Rorty and Kierkegaard on Irony and Moral Commitment

Rorty and Kierkegaard on Irony and Moral Commitment

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Rorty and Kierkegaard on

Irony and Moral Commitment

Philosophical and Theological Connections

by

Brad Frazier

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RORTY AND KIERKEGAARD ON IRONY AND MORAL COMMITMENT

Brad Frazier, 2006.

Material from Chapter 2,The Ethics of Rortian Redescription, is reprinted bypermission of Sage Publications Ltd from Brad Frazier, The Ethics of RortianRedescription, Philosophy and Social Criticism, vol. 32 no. 4 (2006) (SAGEPublications. London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi, 2006).

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

First published in 2006 byPALGRAVE MACMILLAN175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XSCompanies and representatives throughout the world.

PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the PalgraveMacmillan division of St. Martins Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd.Macmillan is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries.

ISBN-13: 9781403975980ISBN-10: 1403975981

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Frazier, Brad.Rorty and Kierkegaard on irony and moral commitment : philosophical

and theological connections / Brad Frazier.p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN 1403975981 (alk. paper)1. Rorty, Richard. 2. Kierkegaard, Sren, 1813-1855. 3. Ethics, Modern.

4. Irony. I. Title.

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Remain faithful to the earthFriedrich Nietzsche,

Thus Spoke Zarathustra

To Dianne, Timothy, Jonathan, and AnnaFor helping me to be faithful to the earth

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Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction 1

1 Richard Rortys Liberal Irony 7

2 The Ethics of Rortian Redescription 37

3 Autonomy and Moral Commitment in Liberal Irony: Problems and Proposals 69

4 Kierkegaard on the Problems of Pure Irony 105

5 Kierkegaard on Mastered Irony 133

6 Climacus on Irony and Moral Commitment 149

7 Irony and Moral Commitment: Concluding Reflections 193

Notes 207

Bibliography 231

Index 245

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Acknowledgments

This project began as a doctoral thesis in philosophy at Saint LouisUniversity. My supervisor was Greg Beabout. He was assisted byEleonore Stump and Richard Dees. I would like to thank Greg,Eleonore, and Richard for their time and energy, their encouragementand support, and their thoughtful and challenging comments andquestions on previous drafts of this project. I am deeply grateful toGreg, in particular, for being an exemplary mentor and friend. I alsowould like to thank Sumner Twiss, Jenny Overton, and JosephKoterski, S.J., as well as the participants in various conferences atwhich I have given papers in recent years, for their comments and sug-gestions on various aspects of this project. Additionally, I am indebtedto Emily Leithauser and Amanda Johnson at Palgrave for supportingthis project and providing very helpful advice and assistance to me asI completed it. I am grateful as well to Josh Clark, who providedinvaluable assistance with the index, and to the administration at LeeUniversity, specifically, Paul Conn and Carolyn Dirksen, for researchfunding and other institutional support that greatly expedited thecompletion of this project.

A version of Chapter 2 recently appeared in Philosophy and SocialCriticism, vol. 32 no. 4 (2006). A version of Chapter 4 was publishedin Journal of Religious Ethics, vol. 32 no. 3 (Winter 2004): 417447.A version of Chapter 5 was published in International PhilosophicalQuarterly, vol. 44 no. 4 (December 2004): 465479. I am gratefulto these journals and to Sage Publications, Blackwell Publishing, andthe Philosophy Documentation Center, respectively, for kind permis-sion to use the material in these articles again here.

Finally, I would like to thank my familyDianne, Timothy,Jonathan, and Annawho have sustained and supported methroughout my work on this project and who fill my life with mean-ing and keep me grounded. I am grateful as well to my parents, Rudelland Betty Frazier, for their abiding love and support. I also have relieddeeply on and drew inspiration from certain friends and colleaguesduring the time in which I was engaged with this project, including

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Clay Dishon, Craig Howell, Emerson Powery, Todd Hibbard, DaleCoulter, Barb Searcy, and Michael Fuller, in addition to others. Toall of these persons, I owe a profound debt of gratitude for theirfriendship and support. I have enjoyed, in particular, the manyrefreshing and invigorating trips that I have taken with my friends andcolleagues to the sea of irony.

BRAD FRAZIER

x ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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Introduction

We commonly seek in our lives together a mean between unreflectivedevotion and hypercritical disengagement. But this mean is elusive.For once we become critically reflective, it is not easy for us to pindown and observe appropriate limits to this activity. When we come tobelieve that we have overstepped these limits, moreover, we some-times overreact by lapsing back into uncritical devotion.

One way to describe the critically engaged stance that we desire isto say that a person who takes it successfully combines irony andmoral commitment in her life. Yet some philosophers and social com-mentators allege that irony is incompatible with earnestness.Commenting on the pervasiveness of irony in contemporary Americanculture and its acidic effects, Jedediah Purdy notes:

Irony has become our marker of worldliness and maturity. The ironicindividual practices a style of speech and behavior that avoids all appear-ance of naivetof nave devotion, belief, or hope. He subtly proteststhe inadequacy of the things he says, the gestures he makes, the acts heperforms. By the inflection of his voice, the expression of his face, andthe motion of his body, he signals that he is aware of all the ways inwhich he may be thought silly or jejune, and that he might even thinkso himself. His wariness becomes a mistrust of language itself. He dis-owns his own words.1

Today the attitude that we all encounter and must come to termswith is the ironists. . . . Autonomous by virtue of his detachment, dis-loyal in a manner too vague to be mistaken for treachery, he is match-less in discerning the surfaces whose creature he is. The point of ironyis a quiet refusal to believe in the depth of relationships, the sincerity ofmotivation, or the truth of speechespecially earnest speech.2

Purdy believes, then, that irony undercuts authenticity and commit-ment. It is a short step from this observation to the conclusion that itis unsuitable for those who are committed to fragile, moral goods.

Purdy has a philosophical counterpart in Alasdair MacIntyre.MacIntyre rejects irony on the grounds that it is an impediment tomoral commitment. Some ironists defend themselves by pointing out

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our need for some critical distance from our commitments. MacIntyreretorts:

If and insofar as it is necessary, in order to take up an adequately criticalattitude, to disengage ourselves from our relationships and commit-ments and to view them with a cold and sceptical eye, then at that pointwe will have distanced ourselves from our commitments in a way thatmay always endanger those commitments. It follows that, even if thereis a time for criticism, there are also times when criticism has to be putaside and to negotiate the relationship between these successfully itselfrequires the exercise of the virtues and a further recognition of ourneed for the virtues. But neither time is a time for irony.3

So irony, as MacIntyre understands it, is associated with a kind of crit-ical disengagement that is inimical to commitments and relationshipsthat hold together human communities. In that case, we should notcharacterize the mean that we seek between overcritical detachmentand nave loyalty as a complex stance that combines irony and moralcommitment. For, on this view, irony and moral commitment areirreconcilable.

MacIntyre specifically has in view Richard Rortys account ofirony.4 Rorty sketches his position, which he refers to as liberalirony, in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, an eloquent andprovocative work that continues to receive widespread attention.5

MacIntyre is not alone in his negative assessment of Rortys position.Thomas McCarthy, Jean Bethke Elshtain, James Conant, and SimonCritchley, in addition to others, take it to be plagued by a kind ofbreezy, moral laxity. Richard Bernstein goes so far as to suggest thatRortys nod to the power of redescription closely parallels the per-spective of the corrupt politicians involved in the Watergate scandal.6

Elshtain alleges that to embrace certain implications of Rortys posi-tion is to make oneself morally loathsome.7 Suffice it to say thatRortys position has generated considerable moral indignation amongnot a few of his peers.

I find this response to Rorty problematic. If we carefully andpatiently analyze his position, it turns out not to be nearly as morallyobjectionable as most of his critics suggest. Furthermore, there arefeatures of Rortys position that are very insightful and suggestive,such as his account of redescription and its relation to self-creation, forinstance. These often are lost sight of in the wake of the moralexasperation vented by Rortys harshest critics. Some philosophers, suchas MacIntyre, go so far as to reject irony altogether, moreover, on the

2 IRONY AND MORAL COMMITMENT

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basis of their critique of Rortys account of irony. Apparently theyconflate Rortian irony and irony simpliciter. But this move is a mistakeno matter what one thinks of Rortys position. For other accounts ofirony and moral commitment are worthy of consideration.

I hope to show that Sren Kierkegaard offers us one such account.Kierkegaard extensively examines irony in his first major work,The Concept of Irony with Continual Reference to Socrates, and thenreturns to it explicitly in his most important pseudonymous work,Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments.8 Akey concept in Kierkegaards account is mastered irony. This sort ofirony is irony that is employed within the boundaries of moral com-mitment in order to promote ethical life. According to Kierkegaard, itbrings refreshment, critical insight, consistency, and vigor to ethicalexistence.

Purdy himself takes a position analogous to Kierkegaards andmore thoughtful than MacIntyres when he states:

However, there is another kind of irony, which discovers a different sortof unexpected significance. It uncovers, in what is ordinarily imaginedto be unimportant or banal, something that elicits surprise, delight, andreverence. What it uncovers is richer than what the rebellion againstreality produces; above all it is real. This irony is ecstatic, in the etymo-logically strict sense of drawing us out of our stasis. It is the irony of dis-covery. It moves us.9

Purdys critique of a morally enervating sort of irony also closely par-allels Kierkegaards position. For before Kierkegaard posits masteredirony as an essential element in an ethical way of life, he sharply cri-tiques unbridled, withering irony, which he characterizes as infiniteabsolute negativity. Kierkegaard takes this sort of irony to be self-destructive and deeply harmful to human community.

Whether or not Rortys position is morally lax, it is very difficult tolevel this charge at Kierkegaards account of irony and moral commit-ment. Since critics of Rorty have seized on the moral implications ofhis account as their main reason for rejecting it, they at least shouldconsider Kierkegaards position, not to mention other interestingaccounts of irony, before they dispatch with irony altogether.

My suggestion that Kierkegaards position is worthy of careful con-sideration is not based on a lack of appreciation for Rortys position. Onthe contrary, I take Rortys liberal irony to be much more resourceful,insightful, and suggestive than Rortys critics tend to recognize. Still, Ifind Kierkegaards account to be more incisive and comprehensive and

INTRODUCTION 3

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less objectionable than Rortys position. Kierkegaard gets to the core ofirony and reveals its vital developmental and ethical functions. There isno reason, however, why we cannot capture and appropriate the bestinsights of Kierkegaard and Rorty. That is what I attempt to do in myreflections.

The structure of my project is as follows. In chapter one, I explicateRortys account of liberal irony as he first sketches it in Contingency. Ialso attempt to remove surface-level obstacles in Rortys preliminaryaccount so that it may receive a full and fair treatment. In chapter two,I carefully consider Rortys account of redescription. Not a little of themoral outrage directed at Rorty derives from this specific feature of it.I argue that most of this criticism turns on a misconstrual of a keyclaim that Rorty advances in regard to the power of redescription.Nevertheless, some problems remain for Rorty because he does nottake full account of the implications of his endorsement of truthful-ness. In chapter three, I offer an explication and analysis of Rortysaccount of self-creation. I find this Nietzschean element in Rortysposition very suggestive but also problematic and in need of qualifica-tion. I argue that Rorty recognizes this problem and suggests importantmodifications of Nietzsches view of self-creation, as he understandsand commends it.

In chapter four, I explain, clarify, and offer several assessments ofKierkegaards critique of pure irony as he advances it in The Conceptof Irony. This chapter lays the groundwork for the claim thatKierkegaard is well aware of the volatility and potentially destructivenature of uncontrolled irony. Indeed, his critical analysis is as extensiveand incisive as any contemporary analysis of which I am aware. Inchapter five, I turn to Kierkegaards account of mastered irony. In orderto clarify and commend Kierkegaards position, I attempt to elucidatea very suggestive analogy that he proposes between artists who gain-fully employ mastered irony in their work and individuals who utilizethis kind of irony to great effect in their ethical strivings. I also unpackfour illuminating metaphors that Kierkegaard uses to convey the ben-efits of mastered irony. In chapter six, I examine the discussion ofirony and moral commitment that Kierkegaard offers in Postscriptunder the guise of Johannes Climacus. Although I argue that some ofClimacuss views represent a regression in Kierkegaards thought, Ialso find that Climacuss position helpfully clarifies and extends cer-tain features of the account of irony and moral commitment thatKierkegaard first presents in his thesis. In chapter seven, I conclude byoffering some comparisons between Rortys and Kierkegaardspositions. I focus especially on the different ways in which Rorty and


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Kierkegaard construe irony and the stance of a person who mastersirony, that is, an ethical ironist. Although a Rortian ironists recogni-tion of contingency is an important insight, I argue that Rortian ironyis parochialized to some extent on account of Rortys preoccupationwith debunking metaphysics and epistemology. Still, his treatment ofirony is much preferable to MacIntyres hasty dismissal of it. Givencertain crucial qualifications, however, I find that Kierkegaardsposition is more tenable as it is more probing, disclosive, and haswider appeal. I conclude by suggesting that we look to Kierkegaardand Rorty for insight about how to understand and overcome theseemingly irreconcilable dualism of irony and moral commitment.

INTRODUCTION 5

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C H A P T E R 1

Richard Rortys Liberal Irony

Richard Rortys account of liberal irony is one of the most prominentbut also most controversial treatments of irony in contemporary phi-losophy. I am concerned in this chapter with explicating and clarifyingRortys position as he first presents it in Contingency. After providing apreliminary introduction to Rortys position, I proceed in four steps.First, I elucidate Rortys understanding of contingency and its relationto irony. Second, I discuss the close relation in Rortys thought betweenirony and self-creation. This aspect of Rortys position cannot be ade-quately clarified apart from a discussion of Rortys interesting andprovocative concept of redescription. So after I discuss in a preliminaryway the relation between irony and self-creation in Rortys account, Iturn then to an explication of redescription, as Rorty understands it,and its relation to irony and self-creation. Once these components ofRortys account are in place, I discuss the other-regarding side of hisposition, that is, his commitment to and understanding of liberalism. Iconclude by briefly reviewing key points in Rortys account and by not-ing problems that I will address in subsequent chapters.

1.1 Rortian Irony: A Preliminary SketchRorty construes irony as a stance adopted toward final vocabularies.In regard to these, Rorty states:

All human beings carry about a set of words which they employ to jus-tify their actions, their beliefs, and their lives. These are the words inwhich we formulate praise of our friends and contempt for our enemies,our long-term projects, our deepest self-doubts and our highest hopes.They are the words in which we tell, sometimes prospectively andsometimes retrospectively, the story of our lives.1

So, for Rorty, the words that a person employs to form a conceptionof herself, others, and the world constitute her final vocabulary. Themost fundamental questions she asks about her life and the lives of

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others will be expressed in the terms of this vocabulary and so also theanswers that she comes to accept. Furthermore, as the concept isemployed by Rorty, a vocabulary is final if, in addition to its havingthe characteristics described above, the one who employs it wouldhave no noncircular argumentative recourse if she were pressed fora justification for her vocabulary.2 So a vocabulary is final in Rortyssense if (a) it contains the words one utilizes to understand, evaluate,and explain ones own actions, beliefs, and way of life, and the actions,beliefs, and lives of others, and (b) there is nothingno vocabulary orset of words or conceptsmore ultimate to which one can appeal in anoncircular manner in order to underwrite or justify the vocabulary.

Rorty also distinguishes between thick and thin terms in afinal vocabulary. He notes:

A small part of a final vocabulary is made up of thin, flexible, and ubiq-uitous terms such as true, good, right, and beautiful. Thelarger part contains thicker, more rigid, and more parochial terms, forexample, Christ, England, professional standards, decency,kindness, the Revolution, the Church, progressive, rigorous,creative. The more parochial terms do most of the work.3

Thick terms in a persons final vocabulary thus are fairly precise andless portable from local practices and cultures to others than are thinterms. Also, thick terms do more work in our final vocabularies in thatwe employ them more frequently in the tasks described above. So, forinstance, when a person defines herself, she utilizes thick terms in herfinal vocabulary more than thin ones.

If Rortian irony then is a kind of stance one takes toward finalvocabularies, as briefly described above, what sort of stance is it?According to Rorty, an ironist fulfills three conditions:

(1) She has radical and continuing doubts about the final vocabularyshe currently uses, because she has been impressed by other vocabular-ies, vocabularies taken as final by people or books she has encountered;(2) she realizes that argument phrased in her present vocabulary canneither underwrite nor dissolve these doubts; (3) insofar as she philos-ophizes about her situation, she does not think that her vocabulary iscloser to reality than others, that it is in touch with a power not herself.4

Among the characteristics that a Rortian ironist is said to have here, herradical and continuing doubts about her final vocabulary stand out asmost conspicuous. For a person could believe that she is in touch witha power not herself, whether it is God, reality, goodness, or something


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like this, without thinking that her language is adequate for describingthis power or is itself in touch with this power. Such a person could alsobelieve that she is unable through recourse to arguments phrased in herpresent vocabulary to assuage the doubts of others and perhaps evenher own doubts regarding the existence and nature of this power. Shemight even be impressed with the views of others who doubt the exis-tence of this power with which she takes herself to be in touch. Yet forall this she might not have radical and continuing doubts about her finalvocabulary. So although a full-fledged Rortian ironist fulfills all threeconditions listed above, even at this preliminary point we can locate aweaker sense of being such an ironist. A person who meets all the con-ditions listed except that she fails to have radical and continuing doubtsabout her final vocabulary merely exhibits what Gary Gutting refers toas epistemic ironism. She has simply an antifoundationalist, or more gen-erally, an antiepistemological attitude.5 An ironist who also has radicaland continuing doubts about her final vocabulary has additionalconcerns that a mere epistemic ironist might not share.

Rortian ironists also hold to a fairly strong thesis about the powerof redescription. They believe, as Rorty puts it, that anything can bemade to look good or bad by being redescribed.6 Of course, no onedesires that her most basic values and the things that give her lifemeaning be redescribed in such a way that they appear bad, evil, orrepulsive. Rorty notes, however, that his ironists do not deplore orregret the fact that redescription has this power. Rather, they respondto their recognition of the power of redescription with a sense of lib-eration on account of their believing that redescription can beemployed in the production of novel and interesting forms of self-creation. For Rortys ironists, redescription is a powerful tool forgetting out from under stultifying final vocabularies.

Rortian ironists also are nominalists and historicists.7 What thesecommitments amount to, for Rortian ironists, is captured by MicheleM. Moody-Adams, who notes:

The historicism involves, among other things, accepting the contingentorigins of even ones most important beliefs, plans, and preferences,while the nominalism requires jettisoning the notion that in order to befully human a person must conform to some antecedently given patternof plans, preferences, and beliefs.8

A Rortian ironists historicism leads her to think that it is futile forhuman beings to attempt to climb outside of their own practices andhistorical context in order to see the world sub specie aeternitatis. Her

RICHARD RORTYS LIBERAL IRONY 9

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nominalism refers to her antiessentialism. Rorty explains this featureof his sort of ironist this way: She thinks that the occurrence of a termlike just or scientific or rational in the final vocabulary of the dayis no reason to think that Socratic inquiry into the essence of justice orrationality will take one much beyond the language games of onestime.9 This belief, in turn, leads Rortian ironists to dismiss attemptsto formulate criteria of choice between final vocabularies.10

Finally, Rortian ironists are characterized by a kind of light-mindedness. They are never quite able to take themselves completelyseriously, Rorty suggests, because they are struck by the fact that theterms in which they describe, understand, and evaluate their own livesand the lives of others are mutable, contingent, and fragile.11

1.2 Irony and ContingencyAs Rorty construes irony, it has a very close relation to recognizingand coming to terms with contingency. In the introduction toContingency, Rorty states that an ironist is the sort of person whofaces up to the contingency of his or her own most central beliefs anddesires.12 When Rorty introduces the ironist in the middle section ofContingency, moreover, he notes that she will take naturally to theline of thought concerning the contingency of language and thehuman self that he has developed in the first part of Contingency. Sowe can clarify Rortian irony by clarifying what is involved, for Rorty,in facing up to contingency.

Before we can understand more clearly what facing up to contin-gency involves, however, we need an account of Rortys conception ofcontingency. What exactly does Rorty mean when he claims that iro-nists face up to the contingency of their most central beliefs anddesires? On a common meaning of contingency, according to whichsomething is contingent if it can be or fail to be, Rortys claim merelymeans that ironists face up to the fact that their most central beliefsand desires might have been very different and could be revised sub-stantially in the future. Indeed, since ironists might not have existed,they might not have had beliefs and desires.

There is something right about this way of interpreting Rortysclaim.13 Rorty certainly agrees that human beliefs and desires arecontingent in this respect. Consider, for instance, how many of ourcurrent beliefs and desires might have been very different. We mighthave had very different experiences; we might have lived in a differ-ent culture, at another time, inhabiting a different language, withdifferent parents, children, and friends, and in a society influenced by


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different religions. Perhaps these observations are enough to give uspause about the extent to which our current final vocabularies, andthus our self-conceptions, might have been different and are out of ourown control in certain respects. Rorty intends to claim much morethan this, however, when he claims that his ironists face up to thecontingency of their deepest beliefs and desires, for it is difficult to seewhy any thoughtful person would not face up to the contingency, inthis sense, of even her most central beliefs and desires. So we have notyet uncovered an important distinction between being merely areflective person and a Rortian ironist. But surely there is one.

We begin to uncover a controversial thesis about contingency towhich Rortian ironists are committed when we consider what isinvolved, for Rorty, in not facing up to contingency. If we fail to cometo terms with the contingency of even our most central beliefs anddesires, what have we done, in Rortys view? We get a preliminaryanswer from Rorty to this question in the context of his discussion ofthe strong poet or maker, a figure who is contrasted with personswho fail to come to terms fully with contingency. Rorty states:

Only poets, Nietzsche suspected, can truly appreciate contingency. Therest of us are doomed to remain philosophers, to insist that there isreally only one true lading-list, one true description of the human situ-ation, one universal context of our lives. We are doomed to spend ourconscious lives trying to escape from contingency rather than, like thestrong poet, acknowledging and appropriating contingency.14

We can gather from these claims that, for Rorty, contingency is to becontrasted not only with necessity but also with universality. Forinstance, when Rorty claims that human nature is contingent, he doesnot mean merely that human beings might have failed to exist andhave a rather fragile existence while they exist. He also intends toclaim that there is no universal human nature, no single true descrip-tion of the human situation.15 So facing up to the contingency ofones beliefs and desires involves accepting that ones beliefs anddesires are features of ones own local historical epoch and that thereare no beliefs and desires that all human beings share qua human.16

This interpretation is borne out by other remarks Rorty advances inthe same context about the strong maker. Rorty explains:

The strong maker, the person who uses words as they have never beforebeen used, is best able to appreciate her own contingency. For she can see,more clearly than the continuity-seeking historian, critic, or philosopher,that her language is as contingent as her parents or her historical epoch.17


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The continuity-seeking historian, critic, or philosopher to whomRorty refers, is a person who seeks for universal features in humanhistory, language, or the human condition. Rorty contrasts this sortof person with persons (strong makers) who see more clearly andappreciate their own contingency. The contingency of language, towhich Rorty refers, concerns not just the contingency of the actualwords of a language, but the concepts (Rorty calls thesemetaphors) one uses to understand and evaluate oneself, others,and the world. So Rorty intends to convey that the strong makerappreciates the contingency of final vocabularies as well as thecontingency of the words and phonemes of human languages. Sinceself and world conceptions are learned and expressed in the termsof final vocabularies, Rorty also intends that these things arecontingent, that is, not necessary and not universal. We are invitedto believe that local historical and cultural factors that could havebeen otherwise cause us to have the final vocabularies that weinherit.

Rorty contrasts ironists and metaphysicians in a way that closelyparallels his distinction between strong makers and continuity-seekingthinkers. This contrast also helps him to elaborate the claim that rec-ognizing contingency involves recognizing the local, nonuniversalquality of our most cherished beliefs and deeply seated desires. AsRorty explains:

The metaphysician is someone who takes the question What is theintrinsic nature of (e.g., justice, science, knowledge, Being, faith,morality, philosophy)? at face value. He assumes that the presence of aterm in his own final vocabulary ensures that it refers to somethingwhich has a real essence. The metaphysician is still attached to commonsense, in that he does not question the platitudes which encapsulate theuse of a given final vocabulary, and in particular the platitude which saysthere is a single permanent reality to be found behind the many tem-porary appearances. He does not redescribe but, rather, analyzes olddescriptions with the help of other old descriptions.18

The metaphysicians basic blunder, according to Rorty, is that hethinks that terms in his final vocabulary track with real essences thattranscend his local time and place. Rorty suggests that this problemderives from the metaphysicians failing to come to terms with thesheer contingency of his final vocabulary, especially the metaphorswithin it that suggest to him that he has grasped certain universalfeatures of human existence.


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Rorty also claims that metaphysicians continue to be attached tocommon sense. This feature of a metaphysician contrasts sharply withan ironists attitude toward common sense. As Rorty explains:

The opposite of irony is common sense. For that is the watchword ofthose who unselfconsciously describe everything important in terms ofthe final vocabulary to which they and those around them are habitu-ated. To be commonsensical is to take for granted that statements for-mulated in that final vocabulary suffice to describe and judge thebeliefs, actions and lives of those who employ alternative vocabularies.19

So just as Rortys ironist will take naturally to his defense of contin-gency, the metaphysician will recoil from it, since he interprets Rortysline of reasoning about contingency as an attack on common sense.This contrast between the metaphysician and the ironist helps usbegin to clarify the connection between contingency and irony inRortys account.

A Rortian ironist displays a certain kind of light-minded attitudetoward final vocabularies, especially her own, which owes to her nom-inalism and historicism and her appreciation of the power ofredescription. Furthermore, she displays a facing-up-to-contingencyattitude that contrasts sharply with the attitude of metaphysicians,who, as Rorty construes them, are anything but light-minded aboutfinal vocabularies, especially their own. Metaphysicians continue totalk about and argue for universal features of human existence.20

Rorty suggests that they must overcome this tendency in order tocome to terms fully with contingency.

One might conclude from this sketch that, for Rorty, a personmerely needs to become sufficiently nominalist and historicist in orderto face up to contingency. But there is a difference between merelyrecognizing contingency and facing up to it. The latter involves beingaware of the deeper implications of contingency and embracing them.Rorty thinks that persons can recognize contingency and yet fail tobecome ironists by failing to follow out and come to terms fully withthe implications of this insight. He makes this point in his brief dis-cussion of a liberal utopia. In Rortys utopia, nominalism and histori-cism would be part of common sense just as atheism and agnosticismnow are acceptable common sense positions, even if they are some-what variant forms of common sense thinking. As he explains:

In the ideal liberal society, the intellectuals would still be ironists,although the nonintellectuals would not. The latter would, however, be


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commonsensically nominalist and historicist. So they would seethemselves as contingent through and through, without feeling anyparticular doubts about the contingencies they happened to be. . . .They would be commonsensical nonmetaphysicians, in the way inwhich more and more people in the rich democracies have beencommonsensical nontheists. . . .

But even if I am right in thinking that a liberal culture whose publicrhetoric is nominalist and historicist is both possible and desirable, Icannot go on to claim that there could or ought to be a culture whosepublic rhetoric is ironist. . . . Ironists have to have something to havedoubts about, something from which to be alienated.21

Notice that nonintellectuals in Rortys utopia recognize contingencybut are not subsequently plagued by radical and continuing doubtsabout their final vocabularies. Ironists, however, still suffer from thesedoubts even in Rortys utopia. The reason is that ironists have to havesomething from which to be alienated, something about which tohave doubts. Perhaps ironists are alienated from the liberal finalvocabulary dominant in their utopian culture. In this utopia, intellec-tuals and nonintellectuals would be liberals without believing thatthey have noncircular philosophical foundations for their liberalism.They would not believe, moreover, that liberalism is the right politicaltheory in the sense that it best promotes the realization of humannature, even though they might believe that liberalism is best for pro-moting the flourishing of persons like themselves. Yet somethingabout this situation bothers ironists in Rortys liberal utopia. Perhapsthey doubt the utility of liberalism or have doubts about the variousways of life that are underwritten by liberalism in their utopia. Whatthese lingering doubts could be will be discussed in more detail below.

So when Rorty refers to the various contingencies of human exis-tence or even the set of contingencies that human beings, are he has inmind not merely the lack of necessity of human language, human con-cepts, and human beliefs and desires, but also the local and finely con-textualized quality of these things. Furthermore, Rorty suggests thatthere is a very close connection between being an ironist and comingto terms with these various and thoroughgoing contingencies ofhuman life.22 The connection is this: Rortian ironists do not flinchwhen it comes to facing up to contingency. They accept the fragilityand mutability of their most central beliefs and desires. This accept-ance gives rise to a kind of liberating light-mindedness toward theirfinal vocabularies. But they are not distinguished from other intellec-tuals and nonintellectuals simply by their acceptance of the variouscontingencies of human existence. For Rorty believes that nonironists


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can accept contingency by becoming nominalists and historicists.Rather, ironists are distinguished from other nominalists and histori-cists by their radical and continuing doubts about their own finalvocabularies. Perhaps these doubts indicate the degree to which theyrecognize and embrace contingency and are alienated.

Thus far I have focused mainly on the antiepistemological andantimetaphysical features of Rortian irony.23 I fear that, as a result, atthis preliminary point it may not be at all clear why reflective andmorally serious persons would want to be Rortian ironists. After all,what is attractive about a life characterized by doubt and alienation?Based on what we have seen thus far, moreover, one might suspectthat a Rortian ironist could not avoid having a cavalier attitude towardmorality. Also, it is still unclear what we are to make of the radical andcontinuing doubts of Rortian ironists about their final vocabularies. Iwill address these concerns in the next two sections by developing theaesthetic and ethical components of Rortian irony.

1.3 Irony and Self-CreationThe sketch of Rortys views on contingency above suggests that facingup to the various contingencies of human existence is a bracing andsobering task. But Rorty thinks it also is liberating. In fact, he suggeststhat we think of freedom as the recognition of contingency.24 Whatdoes this claim about freedom mean?

It is not difficult to misconstrue what Rorty has in mind. A naturalinterpretation of Rortys claim about freedom is that, in order to actfreely or to be a free agent, one must believe that the circumstances inwhich one acts are contingent in some respect. When this reading, inturn, is set in the context of current philosophical debates about freewill, it quickly translates into the idea that we must have or at leastbelieve that we have the ability to do otherwise with respect to anygiven choice in order for that choice to be a free choice. Or it maysuggest that there has to be real indeterminacy in the world or that wehave to believe in indeterminacy, in order to act freely. These possibleextrapolations, however, are far from Rortys mind. He never even somuch as hints or subtly intimates that he intends his view of freedomto be understood in this metaphysical way. So, we have to be carefulabout how we interpret Rortys claim that we think of freedom as therecognition of contingency.

We have observed that, for Rorty, the ironist fully recognizes hercontingency. If freedom is the recognition of contingency in somesense, it stands to reason that the ironist is free or freer than persons


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who do not recognize contingency to the extent that she does. So wemay get a clearer picture of how Rorty conceives of freedom byobserving his reflections on the nature of the ironist. This turns out tobe a helpful strategy. Rorty characterizes the ironists existence as astruggle for self-creation through the recognition of contingency.25

Consequently, for Rorty, freedom is or is closely related to self-creation.Rortys discussion of self-creation is one of the most interesting

and suggestive features of Contingency. He claims that our self-conceptions are initially given to us through the final vocabularies thatwe inherit. The task of self-creation thus becomes, for Rorty, the taskof getting out from under inherited vocabularies by forging ones ownterms for describing, understanding, and evaluating oneself and oth-ers.26 The final vocabularies that we inherit and, to a lesser extent,other final vocabularies that we encounter constitute the raw materi-als out of which we compose these new terms. What exactly does all ofthis have to do with recognizing contingency? The answer is this:recognizing the contingency of final vocabularies, especially the finalvocabulary that one has inherited, leads a person to see that it is notnecessary and inevitable that she understand herself and others just inthe terms that have been given to her by her culture, parents, andancestors. A person who has this realization awakens to the possibilityof becoming an individual, someone who to some extent gives her lifeits own particular character, who exerts some amount of control overher life.27 As Rorty states, in regard to such a person:

He is trying to get out from under inherited contingencies and makehis own contingencies, get out from under an old final vocabulary andfashion one which will be all his own. . . .

The generic task of the ironist is the one Coleridge recommended tothe great and original poet: to create the taste by which he will bejudged. But the judge the ironist has in mind is himself. He wants to beable to sum up his life in his own terms.28

In a related discussion of Nietzsche, Rorty adds:

He hoped that once we realized that Platos true world was just afable, we would seek consolation, at the moment of death, not in hav-ing transcended the animal condition but in being that peculiar sort ofanimal who, by describing himself in his own terms, had createdhimself. More exactly, he would have created the only part of himselfthat mattered by constructing his own mind. To create ones mind is tocreate ones own language, rather than to let the length of ones mindbe set by the language other human beings have left behind.29


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Rorty sums up this line of reasoning by suggesting that we viewself-knowledge as self-creation.30 In other words, when we see thatthe terms in which we understand ourselves are contingent and revis-able, then we are more able and more inclined to undertake theprocess of becoming new selves through modifying, revising, andexpanding these terms. So, for Rorty, the recognition of contingencyis closely linked to the likelihood, if not the possibility, of novel self-creation. That is why he suggests that we construe freedom as therecognition of contingency.

Whether or not we accept Rortys conception of freedom, perhaps wenow are in a better position to understand in part why Rorty is attractedto irony. A Rortian ironist clearly perceives and fully embraces the con-tingency of her final vocabulary. The upshot of this, we now see, is thatshe experiences greater freedom and individuality. This freedom derivesfrom her coming to take the final vocabulary she has inherited lightlyenough that she is able to get out from under it by constructing out ofit and other final vocabularies that she encounters her own termsfor understanding and evaluating herself, others, and the world.Consequently, an ironist experiences greater freedom from inheritedvocabularies, which may be stifling, and freedom for experimentationwith new ways of conceiving herself, others, and the world.

Still it is possible that an ironists inherited final vocabulary and herlimited experience with other final vocabularies will not provide herwith enough suitable raw materials for the construction of a new finalvocabulary that adequately promotes her project of self-creation.Furthermore, she may fear that she has been so thoroughly socializedinto her inherited final vocabulary that she will never really get out fromunder it, no matter how much she attempts to do so. Persons who turnaway from the religious traditions into which they were socializedsometimes experience this kind of doubt, whether they turn to otherreligious traditions or away from religion altogether. Suppose, though,that our exemplary Rortian ironist is able to get out from under thefinal vocabulary that she inherited and construct what she takes to beher own terms for understanding herself and others. She still mightcontinue to worry that her new final vocabulary will turn out to besomeone elses or a hodgepodge of terms that she has borrowed het-eronomously, that is, without any significant alteration or refinementthat makes this vocabulary her own in some important respect.

I think that Rorty has these kinds of doubts in mind when he states:

The ironist spends her time worrying about the possibility that she hasbeen initiated into the wrong tribe, taught to play the wrong language


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game. She worries that the process of socialization which turned herinto a human being by giving her a language may have given her thewrong language, and so turned her into the wrong kind of humanbeing.31

We have to be careful about how we interpret the phrases the wrongkind of human being and wrong language game in this passage.Clearly Rorty does not intend to suggest by these phrases that his iro-nists worry that they have inherited a conception of human naturethat fails to correspond to the way human nature really is and thus areunable fully to realize their humanity. Nor does he intend that ironistsworry about whether they have inherited a language that fails to carvereality at its joints. Their thoroughgoing nominalism precludes thisreading. An ironists doubts primarily are not doubts about the falsityof her current final vocabulary. Rather, they are doubts about the ade-quacy of her current final vocabulary for her own projects of self-creation. So to say that she worries about becoming the wrong kind ofhuman being as a result of inhabiting the wrong language game is tosay that she is concerned that she is living her life on someone elsesterms, with a self and world conception that leads her to miss out onnovel and interesting possibilities for self-creation.32

Gutting offers a similar reading of Rorty on this point. He states:

We are bound to wonder what could possibly be the source of the iro-nists doubts. . . . Unless the ironist slips back into ethical objectivism,what sense is there to the worry that her final vocabulary is wrong?As final, it expresses what, all things considered, she really does value.The worry Rorty evokes makes sense only on the assumption of anethical objectivism that he has firmly repudiated.

The reaction of Rortys ironist to the diversity of final vocabulariesis, despite his misleading language, better construed as a matter of aes-thetic fascination than of ethical worry. The ironist constantly seeksintellectual and aesthetic stimulation, the challenging of old vocabular-ies for describing ourselves and the formation of new descriptions thattake account of more and more perspectives. The worry then is thatthe ironists contingent perspective at a given time will cause her to misssomething new and exciting, not that her perspective is wrong.33

There certainly is a strong aesthetic component to the ironists questfor self-creation, as Gutting implies. Her intractable concerns areabout missing out on novel and aesthetically pleasing forms of self-creation, not about her perspectives failing to capture objective criteriafor human flourishing.


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Yet it does not follow from this that an ironists doubts are not atall ethical doubts. There remains a sense in which her doubts are eth-ical concerns.34 Rorty sometimes refers to the ironists self-creativestruggle as a struggle for autonomy,35 and as involving attention to aduty to self.36 He does not demur from the commonly held viewthat autonomy is an ethical good. Therefore, he takes the pursuit ofautonomy to be an ethical project. Rorty also conceives of his ironistsstruggle for self-creation as a struggle for self-realization and perfection.As he explains:

The older Hegel became a name for such a vocabulary, and Kierkegaardand Nietzsche have become names for others. . . . We treat the namesof such people as the names of the heroes of their own books. . . . Wedo not care whether these writers managed to live up to their own self-images. What we want to know is whether to adopt those imagestorecreate ourselves, in whole or in part, in these peoples image. We goabout answering this question by experimenting with the vocabularieswhich these people concocted. We redescribe ourselves, our situation,our past, in those terms and compare the results with alternativeredescriptions which use the vocabularies of alternative figures. We iro-nists hope, by this continual redescription, to make the best selves forourselves that we can. . . . Ironists read literary critics, and take them asmoral advisers, simply because such critics have an exceptionally largerange of acquaintance. . . . They have read more books and are thusin a better position not to get trapped in the vocabulary of any single book.37

Here Rorty construes projects of self-creation as attempts at self-perfection. The good of self-perfection is not merely an aesthetic good.Formally speaking, it also is a moral good. Furthermore, in the samecontext Rorty adds that ironists read literary critics in order to gaininsights for their efforts at self-creation. In this capacity, such criticsserve as moral advisers. In another passage, Rorty refers to autonomyas a criterion of private perfection.38 He also explicitly identifies thepursuit of autonomy with ethical considerations which arise from, forexample, ones attachment to a particular person, or ones idiosyn-cratic attempt to create oneself anew.39

Consequently, Rortys own understanding of his position is that hisironists worries are aesthetic and ethical concerns.40 We too takequests for autonomy and self-perfection to be ethical quests, at least ina formal sense. So, I do not think that we should reduce an ironistsdoubts to just aesthetic worries, as Gutting suggests.41 Nevertheless,this tweaking of Guttings reading is minor. Even on Rortys own


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view of his position, the main ethical component of an ironists stanceis not her quest for personal autonomy but her commitment to liber-alism. Furthermore, as Rorty recognizes, there are obvious difficultieswith the view that self-creation, as he construes it, is an ethical project.What about persons who believe that their own projects of self-creation have nothing to do with meeting ethical duties to others orto certain others? These persons might refuse to conceptualize theirprojects of self-creation in this way in an attempt to get out fromunder certain final vocabularies.

Clearly, projects of self-creation can be solipsistic and destructive ofsocial goods. Even when self-creative projects are not antisocial, formany persons such projects are not easily reconcilable with the pursuitof other ethical goods. Rorty recognizes and even accentuates thisproblem of reconciling the good of self-creation with other goodsthat are more robustly ethical. In the context of introducing the posi-tions that he advances in Contingency, he states, This book tries toshow how things look if we drop the demand for a theory which uni-fies the public and private, and are content to treat the demands ofself-creation and of human solidarity as equally valid, yet foreverincommensurable.42 In a subsequent passage, he adds:

Metaphysicians like Plato and Marx thought they could show that oncephilosophical theory had led us from appearance to reality we would bein a better position to be useful to our fellow human beings. They bothhoped that the private-public split, the distinction between duty to selfand duty to others, could be overcome. Marxism has been the envy ofall later intellectual movements because it seemed, for a moment, toshow how to synthesize self-creation and social responsibility, paganheroism and Christian love, the detachment of the contemplative withthe fervor of the revolutionary.

On my account of ironist culture, such opposites can be combinedin a life but not synthesized in a theory.43

These passages show that Rorty recognizes the difficulty of reconcil-ing self-creation and other ethical goods, such as solidarity. The sec-ond passage contains an important additional point. In Rortys view,some persons may be able to unify in their lives or in a practical waytheir struggle for self-creation and their social responsibilities. So, onRortys view, autonomy and solidarity will not be reconciled at thelevel of theory despite the best attempts of metaphysicians since Plato.But they may be practically reconcilable.

I take all of this to imply that an ironists doubts about the ade-quacy of her final vocabulary for her pursuit of autonomy are ethical


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in a formal sense and could be ethical in more than a formal sense. Tothe extent that an ironist is able to harmonize in her life her pursuit ofautonomy and her commitment to solidarity, to that extent herdoubts about her final vocabulary become ethical doubts in more thana merely formal sense. In other words, if the autonomous person anironist seeks to become is also a person who is committed to and pro-motes solidarityif that is, in fact, how she pursues autonomythenher worries about not being able to become autonomous are also wor-ries about not being able to be committed to and promotive of soli-darity. In that case, they clearly are ethical concerns in more than aformal sense.

But why does Rorty hold such a dim view of the prospects of rec-onciling goods associated with autonomy and social goods? Why isself-creation so difficult to square with solidarity? A full answer to thisquestion would take us well beyond the purview of this chapter. Wecan attain a partial answer by exploring our final topics of this chapter:self-creation and redescription and irony and liberalism.

1.4 Self-Creation and RedescriptionIf someone were to ask Rorty what the main way is by which onecomes to recognize the contingency of the final vocabulary she hasinherited, or what primary tool an ironist utilizes in her attempts atself-creation, it is likely that Rorty would give the following answer.Encountering suggestive, provocative, and reorienting redescriptionsof ones current final vocabulary is a main way in which one comes tosee the contingency of that vocabulary; and the imaginative employmentof redescription is the primary tool employed by ironists in their questsfor autonomy. But what is redescription anyhow? Furthermore, whydoes getting clear on the nature of redescription help to illuminate thedifficulty of reconciling self-creation and solidarity?

As I noted above, for Rorty, someone who employs redescriptionin the pursuit of self-creation is attempting to use a different finalvocabulary than her current one to redescribe herself, her situation,and her past in a way that will help her see these things in a very dif-ferent light. Someone who more passively succumbs to a redescriptionof her current perspective offered by another person gains a similarreorientation. In both cases, Rorty suggests, redescription is closelyrelated to the formation of a new self in the sense that such a personcomes to reject or revise certain beliefs, desires, and projects that hadformed the core of her identity and acquires new identity-conferringbeliefs, desires, and commitments.44


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Consider, for instance, a married woman who has inherited anoppressive final vocabulary according to which the role of being agood wife carries with it the expectation that she submit to and evenobey her husband. Suppose further that her husband exploits thisconception of the social role of being a good wife by being abusiveand demanding. Then she encounters other women, some of whomare married, who do not have this conception of wifehood and beingfemale as part of their final vocabularies. These persons eventuallystrike her as much happier persons and as having much better mar-riages, if they are married. These experiences may lead her to questionher understanding of being a good wife. She may also come to ques-tion the other features of her final vocabulary that lend credence tothis notion, as she experiments with thinking of her life and socialroles in other terms borrowed from the persons she encounters whohave different final vocabularies.45 It is not hard to imagine how herrelationship to her husband might dramatically change as a result andhow she may come to experience self-respect and expect respect fromothers in ways that had never occurred to her before she began toquestion her understanding of wifehood and what it is to be a woman.She then may become a different person with a different conceptionof the future self she aspires to be.

Admittedly this is a contrived and oversimplified example. Still, ithelps to clarify what redescription is and how it may lead to substan-tial revisions in a persons self-conception. These revisions, in turn,help persons to become novel selves as they gain critical distance fromstifling conceptions of social roles.

Rortys discussion of Proust helps to clarify a bit more what hetakes redescription to be and its relation to self-creation. Rortyadmires Proust not only for his considerable literary ability and imag-ination, which Proust utilized in his own quest for autonomy, but alsobecause Proust never lost sight of the contingency of all humandescriptions, including his own. For these reasons, Proust stands outfor Rorty as an exemplary ironist, a master of redescription in the serviceof self-creation. As Rorty explains:

Proust, too, was interested in power, but not in finding somebody largerthan himself to incarnate or to celebrate. All he wanted was to get outfrom under finite powers by making their finitude evident. He did notwant to befriend power nor to be in a position to empower others, butsimply to free himself from the descriptions of himself offered by thepeople he had met. He wanted not to be merely the person these otherpeople thought they knew him to be, not to be frozen in the frame of aphotograph shot from another persons perspective. . . . His method of


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freeing himself from these peopleof becoming autonomouswas toredescribe the people who had described him. He drew sketches of themfrom lots of different perspectivesand in particular from lots of differ-ent positions in timeand thus made clear that none of these peopleoccupied a privileged standpoint. Proust became autonomous byexplaining to himself why the others were not authorities, but simplyfellow contingencies. . . .

At the end of his life and his novel, by showing what time had doneto these other people, Proust showed what he had done with the timehe had. He had written a book, and thus created a selfthe author ofthat bookwhich these people could not have predicted or even envis-aged. He had become as much of an authority on the people whom heknew as his younger self had feared they might be an authority on him.This feat enabled him to relinquish the very idea of authority, and withit the idea that there is a privileged perspective from which he, oranyone else, is to be described. . . .

Proust temporalized and finitized the authority figures he had met byseeing them as creatures of contingent circumstance. . . . He masteredcontingency by recognizing it, and thus freed himself from the fear thatthe contingencies he had encountered were more than just contingen-cies. He turned other people from his judges into his fellow sufferers,and thus succeeded in creating the taste by which he judged himself.46

I find Rortys description of Prousts employment of redescription sug-gestive and illuminating. In Rortys reading of Proust, Proust utilizedredescription mostly in his attempts to overcome the descriptions ofhimself offered by his friends and acquaintances. He wanted to be moreand other than the sum total of what he was according to their descrip-tions of him. Proust found these descriptions limiting, oppressive, andstultifying. Through redescription he gained a kind of leverage over andagainst them that allowed him to create for himself a novel self.

As an analogue consider the common experiences of children inrelation to their parents. Our parents provide most of the content ofour initial self-understanding. As we become adults, we attempt tounderstand ourselves in other ways. Some persons reject in a whole-sale way, others in a piecemeal fashion, the selves their parents takethem to be and expect them to become. Not infrequently this processbegins to occur when they encounter persons, in books, film, or inlife, who in some way suggest to them a different self-conception. Asa result they enlarge their thinking about who they are and couldbecome. Perhaps these points are trite commonplaces of developmentalpsychology. Still, it is illuminating to take this way of becoming anindividual to be a process of struggling to achieve autonomy throughredescription.


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Why this is so becomes clearer when we contrast redescription withother methods for promoting changes in self and world conceptionsthat foster autonomy. Rorty offers us one such contrast in the contextof explicating a distinction between ironists and metaphysicians. Hestates:

The metaphysician thinks that there is an overriding intellectual duty topresent arguments for ones controversial viewsarguments which willstart from relatively uncontroversial premises. The ironist thinks thatsuch argumentslogical argumentsare all very well in their way, anduseful as expository devices, but in the end not much more than waysof getting people to change their practices without admitting they havedone so. The ironists preferred form of argument is dialectical in thesense that she takes the unit of persuasion to be a vocabulary ratherthan a proposition. Her method is redescription rather than inference. . . . An ironist hopes that by the time she has finished usingold words in new senses, not to mention introducing brand-new words,people will no longer ask questions phrased in the old words.47

Rorty touches on several points here that clarify his notion ofredescription. First, it is to be distinguished from logical argument,which proceeds on the basis of inference. Second, redescription has adeflationary effect, at least as Rortian ironists employ it. It is supposedto help us get over certain recurring problems that plague our oldvocabularies not by solving these problems but by dissolving them aswe take up new perspectives or new patterns of thought and speech.Third, that which is bandied about between interlocutors from con-trasting perspectives is not a proposition, such as God exists, forinstance, but a vocabulary. I take Rorty to mean by this that redescrip-tion does its change-inducing work primarily at the level of finalvocabularies. For instance, suppose redescription is involved in a cru-cial way in a persons conversion to atheism. As Rorty sees it, the roleit plays in such a case is not to help one decide the logical coherenceand plausibility of propositions for and against the existence of God.Rather, it is employed, in this case, to cast theism in a negative lightand atheism in a superior and more attractive light. Of course, thequestion immediately arises: what makes one final vocabulary superiorto or more attractive than another? Rortys answer thus far seems tobe that as long as both vocabularies are coherent, the one that pro-motes more novel and interesting forms of self-creation is superior.But then we might well wonder how this response could help, sincewhat will count as novel and interesting is apt to be relative to eachparticular user of a final vocabulary. A person who is socialized in a


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strict and dull religious home might find an atheistic final vocabularyriveting when she encounters it. On the other hand, someone who issocialized into a sour and depressing form of atheism might find cer-tain theistic final vocabularies inviting and inspiring when she encoun-ters them. We might have hoped for more help than this in evaluatingcompeting vocabularies.

Rorty recognizes and embraces to some extent these limitations.He states although the thoroughgoing ironist can use the notion ofa better description, he has no criterion for the application of thisterm and so cannot use the notion of the right description. 48 Onemight wonder how a Rortian ironist can use the notion of a wronglanguage game or wrong kind of human being if she has no use forthe idea of a right description. On a charitable reading, however,the discrepancy here may only be apparent. Rorty can make use of abetter description because better can consistently mean moreproductive of novel and interesting forms of self-creation. But hecannot make use of a strong sense of the right description preciselybecause of the relativity across persons of what counts as novel andinteresting. As Rorty puts this point in the same context, whatcounts as resolution, perfection, and autonomy will always be a func-tion of when one happens to die or go mad. But this relativity doesnot entail futility.49

Whether or not Rorty is right about this last claim, we now are in aposition to understand more clearly why he thinks it is very difficult toreconcile the pursuit of self-creation with solidarity. Simply stated,there is no blueprint or script for self-creation that implies that one hasto care about human solidarity in order to become fully realized orautonomous. For some persons these pursuits will coincide. There isno reason to think, however, in Rortys view, that this happy conver-gence is anything but a quirk of a persons idiosyncratic background.Even a Platonist may concur with Rorty that the convergence of thequest for autonomy and commitment to solidarity, when it occurs in ahuman life, is a serendipitous bit of moral luck. Rortys claim is moreradical, though. He suggests that when these pursuits do converge,there is no reason, other than perhaps a practical one that is relative toa persons unique history, to think that this convergence is better thana lack of convergence or is something we ought to go to great lengthsto impose on our lives. Whether a persons commitment to solidarityhelps her become an autonomous person depends on the contingentcircumstances of her own life.

Rorty is bothered by the thought that his position appears toendorse and promote cruelty. This problem arises for him in the


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following way. He rejects the idea that there is a normative account ofhuman nature that makes it the case that human beings need to com-mit themselves to solidarity and not cruelty in order to lead interestingand autonomous lives. Furthermore, by Rortys own admission,redescription, a main tool of the ironist in her struggle for self-creation,can be very cruel. As Rorty explains:

Ironism . . . results from awareness of the power of redescription. Butmost people do not want to be redescribed. They want to be taken ontheir own termstaken seriously just as they are and just as they talk.The ironist tells them that the language they speak is up for grabs by herand her kind. There is something potentially very cruel about that claim.For the best way to cause people long-lasting pain is to humiliate themby making the things that seemed most important to them look futile,obsolete, and powerless. Consider what happens when a childs preciouspossessionsthe little things around which he weaves fantasies thatmake him a little different from all other childrenare redescribed astrash, and thrown away. Or consider what happens when these pos-sessions are made to look ridiculous alongside the possessions ofanother, richer, child. . . . The redescribing ironist, by threatening onesfinal vocabulary, and thus ones ability to make sense of oneself in onesown terms rather than hers, suggests that ones self and ones world arefutile, obsolete, powerless. Redescription often humiliates.50

By Rortys own admission, then, redescription sometimes is very cruel.Yet it is a primary tool for the task of self-creation. This threatens tobe a significant problem. If Rortys position implied that cruelredescriptions are not apt to facilitate self-creation, then he wouldhave a straightforward way out of this problem. He has no recourse tothis sort of response, however. Consequently, it might appear that hehas nothing to say to persons who commit themselves to projects ofself-creation that involve cruelty.

Rorty offers two lines of response to this problem. The second lineof response is much more involved than the first. I take it up in thenext section. The first line of response can be summarized as follows.Redescription is not a specific or distinguishing mark of the ironist. Itis a generic trait of the intellectual.51 Therefore, intellectuals in gen-eral have to deal with the problem of cruelty as they employ the toolof redescription. Ironists in particular arouse special resentmentbecause they cannot consistently say that their redescriptions of othersreveal their true selves or the real nature of a common public worldwhich the speaker and the interlocutor share.52 So ironists, unlikeother intellectuals, cannot promise those persons whose lives and


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commitments are redescribed that they thereby are empowered or putin touch with a deeper or greater reality. Rorty concludes that whatthe ironist is being blamed for is not an inclination to humiliate but aninability to empower.53

When Rortys position, in turn, is criticized on these grounds, hesimply bites the bullet, so to speak. An ironist, unlike a metaphysician,cannot promise others that when they are redescribed possibly theyare empowered, if the redescription corresponds to reality. Rorty doesnot think that this is a damning concession, however. He thinks that ametaphysicians promise to empower ultimately is empty. Also, hethinks that there is another basis for human solidarity that an ironistcan accept and commend and that this alternative ground for solidarityis adequate. As he explains:

The ironist thinks that the only redescriptions which serve liberal pur-poses are those which answer the question What humiliates? whereasthe metaphysician also wants to answer the question Why should Iavoid humiliating? The liberal metaphysician wants our wish to be kindto be bolstered by an argument, one which entails a self-redescriptionwhich will highlight a common human essence, an essence which issomething more than our shared ability to suffer humiliation. The lib-eral ironist just wants our chances of being kind, of avoiding the humili-ation of others, to be expanded by redescription. She thinks thatrecognition of a common susceptibility to humiliation is the only socialbond that is needed. Whereas the metaphysician takes the morally rele-vant feature of the other human beings to be their relation to a largershared powerrationality, God, truth, or history, for examplethe iro-nist takes the morally relevant definition of a person, a moral subject, tobe something that can be humiliated. Her sense of human solidarityis based on a sense of a common danger, not on a common possessionor a shared power.54

So Rorty argues that as long as an ironist shares a sense of danger andfear of humiliation with those she redescribes, she has reason to careabout solidarity with them and avoid redescriptions that undermine it.A philosophical account that demonstrates in a non-circular way whywe should not humiliate other persons is both unnecessary and notforthcoming, according to Rorty. Consequently, the fact that an iro-nist does not have recourse to such an account to motivate her com-mitment to solidarity with others does not indicate a damning ordistinctive weakness in her position.

This last move still does not resolve the problem that there does notappear to be a reason for a Rortian ironist to care about human


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solidarity in circumstances where she can get along in her pursuit ofautonomy while ignoring or even undermining solidarity. Even ifhuman solidarity can be rooted in a perception of common danger,what is to stop an ironist from being as cruel as she wants to be in herredescriptions so long as these help her achieve autonomy and do notisolate her so much that she is unable to take advantage of the benefits ofliving among persons who share a stronger commitment to solidarity?

The lingering problem we have come up against here arises in partfrom attempting to locate an ethical component in Rortian ironymainly in the ethical value of autonomy, as Rorty understands it. Onemight think that Rorty has left himself in a position where he has lit-tle to say to reign in ironists who are fond of cruel redescriptionsexcept to remind them that they too can be humiliated and that theyalso need the help of other persons in order to survive and flourish. Isthis enough?

1.5 Irony and LiberalismWe are precisely at the juncture where Rorty introduces the more sub-stantive ethical component of his account of irony. Ironists, as Rortyconstructs and commends them, are not mere ironists. They are lib-eral ironists. The liberalism in their stance is supposed to provide themoral backbone that Rortys account needs in order to be moreresponsive to the concerns raised above. The complexity of this com-ponent of Rortys account, to which I alluded above, does not arisefrom Rortys conception of liberalism. He follows Judith Shklar inconstruing liberalism roughly as the idea that cruelty is the worstthing we do.55 Rather, the complexity derives from Rortys positinga firm distinction between the public and private in the final vocab-ulary, concerns, and life of his ironist.56 What exactly does Rorty havein mind?

On a first pass, Rortys introduction of a split between the privateand public is to be understood as a division between redescription forprivate and for public purposes.57 As Rorty explains:

For my private purposes, I may redescribe you and everybody else interms which have nothing to do with my attitude toward your actual orpossible suffering. My private purposes, and the part of my final vocab-ulary which is not relevant to my public actions, are none of your busi-ness. But as I am a liberal, the part of my final vocabulary which isrelevant to such actions requires me to become aware of all the variousways in which other human beings whom I might act upon can be


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humiliated. So the liberal ironist needs as much imaginative acquaintancewith alternative final vocabularies as possible, not just for her own edi-fication, but in order to understand the actual and possible humiliationof the people who use these alternative final vocabularies.58

The privatepublic distinction therefore provides a way for Rorty tohandle the potentially cruel redescriptions an ironist might offer. Sheis not to engage publicly in cruel redescriptions, since as a liberal sheis committed to the idea that treating others cruelly is the worst thingshe could do to them. In private, she can dissect and deconstruct thecommitments and vocabularies of others as much as she wants, solong as this activity does not lead her to act cruelly. Furthermore, theironists penchant for imaginatively experimenting with other finalvocabularies can serve her public commitment to liberalism insofar asit enables her to recognize more clearly the various ways in which oth-ers can be humiliated.

This last claim captures Rortys thinking at one of the moments inwhich he tends toward the view that irony and liberalism are made foreach other in certain respects. According to Nancy Fraser, this is thesecond of three distinct moments in Rortys thinking regarding thedistinction between public and private or the relation between liberal-ism and irony.59 Fraser takes Rorty to move back and forth amongperspectives where he characterizes the relation between irony and lib-eralism as: (a) antagonistic, (b) a relation between natural partners,and (c) a partition relation, which seems to be Rortys consideredposition.60 The first category represents Rorty at his most pessimisticmoments in his reflections on reconciling liberalism and ironism. Thetextual support Fraser cites as revealing this moment in Rortysthought concerns his admission that ironists cannot be progressiveand dynamic liberals since they cannot offer the same sort of socialhope as metaphysicians offer.61 Rorty has in mind that ironists can-not promise that persons will become more autonomous as theybecome more committed to human solidarity. The second, naturalpartners, moment in Rortys thought is evident in the passagequoted above, according to which the ironists inclination to experi-ment with alternative final vocabularies actually enhances her ability torecognize the various ways in which others can be humiliated. Thethird moment, the partition view, represents, according to Fraser,Rortys coming to terms with the fact that he cannot bring himself toabandon either irony or liberalism even though they are largelyincompatible. So, they simply have to coexist with each other withoutany sort of overall synthesis.62


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Frasers analysis helps to isolate certain tensions in Rortys positionregarding the relation between irony and liberalism. It is not difficult,however, to overstate these tensions and make too much of the differ-ences among the perspectives in Rortys thought that give rise to thesetensions. Fraser provides little evidence for the claim that Rorty everholds an entirely pessimistic attitude about the possibility of reconcilingirony and liberalism, self-creation and solidarity. More important,the notion of reconciliation is ambiguous, as we have seen. It couldrefer either to theoretical or practical reconciliation. This ambiguitymay explain away or significantly reduce the apparently strong ten-sions and double-mindedness in Rortys account, to which Fraseralludes.

As we have seen, Rorty consistently rejects the idea that goodsassociated with autonomy and self-creation can be theoretically recon-ciled with the goods of solidarity. Furthermore, he consistently affirmsthe view that these goods may be reconciled in a persons life, if thatpersons idiosyncratic background predisposes the person to such rec-onciliation. That Rorty maintains both of these claims but focuses onone and then the other in his writings might explain why there appearto be moments when he is rather pessimistic about reconciling ironyand liberalism and moments when he is quite optimistic about this. Inthe former moments, perhaps he has in view theoretical reconcilia-tion. In the latter, he may have in mind the possibility that some per-sons, due to their peculiar histories, might not find it very difficult toreconcile their projects of self-creation and their commitment tohuman solidarity. In that case, Rortys partition view is his generalaccount of how ironists are to reconcile self-creation and solidarity,whatever their peculiar backgrounds happen to be. As a liberal, an iro-nist has to oppose cruelty and commit herself to solidarity, as sheworks out her own salvation or struggles to create herself as a new,autonomous self. Her liberalism refers to her public attitude of oppo-sition to cruelty and commitment to solidarity. Her ironism refers toher abiding interest in self-creation, redescription, and the complexattitude she takes toward her own and other final vocabularies. If thisinterpretation is correct, an ironist has to privatize her ironic side tothe extent that its public display would be cruel and undermining ofhuman solidarity.

In his defense of Rorty, Gutting suggests a similar reading:

Almost any action, no matter how apparently private, can and oftendoes have social consequences. But Rortys distinction between the pri-vate and public spheres need not deny this. Its point requires merely


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that we be able, in practice, to separate actions that do not pose aserious threat to the freedom of others from those that do.63

This point is helpful as far as it goes. Rortys privatepublic distinctionalso requires us, however, to be able to separate in practice actionsthat are cruel from those that are not, so that the former can beavoided as much as possible.64 An action that might not pose a seriousthreat to anothers freedom might be very cruel, nonetheless. A liberalironist would not be a very committed liberal, if she routinely counte-nanced such actions.

Still, one might wonder why an ironist would be a committedliberal. If ironists face up to the contingency of human language andhuman selves, then to be consistent they have to face up to the con-tingency of their commitment to liberalism as well. Could a person befirmly committed to liberalism in such circumstances? One mightthink that such a person would constantly have to hold out the possi-bility of sheering off her liberal commitments in case she were to finda more interesting, autonomy-promoting vocabulary. Furthermore,even if she never finally rejects liberal principles, the fact that she holdsthem in this tentative way might appear to nullify the claim that she iscommitted to liberalism. When we view the tension between irony andliberalism from this angle, it suggests that Rortys introduction of lib-eralism as a component in the final vocabulary of an ironist rendersthe ironists position unstable.

Rorty anticipates this problem. His response turns on the claimthat one can be fully committed to principles that one takes to becontingent. In fact, Rorty claims that this idea is a fundamental prem-ise of Contingency.65 As he explains, a belief can still regulate action,can still be thought worth dying for, among people who are quiteaware that this belief is caused by nothing deeper than contingenthistorical circumstance.66 Rorty also approvingly refers to JosephSchumpeters idea that standing unflinchingly for ones convictionswhile acknowledging their relative validity is what distinguishes acivilized man from a barbarian.67 From Rortys perspective, thenotion of absolute validity is unhelpful, especially in sorting out sig-nificant differences among various ethical and political convictions.He thinks it would only have purchase if we were able to attain astandpoint outside the particular historically conditioned and tem-porary vocabulary we are presently using.68 Since we are unable toescape our own historicity in this respect, we have to settle for rela-tive validity. But once we recognize this limitation, for Rorty, there isno longer any point to the alleged problem of a persons standing


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firmly for beliefs that she takes to have merely relative validity. As hestates:

We should learn to brush aside questions like How do you know thatfreedom is the chief goal of social organization? in the same way as webrush aside questions like How do you know that Jones is worthy ofyour friendship? . . . We should see allegiance to social institutions asno more matters for justification by reference to familiar, commonlyaccepted premisesbut also as no more arbitrarythan choices offriends or heroes. Such choices are not made by reference to criteria.They cannot be preceded by presuppositionless critical reflection, con-ducted in no particular language and outside of any particular historicalcontext.69

Notice how Rorty addresses the issue of an ironists commitmentto contingent convictions. I take Rortys response to be that thereare no beliefs, certainly no nontrivial ones, that are not contingent.So the problem is not an ironists commitment to liberalism so muchas it is her commitment to any ideals, since all her convictions arecontingent. Once the problem is stated this way Rortys responseappears less evasive. In effect, he suggests that in a certain respect wesimply find ourselves with the various allegiances we have to socialinstitutions and the values that support them. We have to startwhere we are, with the convictions that we have.70 So the question,why do we have convictions? or more specifically, how could ironistshave basic moral convictions? is somewhat uninteresting to Rorty, atleast as a question about the validity of these convictions and nottheir idiosyncratic origins.71 He thinks we cannot get behind ourconvictions and discover a primordial choice, according to certainobjective criteria, to have them. The same is true with respect to themore specific issue of how ironists manage to be liberals. As Rortyargues:

We cannot assume that liberals ought to be able to rise above the con-tingencies of history and see the kind of individual freedom which themodern liberal state offers its citizens as just one more value. Nor canwe assume that the rational thing to do is to place such freedom along-side other candidates . . . and then use reason to scrutinize these var-ious candidates and discover which, if any, are morally privileged.Only the assumption that there is some such standpoint to which wemight rise gives sense to the question, If ones convictions are onlyrelatively valid, why stand for them unflinchingly?72


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Thus, Rortys ironists have basic liberal commitments mainly becausethey find themselves with these commitments and they cannot escapethe conclusion that it is good to have them.

If this reading is correct, it shows that Rorty has a thoughtfulresponse to those who claim that ironists cannot be committed toliberalism because they perceive the contingency of their liberal con-victions. Liberal ironists simply find themselves with their liberalconvictions, presumably even after reflecting about why they shouldkeep them. It is not as if they could ascend to an ahistorical perspec-tive, moreover, in order to assess the validity of their beliefs. So whatelse can they do except stand for their convictions, if these beliefs seemright to them? The fact that their convictions are contingent and onlyrelatively valid is no reason to aband

Rorty and Kierkegaard on Irony and Moral Commitment

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