Irony’s Commitment: Rorty’s Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity

Abstract

With Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989) Richard Rorty tries to persuade us that a case for liberalism is better served by historical narrative than by philosophical theory. The liberal ironist is the complex protagonist of Rorty’s anti-foundationalist story. Why does Rorty think irony serves—rather than undermines—commitments to liberal democracy? I distinguish political from existential dimensions of irony, consider criticisms of Rorty’s ironist (by Michael Williams, J. B. Schneewind, Jonathan Lear), and then draw on recent work by Lear to argue that Rorty’s ironist character nevertheless can be recast as an image useful to the self-understanding of contemporary liberal democrats.

Notes

1. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); hereafter cited in the text, abbreviated as CIS.

2. Following Rorty, I take “liberalism” here in its American designation, as roughly synonymous with “social democratic.” Unlike libertarians, social democrats think governments should play an ongoing and active part in ensuring the well-being of all citizens both through public ownership of essential resources and basic infrastructure and through redistribution of economic resources among citizens.

3. Neil Gascoigne, in his excellent book Richard Rorty (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008), observes that, “the figure of the liberal ironist represents the promised new self-image of the intellectual... one that we readers, we intellectuals, are invited to adopt” (180). Gascoigne makes this point central to the resolution of his interpretation of the figure, and I follow him in this, even if to a different terminus.

4. Critics of the first kind rarely bother with Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Some may have felt obligated to react to Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, but once that job was done, and the world yet again made safe for metaphysics, Rorty—understandably—could be of no further interest. Critics of the second kind are well represented in Rorty and His Critics, ed. Robert B. Brandom (Cambridge: Blackwell, 2000); see, for instance, the contributions by John McDowell and Donald Davidson. For the third kind of critic, focusing, for example, on the substance of Rorty’s conception of politics, see Nancy Fraser, “Solidarity or Singularity? Richard Rorty between Romanticism and Technocracy,” in Reading Rorty, ed. Alan R. Malachowski (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990).

5. Here is Charles Guignon and David R. Hiley in their introduction to Richard Rorty, ed. Charles Guignon and David R. Hiley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003): “There is a deep tension between the existential and pragmatic strands in Rorty’s thought—between the private project of self-elaboration and the public project of reducing suffering and expanding solidarity” (29). Michael Williams, while on the whole very sympathetic to Rorty’s deconstruction of representationalist metaphysics, thinks of Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity as retrograde, as falling prey in its depiction of the liberal ironist to skeptical modes of thinking that Rorty’s own better insights militate against. See Michael Williams, “Rorty on Knowledge and Truth,” in Guignon and Hiley, Richard Rorty, 69ff. He, too, finds a tension in Rorty between the existentialist (the skeptic) and the pragmatist (the sensible fallibilist). Nancy Fraser takes Rorty to task for enforcing a division between the romantic and the pragmatic that dangerously depoliticizes what ought to be subject to political assessment and understanding.

6. For critical discussions of this essay by readers who are close allies of Rorty on a wide range of issues, see J. B. Schneewind, “Rorty on Utopia and Moral Philosophy,” in The Philosophy of Richard Rorty, The Library of Living Philosophers, vol. 32, ed. Randall E. Auxier and Lewis Edwin Hahn (Chicago, IL: Open Court, 2010), 479–505; and Williams, “Rorty on Knowledge and Truth.”

7. Richard Rorty, “Reply to Schneewind,” in Auxier and Hahn, The Philosophy of Richard Rorty, 506. Williams reports similar admissions from Rorty in conversation (personal communication).

8. For the considerations that move Rorty, see Schneewind, “Rorty on Utopia and Moral Philosophy,” esp. 491ff.

9. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope (Penguin, 1999); hereafter abbreviated as PSH and cited in the text.

10. This is an insight of Marxism, according to Rorty. Another is the unscrupulousness, resourcefulness and will mustered by the privileged in their/our efforts to hold onto what they/we have and to make it grow at the expense of everyone else.

11. In describing this tension Rorty comes close to allowing something he generally disparages, namely, making use of the idea of ideology. Something like that idea is present in his criticisms of identity politics, the fanciful flights into ever-fancier theory, the contortions we intellectuals go through in an effort to conceal from ourselves our loss of hope framed in terms of basic liberal political aspirations (see, in particular, “Globalization, the Politics of Identity and Social Hope,” in PSH, 229–39). Another possible use, perhaps not very far from Rorty’s own concerns, may be in a description of the ways—beyond physical force—in which the privileged 20% secure the acquiescence of the majority. What we then describe is how clusters of ideas, in their specific vocabularies, serve to obscure certain attitudes and interests that nevertheless operate decisively in shaping the economics of a society. And that is, plausibly, to make the notion of ideology (or something like it) after all “mean more than ‘bad idea’” (CIS, 84 n. 6).

12. Though even if that were true in some specific respects, the likelihood that effects of global environmental degradation will hit the weakest the hardest is high. This may well turn out to be a greater obstacle to practical liberal hope than the challenges that held Rorty’s attention in the 1980s and early 1990s, namely, the difficulty of generating economic development that could reliably benefit the poorest communities and their poorest members.

13. In a piece called, “Education as Socialization and as Individualization,” Rorty criticizes both “the left” and “the right” for building their conceptions of education around “the identification of truth and freedom with the essentially human” (PSH, 115). “There is no such thing as human nature,” says Rorty, “in the deep sense in which Plato and Strauss use this term” (PSH, 117–18).

14. I rely on the term negative naturalism to distinguish Rorty’s use of Darwinian considerations in his campaign against representationalism and essentialism from varieties of physicalism and biologism that underwrite programs of naturalization of problematic entities or domains. The latter give rise to tasks of constructive theory, vindication, reform or elimination of ranges of concepts. Rorty’s naturalism definitively does not.

15. The contingency of language, Rorty claims, “leads to a recognition of the contingency of conscience,” and these together to “a picture of moral and intellectual progress as a history of increasingly useful metaphors” (9). He never settles on any precise use of the notion of a vocabulary. He writes, “I have no criterion of individuation for distinct languages or vocabularies to offer, but I am not sure we need one. ... Roughly a break of this sort [indicating distinct vocabularies] occurs when we start using “translation” rather than “explanation” in talking about geographical and chronological distances” (7).

His predominant use of “vocabulary” denotes our language, as it is at some period in time, in its entirety. This is the use that fuels Rorty’s romantic, anti-rationalist reading of the history of culture, for instance when he writes that “there is no standpoint outside the particular historically conditioned and temporary vocabulary we are presently using from which to judge this vocabulary” (48). Of course we may also think—as Rorty also does—of vocabularies more narrowly, as a way to characterize particular linguistic practices we deploy in service of particular needs and interests among the various we may have. This use obviously allows an “outside” standpoint—in this sense we may well have vocabularies designed to evaluate other vocabularies. But not all of Rorty’s uses fall smoothly into the one category or the other. A salient example of this is the very notion of a final vocabulary. It cannot mean simply our language, in the sense of that term which Rorty invokes when, for instance, he cites Davidson’s claim that we cannot be thinkers without language (50). Nor, however, can it be assessed from the outside, as a tool, in the way that a particular theory, for instance, may be regarded and evaluated as an explanatory device.

16. Cf. Rorty’s remark: “The topic of ironist theory is metaphysical theory” (CIS, 96).

17. Gascoigne is helpful on this. See “The Last Ironist,” chap. 5, sec. 7, of Richard Rorty. Gascoigne, however, concludes that “irony is not so much the predicament of the intellectual as a certain sort of intellectual’s predicament, one derived from an ongoing concern with achieving an ‘outside view’. Perhaps when the urge for such a view is no longer felt we will have seen the passing of the last ironist” (182). In what follows I diverge from Gascoigne’s suggestion that irony is a symptom of a condition we may overcome. I will try to make a case for irony as a virtue of intellectuals, one that ought to be preserved in our intellectual practice as well as in our self-image.

18. Williams, “Rorty on Knowledge and Truth,” 78.

19. Williams, “Rorty on Knowledge and Truth,” 76.

20. Williams, “Rorty on Knowledge and Truth,” 79.

21. Schneewind, “Rorty on Utopia and Moral Philosophy,” 492.

22. Schneewind, “Rorty on Utopia and Moral Philosophy,” 593.

23. Schneewind, “Rorty on Utopia and Moral Philosophy,” 499.

24. Jonathan Lear, A Case for Irony (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 39; hereafter cited in the text.