Thread by @ZoharAtkins

The time has arrived for a @threadapalooza on Richard Rorty (1931-2007), pragmatist, ironist, liberal, and romantic; a self-cancelling philosopher who imported European postmodernism into the American mainstream, and believed fiction could do what metaphysics could not.

Rorty is one of those thinkers whom it is fruitful to think with even if you disagree. His position is beautifully clear & his synthesis of traditions wide ranging and admirable. If for no other reason we owe him a debt for making difficult 'continental' thinkers intelligible. 2

For me, the most compelling insight in Rorty is that the blessings and challenges of private life conflict with those of public life. We can't reneg on our responsibility either for being a self or for belonging to society, but each requires a different set of habits. 3

Private life is about cultivating the self or engaging in "self creation." Public life or political life is about minimizing cruelty or if you want to use the more colloquial but poorly understood term, "justice." (Rorty was skeptical that justice has a fixed or real meaning). 4

One meaning of "irony" for Rorty involves living with a dissonance between private and public discourses. To put this plainly: the kinds of things I read in self-help books can be true & false at the same time. 5

They can be true on the axis of becoming a self and false on the axis of social responsibility. The myths we need to believe in to become healthy selves don't scale. 6

Conversely, if we do everything through the lens of politics or publicity we're going to have impoverished private lives. 7

Much like people speak of "work-life balance" Rorty would favor something like politics-life balance. I don't have to be politically engaged when reading a novel or watching a film or going for a walk. I get time off. 8

The liberal Lockeian ideal of the right to property is extended to my time and not just my space or my body. "My clock, my choice." 9

Rorty's ideal of self-creation, which he draws on from Emerson and Nietzsche, and which he shares with German romantics and novelists of the Bildungsroman (the coming of age story), is evident in his own intellectual journey. 10

Besides Cornel West and Stanley Cavell on the philosophical side, I know of very few thinkers who combine such an array of sources and traditions. Rorty is a reader of Quine and Dewey, Wittgenstein and Heidegger, Darwin and Derrida, Woolf, Melville, and Nabokov. 11

Rorty's eclectic reading diet is itself a model for anyone who believes that to become a self is to cultivate one's influences, to be a curator. It's my life and I'll read whatever I want. I don't have to stick to an ideological or stylistic box. Imo we need more of this. 12

I have my qualms with the postmodern poetry ideal of "unoriginal poetry" championed by Kenneth Goldsmith and Marjorie Perloff, but here's what I agree with: the greatest act of originality is not in making but in gathering; creation lies in the combination of sources. 13

There is a method to Rorty's madness. And that method is a kind of deliberate non-method or anti-method. 14

For Rorty, the self, me, my language, my culture, my history, my life is contingent. That is, there is no pre-given design to it, not teleology to it, no necessity to it. The self is a project I must make and the way I make it is arbitrary; it is "up to me" 15

Except even putting it that way is too metaphysical since there is no actual self that chooses. Rorty rejects not just Plato's ideas and medieval scholastics' God, but also the post-Kantian self. 16

Rorty believes that we are caught up in language and that anything we say says more about us than anything out there, anything real. Ghosts might exist, but the only thing that matters in that statement is what the statement is 'doing' for me and the listener. 17

Same goes for Platonic forms; same goes for any philosophical worldview. It's all useful as a matter of self-building but things go haywire when we take philosophy too seriously and think we can actually know stuff. Epistemology is a kind of high brow version of snake oil. 18

I see this view as similar to Deleuze's argument in What is Philosophy? Philosophy is a language, a "vocabulary" that is useful, but it should be assessed on the basis of its use, not on the basis of its truth. 19

This begs the question of what the use is and who gets to decide. As mentioned above, we have different needs and modes of being and so philosophy that is useful in one context can be useless or even destructive in another. 20

I'm reminded of the Kafka image of a human being with two chains around his neck, one attached to heaven and one attached to earth. When he moves in either direction the other chain tugs him. There is a kind of humdrum tragedy to Rorty's view. 21

It also parallels Leo Strauss's argument that the philosophical project and the political one are not the same, and that the reduction of the one to the other threatens both. 22

But Strauss believed in great questions, in transcendent problems, and even if he was, like Rorty, skeptical that we could solve them (great thinkers come up with different answers and there is no consensus), he didn't think philosophy was just a game or a useful vocabulary. 23

I said Rorty was self-canceling. There are a few reasons for this. One is that his humility about what philosophy can do renders his own task paradoxical, he's the prophet railing against prophecy, the pragmatist who says nothing is ultimately true (even his own statement). 24

On one read of Rorty, he's kind of a downer, a more bourgeois version of Foucault, a naysayer in a beige suit with tenure at Princeton, a bad boy domesticated by a polite veneer. 25

But there's also a joviality to the Rorty-an project, a kind of sartori that comes from realizing we can't have truth and that the self is an illusion. The self-deconstruction is meant to free us not trap us in nihilism. The jury is out on how many feel liberated in this way. 26

I'll accept Rorty at his word that his project is a constructive and not simply negative one, that it's ultimately about rebuilding, not destroying. I'm concerned it's the rare soul that can do this. 27

If Rorty is representative of a certain kind of American political liberalism, and more precisely, a left-wing (anti-communist) reformist version of it, his writings are sermons for this Church. 28

Judging by what most people in the world and in the US want, this is kind of scary; because it suggests that liberalism is a largely uncomplying doctrine, basically reserved for bourgeois academics who have time and desire to read. 29

Edit: uncompelling* doctrine.

Rorty would be the first to admit the fragility of liberalism. He's on the opposite side of the aisle as @FukuyamaFrancis whose The End of History is best read in conjunction with Rorty's Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. 30

For Fukuyama, liberal democracy is the best, most rational form of government and one which cannot be improved upon. Authoritarianism and tyranny are not sustainable because they are irrational. Long-term, Protectionism cannot compete with free market economics. 31

For Rorty, though, there is no such thing as rationality. Reason is mostly a function of what people agree is reasonable, and it's often localized. 32

Rorty was an unabashed patriot, not because he was an American exceptionalist, but because he believed that one could not escape one's history and community and nation and that one's best chance for reform involves embracing one's conditions. 33

I am not closely familiar with Rorty's positions on various political matters of his day, but he's oddly nationalistic for a liberal. He's less cosmopolitan than the typical academic in part because he doesn't think there's anything humans share in common besides language. 34

Rorty is not an "America First" guy in the sense of being anti-immigration; he's anti-essentialist and thinks identity is what we make of it. Thus he writes an essay of America called "Achieving our Country." The meaning of America is tbd, not determined by the past. 35

But he is America First in the sense that he believes the way to help humanity is to focus on the discourse and society in which one finds oneself. 36

On the other hand, the romantic in him can give no reason for why I shouldn't join the peace core and live as a permanent ex pat in a third world country, or become a specialist in plumbing in Mozambique. 37

But as long as my language is English, I cannot leave my home in English, and my home in the culture that mediated my literacy. "Wherever you are, there you are." 38

Rorty gives secular expression to the importance of tradition, even as he is hardly a traditionalist and even an anti-traditionalist (the past has no authority qua past). 39

Another thing that makes Rorty at once representative of academia and old-school, a kind of relic of an academic culture long past, is his implicit argument for great books even as he rejects their reification. 40

Historicism is the belief that phenomena are not permanent, but change and develop over time, that the present is a function of what came before. It's a position that Rorty embraces and that leads him to argue for "contingency." 41

But there are various forms of historicism out there. The materialist view, offered by Marx co., is that history is the result of class conflict; ideology exists to serve the ruling class and is the 'superstructure' that sits atop the 'base' of economic conditions. 42

Yet Hegel and other "idealists" such as R.G. Collingwood, believe that ideas drive history; thus, the essence of history is intellectual history. If you want to know how things came to be, read the thinkers, don't read the population and demographic surveys. 43

Rorty was against unified theories, so he'd be against both Hegel and Marx, seeing them as metaphysical. 44

But, Rorty in my view, is still a bit of an idealist, a kind of snob (and I mean this positively), in that he privileges the discourses of great books above those of everyday life. 45

In contrast to Walter Benjamin, for whom the script on an awning held messianic potential, Rorty basically reserves his attention for the canon. 46

Is the canon great because it contains 'great books' or are the books great because they've been canonized? (Of course it can be both). But I suspect Rorty would have to say they are great owing to the fact that they are part of the culture. Our love for them is contingent. 47

Fine. Maybe he's right, but I doubt he feels that way when he's reading Don Quixote. Can you really spend your life reading books and living a university life and not feel a sense of deep meaning in it? 48

Rorty is self-canceling, then, not just because he proclaims with bombast that we ought not be bombastic, but because he embraces a love of learning as (a personal) ideal even though officially he says it's no better or more important than any other life. 49

If Rorty were serious, I'd find it pretty sad, but I don't believe him, which means I'm patronizing. It's hard to imagine a life of devotion that is actually premised on a sense of pure contingency. But that's just me. 50

In the American reception of Heidegger there's a debate as to whether Heidegger is a pragmatist and therefore a relativist or not. Allan Bloom says Heidegger is bad in part because he's a pragmatist. 51

For Bloom, Heidegger's pragmatism and relativism enables him to embrace Nazism, since he has no principles on which to opposite it; and through osmosis it makes him responsible for "the closing of the American mind." 52

For Rorty (and also for Cavell), Heidegger is not pragmatist enough! His Nazism is to be blamed on the fact that he is too somber and not ironic enough. If only he could see the absurdity and contingency of his project, he'd laugh at Hitler instead of seeing him as a savior. 53

In terms of culture war, Rorty and Straussians are sort of polar opposites. One thinks the cure is humor and sentimentality and the other thinks it is gravitas. One reason Rorty likes Derrida is for the humor and sense of play. 54

But the issue of humor vs. being a 'killjoy' is not strictly partisan. 55

The Frankfurt School theorists were mostly quite dour. Adorno and Strauss would both see Rortyan humor as a kind of decadence or bourgeois complacency. (Rorty for his part embraces the label bourgeois as a matter of fact. That is what he is, not that it's good or bad.) 56

But if the relation to humor is not a matter of right vs. left, it might be a matter of 'radical' vs. 'moderate.' I'm willing to be wrong on this but it seems difficult to be a revolutionary and a comedian. 57

To be sure comedians poke fun at society, and "tell the truth, but tell it slant." Yet the jester or fool is a hire of the king. There is a limit to the fun he can poke. Comedy is a release valve for discomfort but in releasing the discomfort, it saps the zeal for revolution. 58

Like prayer and ritual more generally, comedy is cathartic. Revolutionaries need to save cathartic energy for the revolution itself. But comedy in the service of revolution can't be funny, because the essence of comedy is surprise, unruliness. 59

Revolutions are based in first principles; they are tyrannical. And this is why free speech debates often center around the comedian. The comedian is the figure of freedom. The right to offend and the right to laugh are entwined. 60

So basically tell me what you think of humor and I'll tell you whether you're a liberal. 61

The classic argument for Cold War liberalism advocated by Arendt and Berlin and Trilling and Levinas is something like: certainty about truth leads to violence and we don't want war or oppression in the name of first principles. Better to just have "negative liberty." 62

Rorty goes further and is kind of Cold War liberalism 2.0 (remember he's a generation later and also not a European). There is no truth. If we accept this truth, that there is no truth, we'll get along. 63

Rorty's version is more fundamentalist in its rejection of fundamentalism; it's stridently secular. And it shows why a lot of people reject liberalism; they don't see liberalism as neutral, but a a replacement religion for other ones. 64

While liberalism 1.0 is happy to admit a theoretical distinction between church and state, Rorty-an liberalism thinks liberal democracy only works well if everyone converts to pragmatism. 65

That seems both naive and contradictory, but abstractly it makes sense. We can only cooperate when we have some baseline homogeneity. What makes Rorty interesting is his desire to make the character of liberal homogeneity a commitment to the truth value of pragmatism. Hmm. 66

I'm a big fan of Rav Soloveitchick, a giant in the realm of both Torah and philosophy. One thing I love about him is his transparency that we can't reconcile all of our ideals. Life is about tension. He shares this existentialism with other thinkers like Unamuno. 67

Unamuno wrote "The Tragic Sense of Life." The Rav, Unamuno, and also a Heideggerian commentator named Reiner Schürmann, and of course, Kierkegaard, really get that the meaning of life is constituted by the choice of incommensurate goods. 68

One thing I get from Rorty is a realization that the mythos underlying political liberalism is deeply unsatisfying as a matter of personal life. 69

I think therefore that is more honest for people in a liberal society to recognize that political liberalism answers some things and not others. Being religious or even just metaphysically inclined in a tolerant society involves cognitive tension. 70

Even Rorty felt this tension, with the pursuit of humanistic enquiry playing the role that church plays for others in a Protestant society. Rorty's conception of the good life is basically just Protestantism with great books replacing Scripture. 71

So Rorty thinks it's important to care about others, but doesn't seek to ground this concern in a system of thought. Human rights are a construct, not a real thing. The Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights are, to use Wittgenstein's phrase, but a "language game." 72

You can see how this sort of skepticism easily aligns with an authoritarian and/or Machiavellian position. In another context, Rorty's arguments might just as well be made by Orban, Assad, or Putin. 73

Not that criticizing human rights is a strictly right-ist position. @samuelmoyn 's "Not Enough" argues from the left that human rights are cover for an indifference to issues of (economic) inequality. 74

Rorty's view is that if we want a world in which people suffer less we need to invest in creating conditions for empathy and solidarity. We need to invest in cultivating feelings that extend our sense of moral concern. For him it is literature that fulfills this function. 75

Tell that to folks who witnessed genocides in Rwanda and Darfur, in Bosnia; tell that to the Uyghurs. Do they have time to wait for college educated Americans to read more Madame Bovary?? 76

But in fairness to Rorty, he might say that if you want prevent or minimize more genocide in the future you have to invest now in "sentimental education." I'm highly skeptical of his claim. I see it as being without evidence. 77

Love of art and love of people need not correlate and even if they do correlation does not imply causation. 78

Rorty has penned many quotable lines like this one: “There is nothing deep down inside us except what we have put there ourselves.” But if we really believe this, on what basis should we care about our fellow humans? I mostly see Rorty as a reductio against himself. 79

The historicist, Darwinian poet of view he embraces is only linked by contingency (and he would admit this) to a philanthropic and humanistic position. But it seems more likely that one reads Rorty and becomes callous to the suffering of others. 80

Rorty himself does not feel this way, obviously; he is a moralist who thinks there is no firm basis on which to be moralistic, and this makes him interesting, even heroic; like someone on a small raft on the open sea. 81

Arendt famously said in an interview that the only thing that remains after the Holocaust is the [German] language. "Die Sprache bleibt." That is, the thought of Germany is called into question by the fate of Germany. 82

But the German language itself remains for it is still the language in which one must take up the question. 83

The poet who epitomizes this attitude is Paul Celan, who wrote in German even as it was the language of those who murdered his family members. 84

Rorty like Arendt and Celan would concur that after all the catastrophes of the 20th century, all that remains is language. What we need is not more rationality, not more grand theories, but more humility. 85

Basically there are two reactions to Nazism and Communism amongst U.S. liberals: one is to say these failed and so now should be postmodern; the other is to say these failed and now we need to find a new way of defending reason. 86

Adorno, Arendt, and Gillian Rose are exemplars of the second view. Rorty, Berlin, Levinas, and Rabbi Yitz Greenberg are, roughly defenders of the first view. 87

One of the big cultural debates in the US concerns the story of the American founding--is the country about liberty and the pursuit of happiness? Is it about slavery and racism? Is it about Christianity? 88

As an anti-essentialist, Rorty would say all the stories are right and wrong; the only thing that matters is whether they are useful in getting us to the future we want. This revisionist view is shared by Nietzsche. 89

It's sort of dangerous position as it can lead to all kinds of denialism. To say history is just a story makes it difficult to adjudicate past crimes. How does the pragmatist argue against holocaust denial accept on pragmatic grounds? 90

in any case, Rorty's pragmatism makes him an optimist as he sees a country's narrative as open to revision. Meaning is what we make of it. 91

Here's a quote from Achieving our Country that is fitting for this Elul season, the time of (Jewish) repentance:

“But now suppose that one has in fact done one of the things one could not have imagined doing, and finds that one is still alive...

92

At that point, one's choices are suicide, a life of bottomless self-disgust, and an attempt to live so as never to do such a thing again. Dewey recommends the third choice.” 93

Rorty makes the argument that the past is not our fate. His anti-foundationalism proves to be useful in getting us to embrace our sense of freedom and agency. 94

This is the strange thing: he deconstructs the self, says there is nothing but language and yet wants us to feel free, believes the project of selfhood is one of discovering freedom by embracing contingency. 95

To quote Mallarme: "A Throw of the Dice will Never Abolish Chance" 96

To read Rorty is either to embrace the Church of his American Liberalism or to discover that one is a metaphysician and that one cannot follow him all the way in making a god of irony, a temple of contingency, a sacrifice of solidarity. 97

But to the extent that one affirms the benefits of liberalism while disliking the Rortyan anti-metaphysics that accompany it, one must stake out another position. 98

Paradoxically, the rejection of Rorty is itself Rortyan, as he doesn't think he has the final answer or vocabulary and would be the last to think we should become Rortyans. Rather, the romantic, existentialist quest requires that we find our own language and resources. 99

Philosophy can help us be selves, should help us be selves, but it can't account for everything in a grand, unified way. What we do about this is up to us. 100/100