is relevant to such actions requires me to become aware of all the various ways in which other human beings whom I might act upon can be humiliated. (CIS, 91–92) Thus, the Rortyan liberal ironist/strong poet is more liberal than ironist because the restriction of our redescriptive capacity (which feeds and develops the ironist urge for autonomy) stems from the vocabulary that rejects cruelty. We can display an initial observation regarding Rorty’s proposal by comparing it to Rawls’s defense of epistemic abstinence in the confguration of public reason. First of all, we should distinguish the ways in which each author presents the virtue of civility. Thomas McCarthy has pointed out that the idea of epistemic abstinence held by Rawls contains an unexpected variation of the Kantian dispute between the autonomous self and the heteronomous self, insofar as the weight of Rawls’s proposal rests on individuals and does not refer to institutional barriers or legal restrictions to freedom of speech. According to McCarthy, “Rawls’ politically autonomous self is also built from self-abnegation; but now deep convictions and deliberations of own conscience are the ones that have to be controlled” (McCarthy 1994, 52). Therefore, the passions that should worry us for the stability of a just society are the ones I would like to call “inclinations of conviction.” In Rorty, on the contrary, the passion to be controlled in favor of liberalism is that of redescription, which is not anchored in convictions but rather in our doubts about them. If in Rawls unreasonableness seems to be linked to the excesses of dogmatism, Rorty cares more about the shape of unreasonableness linked to the excesses of the kind of fgure that his criticism of epistemology seems to promote: the aesthete. This divergence, at the same time, rests on the different discursive spaces that need to be restrained. While in Rawls the distinction is between public and nonpublic reason (with the latter being inherently social and made up, mostly, of a multiplicity of traditions that fght to be consolidated and reproduced), with Rorty, the distinction is given between public and private spaces, understanding the latter as the realm in which individuals confgure their self-affrmation as a transformation of, or break from, inherited traditions. The fact that epistemic abstinence can be applied to a social discourse of reinforcing tradition in one case and redescriptive abstinence can be applied to an individual discourse of fssure of those same traditions in the other may work as a hint to accuse Rorty of a conservatism that seems to be alien to Rawls.6 For Rorty, however, this dichotomy we can demand from the liberal ironist does not prevent the use of redescription for political goals. On the contrary, Rorty accounts for a sense of moral progress in the direction of a greater human solidarity, although that solidarity cannot consist

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of the recognition of an essence present in all human beings but should be conceived as “the capacity to perceive each time more clearly that the differences of tradition (tribal, religion, race, customs, and such) have no importance when compared to the similarities that refer to pain and humiliation” (CIS, 192). Thus, the practice of redescription becomes an instrument of social transformation. Building a language able to formulate previously untold redescriptions, where cruelty can be seen where it used to be unimaginable, is something that has public consequences. If the ironist attitude of the strong poet is the one that trains us in the redescriptive task, then there is a passage from private ironism to public life since redescription is capable of generating the conditions for denouncing heretofore unconceptualized cruelty.7 By acknowledging that the private/public is conceived in analogy to a porous membrane, we must trace a distinction between private and political forms of redescription.8 I believe that the ironist is worried about the choice of terms for her fnal vocabulary and carries out her redescriptive practice with that aim in mind: to confgure which terms constitute her as a person. The liberal, on the other hand, is worried about the extension of the term “cruelty.” In the case of the ironist, redescription manages to put in the subject’s center of attention a group of words that were, as Frankfurt would say, outside the feld of what was important for her to care about. Those who use redescription as an exercise of criticism in public life are not worried about what kind of person they would be if certain words worried them. Instead, they are concerned about the extension of a single word: “cruelty.” This does not mean that redescriptive practices could generate conceptual changes in the frst case and not in the second. If one were to adhere to an inferentialist semantics like the one Rorty accepts through Brandom, the change based on the extensional application of a word would produce, at the end of the road, a genuine conceptual transformation.9 It is possible to defend the idea that there is a refective equilibrium in the practice of extending the application of a word because this practice could be described in the following terms: frst, one begins with certain paradigms of the use of the term “cruelty” (“paradigms” in the sense of certain examples of applications of the term that are used as canonical, evaluating their similarity in order to accept or reject other applications); second, one experiments with a novel application; fnally, one puts it in relation to the previous paradigms. This practice can, and often does, generate a process in which paradigms are modifed.10 In consequence, the fact that redescriptive practices have a public use is not incompatible with the public/private distinction, given that there are two ways of exercising redescription: Ironist redescription: seeking to renovate the terms that matter in the private forum

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Liberal redescription: seeking to modify the extent of application for the term “cruelty”11 As a consequence, the liberal ironist faces only one requirement for the redescriptive abstinence that she imposes upon herself to be possible: that in the private forum she never eradicate the term “cruelty” from her fnal vocabulary. This is what constitutes her as a liberal. Of course, there may be nonliberal ironists, but their existence doesn’t imply that the liberal ironist is an inconsistent and/or a conservative fgure. Rorty’s suggestion of privatizing the redescriptive impulse by maintaining the exercise of liberal redescription tends to provoke a certain political irritation, because liberal redescription also can, and tends to, cause cruelty and humiliation. As a consequence, it becomes impossible to comply with the mandate of being consistent when privatizing all humiliating redescriptions because, in that case, we would turn into conservative liberals. Thus emerges, against redescriptive abstinence, the concept of parrhesia, much studied by Foucault. Parrhesia literally means “to say everything,” and Foucault analyzed the diversity of parrhesiastic practices developed in the Greco-Roman world. In Foucault’s own words: [E]tymologically, parresia is “telling all”. The parrhesia [sic] tells all. In actual fact, it is not so much a question of “telling all” in parrhesia. What is basically at stake in parrhesia is what could be called, somewhat impressionistically, the frankness, freedom, and openness that leads one to say what one has to say, as one wishes to say it, when one wishes to say it, and in the form one thinks is necessary for saying it. The term parrhesia is so bound up with the choice, decision, and attitude of the person speaking that the Latins translated it by, precisely, libertas. (Foucault 2005, 372) Rorty warns that his appeal to redescriptive abstinence may cause suspicions that lead to the removal of critical discourse by virtue of its humiliating potential. If parreshia means “tell the powerfull all,” then the cruel potential of liberal redescription can lead to a curtailment of the parreshiastic impulse in the name of liberalism, which would constitute a clear dilemma for Rortyan policies of social and cultural change. In Rorty’s words, Lots of people, liberals and non-liberals, have wondered whether Rushdie, by publishing The Satanic Verses, was trying to be helpful to the Muslim world […] or was just being sadistic. I should not be surprised if Rushdie himself had not, during his worst nights, wondered about this. (Rorty 2001a, 32)

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I believe that the response to this kind of question can be developed in three steps. First, we should point out that cruelty or humiliation produced by liberal redescriptive practices (the ones worried about the extent of the term “cruelty”) is inevitably entailed by such practices, inasmuch as they try to redesign power relations.12 The powerful will always feel the humiliation generated by the literalization of redescriptive metaphors. To think anything else is to think that politics is not constituted by conficts of power, by the fght for discursive and material hegemony.13 As Rorty points out, The humiliations inficted on the French clergy by the laicization of primary education were a lesser evil than permitting the citizenry of a constitutional democracy to be forced to imbibe Catholic doctrine. Analogously, the humiliation of people who were raised as Catholics, when their views are laughed off by what they regard as a tyrannical majority, seems to me a lesser evil than trying to enforce a public policy, which guarantees that expressions of religious conviction are greeted with respectful attention. (Rorty 2001b, 113–114) The next step consists of showing that it is possible to differentiate the cruelty produced by liberal redescriptive practices from the cruelty produced by the ironist through the redescription of her inherited fnal vocabulary. The latter has no political justifcation, as it is exercised merely by virtue of the creative spirit of those concerned about the kind of idiosyncratic person they intend to be. In that case, there is no sort of evaluation of the specifc weight of the different cruelties because the end of the ironist is not the elimination of cruelty through a redescription that can itself generate humiliation. The liberal is the one who is facing the need to balance two cruelties: the one fought by the liberal redescription, and the one produced by such redescription. The third step consists of pointing out that there is no way of having a general theory able to explain how to trace limits in the exercise of liberal cruelty (the one produced by redescriptions regarding the extension of the term “cruelty”) when the generated cruelty exceeds what is politically acceptable. However, this typical Rortyan rejection to conceive decisions in algorithmic terms—that is, as governed by rules that apply case by case—should not be thought of as assuming a dichotomous conception of normativity: either there are algorithmic rules, or there is an abyss in the process of decision taking. The need to measure the quantum of cruelty that the elimination of cruelty admits in certain circumstances requires a judgment, which we make not based on algorithms but on a defnitely deliberative exercise that can be equated, as Bernstein taught us, to Aristotelian phronesis.14 It is a fragile deliberation, fallible, and aware of the plurality of experience. Once again, Rorty: “I still would

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not be able to equip the liberal with a criterion for detecting her own unconscious sadism, or for resolving the sorts of moral dilemma which Socrates, Voltaire and Rushdie faced” (Rorty 2001a, 32). My impression is that the path I have traveled through Rorty’s work allows us to identify those cases as examples not of ironist redescriptions that fail to endorse the public/private distinction but of liberal redescriptions that make us wonder if there has been an imbalance. The nonconservative public/private distinction, pace Rorty, still works!

Notes 1 For a discussion on the relevance of viewing fnal vocabularies as sets of words, see Santelli, (2020). Brandom (2000b) is an inescapable reference for implications of the Rortyan concept of vocabulary. 2 This emphasis on qualitative or experiential aspects supposed by the passage from beliefs to words could be a frst moment of resistance to the classical criticism of Rortyan pragmatism that accuses it of developing a logocentric epistemology. For an excellent example of such criticism, see Allen (2004). 3 Besides this identifcation between ironism and skepticism, some authors have tried to link the Rortyan defense of ironism with some form of cynicism or ideology of “the end of the ideologies.” For a criticism of such interpretation, see Del Castillo (2015, 102–110). 4 See Rorty (ORT 128) for the distinction between three uses of “truth”: laudatory, cautionary and, disquotational. 5 “Hating cruelty, and putting it frst, remain a powerful part of the liberal consciousness” (Shklar 1984, 43). 6 See Penelas (2010). 7 Michael Bacon (2017) presents a clear defense of the possibility of such a passage. 8 My description of the membrane as porous does not imply a rejection of the private/public distinction. For two types of complementary rejection of such a distinction, see Voparil (2006, Chapter 5) where the author defends a version of perfectionism whereby private self-realization can enhance politics, and Shusterman (1997, 79–87), where the author argues that cultural politics can enhance our private perfection. My reaction to both criticisms is that Rorty only would reject them if we replaced “can” for “must” in their slogans. Another way of pointing out the porousness of the membrane without rejecting the private/public distinction is, following Barthold (2012), making a distinction inside the private sphere between “idiosyncratic private beliefs” and “comprehensive private beliefs,” where porousness occurs in the latter. 9 See Brandom (2000a, Chapter 1). 10 See Penelas (2012). 11 This distinction between types of redescriptions was introduced for the frst time in Penelas (2019). 12 Jeffrey Stout pays special attention to this aspect of political life. In his words, “Our expressions of anger and contempt make clear where each faction comprising the body politic intends to locate the limits of cooperation. One function of political discourse is to negotiate those limits. It hardly needs pointing out, however, that expressions of anger and contempt are themselves intrinsically diffcult from hatred and cruelty—in the eyes of both accuser and accused. Questioning one another’s motives in public is something necessary,

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but it always has a price. Such is the social-psychology of the Kukturkampf” (Stout 2010, 530). 13 For an interpretation of Rorty’s political thought as a kind of political agonism, see Penelas (2014). 14 For phronesis as one of Bernstein’s main articulating concepts, see Bernstein (1983). Works by Rorty CIS. 1989. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. New York: Cambridge University Press. ORT. 1991. Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers, Volume 1. New York: Cambridge University Press. Rorty, Richard. 2001a. “Reply to John Horton.” In Richard Rorty: Critical Dialogues, edited by Matthew Festenstein and Simon Thompson, 29–32. Cambridge: Polity Press. ———. 2001b. “Reply to David Owen.” In Richard Rorty: Critical Dialogues, edited by Matthew Festenstein and Simon Thompson, 111–114. Cambridge: Polity Press. ———. 2007. “The Fire of Life.” Poetry 191 (2): 129–131. ———. 2010a. “Reply to Schneewind.” In The Philosophy of Richard Rorty, edited by Randall E. Auxier and Lewis Edwin Hahn, 506–508. Chicago: Open Court. ———. 2010b. “Redemption from Egotism: James and Proust as Spiritual Exercises.” In The Rorty Reader, edited by Christopher J. Voparil and Richard J. Bernstein, 389–406. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell. Other Works Allen, Barry. 2004. Knowledge and Civilization. Boulder: Westview. Bacon, Michael. 2017. “Rorty, Irony and the Consequences of Contingency for Liberal Society.” Philosophy and Social Criticism 43 (9): 953–965. Barthold, Lauren Swayne. 2012. “Rorty, Religion and the Public-Private Distinction.” Philosophy and Social Criticism 38 (8): 861–878. Bernstein, Richard J. 1983. Beyond Objectivism and Relativism. Science, Hermeneutics and Praxis. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. ———. 2016. Ironic Life. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bloom, Harold. 1997. The Anxiety of Infuence. A Theory of Poetry, 2nd edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brandom, Robert. 2000a. Articulating Reasons. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2000b. “Vocabularies of Pragmatism: Synthesizing Naturalism and Historicism.” In Rorty and His Critics, edited by Robert Brandom, 156–183. Malden: Blackwell Publishers. Del Castillo, Ramón. 2015. Rorty Y El Giro Pragmático. Barcelona: Batiscafo. Doran, Robert. 2017. The Ethics of Theory. Philosophy, History, Literature. New York: Bloomsbury.

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Foucault, Michel. 2005. The Hermeneutics of the Subject. New York: Palgrave MacMillan. Frankfurt, Harry. 1998. “The Importance of What We Care About.” In The Importance Of What We Care About. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Llanera, Tracy. 2016. “Redeeming Rorty’s Private-Public Distinction.” Contemporary Pragmatism 13 (3): 319–340. McCarthy, Thomas. 1994. “Kantian Constructivism and Reconstructivism: Rawls and Habermas on Dialogue.” Ethics 105 (1): 44–63. Penelas, Federico. 2010. “Di ciò su cui non si può raggiungere il consenso si deve tacere. Problemi per l’astinenza epistemica nel liberalismo politico.” Ragion Pratica 34: 221–233. ———. 2012. “The Idea of Epistemic Community from the Standpoint of Rortyan Conversationalism.” Pragmatism Today 3 (1): 98–110. ———. 2014. “Contributions and Limits of Rortyan Pragmatism for Political Agonism.” Contemporary Pragmatism 11 (1): 103–113. ———. 2019. “Rorty on Hermeneutical Injustice, Liberal Redescription and Utopian Imagination.” ÉNDOXA: Series Filosófcas 43: 313–333. Ramberg, Bjørn. 2014. “Irony’s Commitment: Rorty’s Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity.” The European Legacy 19 (2): 144–162. Rawls, John. 1993. Political Liberalism. New York: Columbia University Press. Santelli, Mauro. 2020. “Redescribing Final Vocabularies. A Rortyan Picture of Identity and Selfhood.” European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy XII (1). Schneewind, Jerome B. 2010. “Rorty on Utopia and Moral Philosophy.” In The Philosophy of Richard Rorty, edited by Randall E. Auxier and Lewis Edwin Hahn, 479–505. Chicago: Open Court. Shklar, Judith. 1984. Ordinary Vices. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Shusterman, Richard. 1997. Practicing Philosophy. Pragmatism and Philosophical Life. London/New York: Routledge. Stout, Jeffrey. 2010. “Rorty on Religion and Politics.” In The Philosophy of Richard Rorty, edited by Randall E. Auxier and Lewis Edwin Hahn, 523–545. Chicago: Open Court. Voparil, Christopher. 2006. Richard Rorty. Politics and Vision. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefeld Publishers. Williams, Michael. 2003. “Rorty on Knowledge and Truth.” In Richard Rorty, edited by Charles Guignon and David R. Hiley, 61–80. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

15 The Ironic and Liberal Defcit in Rorty’s Irony Rebeca Pérez León

Rorty never tired of insisting that the “link between philosophy and politics” was not particularly “tight” (PSH, 23) and that philosophers should not try to make it any tighter. And he certainly did not regard the longstanding association between pragmatism and liberal democracy any differently, for he saw this most natural of pairs as no more than a contingent, lucky match. Rorty maintained that “[n]o argumentative roads from epistemological or semantic premises will take one to political conclusions” (PSH, 23n1), for the pragmatist’s discarding of the notions of Reality as It Is in Itself and Reason as a truth-and-good detector means discarding the idea that there is a single vocabulary that can answer epistemological, moral, aesthetic, and political questions regarding the best form of government or the virtues necessary for the fourishing of the political community. Yet Rorty’s characterization of irony and his liberal ironic utopia is in tension with Rorty’s insistence to keep philosophy and politics apart. On the one hand, Rorty maintains that irony is a private matter and, on the other, that in his liberal utopia, irony would be universal. The frst characterization derives from a refusal to merge the meaning of a person’s life and his public concerns in one single vocabulary and duly respects the boundaries between the private and public spheres that Rorty so persistently defended. The second, on the contrary, expands irony’s infuence to the point where the divide between the private and public spheres is blurred altogether. Rorty’s interpreters see this tension as derivative of another tension between the existential and political characterizations of irony, which actually helps resolve the matter (Ramberg 2014, 59–60; Voparil 2016, 7f). Existential irony is the doubtful, anxious disposition displayed by the ironist when, after being impressed by other vocabularies, he starts wondering, for example, whether his vocabulary has made him a “wrong kind of human being” (CIS, 75). Political irony is the civic virtue “that helps [liberal citizens] be tolerant, adaptable and just” (Curtis 2015, 93). Having these two senses of irony, it is reasonable to establish a healthy division of labor among ironists, some of whom will be more inclined DOI: 10.4324/9781003208150-20

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to reduce cruelty and, thus, to spend their time in public undertakings, whereas others will be devoted primarily to self-creative projects in the private sphere. Political irony, then, would be suitable for universalization, whereas existential irony would be better kept in the private sphere. This division of labor would make compatible Rorty’s claim that “irony seems an inherently private matter” (CIS, 87f) with his suggestion that irony should be made universal (CIS, xv), provided these claims are read as “existential irony is an inherently private matter” and “political irony is universalizable.” In this chapter, however, I argue that Rorty made an ironic and liberal mistake in suggesting that irony should be made universal, even if it is understood as political irony only. The desire to universalize irony is insuffciently ironic because it reveals the ironist’s “public ambition” that his vocabulary will be relevant not only to “one man once, and that man dying” (Larkin in CIS, 23) but to “everybody” (CIS, 118). This ambition reveals the failure of the ironist to recognize the contingency of all vocabularies, including his own, or in other words, his failure to recognize that his ironist vocabulary is just one more vocabulary among many others. The universalization of irony in Rorty’s liberal utopia is also insuffciently liberal because irony’s historicism or recognition of the contingency of all vocabularies involves a total view of the world and all of life which, if universalized, would prevent the existence and creation of comprehensive views that do not share irony’s historicism, thereby compromising the values of pluralism and cooperation, which guide liberalism’s public life. Although I agree with Rorty’s interpreters that the public-private divide should be understood as in continuous negotiation, I argue that irony should be understood as “inherently a private matter” if it is to remain both ironic and liberal. Further, I take recourse to Rorty’s own arguments to maintain that the existential characteristics that Rorty unwarrantedly attributed to “all ironist intellectuals” (Rorty 2010, 506; emphasis added) should be discarded because their unavoidability essentializes the ironist’s narrative and, consequently, opposes the historicism that is the ironist’s trademark. Without existential irony, however, the neat solution to the tension of the ironist’s political infuence also falls by the wayside because there are no longer two ironies doing two different jobs. Rather, there is only irony as historicism, as the recognition of the contingency of all vocabularies. I start by questioning the essential characteristics of Rorty’s defnition of irony in CIS and then move on to my criticisms of Rorty’s desire to universalize irony. In CIS, Rorty defnes the ironist as someone who fulflls three characteristics: frst, the ironist has continuous and radical doubts about her fnal vocabulary because she has been impressed by other vocabularies; second, the ironist recognizes her inability to assuage her doubts using her current fnal vocabulary; and, third, “insofar as she philosophises about her situation, she does not think that her vocabulary

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is closer to reality than others” (CIS, 73). In a move that could rightly be described as ironic, toward the end of his life, Rorty crossed out in a few lines some of these defning characteristics. In his “Reply to Schneewind,” Rorty recognizes that “his description of the liberal ironist” in CIS “was badly fawed” (Rorty 2010, 506). It was badly fawed because he “made it sound as if you could not be an antifoundationalist and a romantic self-creator without becoming a Sartrean, ever conscious of the abyss” (Rorty 2010, 506)—that is, without being beset by constant worries and doubts about one’s own fnal vocabulary. The problem with such a characterization of irony is that it is insuffciently ironic. Its ironic defcit is revealed in the suggestion that irony “necessarily brings on a sort of emotional or spiritual crisis” (Rorty 2010, 506; emphasis added) which, just as the narratives in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and Heidegger’s Being and Time, leaves “no room for contingency in the narrative” (CIS, 100). Indeed, maintaining that all ironists necessarily go through a crisis of sorts as a result of their irony essentializes the narrative of the ironist and compromises the very historicism and antiessentialism that defnes this fgure. Rorty in fact had a keen eye for spotting such mistakes in other prominent ironist theorists like Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger. In all these cases, the necessity of their narratives contradicted the historicism that they had so staunchly defended and made them relapse into metaphysics. Rorty’s course correction in his Reply to Schneewind allows him to avoid the knots previous ironic theorists had got themselves into and remain true to his historicism. It is a course correction that discards the unironic remnants in the fgure of the ironist and allows this fgure to stay truly ironic. William Curtis provides further reasons to think that neither radical doubting nor self-creation are necessary features of the ironist, for “they could, in principle, be ignored, as they are by nonintellectuals” (Curtis 2015, 99). The relatively varied typology of ironists that progressively appears in CIS was already suggesting that the doubtful demeanor of the ironist was optional. There are ironist theorists who do experience such incessant doubting but also ironist novelists who do not necessarily go through the anxiety of constant doubting. And the same optional character would apply to the self-creative urge that Rorty unwarrantedly attributes to all ironists. To quote John Owens’s apt question, “[S]urely a person can repudiate metaphysics and yet live peacefully with his or her current contingencies?” (Owens 2000, 27). The second chapter of CIS in fact agrees with Owens’s observation as it clearly states that coping with one’s contingency does not necessarily mean engaging in projects of selfcreation. There, Rorty says, Freud himself eschewed the very idea of a paradigm human being. He does not see humanity as a natural kind with an intrinsic nature, an intrinsic set of powers to be developed or left undeveloped. By

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breaking with both Kant’s residual Platonism and Nietzsche’s inverted Platonism, he lets us see both Nietzsche’s superman and Kant’s common moral consciousness as exemplifying two out of many forms of adaptation, two out of many strategies for coping with the contingencies of one’s upbringing of coming to terms with a blind impress. (CIS, 35; emphasis added) Kant here represents an uncreative character whose sense of life is exhausted in abiding by principles. His law-abiding behavior is presented as a way of coping with one’s contingency alongside self-creation, which is the preferred mode of adaptation of the character Nietzsche represents. Having them both side by side shows the contingency and historicity of being human generally, which is Rorty’s point. But as ways of coping with one’s contingency, they also show the contingency of the ironist’s self-creative project, for he could as well cope with contingency by abiding by the law just as the character of Kant does. After such slimming down of the defning characteristics of irony, the question is reasonably whether there is anything left of Rorty’s irony. What remains is the distinctiveness of irony—namely, the recognition of contingency. Or, in other words, historicism, which means a rejection of treating “any fnal vocabulary as if it were closer to reality than others” (CIS, 73). This slimming down means that the ironist does not necessarily have to go through a spiritual or existential crisis on the run-up to the recognition of contingency, or as a result of it. It also means that the ironist does not necessarily have to recreate him or herself from the ground up in the face of such recognition. Recognizing that these are optional, contingent traits keeps Rorty’s irony properly ironic. Just as Rorty’s description of irony exhibits a metaphysical remnant, his ambiguity regarding irony’s political import suggests that Rorty was probably more tempted than he would have been ready to admit by the metaphysical and authoritarian desire to make the link between philosophy and politics tighter than he himself had suggested was safe for both. As a number of philosophers have noticed, there is a tension in Rorty’s work between his insistence that irony should be kept in the private sphere and his suggestion that irony should be universalized. On the one hand, universalizing irony would make it public not only in an accidental and contingent way, as when the product of an ironist has resonance with a wider audience and, in Rorty’s words, it is “repeated, caught up, bandied about” (CIS, 18) but rather in a way that would risk erasing that boundary altogether. On the other hand, privatizing irony appears to disengage the ironist’s moral from his political behavior and beliefs and deprive the public sphere of the disruptively auspicious contributions the ironist might be able to make. Adding to the confusion, Rorty makes both suggestions with the purpose of advancing and strengthening liberal democracy.

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William Curtis (2015) maintains that this tension is only apparent because it is possible to put the seemingly different private and universal ironies in a single, coherent interpretation of Rorty’s political work. He provides two arguments. First, Curtis argues that Rorty’s ambiguity regarding the ironist’s public infuence parallels two distinct characterizations of irony, one of which is more immediately publicly relevant and political, whereas the second is centered on the individual and could be politically dangerous, for it involves engaging in redescriptions that risk humiliating others. Thus, Curtis affrms, we could make both Rorty’s claims to universalize irony and to keep it private compatible if the frst claim refers to irony understood as a civic virtue and the second to irony understood as, in Rorty’s words, “existential anguish” (Rorty 2010, 506). In this picture, irony as civic virtue would be universalizable, whereas irony as existential anguish would be better kept in the private sphere. Second, once it has been established that it is only irony as civic virtue that would be made universal, Curtis argues that the universalization of irony in the relevant sense is perfectly compatible with liberalism, for liberalism requires a matching form of life, and universalizing irony understood as civic virtue would help create and shape that liberal form of life. I disagree with Curtis’s conclusions and, in what follows, I argue that Rorty made an ironic and liberal mistake in suggesting that, in his liberal utopia, irony in the relevant sense would be universal. Curtis is certainly on point when he affrms that irony could be understood as a civic virtue and that liberal democracies need to create a compatible form of life to be stable. I argue, however, that as much as irony as civic virtue might be compatible with liberalism, its universalization is not compatible with it. It is not compatible with liberalism because irony is a comprehensive morality involving a particular view of the world and all of life which, if universalized, would prevent the existence and creation of views that did not adopt irony’s historicism. This would include all religions, esotericism, shamanism, ancestral wisdom of indigenous communities, etc., unless and until they adopt the ironist’s historicism, which is out of the question given the nature of these comprehensive moral views. I claim that universalizing irony would destroy plurality and autonomy and thereby liberal democracy. Further, I use Rawls’s distinction between comprehensive morality and political morality to argue that the kind of matching liberal form of life and morality liberal democracy requires is precisely a political one that rests on having a working distinction between the public and the private, a distinction that no totalitarian regime would allow and which no democracy should put at risk. I will now expand on Curtis’s, Rorty’s, and my own arguments. Curtis’s attempt at constructing a coherent picture where irony can be both private and ultra-public, publicly dangerous and publicly worthy, rests on a differentiation in the concept of irony (Cf. Curtis 2015, 96). The minimal defnition of irony is “the acceptance of contingency and

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the rejection of essentialism” (Curtis 2015, 93), which, Curtis maintains, can be understood as a civic virtue because it cultivates “‘critical open-mindedness’: a sense of one’s own fallibility and fnitude, which… enables liberal citizens to be properly, though not absolutely, tolerant in their politics” (Curtis 2015, 96.) Indeed, by rejecting to see any fnal vocabulary as if it were closer to reality, the ironist is better able to see all vocabularies as standing on equal epistemological ground and to judge them according to the different purposes that they serve rather than according to the different transcendents that they serve. Curtis affrms that, to this minimal defnition, Rorty added a “more radical and comprehensive view” (Curtis 2015, 95) of irony. In this more radical and comprehensive view, irony is not only the recognition of contingency and the rejection of essentialism but also what Curtis refers to as “intellectual restlessness” (Curtis 2015, 95). In contrast to the ironist historicist, the intellectually restless ironist “‘spends her time worrying about the possibility that she has been…taught to play the wrong language game’” (Rorty in Curtis 2015, 95) and “feels impelled to challenge and transform her fnal vocabulary” (Curtis 2015, 95). This second sense of irony is meant only for intellectuals who are nonmetaphysicians. The main reason for restricting the resonance of this second sense of irony is that ironists of this sort are not necessarily public-friendly. This particular sort of ironist is actively engaged in playing off vocabularies against one another in order to create new ones and thereby “formulate novel forms of individuality and life” (Curtis 2015, 98). This urge to create new metaphoric redescriptions is not only disruptive of liberalism’s paced reformism, but also potentially publicly dangerous because it “threaten[s] one’s fnal vocabulary, and thus one’s ability to make sense of oneself in one’s own terms” (CIS, 90). “Redescription,” Rorty maintains, “often humiliates” (CIS, 90). Having two ironies with different characteristics instead of one helps Curtis match them neatly with the public-private divide. Insofar as irony as civic virtue is compatible with liberalism and can help advance the tolerant dispositions of its citizens, it is the most suitable to be made universal in Rorty’s liberal utopia. Conversely, with its more restrictive membership requirements and its penchant for redescription and likely humiliation of others, the second sense of irony is better kept in the private sphere. This, however, should not be understood as excluding ironists in this second sense from the public sphere full stop. Curtis recognizes, as does Rorty (Rorty 1996, 74f), that the public-private divide is “an active negotiation between the two spheres” (Curtis 2015, 111) and that the line that divides them “gets drawn and redrawn, through the ongoing democratic political process” (Curtis 2015, 106). This suggests that the intellectual products of ironists in the second sense could also be recontextualized and put to good use in the public sphere. Curtis restricts this recontextualization, however, to “fruits of utopian thinking”

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that “have been adequately harmonised with the guiding ideals of liberal democracy” (Curtis 2015, 110). Curtis’s neat solution encounters one frst obstacle in Rorty’s explicit discarding of the existential side of irony in his “Reply to Schneewind.” As we saw, attributing to all ironists a crisis of sorts and presenting selfcreation as the ironist’s paradigmatic way of coping with contingency essentializes the narrative of the ironist and, for that reason, fails to make good the recognition of the contingency of all vocabularies, especially the ironist’s vocabulary. Irony, as corrected by Rorty himself, means no more than the recognition of the contingency of all vocabularies. Left with no more than one irony, Curtis cannot take recourse to the healthy division of public and private labors between civic and existential ironies, respectively, which helps him solve the ambiguity of irony’s political import. Consequently, we are right back where we started—namely, with a tension between Rorty’s claims that irony is “inherently a private matter” and that irony should be made universal. It is not clear how this tension between private irony and universal irony could be resolved given that it is unlike the tension between private irony and public irony. This latter tension is solved contingently all the time as when, for example, the Catholic Theology of Liberation inspired social movements in the South of Mexico and Central America or when the civil rights movement led by Martin Luther King Jr. obtained inspiration from Christian beliefs.1 The tension between private and universal irony, in contrast, cannot be resolved in a liberal democracy, for private irony presupposes the publicprivate divide, which is constitutive of a liberal democracy, whereas universal irony does not and, by that very token, would not qualify as liberal democratic. Thus, rather than trying to solve the tension, I argue that universalization should be dropped, and irony should be understood as an “inherently private matter” if it is to remain both ironic and liberal. The frst of Curtis’s arguments makes an unwarranted move from “irony is compatible with liberalism” to “universalising irony is compatible with liberalism.” It is a non sequitur and a perfect illustration of the phrase “too much of a good thing.” Although irony is compatible with liberalism, making it universal is not compatible with it. The reason is that, to use Rawls’s terms, irony is a “comprehensive morality,” and the universalization of any comprehensive morality clashes with the pluralism of liberalism, regardless of how compatible with liberal values it may be. A comprehensive morality, according to Rawls, refers to a “person’s conception of the (complete) good,” which contains “moral elements… philosophical and religious” and is essential “in characterising [one’s] non-public (or non-political) identity” (Rawls 1985, 240n23). Not all individuals have such a comprehensive morality in a liberal regime, as they also have the “right to identify with no particular conception of the good” (Rawls 1985, 240). The distinctiveness of comprehensive moralities is that they “govern all of life” (Rawls 1985, 245) because they

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“help organise and give shape to a person’s way of life, what one sees as doing and trying to accomplish in one’s social world” (Rawls 1985, 241). Comprehensive moralities do not stop at an individual’s private life. Rather, they infuence public life too, but such infuence should be compatible with the existence of “a diversity of doctrines and the plurality of conficting, and indeed, incommensurable, conceptions of the good” (Rawls 1985, 225) and thus with the recognition that other citizens are free to “have their own conception of the good” (Rawls 1985, 240). Turning now to Rorty, irony can be understood as a comprehensive morality in Rawls’s sense because it contains a total view of how to understand, and comport oneself toward, others and the world—i.e., historicism—which also governs all of an individual’s life—that is, public as well as private life. Historicism governs the ironist’s private life in the sense that it defnes the way he sees his own vocabulary and his self and, as a result, fnds Davidson’s view of language and Freud’s characterization of the self more appealing than their metaphysical alternatives. But historicism also sweeps through the ironist’s public life because it also defnes his view of the community to which he belongs, which is why, for example, the ironist rejects the idea that liberal democracies need philosophical backup. Rawls gives us reasons to think that universalizing any comprehensive morality, including irony and the historicism it entails, would threaten plurality and individual autonomy (Rawls 1985, 246). So much is Rawls against such universalisations that this even applies to liberalism understood as a comprehensive, rather than as a political, morality (Rawls 1985, 245), as I discuss in the following response to Curtis’s second argument. Insofar as a comprehensive morality governs all of an individual’s life, if universalized, it would also govern all the life of the members of a political community, which would break the distinction between a sphere free of governmental interference and the space of public cooperation. Theocracies of various creeds show what follows from making one particular comprehensive moral view a public institution: it compromises individuals’ basic liberal rights to choose the beliefs they want to abide by in their private lives and destroys plurality in public life. Universalizing irony, as Curtis rightly suggests, would have a similar result, for it would make all metaphysical talk “fade from liberal utopia, in both the public and private realms, as its citizens develop the civic virtue of irony and see themselves as ‘commonsensically historicist and nominalist’” (Curtis 2015, 118; emphasis added). In such a state of universal irony, individuals will not have much choice other than to adopt the view that no vocabulary is closer to reality than any other, which will compromise their autonomy and freedom to choose their own fundamental views. Most religions, philosophies, and esoteric forms of knowledge based on some form of metaphysics would disappear, thereby impoverishing the diversity constitutive of liberalism.

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That irony is not a metaphysical view and rather puts all fnal vocabularies on equal epistemological footing does not affect my argument because, from a liberal perspective, forcing a metaphysical view or irony onto the public sphere means forcing one particular comprehensive view onto all citizens and excluding alternative fundamental views. Insofar as liberalism orients itself according to both plurality and cooperation despite differences, the universalization of either irony or a religious morality would have what amounts to the same result: a breach of the private sphere and, thus, individual rights, which will destroy plurality as a consequence. Liberal pluralism aims to accommodate as many fnal vocabularies as possible, regardless of whether they are metaphysical or not, and provided users of these vocabularies can respect a plurality of conficting or even incommensurable comprehensive views. In order to have plurality and effectiveness in the public sphere, liberalism endorses the values of cooperation and the view of fellow citizens as free and equal, which require no metaphysical or anti-metaphysical underpinning. Finally, Rorty would have been able to recognize in his suggestion to universalize irony a clear symptom of a relapse into metaphysics, for he was readily able to diagnose the same relapse through the same symptom in the work of Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger. In “Self-Creation and Affliation: Proust, Nietzsche and Heidegger,” Rorty makes a distinction between ironist theorists like Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger and ironist novelists like Proust. Among them, Rorty regards Proust as the only full-fedge ironist on account of his lack of “public ambitions” (CIS, 118). According to Rorty’s reading, Proust had “no reason to believe that [his ironic products] would mean anything to anybody but his narrator” (CIS, 118), but, as it turned out, Proust’s novels resonated with an audience that he probably did not expect or set out to reach. His resonance has been as contingent and fnite as the vocabularies from whose power he wanted to free himself. In contrast, ironist theorists like Nietzsche and Heidegger do have “public ambitions” and aim to have “resonance with everybody” (CIS, 118). They “often spea[k] as though [they] had a social mission, as if [they] had views relevant to public action” (CIS, 99). It is hard not to see a resemblance between Rorty’s suggestion to universalize irony and Nietzsche’s and Heidegger’s public ambitions. Rorty also sounds as if he was relating to a “larger past, the past…of the culture” (CIS, 101), which he now aims to make completely anew to the point that no metaphysical questions would make sense or be raised. Like Nietzsche and Heidegger before him, Rorty sounds as if he wants to create “something incommensurable with the past” (CIS, 101). Rorty’s liberal utopia, where irony is universal and all metaphysics would have been banished, is just such an incommensurable vocabulary. Thus, the universalization of irony is, like the essentialization of the ironist’s narrative I discussed earlier, a metaphysical vestige that should be discarded in order to keep irony free from sublimity and closer to “mere difference” (CIS, 101). By

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keeping in check his “anxiety of infuence” (CIS, 25n3), the ironist can remain healthily ironic in his ambitions too. Curtis presses the point of the universalization of irony further and argues that “liberalism is and must be a philosophy of life” in the sense that “in a liberal regime, “basic values (of respect for persons and their rights, for example) wash across and seep into the whole of our lives” (Macedo, Liberal Values, 54)” (Curtis 2015, 119). In this second argument, Curtis affrms that Rorty “notoriously insists that liberalism is an ‘ethnocentric’ ‘form of life’” (Curtis 2015, 117), where “ethos indicates something much ethically thicker than merely a ‘set of political relations’” (Curtis 2015, 117). As a form of life, it does not stop at the public sphere, but rather organizes and shapes the totality of citizens’ interactions, beliefs, behaviors, and character, including those pertaining to the private sphere. According to Curtis, as a form of life, liberalism transgresses the divide between the public and the private which it institutes (Curtis 2015, 122). Despite Rorty’s praise and explicit endorsement of Rawls’s political liberalism, Curtis describes Rorty as advancing a pragmatic virtue liberalism that, unlike Rawls’s minimally ethically demanding liberalism, places severe ethical demands on the members of the political community. And Curtis provides suffcient textual evidence in Rorty’s work to prove his point (Curtis 2015, 117f). I agree with Curtis that a liberal democratic regime requires a matching culture or form of life and that such liberal culture or form of life means more than political relations. It would be a mistake, however, to think that there is only one democratic political culture or a paradigmatic liberal citizen that can match liberalism, for that would run the risk of essentializing these concepts and would make us relapse into metaphysics. History shows that as democratic societies differentiate, it becomes more and more diffcult to think of a paradigmatic liberal culture or liberal citizen. The particular groups and moralities within a political community shape political institutions, laws, and the political system more generally rather than, as Curtis suggests, the other way around.2 Curtis affrms that the government shapes the morality of individuals, which leads to the conclusion that if there are standard liberal institutions there must be a standard liberal culture and liberal citizen that would spring from them. But that is not only historically but also empirically unwarranted. Studies on law-abiding behavior, like Marina Kurkchiyan’s research on political and legal culture in post-Soviet societies (Kurkchiyan 2003), have consistently shown that it is rather the moralities and informal social norms of the members of the community that not only shape but condition the effectiveness of the law and the character of political institutions in a political community.3 Consequently, we can only speak of democratic political cultures or forms of life in the plural. But if that is the case, we cannot seriously entertain the idea of a liberal utopia where all individuals will hold the belief that fnal vocabularies are historical. Some political

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communities will have large groups that will hold these beliefs, but the rapid differentiation of the membership of liberal democracies makes it unlikely that all would do so. From the liberal emphasis on plurality, it would also be undesirable. Rawls provides further resources to better understand the claim that democracy needs a matching form of life, as well as reasons to doubt the affrmation that the universalization of irony would develop such a form of life. He makes a distinction between morality and politics or between comprehensive morality and public morality. Politics, Rawls affrms, “is a morality” (Rawls 1985, 237) insofar as it contains concepts of “person and society, …of rights and fairness, as well as principles of justice… [and] the virtues through which those principles are embodied in human character and regulate political and social life” (Rawls 1985, 247). In contrast to a comprehensive morality, the political morality of liberalism does not aim to govern all of life but only public life. Liberal democratic forms of life share as one of their key values the difference between private and public spheres. In practice, most citizens of democratic regimes accept that difference by assuming it without much thought, as when a person converts to another religion or adopts a religion and does not expect his public rights to enlarge or diminish as a result of that change (Rawls 1985, 241), or when citizens in liberal regimes criticize their governments and expect their views to be taken into account rather than being censored (Rawls 1985, 243). In liberal political terms, the private sphere is a space of individual freedom because it is a space of individual rights that the government cannot breach without breaking the limits imposed on it by the very political structure in which individual rights have sense and exist as such. And this is the reason why, in liberal political regimes, citizens’ changes in comprehensive moralities are irrelevant to their membership in a liberal community. Liberal public life is the life of plurality and, consequently, of cooperation and compromise. Such plurality in public life presupposes a private life where individuals develop their own unique individualities. But plurality can easily hamper the possibility of making political decisions in the public sphere unless the values of cooperation and the recognition of one’s fellow citizens as free and equal are adopted as political or public morality. As Rawls affrms, “[I]n a constitutional democratic state under modern conditions there are bound to exist conficting and incommensurable conceptions of the good” (Rawls, 1985, 245) whose radical differences are unlikely to be resolved politically. Cooperation in the public sphere of liberalism, however, need not resolve, and is not meant to resolve, these fundamental differences because it presupposes plurality and, thus, individual autonomy (see Rawls 1985, 230). Rather, cooperation in the public sphere is based “solely upon basic intuitive ideas that are embedded in the political institutions of a constitutional democratic regime” (Rawls 1985, 225; emphasis added). And it also

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demands citizens’ ability to negotiate—rather than blur—the distinction between the public and the private by making an effort to offer reasons or appeal to values in the public sphere that their fellow citizens will be able to understand and accept. Rawls suggests that this form of cooperation is all we can get in terms of a political morality if plurality and the view of one’s fellow citizens as free and equal are to be protected (see Rawls 1985, 247). Rawls affrms that even liberalism with its substantive values of individuality and autonomy must not be pursued as a comprehensive morality. He continues, The reason is that any such ideal [such as individuality and autonomy], when pursued as a comprehensive ideal is incompatible with other conceptions of the good…consistent with justice and which, therefore, have a proper place in a democratic society. As comprehensive moral ideals, autonomy and individuality are unsuited for a political conception of justice. As found in Kant and J. S. Mill, these comprehensive ideals, …, are extended too far when presented as the only appropriate foundation for a constitutional regime. So understood, liberalism becomes but another sectarian doctrine. (Rawls 1985, 246; emphasis added) Liberal democracy as a form of government differs from liberal democracy as a comprehensive morality. The former is a form of organizing political power based on plurality and preference for peaceful confict resolution mechanisms like conversations, whereas the latter is one particular comprehensive view of the world, ourselves, and others among many others. Preventing liberalism from becoming another “sectarian doctrine” rests on keeping its comprehensive morality in the private sphere and establishing cooperation as the political morality in the public sphere. This means that liberalism can admit as many comprehensive moralities as there are members in a community as long as individuals can fnd reasons within their own comprehensive morality to abide by the public or political morality of cooperation (Rawls 1985, 247). In contrast to Curtis’s views, liberalism as a form of life or as a philosophy of life assumes the division between the public and the private. Its morality is political, rather than comprehensive, which aims to govern public life and deliberately restricts its inherence in individuals’ private lives in order to respect individuals’ rights. Rorty’s liberal democratic self understood this well when, at the start of his controversial essay “The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy,” he affrmed that although secularism is perfectly compatible, and has even helped advance the liberal democratic ethos, secularism should not be made a public policy, for that would breach the public-private divide— i.e., it will destroy individual autonomy and plurality.

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Rebeca Pérez León Thomas Jefferson set the tone for American liberal politics when he said “it does me no injury for my neighbour to say that there are twenty Gods or no God”. His example helped make respectable the idea that politics can be separated from beliefs about ultimate importance—that shared beliefs among citizens on such matters are not essential to a democratic society…. Many Enlightenment intellectuals were willing to go further and say that since religious beliefs turn out to be inessential for political cohesion, they should simply be discarded as mumbo jumbo—perhaps to be replaced (as in twentieth century Marxist totalitarian states) with some sort of explicitly secular political faith that will form the moral consciousness of the citizen. Jefferson again set the tone when he refused to go that far. He thought it enough to privatise religion, to view it as irrelevant to social order but relevant to, and possibly essential for, individual perfection. (ORT, 175)

Universalizing irony is exactly what liberals like Jefferson’s and Rorty’s best democratic self would stop short of doing—namely, establishing an explicit secular political faith that would unduly interfere in individuals’ fundamental liberal right to choose the sense of who they are. Going any further, as Rorty’s example in parentheses suggests, can easily put liberal democracy down the path of totalitarianism. Thus, if irony is to remain liberal, then Rorty’s desire to universalize irony should be dropped and irony should be understood as “inherently a private matter.” In this chapter, I argued that Rorty made a mistake in essentializing irony and suggesting that it should be universalized. Both mistakes reveal an ironic and liberal defcit in Rorty’s work. I argued that these mistakes can be corrected if, frst, the alleged essential characteristics of irony are discarded in favor of a minimal defnition of irony consisting of no more than the recognition of contingency without necessary doubts or urge to self-create, and, second, the universalization of irony is dropped, and irony is kept within the always porous private sphere. This does not mean that irony will not spill over into the public sphere, not only because that distinction is constantly been “drawn and redrawn” but also because, from a historicist perspective, there is no limit to the possibilities of recontextualizing ironists’ redescriptions.

Notes 1 “The civil-rights movement combined, without much strain, the language of Christian fellowship and the ‘language of individualism’” (PSH, 181n12). 2 Curtis affrms, “[G]overnment sets up the political and legal framework that constitutes the rules for which activities citizens can engage in and how they can interact with each other. In other words, government, insofar as it is effective, plays a large role in determining our ethics and morality, the way we live

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our lives. This is not to say, of course, that government offcials necessarily micromanage our beliefs, decisions and affairs” (Curtis 2015, 119). Curtis’s affrmation is questionable, as studies on law-abiding behaviour show that it is people’s moralities and informal social norms that shape public institutions and legal frameworks rather than the other way around. Cf. Barrett Jacob and Gerald Gaus (2020). “Laws, Norms, and Public Justifcations: The Limits of Law as an Instrument of Reform”: “an overwhelming body of evidence indicates that most people follow the law because of their own moral attitudes towards particular laws and towards the legitimacy of laws in general, as well as because of social norms” (Barrett and Gaus 2020, 11). 3 Barrett and Gaus affrm, “Public reason liberalism is, at its heart, a bottomup theory: it is the reasoning of good-willed citizens that determines political justice” (Barrett and Gaus 2020, 225). Works by Rorty CIS. 1989. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. New York: Cambridge University Press. ORT. 1991. Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers, Volume 1. New York: Cambridge University Press. PSH. 2000. Philosophy and Social Hope. New York: Penguin Books. Rorty, Richard. 1996. “Response to Ernesto Laclau.” In Deconstruction and Pragmatism, edited by Chantal Mouffe. London: Routledge, 69–76. ———. 2010. “Reply to J. B. Schneewind.” In The Philosophy of Richard Rorty, edited by Randall Auxier and Lewis A. Hahn, 506–508. Chicago: Open Court. Other Works Barrett, Jacob and Gerald Gaus. 2020. “Laws, Norms, and Public Justifcation: The Limits of Law as an Instrument of Reform.” In Public Reason and Courts, edited by Silje A. Langvatn, Mattias Kumm and Wojciech Sadurski, 201–228. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Curtis, William M. 2015. Defending Rorty. Pragmatism and Liberal Virtue. New York: Cambridge University Press. Kurkchiyan, Marina. 2003. “The Illegitimacy of Law in Post-Soviet Societies.” In Law and Informal Practices: the Post-Communist Experience, edited by Denis Galligan and Marina Kurkchiyan, 25–46. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Owens, John. 2000. “The Obligations of Irony: Rorty on Irony, Autonomy and Contingency,” The Review of Metaphysics 54 (1): 27–41. Ramberg, Bjørn. 2014. “Irony’s Commitment: Rorty’s Contingency, Irony and Solidarity.” The European Legacy 19 (2): 144–162. Rawls, John. 1985. “Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 14 (3): 223–251. Voparil, Christopher J. 2016. “Rorty and James on Irony, Moral Commitment, and the Ethics of Belief,” William James Studies 12 (2): 1–27.

Index

A Common Faith 64 Alterity 25–28 Anderson, Elizabeth 124, 125 Anti-authoritarianism 5, 15, 133 Anti-essentialism 2 Appiah, Kwame Anthony 100 Aristotle 56–58, 71, 113, 149, 155 Attitude 12, 13, 34, 36, 39, 45, 51, 107–111, 113–119, 124–126, 129, 131, 132, 144, 146, 183, 185, 193, 198, 199, 200, 201, 219 Bacon, Michael 74; distinction between contingency and irony 158, 159; neurotic irony 164, 165; redescription of the public role of irony 162, 163; self-creation 161 Baier, Annette 6, 9 Barthold, Lauren 203 Beethoven, Ludwig van 97 Bernstein, Carl 101 Bernstein, Richard J. 4, 15, 24, 27, 28, 73, 79, 101, 105, 145–147, 149; contingencies and “fnal vocabularies” 164–166, 197, 202, 204, 205 Bildung 73, 77 Bloom, Harold 13, 72, 75, 78, 143, 149, 185, 197, 204 Boisvert, Raymond 100, 181, 191 Brandom, Robert 75, 79, 92, 93, 102, 166, 188, 189, 191, 192, 200, 203, 204 Brooks, David 94–97, 100 Brown, Chris 100 Carman, Taylor 27 Chodat, Robert 84, 92, 93 Columbia University xiii, 20

Contingency 8, 23, 26, 29, 32, 45, 49–50, 74, 88, 103, 142, 156–164, 182–183, 188, 190, 194, 197, 207–212, 218 Conway, Daniel 35, 40 Cosmopolitan xi, xii, 21, 23, 44, 47, 52, 100, 105, 106 Curtis, William 51, 53, 119, 161, 163, 165, 206, 208, 210–213, 215, 217–219 Darwin, Charles 60 Dasein 87 Davidson, Donald 159, 164, 165, 185, 191, 205 De Beauvoir, Simone 13 De Man, Paul 112 De Unamuno, Miguel 182 Del Castillo, Ramón 203, 204 Derrida, Jacques 3, 112, 137, 191 Dewey, John xi, 3, 9, 12, 26–28, 37, 40, 54, 57, 58, 64–66, 73, 79, 81, 82, 103, 105–114, 116–120, 140, 142, 149, 158, 185, 187–191 Djenne 42 Diamond, Cora 9 Doran, Robert 193, 204 Dostoevsky, Fodor 26 Dreyfus, Hubert 85 Edmundson, Mark 82, 91–93 Epicurus 183 Erez, Lior: self-creation vs. solidarity 156, 165 Etzioni, Amitai 100 Evin Prison 21 Existentialism 137, 141, 150, 182, 184 Experimentalism 107–109, 111, 113–118 Expressivism 125, 131, 133–135

Index Feminism 11, 14, 19, 53, 76, 79, 169, 170, 174–180 Feyerabend, Paul 9 FGM (Female Genital Mutilation) 43, 47 Final vocabulary 10–14, 23, 157, 160–164, 170, 173, 174, 193, 199, 208, 209, 211 Fish, Stanley 50 Foot, Phillipa 9 Foucault, Michel x, 10, 29–32, 37, 40, 41, 201, 204 Foundationalism 188 Frankfurt, Harry 196, 200, 204 Franzen, Jonathan 90 Fraser, Nancy 79, 169, 174, 180 Freud, Sigmund 75, 148–150, 184, 185, 191, 208 Friedan, Betty 20 Frye, Marilyn 76, 77, 79, 177, 180 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 74, 79 Geertz, Clifford 46 Genealogy 166, 35, 38, 40, 41 Gitlin, Todd 20 Gladwell, Malcom 20 Glaude, Jr. Eddie 181, 182, 191 Guilty relief 175, 176 Gutiérrez, Carlos xii, 74, 79 Hegel, G.W.F. 15, 71, 97, 139, 208, 214 Heidegger, Martin xi, xii, 3, 15, 27–79, 87–89, 92, 93, 112, 120, 142, 166, 191, 208, 214 Helsinki Declaration 50 Hermeneutics xii, 27, 41, 71, 77, 204 Hillman, James 151; “imaginal understanding” 152–154, 158, 165 Hitler, Adolf 95–97, 99, 146 Hobbes, Thomas 61 Hook, Sidney 79, 111, 112, 119, 120, 181–184, 191 Human rights 10, 19, 25, 44, 46, 47, 49, 54, 175 Humiliation 4, 14, 89, 90, 102, 139, 170–174, 179, 200–202, 211 Husserl, Edmund 112 Imagination 11, 12, 45, 46, 69–79, 86, 88, 98, 99, 124, 132, 133, 148, 151, 152, 157, 158, 160, 163, 177, 205

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Importance 11, 14, 29, 47, 60, 93, 107, 119, 123–125, 142, 156, 162, 165, 190, 193, 195–201, 203–205, 218 In a Shade of Blue 183 Intentionality 86–87 Iran xiii, 10, 19, 21, 22, 26, 27 Ironist redescription 137, 139, 140, 145, 147–149, 151, 157, 158, 160 Irony xii, 14, 22, 73, 90, 151–165, 179, 184, 185, 187, 193–202, 213–215 Jahanbegloo, Ramin 21 James, William xi, 56, 57, 59, 60, 66, 72, 73, 79, 101, 107, 108, 119, 166, 189, 191 Janack, Marianne 38, 41 Janeway, Christopher 36, 41 Jesus 98 Kant, Immanuel x, 9, 15, 54, 71, 123, 135, 209, 217 Kierkegaard, Søren 23, 25 Kingsolver, Barbara 84 Klein, Jacob 153, 158, 165 Kuhn, Thomas 9, 77 Landor, William Savage 184 Larkin, Philip 78, 185, 186, 207 Lazarus, Emma 61 Lear, Jonathan 23, 195 Leopold, Aldo 104 Levinas 25 Lewis, Sinclair 99 Liberal democracy 13, 15, 19, 25, 34, 145, 156, 160, 164, 206, 209, 210, 212, 217, 218 Liberal ironist xii, 137, 139, 140, 145, 147, 149, 151, 157, 161, 165, 179, 184, 193, 198, 199, 201, 208 Liberal redescription 14, 151, 201, 202, 205 Liberalism xi, 8, 12–14, 21, 24, 44, 45, 47, 50, 52, 89, 90, 94, 97, 103, 145, 211–219 Llanera, Tracy 193 Lolita 152 Lovibond, Sabina 9 Luttwak, Edward 61 Lysaker, John 35

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Index

Machado, Antonio 181 MacIntyre, Alasdair 9, 100 Mackinnon, Catharine A. 76, 176, 177, 180 Madelrieux, Stéphane xi, 12, 107, 108, 110, 112, 114, 116–119 Marxist 19, 66, 102, 218 McCarthy, Thomas 199 Midgely, Mary 105 Montaigne, Michel 154, 165 Montesquieu, Baron de 154, 165 Müller-Lauter, Wolfgang 39 Murdoch, Iris 9 Nabokov, Vladimir 7, 159, 160, 163, 164, 170, 171 Nagel, Ernest 112 Nazi and Nazism 95, 103 New School for Social Research 19 New York Times (The) 8, 20, 94, 95 Niebuhr, Reinhold 21–23, 25–28 Nietzsche, Friedrich x, xi, 10, 13, 15, 22, 23, 27, 29–40, 75, 98, 149; Apollonian vs. Dionysian “art instincts” 152–154, 156–160, 163– 165, 208, 209, 211; cruelty 151 Nussbaum, Martha 100 Open Society Foundation 10, 19, 21 Orchids 72, 73, 78, 191 Orwell, George 14, 24, 98, 170–172, 174, 180 Parrhesia 201 Patriotism 81 Peirce, Charles 56, 58, 75, 107, 108, 140, 195 Perspective xii, 1, 2, 6, 8, 11, 15, 30, 31, 33, 35–37, 39, 40, 43, 46, 47, 49, 52, 84, 90, 95, 112, 125, 127, 129, 132, 147, 153, 178, 181, 214, 218 Pettigrew, John 162 Poetry xi, 9, 71, 73, 76, 118, 160, 179, 183, 190, 197 Positivism 112, 115, 118 Post-metaphysical theology 27 Powers, Richard 12, 82–93 Pragmatism x–xiii, 8, 11, 13–15, 27, 43, 51, 53, 57, 59, 65, 71, 75, 79, 107– 109, 111, 112, 114, 115, 118, 119, 125, 142, 163, 169–170, 174–177, 179, 181–185, 187–191, 203, 206 Private/Public distinction 14, 193, 203 Quixote, Don 187

Ramberg, Bjørn T. 195 Ravel, Maurice 97 Rawls, John 15, 138–140, 153, 193, 199, 212, 213, 216, 217 Regan, Tom 123 Robbers Cave Experiment 95 Sagacious Turn (The) 102 Sagacity 12, 100, 101, 102, 103 Sandel, Michael 100 Santelli, Mauro 203 Sartre, Jean-Paul xiii, 89, 93, 137, 141, 142, 184, 190 Schmitt, Carl 95, 105 Schneewind, Jerome B. 8, 9, 184, 189, 195, 196, 208, 212 Science 9, 36, 81, 84, 86, 93, 95, 96, 107–109, 112, 113, 115–119, 134, 190 Scientism 111 Self-creation 10, 13, 29–33, 35–39, 73, 89, 97, 146, 156, 157, 161, 163, 164, 171, 177, 184, 188, 189, 197, 198, 208, 209, 214 Sellars, Wilfrid 15, 76, 125, 126, 129, 130, 134, 156 Shakespeare, William 97 Shklar, Judith 8, 13, 139, 151, 154–158, 162–165, 198, 203 Shusterman, Richard 182, 184, 185, 188, 190, 203 Simar, Suzanne 85, 86, 87, 92 Singer, Peter 8, 123 Snyder, Timothy 95–97 Solidarity 12, 13, 21, 23, 25, 33, 43, 58, 60, 65, 87, 88, 101, 102, 115, 125, 130, 132, 139, 151, 156–158, 163, 170, 188–190, 199 Soros, George 19 Spinoza, Baruch 187, 193 Stout, Jeffrey 203, 204 Street, Sharon 125 Strong poet 14, 174, 184, 185, 187, 197, 198, 199, 200 Swinburne, Algernon 184 Taylor, Charles 85, 100 The Hidden Life of Trees 86 The New Colossus 61 The Overstory 83 The Pale King 91 Thrownness 25, 26, 27 Tillich, Paul 25, 26 Tragedy 152, 181–184, 187, 188, 190

Index Transcendence xii, 10, 13, 27, 40, 82, 91, 143 Trotsky and the Wild Orchids 72 Trump, Donald 105 Trumpism 103, 105 UNESCO 42, 47 Virtue 198, 201, 202, 206, 210, 211, 213, 215, 216 Voparil, Christopher ix, 15, 79, 107, 155–157, 162, 169, 174, 179, 203, 206

223

Wallace, David Foster 90, 92, 93 Walzer, Michael 6 Warren, Mary Anne 123, 129, 134 Wells, H.G. 98 West, Cornel 20, 181 Whitman, Walt 56, 65, 82 Will to power 25, 39 Williams, Bernard 9, 33, 125 Williams, Michael 163, 164, 195 Wohlleben, Peter 85, 86, 87 Wolfe, Alan 94–96 Yale University 95