Rorty’s Virtuous Ambivalence toward Art

Abstract

Richard Rorty sacrifices high art on the altar of freedom, tolerance, and equality, although novelists like Dickens awaken his hope for the greatest possible improvement in our cultural well-being. Essentialist artists and philosophers of misery strike him as loathing ordinary humans and their foibles. His populist aesthetics owes to his belief in pragmatism as redemptive “knowledge about how things really are.” Still, he rejects some progressive works as artistic failures while embracing other art forms that ignore culture altogether. Rorty’s advocacy of art for the common good situates him in an ethical aesthetic tradition imbued with many of the ironies presented by Plato, although in the final analysis his progressive neo-pragmatism safeguards all forms of art.

Notes

1. Richard Rorty, “Redemption from Egotism: James and Proust as Spiritual Exercises,” in The Rorty Reader, ed. Christopher J. Voparil and Richard J. Bernstein (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 402.

2. Richard Rorty, “Idealism and Textualism,” in Consequences of Pragmatism: Essays 1972–1980 (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 153.

3. Richard Rorty, “Philosophers, Novelists, and Intercultural Comparisons: Heidegger, Kundera, and Dickens,” in Culture and Modernity: East-West Philosophic Perspectives, ed. Eliot Deutsch (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1991), 14.

4. Rorty, “Philosophers, Novelists, and Intercultural Comparisons,” 5.

5. Rorty, “Philosophers, Novelists, and Intercultural Comparisons,” 15.

6. Rorty, “Philosophers, Novelists, and Intercultural Comparisons,” 3.

7. Rorty, “Redemption from Egotism,” 406.

8. Rorty, “Philosophers, Novelists, and Intercultural Comparisons: Heidegger, Kundera, and Dickens,” 5.

9. Rorty, “Philosophers, Novelists, and Intercultural Comparisons,” 5.

10. Rorty, “Redemption from Egotism,” 396, 397.

11. Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, in Walt Whitman: Complete Poetry and Selected Prose, ed. Justin Kaplan (New York: Library of America, 1982), 56.

12. Richard Rorty, “American National Pride: Whitman and Dewey,” in The Rorty Reader, 383.

13. John Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” in Keat’s Poetry and Prose: Authoritative Texts, Criticism, ed. Jeffrey N. Cox (New York: Norton, 2009), 462.

14. John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Minton, 1934), 34.

15. Richard Rorty, “Feminism and Pragmatism,” in The Rorty Reader, 346.

16. Richard Rorty, “Human Rights, Rationality, and Sentimentality,” in On Human Rights: The Oxford Amnesty Lectures, ed. Stephen Shute and Susan Hurley (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 248n.

17. Richard Rorty, “Philosophy as a Kind of Writing: An Essay on Derrida,” in Consequences of Pragmatism, 96.

18. Rorty, “Philosophy as a Kind of Writing,” 97.

19. Rorty, “Philosophy as a Kind of Writing,” 108.

20. Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 60.

21. Jacques Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy,” in Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 130.

22. Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Don McLeod (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 9.

23. Derrida, The Truth in Painting, 381.

24. Richard Rorty, “Response to Richard Shusterman,” in Richard Rorty: Critical Dialogues, ed. Matthew Festenstein and Simon Thompson (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001), 154.

25. Rorty, “Response to Richard Shusterman,” 148.

26. Rorty, “Response to Richard Shusterman,” 156.

27. Hilary Putnam, “Sense, Nonsense, and the Senses: An Inquiry into the Powers of the Human Mind,” Journal of Philosophy 91.9 (September 1994): 489.

28. Hilary Putnam, Enlightenment and Pragmatism (Amsterdam: Van Gorcum, 2001), 36.

29. Putnam, “Sense, Nonsense, and the Senses,” 516.

30. Rorty, “American National Pride: Whitman and Dewey,” 383.

31. Hilary Putnam, Jewish Philosophy as a Guide to Life: Rosensweig, Buber, Levinas, Wittgenstein (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2008), 6.

32. Dewey, Art as Experience, 135, 3.

33. Richard Rorty, “Trotsky and the Wild Orchids,” in The Rorty Reader, 507.

34. Richard Rorty, “Philosophy as a Transitional Genre,” in The Rorty Reader, 486.

35. Plato, The Symposium, trans. Christopher Gill (London: Penguin, 1999), 212a. Subsequent citations in the text refer to this edition.

36. Rorty, “Trotsky and the Wild Orchids,” 509.

37. Rorty, “Trotsky and the Wild Orchids,” 510.