Richard Rorty
Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity

Introduction

Rorty follows up his previous work with a development of the consequences of his anti-foundationalist stance. At the end of the line we are finally left with some big questions in the ruins of foundationalism.

Outline of this Guide

1. Overview
2. Readings
3. Contingency in Language and Community
4. Final Vocabularies
5. Liberal Ironists
6. The Contingency of Cruelty and Liberality
7. Questions
8. Bibliography

Overview

• Richard Rorty: American Professor of Philosophy (University of Virginia).
• Continued the themes of his book Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature with elaborations of his views.

Readings

• Introduction and The contingency of language (pp.xiii-22)
• The contingency of a liberal community (pp.44-69)
• Private irony and liberal hope (pp.73-95)
• The last intellectual in Europe: Orwell on cruelty (pp.169-188)
• Solidarity (pp.189-198)

Contingency in Language and Community

• This book represents Rorty working through some of the difficult consequences of his earlier work. If there are no foundations for philosophy to base systematic theories on, then we are left with many challenges about how (or if) to answer traditional philosophical questions. We are left with the fact of contingency: our beliefs are not based on ultimate enduring Truth, but contingent circumstances.
• Rorty traces the ramifications his earlier work has on our concepts of language and community. He develops notions of "final vocabularies" and "liberal ironists" to address the challenges he faces.

Final Vocabularies

• Once we abandon foundationalist philosophy, we need some alternative new way to talk about whether or not statements are true and meaningful. Rorty puts forward the notion that there are no truths in nature, only sentences that are judged as true by particular people at particular times. Sentences are true if they correctly make use of the prescriptive vocabularies that people ultimately have internalized to describe and justify the way they look upon themselves, their world, and the community they consider themselves a part of. These are the "final vocabularies" which define a person's identity (terms like kindness, progressive, Christ, England, professional standards).
• By acknowledging this viewpoint, we take the last step of a long intellectual progression which began when we moved from vesting all validity and transcendence in divinities to the Enlightenment project of vesting validity in universal philosophical principles. We can seek to finally not vest ultimate validity and transcendence in anything beyond our final vocabularies of truth and transcendence. This enables us to evade, rather than argue with, foundationalist views.

Liberal Ironists

• Rorty works to hack out a conception of what a person who adopts his outlook is like. He defines an "ironist" as one who:
1. Possesses radical and continuous doubts about their final vocabulary
2. Realizes that arguments arising from their final vocabulary cannot alleviate these doubts
3. Does not think that their vocabulary is any more or less valid than that of others.
• Rorty contrasts ironists with people who believe in foundational principles as common sense, or "metaphysicians." He is not advocating the development of a "rhetoric of irony," simply the acceptance and realization that there is no useful alternative in foundational thought. Irony is a private, rather than public, philosophy for him.
• Rorty's goal in this book is to describes the outlook of what he terms a "liberal ironist." By "liberals" he means "people who think that cruelty is the worst thing we do." A liberal ironist pursues the goals of creating and maintaining a just society simply because the contingent history of their socialization has led them to, not because of grand foundational philosophy or religion or something similar. They are no more concerned to answer foundational philosophical questions like "Why not be cruel?" than a non-religious person in interesting in answering a question like "Are you saved?"
• Liberal ironists are interested in communication with others in order to compare notes about their final vocabularies, their doubts, and generally to be reassured by social and intellectual contact with others.
• They have a more generalized perception of their community than most people do now. They are more likely to see members of other nations and ethnic groups as part of their conception of "us". Rorty grants that realistically this conception will not extend to the idea of the entire human species, howver, because the notion of an "us" psychologically necessitates the contrasting notion of some "them."

The Contingency of Cruelty and Liberality

• The most difficult part of what Rorty is putting forward is the idea that there really is no unifying, fundamentally and ultimately instrinisic humanity to appeal to in situations of obscene cruelty, like the holocaust. Abandoning foundational thought necessitates this realization. The torturers are only contingently different from "us", not inherently inhuman. The goal of a liberal utopia that Rorty holds out before us is merely something that could contingently be realized, just as a 1984-style dystopia could be our future in some contingency. Abandoning our most deeply held notion of an intrinsic humanity or humane quality that makes us human is a difficult task, but is inevitable once foundational morality is left behind. Conceiving of a liberal utopia as coming about for "merely" contigent reasons is also a rather frightening idea, simply because it makes us realize that it really might not happen at all.
• The key kind of questions to be asked in a liberal utopia are not questions of ultimate morality and truth, but simple questions of sensitivity like "Are you in pain?" This tendency toward solidarity and moderate sensitivity to the needs of others is all that Rorty is hoping for.

Questions

• The contingency which Rorty's philosophy asks us to live with is indeed frightening, because it removes the psychological "safety net" which we carry around internally with us, the deeply held belief that there are some absolutes in life. Rorty recounts at length the reasons why Orwell's 1984 is so morally frightening. It is truly frightening to consider the idea that the kind of absolute moral truths that we hang on to (that torture is evil for example) are in fact contingent beliefs. Yet that seems to be one of the key realizations that Rorty asks of us.
• Rorty's philosophy seems to annihilate prescriptive morality except in the weak sense of the idea that he hopes we will just happen to have been socialized to be liberal and dislike cruelty because that seems in practice to be the best way to be. And even this statement is mostly just implied and not stated very forcefully. It would seem that his very committment to contingency would undercut Rorty's subsequent urgent calls for a more mobilized Left in his latest book (Achieving Our Country). Maybe it is cynical to ask the question, but without the emotional motivation of foundational contexts, how can people be effectively mobilized? Rorty can't throw out foundational precepts and then be shocked and appalled that the latest generation doesn't subscribe to what he thinks is obviously the preferable kind of morality to have. If he opens Pandora's box, he has to live with whatever comes out. He puts forward democratic consensus as the new touchstone by which we will make decisions, but how do you achieve consensus without grand narratives to appeal to?

Bibliography

Nielsen, Kai. After the Demise of the Tradition: Rorty, Critical Theory, and the 
   Fate of Philosophy.  Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1991.

Rorty, Richard.  Achieving Our Country : Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America.
   Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1998.