Rorty on Dignity Humiliation and the Boundaries of the Moral Community - 210611
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Transcript of Rorty on Dignity Humiliation and the Boundaries of the Moral Community - 210611
DARWIN COLLEGE
UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE
RORTY ON DIGNITY, HUMILIATION AND THE
BOUNDARIES OF THE MORAL COMMUNITY
Lior Erez
June 2011
This dissertation is submitted for the
degree of Master of Philosophy
ii
This dissertation is the result of my own work and includes nothing which is the
outcome of work done in collaboration except where specifically indicated in the text.
This dissertation (excluding notes and bibliography) contains 17,626 words.
iii
To Shiri
iv
Preface
This work is the product of an exciting and stimulating year in the MPhil course of
Political Thought and Intellectual History at the University of Cambridge, which has
truly exceeded all of my previous expectations. But it is also the end result of the four
years that has passed since a younger me randomly picked up Contingency, Irony and
Solidarity off the shelves of the Tel Aviv University library. I have since read much
more of Rorty's, but CIS still remains, in my opinion, his most challenging and
exciting book. In this dissertation, therefore, I see not only the conclusion of the
MPhil course but also of that initial reading and the years that followed it.
A few acknowledgements seem to be in order. I would like to thank the Cambridge
Overseas Trust for its generous scholarship, allowing me to pursue the course and the
financial peace of mind to do it properly. Dr Duncan Bell's supervision and support
were at the highest level of professionalism, and his openness to my ideas allowed me
the freedom to fruitfully explore new directions. I would also like to thank the
exceptional group of students in the MPhil course, and particularly Joseph Corey,
Simon Paul, Maia Woolner and Yaping Zhang, for their helpful comments and
insights. Finally, I would like to thank my wife Shiri, to whom this dissertation is
dedicated, for her endless patience and support. I would not be where I am today if
not for her.
v
List of Abbreviations
AOC Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America
CIS Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity
CP Consequences of Pragmatism
EHO Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers, Volume 2
ORT Objectivity, Relativism and Truth: Philosophical Papers, Volume 1
PCP Philosophy as Cultural Politics: Philosophical Papers, Volume 4
PMN Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature
PSH Philosophy and Social Hope
TP Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, Volume 3
vi
Contents
Preface........................................................................................................................... iv
List of Abbreviations ..................................................................................................... v
Contents ........................................................................................................................ vi
Introduction .................................................................................................................... 1
Chapter 1: Dignity without Foundations........................................................................ 6
1.1. Human Dignity as Human Uniqueness ............................................................... 6
1.2 Non-reductionist Physicalist .............................................................................. 12
1.3 Self-Creation and Human Dignity ..................................................................... 15
Chapter 2: Liberalism, Humiliation and Irony ............................................................. 25
2.1 Leaving People Alone ........................................................................................ 25
2.2. The Worst Thing We Can Do ............................................................................ 28
2.3 Irony and the Place of the Intellectual in Rorty's Liberal Utopia ..................... 37
Chapter 3: The Boundaries of Solidarity ..................................................................... 47
3.1 Between Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism ........................................................ 47
3.2 Love and Money ................................................................................................. 54
Conclusion ................................................................................................................... 64
Bibliography ................................................................................................................ 67
1
Introduction
Four years after his death, Richard Rorty (1931-2007) is now widely acknowledged as
one of the most influential figures in twentieth-century American philosophy. Once
praised as 'the most interesting philosopher in the world today' by Harold Bloom,
Rorty had a stellar academic career, holding professorships at Princeton, the
University of Virginia and Stanford, as well as being one of the first recipients of the
prestigious MacArthur Fellowship. His seminal 1979 book, Philosophy and the
Mirror of Nature, has challenged the very conception of philosophy as was
universally accepted by Anglo-American philosophers. He helped revive interest in
the philosophical tradition of pragmatism, and was a pioneer in American philosophy
for his readings of previously ignored continental writers such as Heidegger, Gadamer
and Derrida. In the obituary he published after Rorty's death, Jürgen Habermas wrote:
'Among contemporary philosophers, I know of none who equalled Rorty in
confronting his colleagues – and not only them – over the decades with new
perspectives, new insights and new formulations'.1
From the mid-1980s until his passing, Rorty moved beyond his interest in
epistemology and philosophy of the mind to broader philosophical questions. He
began considering the implications of his philosophical critique on questions of
politics, law, morality, religion and education. This period is marked not only by a
change in Rorty's subject matter, but also by an institutional change (his transfer from
the position of Professor of Philosophy at Princeton to that of Professor of Humanities
at Virginia, and later Professor of Comparative Literature at Stanford), and his
1 Jürgen Habermas, 'Philosopher, Poet and Friend' in Süddeutsche Zeitung (June 11, 2007). English
translation by http://www.signandsight.com/features/1386.html.
2
growing publications in more popular and non-philosophical outlets, such as Dissent,
London Review of Books and The New York Times. Rorty, in other words, became a
public intellectual. But moving from the confines of academic philosophy to the
public sphere rendered Rorty a target for harsh criticism. As Richard Bernstein writes,
'Rorty has offended and antagonized just about everyone: the political left and right,
traditional liberals, feminists, and both analytic and Continental philosophers. His
"strong" readings of key figures strike many as idiosyncratic creations of his own
fantasies. He has been accused of being "smug," "shallow," "elitist," "priggish,"
"voyeuristic," "insensitive," and "irresponsible… Rorty-bashing is rapidly becoming a
new culture industry'.2
The view of Rorty's political writings Bernstein presents might suggest that he has
nothing to contribute to contemporary political theory. In this dissertation, I ask
whether there is anything in Rorty's political thought that can be saved. While I agree
that Rorty's work is not what one considers systematic political philosophy – his
treatment of questions of citizenship, rights and justice is meagre at best – I
nonetheless believe that his theory offers important insights to liberal political theory.
In the following sections, I intend to explore Rorty's contributions to aspects of liberal
political theory. While each chapter can be seen as making an independent argument,
the overarching assertion I would like to pursue in this dissertation is that through a
close reading of Rorty's oeuvre, with a focus on his account of the self, one can find
insightful comments on questions of human dignity, humiliation and
cosmopolitanism.
2 Richard Bernstein, 'Rorty's Liberal Utopia' in The New Constellation: Ethical-Political Horizons of
Modernity/Postmodernity (Cambridge: Polity, 1991): p. 260.
3
The first chapter of this dissertation, entitled 'Dignity without Foundations', serves as
a background for the following chapters. I offer a critical analysis of Rorty's writing
on the self in the context of the human dignity debate. In the first section, I present the
theoretical framework for a discussion of human dignity as human uniqueness, as
exemplified in the writings of classical and contemporary writers. After presenting the
contemporary debate on human dignity, I then argue that Rorty cannot be neatly
placed in either of the opposing camps, and that his position needs to be read through
his interpretation of Darwin, Nietzsche and Freud. It is my contention that Rorty
presents an account of human dignity which is continuous with the accepted
contemporary account, while being localised and historicised to a specific moral
community.
The second chapter discusses Rorty's liberal utopia. As I wish to show, Rorty's
'postmodern bourgeois liberalism' has a dual mission: allowing maximal freedom to
the members of the political unit while avoiding, or minimising, cruelty. While critics
have often seen these two goals as contradictory, I argue that through Rorty's account
of the self one can construct a coherent reading of Rorty's political vision. To make
this argument, I offer my own readings to Rorty's basic terms – 'cruelty', 'irony' and
'humiliation'. Rorty's use of these terms is idiosyncratic, and I wish to demonstrate
through engaging with Rorty's critics that they have often been misread. Finally, I
offer a reformulation for some of Rorty's arguments that I believe fit better with his
general theory.
In the third and final chapter I discuss Rorty's vision of a cosmopolitan political
community. My argument in this chapter is directed against two common criticisms of
4
Rorty levelled by proponents of cosmopolitanism. First, that his political vision is
tainted with American ethnocentrism, and that he sees national borders as morally
relevant; and second, that he believes a global moral community is impossible or
undesirable. I will show, based on the arguments of the previous chapters and through
a reading of Rorty's later texts, why these critiques are based on a false reading of
Rorty. I then discuss the mechanisms through which Rorty suggests a global moral
community can be achieved.
It is important to clarify that some issues regarding Rorty's thought and politics are
not discussed in the following chapters, due to matters of scope and relevance. The
first two paragraphs of this introduction notwithstanding, this work will not discuss
Rorty's biography or the changing themes of his work.3 My working premise is that,
at least from Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Rorty's thought can be seen as a
whole, and while subject to modifications, does not undergo major transformations.
The validity of Rorty's interpretations of other thinkers is another question that is
beyond the scope of this work. As implied in Bernstein's quote above, Rorty's
readings of thinkers like Dewey, Freud, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Rawls and Derrida are
idiosyncratic and often criticised. While this is a fascinating research question, for the
purposes of this work I will focus on Rorty's arguments as given, without trying to
compare it to, for example, the pragmatist tradition or continental interpretations of
Nietzsche. I only discuss Rorty's interpretation of other thinkers where this is
necessary for elucidating his argument, as in the case of his reading of Shklar as
3 A good biography of Rorty can be found in Neil Gross, Richard Rorty: The Making of an American
Philosopher (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). It is worth pointing out, however, that
Gross's account stops at 1982, and thus does not include the majority of works discussed in this
dissertation.
5
discussed in chapter 2. Where relevant, critiques of Rorty's interpretation are
referenced in footnotes.
The purpose of this work is to contribute to the scholarship on Rorty's works. While
several well-researched monographs on Rorty's philosophy and political thought do
exist4, in general, they do not focus on Rorty's contribution to the idea of a global
moral community, nor do they place special emphasis on his account of the self.
These works, while excellent in their own right, often focus on Rorty's writing up to
the early 1990s, mainly Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, but usually do not take
into account Rorty's modifications and expansions of his philosophy in, for example,
his Amnesty lectures on human rights, his writings on feminism, or the essays
collected in the posthumously published Philosophy as Cultural Politics. It is my
contention that reading Rorty's corpus as a whole, including his writings of the 1990s
and 2000s, offer a new perspective for reading Rorty and understanding his relevance.
4 See mainly David Hall, Richard Rorty: Prophet and Poet of the New Pragmatism (Albany, NY: SUNY
Press, 1994) ; Norman Geras, Solidarity in the Conversation of Humankind: The Ungroundable
Liberalism of Richard Rorty (London: Verso, 1995); Matthew Festenstein, Pragmatism and Political
Theory: From Dewey to Rorty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Eric Gander, The Last
Conceptual Revolution: a Critique of Richard Rorty's Political Philosophy (Albany, NY : State University
of New York Press, 1999); Gideon Calder, Rorty's Politics of Redescription (Cardiff: University of Wales
Press, 2007); Michael Bacon, Richard Rorty: Pragmatism and Political Liberalism (Plymouth: Lexington,
2007).
6
Chapter 1: Dignity without Foundations
My purpose in this chapter is to offer a new interpretation of Richard Rorty's position
on human dignity. I will first present the two opposing camps in the contemporary
debates, and establish the premise that human dignity is in essence a question of
human uniqueness, of a special moral status of humans. I will then argue that Rorty
cannot be fitted neatly into either of the camps. While he has explicitly denied appeals
to human dignity, I would argue that through his theory of the self one can formulate
a conception of human moral uniqueness, and thus of human dignity. Rorty's position
is unique, however, as his version of dignity is localised and historicised.
1.1. Human Dignity as Human Uniqueness
I will begin by clarifying what I mean by ‘dignity’. In everyday language, and indeed,
in moral philosophy, the distinction between dignity and other related terms – for
example, honour or respect – is unclear. Dignity is often used to denote two different
things. Sometimes dignity is used as if implying a graduated scale of character, as if it
can increase or decrease in accordance with one's deeds. For example, we can think
that committing a crime diminishes someone dignity, or that an act of virtue increases
one’s dignity. Alternatively, dignity is thought of as a status, in the same way that we
think of being a judge or a king as a dignified status. I prefer using the second
definition – dignity as status – and separate it from the first use, which might more
appropriately be called 'honour'.5
5 '[T]he sense of 'dignity' in which all humans are said to have equal dignity is not the same as that in
which it may be said of some person that he lacks dignity or that he behaves without dignity (…). This kind of dignity is one that humans may occurrently exhibit, lack, or lose, whereas the dignity in which all humans are said to be equal is a characteristic that belongs permanently and inherently to every
human as such'. Alan Gewirth, Human Rights: Essays on Justification and Applications (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1982): pp. 27-28.
7
To understand what dignity means in this context, it is important to notice that the
term actually raises two separate, albeit related, questions.6 First, there is an
ontological question: is dignity to be understood as status, quality, or a right of the
dignified? Who can be considered to have dignity, and who is excluded? This
question is crucial, specifically for the later development of the idea of human dignity,
as it is clear that to make a claim about human dignity one must deny non-humans
(whatever that might entail) that dignity. The second question is a moral one: if we
recognise an agent as having dignity, what kind of behaviour must such recognition
elicit?7 How should we act when dealing with a being which is dignified, as opposed
to one who is not? While these two questions are more often than not dealt with
separately, it is clear that the moral is preconditioned by the ontological in this case.
Our understanding of what dignity means, and who is to be included within the
boundaries of dignity, is of great importance for answering what would consist of
non-moral behaviour towards them. In the following section, I outline a brief sketch
of the idea of human dignity in relation to these two questions.
Originally, dignity signified a certain elevated status in a hierarchical system. The
English word ‘dignity’ derives from the Latin word dignitas used in Roman law,
meaning a social status related to an elevated position or rank. While being a social
status, dignitas did not necessarily connote a moral status. Indeed, one could have
dignitas, that is, to hold high office, without being excellent, or worthy of esteem,
6 See George Kateb, Human Dignity (Cambridge, MA: HUP, 2011).
7 Oscar Schachter, 'Human Dignity as a Normative Concept', The American Journal of International
Law 77, no. 4 (October 1983): pp. 848-854.
8
although the ideas are related.8 So this ancient concept of dignity answers the
ontological question as follows: dignity should be understood as derived from a social
status, of particular bearers of a political office, and is normally separated from the
moral question.
This aristocratic notion of dignity is later universalised, or at least potentially
universalised, to create what could be properly named human dignity. Cicero uses the
notion dignitas to illustrate the idea of a dignity equally shared by mankind, and thus
expands the boundaries of this former, aristocratic concept, detaching it from the
particular political offices to which it was previously connected. It seems to me
Jeremy Waldron is correct in arguing that this move is to be understood not as the
elimination of rank, but as its universalisation – all humans now share the same moral
stratum previously reserved for the aristocracy.9 It is important to note, though, that
the concept still retains its hierarchical aspects. The idea Cicero was advancing is that
of humans as being superior to the brutes, or to nature more generally. What separates
human beings from animals, what makes them unique and therefore the bearers of this
universal dignitas, is their capacity for reason. Herein lies the link to the moral aspect
of human dignity: man must realise that being endowed with reason, unlike animals
that have only passions, holds him dutiful to live with his lower desires governed by
his reason.10
8 Oliver Sensen, 'Human Dignity in Historical Perspective: The Contemporary and Traditional
Paradigms', European Journal of Political Theory 10, no. 1 (2011): pp. 71-91. 9 Jeremy Waldron, Dignity, Rank, and Rights: The 2009 Tanner Lectures at UC Berkeley (New York
University School of Law, 2009). 10
Cicero, De Officiis. translated. W. Miller. (Cambridge, MA: HUP ,1913). See Sensen, pp. 76-78.
9
Human dignity, therefore, was conceptualised as a universal rank shared by all
humans, placing them as superior to animals by the power of reason. This theme
carried on to later accounts of human dignity, with only slight differences. Medieval
Christian theology substituted teleological nature for God. Human dignity lies in
being created in the image of God, and is therefore derivative of God’s own dignity as
the paradigmatic king. In the ‘great chain of being’, the cosmological hierarchy of the
Church ranked by the ability to reason, man was ranked higher than inanimate objects
and animals, and lower than angels and God, the latter being thought of as pure
reason. Being created in the image of God, man had the ability to transcend his bodily
desires through reason. For Renaissance philosopher Pico Della Mirandola, human
dignity consisted in having no fixed place in the chain of being, and the ability to
move up and down in the hierarchy, acting more angel-like or animal-like. As in the
Church’s account, Pico saw humans as superior to animals in their capacity for
reason, and while it is man’s duty to strive to act rationally, his free will allows him
not to use this capability.11
A similar (although not identical) account is famously
given by Kant. In The Groundwork to the Metaphysic of Morals, Kant argues that the
inherent dignity of the subject lies in its free will: Kant captured this idea in terms of
the 'worthiness of every rational subject to be a law-giving member in the kingdom of
ends'.12
The contemporary view of human dignity sees it similarly as an inherent attribute of
members of the human species. However, unlike the traditional view (Kant partially
excluded), human dignity is more often connected to human rights rather than duties.
11
Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola, Oration on the Dignity of Man. Trans. A. Robert Caponigri
(Washington DC: Regnery, 1956). See Sensen, pp. 79-80. 12
Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (ed. Mary Gregor), (Cambridge: CUP:
1997): p. 46.
10
Such views are exemplified by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, stating
that 'recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all
members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the
world'.13
Prominent theorists of human rights incorporate the concept of human
dignity into their defense of human rights. Alan Gewirth, whose theory is based
predominantly on Kant’s, has defined inherent human dignity as both the foundation
for human rights and their main telos. For Gewirth, human dignity is linked to
'human's possession of reason and will', and 'the basis of this dignity is the dignity
inherent in all normal human beings as having these general capacities, directly
reflected in their purposive actions and resulting judgments of worth'.14
Contemporary conceptions of human dignity are different from classical ones in many
respects, especially in their attempt to find non-religious foundations for human
dignity and in their egalitarianism. Nevertheless, there is still one major similarity that
is important to the present discussion. In the bulk of contemporary human dignity
theory, one can still find an emphasis on the superiority of humans over nature due to
inherent mental capabilities. A recent book by George Kateb exemplifies both of
these aspects, claiming that they reinforce each other. He defines human dignity on
two levels, egalitarian and hierarchical. In the first level, the dignity of the human
individual which is shared equally by all humans; and in the second, the dignity of the
human species as superior to other beings. The ontological question – where is the
boundary beyond which dignity stops – is prior to the moral question. The concept of
13
Universal Declaration of Human Rights (http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/) 14
Alan Gewirth, 'Human Dignity as the Basis of Rights' in Michael Meyer and William Parent (eds.),
The Constitution of Rights: Human Dignity and American Values (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1992): p. 26.
11
human dignity is used to set the boundaries of personhood, to determine who is to be
included morally.
It would be false, of course, to assume from the partial account provided above that
contemporary theorists are in complete agreement regarding the scope, definition or
usefulness of human dignity. In the public debate regarding stem cell research, human
cloning and abortion, it has become common for those who argue against these
practices to resort to claims of inherent human dignity. In response, one can find
arguments against the validity of the concept of human dignity, suggesting it as utterly
useless, too narrowly or broadly defined, or morally dangerous. Peter Singer, for
example, has often argued that the idea of intrinsic dignity shared by all humans but
not by non-human animals is unfounded. The boundary set by the concept of dignity
is false; it is merely a residue of the Christian idea of the 'great chain of being' that
should be discarded.15
Similarly, Steven Pinker argues in a provocatively titled essay
against the 'stupidity of human dignity', and Ruth Macklin argues that human dignity
is a useless concept.16
This position can be summarised as follows: there is no morally
relevant sense in which all human beings can be uniquely distinguished from other
living beings. All that should matter with respect to morality is the ability to feel pain
and pleasure, which is shared by humans and animals alike. As Singer argues, the
boundary of moral consideration should be set in a different manner than the idea of
human dignity dictates: wider, to include animals (or at least primates); narrower, to
exclude the unborn or the comatose; or a complex combination of the two. Human
beings are not morally unique.
15
Peter Singer, Practical Ethics (Cambridge: CUP, 1980): pp. 48-71. 16
Steven Pinker, 'The Stupidity of Dignity', The New Republic, 12 May 2008; Ruth Macklin, 'Dignity is a
Useless Concept', British Medical Journal 327 (2003): pp. 1419-20
12
1.2 Non-reductionist Physicalist
We can now turn to Rorty’s position on human dignity. As we have seen, the debate
over human dignity is fundamentally a question of boundaries – what makes human
beings unique? In the schematic overview of the opposing schools of thought I
suggested above, this question is the deciding factor. One camp, broadly defined by
the religious and secular advocates of human dignity, argues for the uniqueness of
human beings, a certain spiritual or mental capacity that separates them from other
animals. This capacity or intrinsic trait is what makes humans worthy of special
consideration, to be treated as ends and not as means, to be seen as having certain
human rights, etc. In the 'Darwinian' camp, the boundary between human and non-
human animals is far less clear. Human beings are just one more species of animal.
Their mental capacities might be impressive in comparison to other animals, but are
morally irrelevant or at least only marginally relevant. Is it possible to place Rorty in
either of these camps? What answer might he give to the question of human
uniqueness, which is essentially the question of human dignity?
It is tempting to see Rorty as belonging to the latter camp. He has explicitly said that
he is denying that human beings possess 'something distinctly "human", an extra
added ingredient, a description of which can be used to explain, for example, why
they have dignity more than mere value'.17
Elsewhere, he praises Darwin for 'arguing
out' most intellectuals from the view that human beings contained that 'special little
ingredient'.18
Darwin’s theory of evolution, says Rorty, has created a new narrative for
us to understand ourselves: no longer created in God’s image, but simply an
17
Richard Rorty, 'Response to Kate Soper' in Matthew Festenstein and Simon Thompson (eds.),
Richard Rorty: Critical Dialogues (Cambridge: Polity, 2001): p. 130. 18
'Human Rights, Rationality and Sentimentality', TP: p. 174.
13
intelligent animal, adapting to its surrounding like all other beings. Philosophers have
tried in the past to find something that is common to all humans and unique to them.
Yet Rorty argues that this is a futile attempt, as 'all we share with all other humans is
the same thing we share with all other animals – the ability to feel pain'.19
In his
earlier writings, he seems to go even further and argue for a materialistic
understanding of humans, replacing utterances such as 'I am sad' or 'I want cake' with
'my C-fibers are stimulated'.20
By this reading, Rorty seems to be saying that there is
nothing to distinguish between human beings and animals, and that we can rid
ourselves of the concept of intrinsic human dignity.
I want to argue, however, that Rorty’s position cannot be understood in this manner.
While Rorty would be definitely opposed to the idea of human dignity that is
derivative of divine dignity, or to any such 'metaphysical' entities that educe such
dignity, he nevertheless has an account of what makes humans morally unique, and
therefore, I argue, of human dignity. Rorty’s account is parallel to the accounts of
human dignity described above, albeit taking a distinct position in the debate by
insisting on it being historically situated. It is therefore important to understand that
his acceptance of materialism does not negate a discussion of mental states, and that
he is in fact not arguing that human beings are merely physical; And secondly, that for
the purposes of the moral discourse, he sees humans as uniquely distinct from animals
and objects.
Rorty’s approach towards materialism has changed slightly throughout his career. In
his early writings in the 1960s and 1970s, he was supportive of 'eliminative
19
CIS, p. 177. 20
See PMN, pp. 70-88.
14
materialism', that is, the position arguing that the talk of feels, wants and will – i.e.,
‘folk psychology’ – is redundant, as human behaviour can be explained through the
natural sciences. In his 1965 essay, 'Mind-Body Identity, Privacy and Categories',
Rorty's theory appeared to openly endorse earlier conceptions of eliminative
materialism offered by Sellars, Quine and Feyerabend, suggesting that sensations do
not actually exist and that they are nothing but brain processes.21
This reduction of the
mental to the neurological is indeed in line with arguing that the idea of a privileged
human mind is obsolete.
Yet Rorty later developed a more subtle approach to this question, which shaped his
theory of the self and later his moral and political theory. Influenced by Donald
Davidson, he began to argue for a 'nonreductive physicalism'. This position is
physicalist in the sense that it still suggests that we see human beings as physical
objects in causal relation with their physical environment. However, mentalistic terms
are not less valid than the physicalistic ones, they are not epiphenomena or illusions
blocking our view from our ‘true’ physical selves. Instead, talk of mental states, or
souls, or demons, or any other non-physical description of human behaviour, should
be accepted as just that – another description, that can be more or less useful for a
particular purpose.22
Rorty wants to present this view as non-reductive, because it
renders the question 'can the mental be reduced to the physical?' pointless. Sometimes
it can, and sometimes it cannot. In a more recent paper, commenting on Steven
Pinker, Rorty argues that as philosophy needs to rid itself of its ‘physics-envy’, and
withdraw from metaphysical questions, science (in that specific case, neuroscience) is
21
Richard Rorty, 'Mind-Body Identity, Privacy, and Categories', The Review of Metaphysics 19, no. 1
(1965): pp. 24-54. 22
'Non-Reductive Physicalism', ORT, pp. 124-6.
15
of no assistance in questions of morality.23
It is false to argue, then, that Rorty sees no
place for the idea of human uniqueness because of his materialistic position. This
sense of uniqueness, and as a result of dignity, can only be conceptualised in an
alternative description of what humans are.
1.3 Self-Creation and Human Dignity
Rorty’s alternative description of what human beings are, his theory of the self, is
again very much influenced by his reading of Darwin (as understood by the early
pragmatists James and Dewey)24
as well as by his readings of Nietzsche and Freud. In
an article titled 'Dewey between Hegel and Darwin', Rorty argues that Darwin could
be read as naturalising Hegel, dispensing with metaphysical claims about rationality
while allowing for a narrative of change. This change can be understood as an endless
series of accidental mutations, of which some are better able to respond to the
challenges of nature than others. What we humans do and are, he argues, 'is
continuous with what amoebas, spiders, and squirrels do and are'.25
Rorty uses this
Darwinian insight, through his reading of Donald Davidson, to de-divinise and
naturalise language. Language should be understood not as a privileged way of
representing reality, but as the use of sentences for the purpose of solving problems
through a cooperative effort. Language, therefore, is a tool for survival used by
humans in the same way other species use capabilities and tools such as night vision,
migration and hibernation to cope with changes in their environment. If language is at
all a break in the continuity between humans and other species, it is only insofar as it
is a tool that humans have at their disposal, and animals do not. Thus, for Rorty,
23
Richard Rorty, 'Philosophy-envy' Daedalus 133, no. 4 (2004): pp. 18–24 24
See John Dewey, The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy, And Other Essays in Contemporary
Thought (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1910). 25
'Dewey between Hegel and Darwin', TP, p. 295.
16
language is not a divine component separate from the natural world, but part of our
'animality'.
The 'animality' of the human species, however, should not necessitate a deterministic
view of what human beings can make of themselves. On the contrary, Rorty
celebrates Darwin as a great contributor to the anti-authoritarian motif in pragmatism.
With the recognition of the human species’ 'full-fledged animality' and a naturalised
theory of the creation of life, Darwin allowed us to dispense with the search for a non-
natural cause for life on earth, as well as the search for a non-human purpose for
human life. Thanks to Darwin, says Rorty, 'it became possible to believe that nature is
not leading up to anything – that nature has nothing in mind'.26
Rorty compares the
effect of Darwin’s theory to that of Copernicus, and argues that we should not see
their decentring effects on humans – no longer the centre of the universe, no longer
the apex of creation – as degrading, but as empowering. The mechanised theories of
the universe 'meant that the world in which human beings lived no longer taught them
anything about how they should live'.27
Relieved from all non-human authority, with
no transcendent standards or ends to aspire to, we humans find ourselves radically
free to invent the purpose of human life for ourselves.
Rorty’s reading of Darwin, however, still does not provide an answer of how this
radical freedom might be expressed. For that purpose, Rorty turns to Nietzsche’s
26
PSH, p. 266. 27
'Freud and Moral Reflection', EHO: p. 145.
17
aestheticised philosophy.28
What we can learn from Nietzsche, he argues, is that it is
pointless to try and discover a true essence of the human self. Since there is no
transcendental authority, no intrinsic meaning or purpose to human lives, this attempt
will be futile. Instead, Rorty’s Nietzschean view of the self is as a 'centerless web of
historically conditioned beliefs and desires', rather than a pre-existent entity that ‘has’
these beliefs and desires.29
The challenge for humans is not therefore to discover their
‘true’ core – this would be impossible – but to create a description of their experience,
of their beliefs and passions that would form a coherent narrative. Nietzsche’s
greatness was in that he did not succumb to nihilism, and did not forfeit humans’
possibility of giving their life meaning. What he did reject was that this was an act of
discovery, rather than of creation. Self-knowledge, for Nietzsche, means self-
creation.30
Self-creation is a dialectical process, in the sense that for a person to be truly able to
redescribe her life as a meaningful narrative, she must first accept the contingency and
meaninglessness of it. In Nietzsche’s aestheticised view of life as art, or literature,
only the poet can truly appreciate the radical freedom offered by contingency, as it is
first crucial for him to recognise the aesthetic possibilities opened up by there not
being any essence of the self. This is, of course, an extremely difficult task that is not
open to everyone. While the poets are able to recognise their own contingency, the
rest of humanity are 'doomed to remain philosophers, to insist that there really is
28
For critiques of Rorty's appropriation of Nietzsche, see Daniel Conway. 'Thus Spoke Rorty: The
Perils of Narrative Self-Creation'. Philosophy and Literature 15, no.1 (1991): pp. 103-110; Lutz Ellrich,
'Richard Rorty’s Pragmatic Appropriation of Nietzsche' in Manfred Putz (ed.) Nietzsche in American
Literature and Thought (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1995):pp. 297-312. 29
ORT, 113-126, and cf. CIS 23-44. Rorty later borrows from Dennett the depiction of the self as a 'centre of narrative gravity'. See Daniel Dennett, 'The Self as a Center of Narrative Gravity' in Frank Kessel, Pamela Cole and Dale Johnson (eds.) Self and Consciousness: Multiple Perspectives. (Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum: 1992): pp. 103-115. 30
CIS, p. 27.
18
only... one true description of the human situation, one universal context of our
lives'.31
Rorty ascribes the popularity of grand, universalising narratives such as
religion, philosophy and scientific reductionism to the seemingly innate desire to
somehow transcend the contingent. The poet’s recognition of his own radically
idiosyncratic contingencies, on the other hand, grants him the ‘artistic license’ to unite
those different pieces together in an original and beautiful manner.
Rorty differentiates between 'strong' and 'weak' poets, a distinction that he borrows
from Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence. The weak poet’s creation is nothing
but imitation, a footnote to the greats who wrote before him. The strong poet, on the
other hand, is in constant terror that his most foundational beliefs and ideas – what
Rorty calls his 'final vocabulary' – might be described by the criteria of others. He
seeks to somehow weave those possibilities and various redescriptions of his
predecessors together into a beautiful, coherent narrative – one that is not simply an
inherited replica, but truly his own. 'To fail as a poet,' writes Rorty, 'is to accept
somebody else’s description of oneself, to execute a previously prepared program, to
write, at most, elegant variations on previously written poems,' while to succeed as a
poet, on the other hand, 'would be to tell a story about one’s causes in a new
language'.32
Rorty cites a quote from William Coleridge that illustrates what
Nietzsche, as an exemplar of a strong poet, sought to do: to create the taste by which
he will be judged, which is the one and only poetic achievement.
It is this poetic achievement, the redescription of one’s contingent set of beliefs and
desires in an original and creative narrative, which is Rorty’s equivalent for human
31
CIS, p. 28. 32
CIS, p. 28.
19
moral autonomy and dignity. Rorty adopts Nehamas’s interpretation of the
Nietzschean idea of eternal reoccurrence to make this point. This concept first appears
in section 341 of Nietzsche’s The Gay Science:
What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest
loneliness and say to you: 'This life as you now live it and have lived it, you
will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be
nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and every
sigh and everything unutterably small or great on your life will have to return
to you, all in the same succession and sequence… Would you not throw
yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or
have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have
answered him: 'You are a god and never have I heard anything more
divine.'…how well disposed would you have to become toward yourself and
to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation
and seal? to create a life which is what you had wanted them to be, to become
who you are – 'thus I willed it'.33
Rorty, following Nehamas, takes this passage to mean that the ‘eternal reoccurrence’
is not part of Nietzsche’s historical or cosmological theory, if he had one.
Alternatively, it is a moral imperative. The full human life, the life that is autonomous
and dignified, is that in which every act and belief can be described by the person
(poet) as integral to his narrative of meaning. As the self is nothing more than the web
of contingent beliefs and desires of one’s life experience, willingness to repeat one’s
life unchanged is to approve of oneself. The possibility of redescribing one’s life
narrative in a coherent and original manner – to substitute 'thus I willed it' for 'it was'
– is to reaffirm one’s autonomy, and thus one’s humanity.34
In this Nietzschean
account, to fail as a poet is to fail as a human being.
Nietzsche, therefore, provides an account of a dignified life which is the result of the
radical freedom of antifoundationalism. The problem with this account for Rorty lies
33
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (ed. Bernard Williams). Cambridge: CUP, 2001 [1882]: pp. 194-
195. 34
See Alexander Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature (Cambridge, MA: HUP, 1985): pp. 141-170.
20
in its elitism. In Nietzsche’s description, it is only the selected few, those with the will
to power to describe the world and themselves by their own terms, which truly matter.
Not everyone can be strong poet. Rorty, as a liberal, cannot accept this conclusion,
and in order to qualify Nietzsche's elitism he turns to the third thinker in his synthesis,
Freud. 'What makes Freud more useful and more plausible than Nietzsche', he argues,
'is that he does not relegate the vast majority of humanity to the status of dying
animals'.35
Freud’s importance lies in the democratisation of Nietzsche – giving every
person the ability to be one’s life poet. This he does through the universalisation of
the creative redescription, by 'giving everyone a subconscious'. Our personal and
contingent experience forms our personality, our beliefs and desires through this
internal poet, and it is through therapy that we can make sense of our idiosyncrasies
and see our lives as meaningful. Instead of having to create the taste through which
others will judge us, as Nietzsche’s poets do, we can all create personalized narratives
by making peace with our pasts and discovering the 'blind impresses' that have
influenced our psychological makeup. We do not have to be like the intellectuals –
those whose private obsessions happen to be public issues – to be able create
ourselves according to the standard of psychological health.36
A successful self-creation is one that offers a meaningful narrative of one’s life,
choices, and beliefs. A meaningful narrative, for Rorty, means a rational narrative, yet
‘rationality’ here should be taken to mean ‘justifiable’ rather than ‘true’. In fact, Rorty
denies that any description, of the self or of anything else, can be true, because as he
35
CIS, p. 35 36
As Richard King points out, 'Rorty takes the bite out of Freud’s description of the self . . . ,
trivializing the unconscious and minimizing intrapsychic conflict'. See Richard King, 'Self- realization and Solidarity: Rorty and the Judging Self' in Joseph Smith and William Kerrigan (eds.) Pragmatism's Freud (Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986): pp. 28-51.
21
contends truth is not ‘out there’. When we say that something is true, he argues, we
actually mean that it is justifiable to think so. Truth is nothing more than 'what our
peers will, ceteris paribus, let us get away with saying'.37
Self-creation, therefore, as
an act of justification of our beliefs, desires and actions to the moral community we
see ourselves part of. This is, for Rorty, the only relevant sense of rational agency:
'the sense in which rational agency is synonymous with membership in our moral
community', the people you count as 'your fellow human beings' .38
Rorty terms this
position on justification 'ethnocentrism'.39
'To be ethnocentric is to divide the human
race into people to whom one must justify one’s beliefs and the others', he argues,
'The first group – one’s ethnos – comprises those who share enough of one’s beliefs to
make fruitful conversation possible'.40
In the act of self-creation, therefore, we must
redescribe ourselves in a way that would be justifiable to the members of our moral
community.
Some critics argue that this position leaves us stuck with the 'unattractive choice'
between uncritical acceptance of the status quo or directionless permanent critique
(which would be, in Rorty terms, irrational or ‘mad’). 41
Admittedly, there are several
places where this extreme 'communitarian' strand in Rorty’s thought is indeed
apparent. Replying to Michael Sandel’s argument that we cannot see ourselves as
Kantian subject 'capable of constituting meaning on our own', and we should see the
37
PMN, p. 176. 38
'Human Rights, Rationality and Sentimentality', TP, p. 177. 39
I will discuss Rorty's ethnocentrism in more detail in section 3.1. 40
'Solidarity or Objectivity', ORT, p. 30. cf. CIS, pp. 189-198. For a comparison of Rorty's and
Gadamer’s hermeneutics, See Georgia Warnke, 'Rorty’s Democratic Hermeneutics' ' in Charles
Guignon and David R. Hiley (eds.) Richard Rorty (Cambridge: CUP, 2003): pp. 105-123. 41
Charles Guignon and David Hiley, 'Biting the Bullet: Rorty on Private and Public Morality' in Alan
Malachowski (ed.), Reading Rorty. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990): p. 359.
22
moral force of our loyalties and convictions to consist 'partly' in our moral
community, Rorty writes:
I would argue that the moral force... consists wholly in this fact, and that
nothing else has any moral force... There is no ground for such loyalties and
convictions save the fact that the beliefs and desires and emotions which
buttress them overlap those of lots of other members of the group with which
we identify... This means that the naturalized Hegelian analogue of 'intrinsic
human dignity' is the comparative dignity of a group with which a person
identifies herself.42
Yet the fact that the vocabulary available for our narratives of our selves is situated
within a specific moral community does not necessarily mean that it is a violation of
the radical freedom of self-creation. It seems to me reasonable to argue that Rorty is
not claiming that working within the vocabulary of one’s moral community is to
accept the way this vocabulary is currently put to use; All he argues is that self-
creation ex nihilo is impossible. 'No project of redescribing the world, no project of
self-creation through imposition of one's own idiosyncratic metaphoric, can avoid
being marginal and parasitic. Metaphors are unfamiliar uses of old words, but such
uses are possible only against the background of other old words beings used in old
familiar ways'.43
Our self-creation needs to be justifiable within the framework of our
moral community not because we literally present it to our peers for justification, but
because we ourselves inevitably work within this framework. When creating new
descriptions of ourselves, we want to be able 'to justify ourselves to our earlier
selves'44
, as well as to imagined future versions of ourselves. By 'naturalizing intrinsic
dignity', I understand Rorty to mean that dignity does not derive simply from the
ability to self-describe, but specifically by the ability to self-describe within the moral
framework of a community.
42
'Postmodernist Bourgeois Liberalism', ORT, p. 200 43
CIS, p. 41. 44
'Solidarity or Objectivity?', ORT, p. 29.
23
It is in this way that the connection between self-description, belonging to a moral
community and dignity becomes clearer. We have already seen that human dignity,
that is, the moral uniqueness of humans, is dependent on their ability to treat their
lives as an aesthetic project, and create a narrative of themselves which is meaningful
and coherent. It is only through membership in a moral community that it is possible
to describe one’s life in a meaningful way, because meaning is necessarily intertwined
with conversation, with justification within the moral framework. To be a full-fledged
member of a moral community, to be counted as a fellow person, is an act of double
negativity – it is to not belong, or think of oneself as belonging, to the group which
the moral community defines itself against.45
We allow our fellow members to self-
describe themselves, not because, contra Charles Taylor, they have an
epistemologically privileged understanding of themselves, but because their
understanding is morally privileged – because they are entitled, as human beings, to
explain their beliefs and actions in a way that would make sense to the rest of the
community. As Rorty puts it, 'The reason why we invite the moronic psychopath to
address the court before being sentenced is not that we hope for better explanations
than expert psychiatric testimony has offered. We do so because he is, after all, one of
us'.46
To conclude, my argument in this chapter is that Rorty can be read as providing an
account of human dignity, albeit one which is historically situated. Rorty denies the
idea of an ahistorical description of what human beings are like that is morally
relevant. 'There is no such thing as human nature....Nor is there any such thing as
alienation from one's essential humanity due to societal repression'. All there is, he
45
'Feminism and Pragmatism', TP, p. 224; Cf. 'Postmodernist Bourgeois Liberalism', ORT, p. 200 46
'Method, Social Science and Social Hope', CP, p. 202 (emphasis added).
24
argues, is 'the shaping of an animal into a human being by a process of socialization,
followed (with luck) by the self-individualization and self-creation of that human
being through his or her later revolt against that very process'.47
The dignity of a
person is the dignity of the moral community he belongs to, which consists of the
special features that distinguish it from other groups. The idea of universal human
dignity – of seeing all members of the human species as part of the moral community
– is for Rorty simply a special case of this conception, a contingent historical
consequence of the history of the West.48
In the following chapters of this paper, I
will discuss the implications of Rorty's theory of the self for his political thought –
first, on his account of the ideal liberal society; and second, on the possibility of a
globally inclusive moral community.
47
'Education as Socialization and as Individualization', PSH, p. 118. 48
Cf. 'Justice as a Larger Loyalty', PCP, p. 45.
25
Chapter 2: Liberalism, Humiliation and Irony
In a paper presented at a 1983 symposium on 'the social responsibility of
intellectuals', Rorty first laid down the foundations for his political thought, later
articulated in Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, Achieving our Country and his
essays in the 1990s and 2000s. He argued there that we should defend the institutions
and practices of 'the rich North Atlantic democracies' without recourse to the
philosophical views used to justify these institutions since their inception. Rorty terms
this view with what he admits to be, on first hearing, an oxymoronic name:
postmodernist bourgeois liberalism. I will attempt, in the following chapter, to show
how Rorty's theory of the self described in the previous chapter plays a prominent role
in his account of liberalism. First, I will address his view of the liberal society as a
society that 'leaves people alone'. Second, I will discuss his definition of a liberal as
someone who thinks that 'cruelty is the worst thing we can do', and his reduction of
cruelty to humiliation. Last, I will argue that one can explain the apparent
contradiction between the two positions through Rorty's account of irony and the role
of intellectuals in the liberal utopia.
2.1 Leaving People Alone
Rorty supports 'bourgeois' liberalism (which he takes to mean political, rather than
philosophical liberalism) because he believes it is a form of politics that allows people
the most freedom to pursue their own self-creation. His view of the ideal society is,
as he says, closer to what Oakeshott calls societas: 'a band of eccentrics collaborating
for purposes of mutual protection rather than a band of fellow spirits united by a
26
common goal'.49
For him, the prime value of liberalism is in its privileging of negative
liberty over any positive conception of self-realisation or empowerment, its 'ability to
leave people alone, to let them try out their private visions of perfection in peace'.50
The ideal liberal society is one 'which has no purpose except freedom'.51
Indeed, it is
Rorty's 'hunch' that with liberal democracy, 'Western social and political thought may
have had the last conceptual revolution it needs'.52
However, 'leaving people alone', as Rorty puts it, does not mean that the political
organisation's role is purely negative. A self-described social democrat, Rorty has
routinely stressed that the purpose of politics is to provide all the members of the
community not only with freedom from restrictions, but also with the proper
education, healthcare and material well-being that will make self-creation possible.
'The point of social organization is to let everybody have a chance at self-creation to
the best of his or her abilities, and that this goal requires, besides peace and wealth,
the standard "bourgeois freedoms"', he writes. 'It would be a conviction based on
nothing more profound than the historical facts which suggest that without the
protection of something like the institutions of bourgeois liberal society, people will
be less able to work out their private salvations, create their private self-images,
reweave their webs of belief and desire in the light of whatever new people and books
they happen to encounter'.53
So, while the public discourse in Rorty's liberal utopia
would have no direct role in the process of self-creation itself – a state which is too
heavily involved with its citizens self-creation is, for Rorty, on a slippery slope
49
CIS, p. 59. Cf. CIS, p. 84-85. 50
'The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy', ORT, p. 194. 51
CIS, p. 60. 52
CIS, p. 63 (emphasis in original) and passim. 53
CIS, p. 84-85.
27
towards totalitarianism – it would focus on how to balance between the needs
required for self-creation, as well as equalising opportunities for self-creation. Beyond
that, people will be left 'to use, or neglect, their opportunities'.54
This seems simple enough, yet things become more complicated when Rorty defines
the liberal as someone who thinks 'cruelty is the worst thing we can do', and that we
should not think that there is any social goal more important than avoiding cruelty.
This seems, at least prima facie, a contradiction of Rorty's avocation of negative
liberty. Indeed, this point was put forward by several of Rorty's critics. 'If the
eradication of cruelty is considered primary, then Rorty's guiding distinction is
untenable', writes Daniel Conway. 'If the sanctity of personal privacy is considered
primary, then the distinction stands, but cruelty is no longer the worst thing we do'.55
Rorty, nevertheless, seems convinced that 'Political liberalism is not merely 'a means
to provide the necessary stability and negative liberty for pursuit of our public aims',
because it is also a means to minimize suffering. But minimizing suffering and
maximizing negative liberty go hand in hand'.56
I argue that on this point, the critique
of Rorty is mostly a result of misreading. Avoiding cruelty and allowing freedom for
self-creation are not necessarily incompatible goals, and it is through Rorty's liberal
ironist that they can be seen as two sides of the same coin. To see why this is the case,
however, it is first necessary to unpack what Rorty means by 'cruelty'.
54
Ibid (emphasis added). 55
Daniel Conway,'Taking Irony Seriously: Rorty's Postmetaphysical Liberalism', American Literary
History 3, no.1 (1991): p. 207, fn. 3. Cf. Susan Bickford, 'Why We Listen to Lunatics: Antifoundational
Theories and Feminist Politics' in Hypatia, Vol. 8, No. 2 (Spring, 1993): p. 110 56
Richard Rorty, 'Response to Shusterman' in Critical Dialogues: p. 155 (emphasis added).
28
2.2. The Worst Thing We Can Do
Rorty's definition of a liberal as someone who thinks 'cruelty is the worst thing we can
do' is borrowed from Judith Shklar. In an essay called 'putting cruelty first', Shklar
first articulates what it means to see cruelty as summum malum:
To put cruelty first is to disregard the idea of sin as it is understood in revealed
religion. Sins are transgressions of a divine rule and offenses against God..
However, cruelty – the wilful infliction of physical pain on a weaker being in
order to cause anguish and fear – is a wrong done entirely to another creature.
When it is judged as the supreme evil it is judged so in and of itself, and not
because it signifies a denial of God or any higher norm.57
Some critics argue that Shklar's and Rorty's definition of a liberal is not very helpful.
If liberals are those who think cruelty is the worst thing we can do, they ask, are non
liberals those who think cruelty is not the worst thing we can do? Surely, people in
general (apart from sadists and psychopaths) do not approve of cruelty.58
This is
doubtlessly true, yet it is my contention that what we are to take from this definition is
that cruelty, in Shklar's terms, is understood as an evil which is purely human. Unlike
sin, it is a kind of evil that can be understood without recourse to an extrahuman
authority (be it God, Truth, etc.). Liberals, therefore, are for Shklar and Rorty people
who see morality in fully human terms, and therefore see causing another person to
suffer is the worst crime someone can commit.
Despite this shared premise, it would be wrong to assume Rorty and Shklar talk about
the same thing when they talk about cruelty. There is, I argue, a major difference
between their accounts, which relates to Rorty's theory of the self. Shklar, as we have
seen, defines cruelty as the infliction of physical pain. As I argued elsewhere, she
does so because she sees the ability to feel pain and the fear of pain as the only thing
57
Judith Shklar, Ordinary Vices (Cambridge, MA: HUP, 1984): pp. 8-9 (emphasis in original). 58
John Kekes, 'Liberalism and Cruelty', Ethics 106, No. 4 (Jul., 1996): pp. 834-844
29
which is shared by all humans.59
Insofar as Shklar discusses the infliction of non-
physical pain – what she terms 'moral cruelty' – she does so only as a secondary type
of cruelty, at best to be accounted for once physical cruelty has been alleviated, at
worse as a competing summum malum. When we are 'reduced to a choice between
physical and moral cruelty'60
, we have to make a hard but inevitable decision. If one
puts moral cruelty first, as Shklar interprets Nietzsche as doing, one is in danger of
inflicting physical pain on others in order to avoid it. On the other hand, those who
put physical cruelty first, as Shklar thinks liberals must do, should grudgingly accept
moral ambiguity as a lesser evil.
Rorty, on the other hand, seems to be mostly focused on cruelty as a synonym for
causing humiliation rather than inflicting physical pain. While all humans share the
ability to feel pain with the animals, he argues, they are unique in their susceptibility
to a special kind of pain: mental, symbolic or emotional pain, which Rorty calls
humiliation. Thomas McCarthy criticises Rorty on this point:
Rorty assures us that the only species universal is the ability to feel pain, to
which he sometimes adds the susceptibility to humiliation as a distinctive
human form of pain. Why not the ability to speak, act, think, work, learn,
interact, play roles, be guided by norms, have desires and feel feelings other
than humiliation?61
Are humans, in Rorty's account, to be thought of only as 'something that can be
humiliated'? This, I think, is an unfair reading of Rorty. It seems to me that
McCarthy's misinterpretation is a result of a failure to take into account Rorty's theory
of the self. As David Owen rightly points out (albeit as a critique of Rorty rather than
59
Lior Erez, Humiliation in Contemporary Liberal Political Thought (unpublished MPhil essay). 60
Shklar, Ordinary Vices, p. 41. 61
Thomas McCarthy, 'Ironist Theory as Vocation: a response to Rorty's Reply', Critical Inquiry 16, No.
3 (1990): p. 649.
30
a defence), 'to be susceptible of humiliation, one must have some minimal sense of
self-worth'.62
But if my reading of Rorty's account of the self is correct, it is through
there that Rorty conceptualises an idea of self-worth.
As I argued in the first chapter, Rorty sees humans as self-interpreting animals,
longing to give meaning to the contingencies of their lives through self-description.
Members of the community allow those who they see as their fellow human beings to
describe themselves, because they see them as fellow human beings. '[People] want to
be taken on their own terms – taken seriously just as they are and just as they talk'63
,
because that is the way their life can have meaning. So, Rorty argues
The best way to cause people long-lasting pain is to humiliate them by making
the things that seemed most important to them look futile, obsolete, and
powerless. Consider what happens when a child's precious possessions – the
little things around which he weaves fantasies that make him a little different
from all other children – are redescribed as 'trash'. Or consider what happens
when these possessions are made to look ridiculous alongside the possessions
of another, richer, child.64
There are, in my view, several things one can learn from this telling quote. It could be
understood as a potential answer to McCarthy's critique. It is true that human beings
are able to 'speak, act, think, work, learn, interact, play roles, be guided by norms,
have desires and feel feelings', yet it is important to notice that in Rorty's description
these activities only become meaningful within the framework of a narrative, of one's
self-description. When someone is humiliated – which is, for Rorty, when the
narrative of his actions and beliefs is redescribed as meaningless, or ugly, or
62
David Owen. 'The Avoidance of Cruely: Joshing Rorty on Liberalism, Scepticism and Ironism' in
Matthew Festenstein and Simon Thompson (eds.), Richard Rorty: Critical Dialogues. Cambridge:
Polity, 2001: p. 101. 63
CIS, p. 89. 64
Ibid. See Hall, 1994, pp. 126-127 for a discussion of humiliation as 'forced redescription'.
31
ridiculous – he is denied all other capabilities that are distinctively human.
Humiliation, in this sense, amounts to the denial of agency, of selfhood, of humanity.
The second point that this quote tells us about Rorty's account of cruelty is that he
drops the notion of intentionality that exists in Shklar. As we have seen, in Shklar's
definition cruelty is wilful; it is done with the purpose of eliciting pain and fear in the
victim. But we can learn from Rorty's description of cruelty, and especially from the
examples he chooses to illustrate it, that cruel acts don't have to be seen as cruel by
the perpetrator.65
Describing the child's toys as 'trash' might be done intentionally to
humiliate him or it might be done with the purpose of education in mind. More
obviously, the richer child with his more expensive toys is almost certainly not
playing with them with the intention of humiliating the poorer child. So cruelty for
Rorty is not necessarily a deliberate act (though it might be), but can also be the result
of ignorance, negligence or carelessness.66
Eric Gander argues that in this reformulation of Shklar, Rorty has taken one step
forward, two steps back. While he commends Rorty for dropping the intention to do
harm from the definition of cruelty, he argues that by including humiliation Rorty has
made the kind of liberalism he supports impossible. Gander argues that there is a
fundamental and unalterable tension between 'the Jeffersonian view of liberalism that
enjoins us to leave people alone... and Rorty's new injunction that we liberals must
65
It might be worth mentioning that in the essay 'liberalism of fear', published after CIS, Shklar also
dropped the intentionality of the agent from her definition of cruelty. Judith Shklar, 'The Liberalism of
Fear' in Stanley Hoffman (ed.), Political Thought and Political Thinkers. (Chicago, IL: University of
Chicago Press, 1998): pp. 3-21. 66
Cf. Avishai Margalit, The Decent Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), and
specifically part IV.
32
also refrain from humiliating each other'.67
While the avoidance of physical injury to
others is simply a matter of 'staying on the surface', he argues, the avoidance of
humiliation at all costs requires a positive act of offering respect on the other, and
possibly an altering of our own final vocabulary.
I agree with Gander that Rorty can be understood as contradicting himself on this
point. Indeed, on several points he does give the impression that 'humiliation, whether
intentional or not, is unacceptable in a liberal society... [and] presumably, one should
then attempt, as far as possible, to avoid those acts that produce humiliation'.68
It is
true that a society whose prime objective is to avoid humiliation would be, in a very
substantive sense, an anti-liberal society. Yet it seems to me that Rorty, despite the
fuzziness of his definitions, might be saved on this point. First, construed through
Rorty's theory of the self, humiliation should be understood separately from insult or
disrespect. In that sense, Rorty's previous example might be misleading, because it
could be seen as if any act that causes someone shame can be understood as
humiliation in the strong sense Rorty is referring to. Yet one should notice that in the
example of the child, it is not just that his toys were described as 'trash', or seemed
insignificant next to the other child. The point here, as I understand it, is that these
toys were important to his self-description, to the way he understand himself, and are
thus closer to his 'final vocabulary'. It is the important difference between ridiculing,
say, one's taste in music and one's religious beliefs.
But even after separating humiliation from lesser offences, it is still not clear that
Rorty means that we should avoid humiliation at any cost. On that point, it seems to
67
Gander, p. 78. 68
Gander, p. 82.
33
me that Rorty is in agreement with Shklar, when she argues that 'the only exception to
the rule of avoidance is the prevention of greater cruelties'.69
Rorty makes clear in his
later writings that it was never his intention to claim that the practice of democratic
politics could eliminate humiliation. Indeed, some aspects of a functioning liberal
democracy – allowing free speech, basic level of education, etc. – involve, at least to a
degree, humiliation in order to avoid future, greater humiliation.70
I agree with
Michael Bacon's claim that for Rorty, 'the avoidance of cruelty is the purpose of
public life, but it does not mean that individual instances of cruelty must (or indeed
should) always be avoided'.71
It is not that the religious fundamentalist, the white
supremacist or the radical atheist in Rorty's liberal utopia would be forbidden from
expressing their views, as Gander seems to suggest, but they will have to be prepared
to suffer the humiliation of their views being dismissed.72
This conception of humiliation, it is important to notice, does not say anything about
the contents of one's self-description. For what is common to humans, what is the
basis of solidarity for the liberal, is not a common truth or a common goal but 'a
common selfish hope, the hope that one's world – the little things around which one
has woven into one's final vocabulary – will not be destroyed'.73
Some of Rorty's critics have taken this to be in contradiction with his provocative
claim that there is no human nature. Norman Geras argues that Rorty's use of 'human
nature' is contradictory and evasive. That there is no human nature may appear to
69
Shklar, 'The Liberalism of Fear', p. 12. 70
'Response to David Owen' in Critical Dialogues, p. 112. 71
See Michael Bacon, 'A Defence of Liberal Ironism' Res Publica 11, No. 4 (2005): p. 421. 72
See Rorty's 'Response to David Owen' in Critical Dialogues, pp. 111-114. 73
CIS, p. 92.
34
mean that [1] there are no commonly shared traits among human beings, or [2] that
there are shared traits to all humans, but they are non distinctly human, or [3] to mean
that there are none which are morally relevant, or [4] that all people do not aspire, and
nor should they, to one very narrowly specified kind of goal, activity, or character.74
Geras grants Rorty the fourth thesis, but claims that in Rorty's own argument – that all
humans are susceptible to pain and as well as to a specific human pain (humiliation) –
one can find a rebuttal of the first three. He therefore argues that Rorty, in spite of
himself, does in fact assume a universal human nature.
While Geras is right in saying that Rorty's application of 'human nature' in the claim
'there is no human nature' is confusing, he is wrong to argue that Rorty's position
necessarily leads him to contradiction. Regarding the first two points, it seems simply
false to attribute to Rorty the notion that human beings have no unique traits beyond
what they share with animals. Rorty is not denying that humans are different from
animals in their ability to use language, but he is arguing against seeing this as
something that is morally relevant simpliciter. To claim that human beings are
different from animals in using language, he argues, is not any more essentialist than
saying that what differentiates animals from plants is their ability to move around.75
What does make human uniqueness morally relevant, as argued in the first chapter, is
their belonging to a moral community that provides meaning to their use of language.
While it is true that belonging to a moral community is something that is common to
74
Geras, pp. 47-64. Cf. Justin Cruickshank,. 'Ethnocentrism, Social Contract Liberalism and Positivistic-
Conservatism: Rorty's Three Theses on Politics', Res Publica 6 (2000): pp. 11-12; Simon Critchley,
'Deconstruction and Pragmatism – Is Derrida a Private Ironist or a Public Liberal?' in Chantal Mouffe
(ed.), Deconstruction and Pragmatism (London: Routledge, 1996): pp. 19-40; Calder, p. 125. 75
'Response to Shusterman' in Critical Dialogues, p. 155. Also see Bacon (2007), pp. 99-100.
35
all humans, this commonality cannot function the way Geras thinks human nature can
function, as a foundation for universal human solidarity.
We can now turn to ask why Rorty, in his appropriation of Shklar's notion of 'cruelty
as the worst thing we can do', focuses mainly on humiliation rather than on physical
pain. The argument I want to present here is that for Rorty, physical cruelty is
reducible to humiliation. First of all, it is important to notice that Rorty conflates 'pain'
with 'suffering', and thus obscures the fact that in his moral theory he means the latter
rather than the former. If we follow Rorty's theory of the self, it seems to me
reasonable to argue that pain in itself, that is, the stimulation of C-fibers that we
usually refer to as 'pain' in ordinary language, is morally meaningless for Rorty. 'Our
relation to the world, to brute power and naked pain, is not the sort of relation we
have to persons', he argues. 'Faced with the nonhuman, the non-linguistic, we no
longer have the ability to overcome contingency and pain by appropriation and
transformation, but only the ability to recognize contingency and pain'.76
But pain in
this non-linguistic sense has no moral meaning. As Rorty himself argues, our biology
only becomes morally relevant through the prism of language.77
But pain understood through language is very different from the kind of brute, naked
pain Rorty is describing in the passage above. To begin with, it is something we have
the ability to appropriate and overcome, or, in the terms of Rorty's theory of the self,
to incorporate as a meaningful part in our self-creation as part of our agency. Pain
might be universal, and while the instinct to avoid pain is natural, it is not intrinsically
76
CIS, p. 40 (emphasis in original). Cf. 'Texts and Lumps', ORT, p. 81: '[The pragmatist] see no way of
transferring this nonlinguistic brutality to facts'. 77
Cf. fn. 22 and 23 above.
36
normative. The Olympic athlete, or the soldier, might read the pain involved in her
exercises as a story of persistence, discipline and pride. A visit to the dentist is
(usually) painful, but most people see it as a normal and necessary routine to keep
healthy. Only the wrong kind of pain, the kind we cannot make sense of within our
life's story, can be called suffering.78
As Elaine Scarry writes, when we understand
pain through language we necessarily personify it, give it agency, even in cases where
such agency is imaginary, such as the virus causing us to be sick.79
But then we might
be able to give it meaning, to include it in our story of self-creation.
It is with intense physical pain, persistent suffering, that self-description becomes
impossible. The ability to self-create, to see one's life as a poem, is reserved to those
human lives that are 'not so racked by pain as to be unable to learn a language nor so
immersed in toil as to have no leisure in which to generate a self-description'.80
At this
point, suffering and humiliation converge. Rorty, following Scarry, takes torture as
the paradigmatic example of cruelty, and adopts the argument that the torturer's goal
is not just to cause physical pain, but to 'unmake' his victim's world. 'The worst thing
you can do to somebody', he writes, 'is not to make her scream in agony but to use
that agony in such a way that even when the agony is over, she cannot reconstitute
herself'.81
Humiliation, in the strong sense Rorty is giving this term, is worse than
simply inflicting physical pain. It is not only painful, but it also denies the victim the
ability to overcome the pain, to make it meaningful. For this reason, I argue, Rorty's
78
As Talal Asad reminds us, certain forms of inflicting physical pain are seen as legitimate in the
West, while others are not. Talal Asad, 'On Torture, or Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment.'
Veena Das, Arthur Kleinman & Margaret Lock (eds), Social Suffering (Berkley: University of California
Press, 1997): pp. 285-309. 79
Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: OUP, 1985): pp.
11-16. 80
CIS, p. 36. 81
CIS, p. 177.
37
appropriation of Shklar's imperative 'don't be cruel' focuses mostly on humiliation. It
is not that Rorty is oblivious to physical suffering, but he sees the destruction of
someone's self-description, of robbing him of the dignity of overcoming physical
pain, as a far worse evil.82
.
2.3 Irony and the Place of the Intellectual in Rorty's Liberal Utopia
While torture is for Rorty the paradigm of cruelty, he is more interested in cases in
which the silencing of suffering is done through the language and practices of the
community. Torture is humiliating in the sense that it is dehumanising, that it inflicts
such physical and mental pain on its victim to the point that he can no longer
redescribe and appropriate the pain. Equally, certain discourse regimes have the same
effect, as they marginalise certain types of behaviours or people, forcing on them a
description which is demeaning or deprived of meaning. For the African slave in the
southern plantation, or the closet homosexual in contemporary Iran, the hegemonic
moral discourse seems to offer no source of meaning. Their suffering might be real to
them, but they would have no voice to express it. Because one's self-description
depends on that of his community, it is only through a change in the public discourse
that the slave, the homosexual or any ostracised person can have a share of human
dignity.
If one recalls that for Rorty there is no foundation for morality beyond the contingent
language of the moral community, and his controversial remark that anything can be
82
Cf. Avishai Margalit, The Ethics of Memory. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), p.
120: 'The wounds of insult and humiliation keep bleeding long after the painful physical injuries have
crusted over'.
38
made to look good or bad by being redescribed83
, it is not surprising that he suggests
that the change in the public discourse, the transformation of moral values, occurs
through redescription and not through a discovery of pre-existing moral facts. In
Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Rorty introduces a distinction between normal
and abnormal discourse. Normal discourse is 'that which is conducted within an
agreed-upon set of conventions about what counts as a relevant contribution, what
counts as answering a question, what counts as having a good argument for that
answer or a good criticism of it', while 'Abnormal discourse is what happens when
someone joins in the discourse who is ignorant of these conventions or who sets them
aside'.84
In Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, he introduces the concept of the strong
poet, who uses language in new and unfamiliar ways.85
Rorty, following Davidson,
argues that the changes in discourse through history – not only moral discourse, but
also in science – can be understood as the advancement of new uses of language, new
metaphors, that were gradually accepted by the general public and thus literalised,
ceasing to be metaphors. Plato's Republic, Newton's Principia Mathematica and
Darwin's Origin of the Species can all, according to Rorty, be described as
introductions of a new set of metaphors to describe the world by strong poets.
Changes in the moral discourse, then, are not to be understood as the discovery of pre-
existing 'moral truths', but as the creation of new metaphors and misuses of language
that make former practices seem bad or insufficient. As in the process of self-
description, for a redescription of the public discourse to be successful, it has to be
formulated in a way which is justifiable to the members of the community. Users of
83
CIS , p. 75. 84
PMN, p. 320. This is Rorty's variation on Kuhn's normal and revolutionary science. 85
See section 1.3 above.
39
new metaphors struggle against the users of common sense language, and the
triumphant side gets to describe the other side as 'irrational'. 'If you find yourself a
slave', writes Rorty, 'don't accept your masters' descriptions of the real; do not work
within the boundaries of their moral universe. Instead, try to reinvent a reality of your
own by selecting aspects of the world that lend themselves to the support of your
judgment of the worthwhile life'.86
It seems unlikely to Rorty, however, that the oppressed would be able to formulate
their emancipating redescription for themselves. The language of the moral
community defines the boundaries of arguments, 'For until then only the language of
the oppressor is available, and most oppressors have had the wit to teach the
oppressed a language in which the oppressed will sound crazy – even to themselves –
if they describe themselves as oppressed'.87
Oppression denies the sufferer a voice not
only in excluding him from the discussion, but by denying him a language. 'Some
victims of cruelty, people who are suffering, do not have much in the way of
language. That is why there is no such thing as the "voice of the oppressed" or the
"language of the victims"'.88
It is the duty of the intellectual, and particularly Rorty's
formulation of the intellectual, i.e. the liberal ironist, to put the silent suffering of the
victims into words.
86
'Feminism and Pragmatism', TP, p. 216. Cf. AOC, p. 203: 'Only if somebody has a dream, and a voice
to describe that dream, does what looked like nature begin to look like culture, what looked like fate
begin to look like a moral abomination' 87
AOC, p. 203. 88
CIS, p. 94
40
A liberal for Rorty, as we have already seen, is someone who thinks that cruelty is the
worst thing we can do. But it remains to be clarified what Rorty means by irony, as
his use of the term is somewhat idiosyncratic.89
Rorty defines the ironist as
Someone who fulfils three conditions: (1) she has radical and continuing
doubts about the final vocabulary she currently uses, because she has been
impressed by other vocabularies… (2) she realizes that argument phrased in
her present vocabulary can neither underwrite nor dissolve these doubts; (3)
insofar as she philosophizes about her situation, she does not think that her
vocabulary is closer to reality than others.90
The ironist is not, as some critics of Rorty suggest, a Cartesian sceptic doubting her
final vocabulary in its totality. Rather, she has encountered an alternative vocabulary,
through which she began to suspect that her present vocabulary is deficient on a
specific point.91
In an attempt to relieve herself of these pressing doubts, the ironist
aspires to expose herself to as many vocabularies as possible, and to enlarge her own
moral possibilities through creative redescriptions of reality. She does so in the hope
that in a new vocabulary she can find a temporary relief from doubts, although she is
constantly aware that a new description might come that will expose her old self
image as false or partial. A liberal ironist is a particular kind of ironist, who has a
particular kind of doubt. As she sees cruelty as the worst thing she can do, she is
constantly in fear that her present final vocabulary has turned her blind to suffering
and pain, and seeks new descriptions of cruelty that will be more inclusive.92
89
Raymond Geuss comments that Rorty's use of the word would not commend itself to 'anyone who
retains a grasp on any of the senses ‘irony’ has had in European life since antiquity'. Raymond Geuss,
'Liberalism and its Discontents', Political Theory 30, no. 3 (2002): p. 334. For Rorty's concept of irony,
see Brad Frazier, Rorty and Kierkegaard on Irony and Moral Commitment: Philosophical and
Theological Connections (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). 90
CIS, p. 73. 91
Bacon (2007), pp. 91-96. 92
Of course, one can easily be a liberal without being an ironist, and vice versa. One's ironic approach
to one's final vocabulary doesn't necessarily involve the fear of being cruel; it can be aesthetic, or
religious, etc. Rorty compares Habermas and Foucault, the first he sees as a non-ironist liberal, and
the second as a non-liberal ironist.
41
This might be a good place to clarify a point that seems to baffle readers and critics of
Rorty. The character of the ironist is often conflated in Rorty's writing with that of the
strong poet. I argue, however, that this is a fundamental misunderstanding of these
two concepts. First, the ironist and the strong poet are working from different
motivations. 'The ironist', as Rorty writes, 'spends her time worrying about the
possibility that she has been initiated into the wrong tribe, taught to play the wrong
language game. She worries that the process of socialization which turned her into a
human being by giving her a language may have given her the wrong language, and
so turned her into the wrong kind of human being'.93
But this is very different from
the strong poet's fear, that he is describing himself in a way which is not original.
Second, while the strong poet certainly has 'radical and continuing doubts' about his
final vocabulary, it is not necessarily the case that he believes, like the ironist, that his
vocabulary is no closer to reality than others.94
I can't see a contradiction between
being a 'strong poet', that is, being a creative idiosyncratic thinker who manages to
change the vocabulary of his followers, and believing that the final vocabulary you
have created is truly the final vocabulary. In other words, there is no reason that the
strong poet would not be, in Rorty's terms, a metaphysician.95
Instead of seeing the strong poet and the ironist as the same, I argue that we should
think of irony, in the Rortian sense, as facilitating creative redescriptions of the kind
the strong poet is offering. Rorty's ironist is a radical pluralist, or as Rorty describes
93
CIS, p. 75. 94
For a variation of this argument, see Richard Shusterman, Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty,
Rethinking Art (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992): p. 150. See also Stanley Fish, 'Truth but No Consequences:
Why Philosophy Doesn’t Matter’, Critical Inquiry, vol. 29 (2003), 389–417, p. 416 (cited in Michael
Bacon (2005), pp. 406-407). 95
See CIS, pp. 76-77.
42
her in one of his later works, a 'polytheist'.96
As she seeks to expose herself to new
descriptions and vocabularies, radically different from the ones her current
community has to offer, she turns to the strong poets. In Rorty's liberal utopia, strong
poets and utopian revolutionaries are the cultural heroes. Society has no purpose
'except to make life easier' for them.
The kind of intellectual that Rorty sees as ideal in his liberal utopia, I argue, is
therefore a strong poet or a utopian revolutionary who is, at the same time, ironic. She
would describe the world in new and creative ways, make people aware of previously
silenced forms of cruelty and suffering, while at the same time never claiming to have
the last word on what counts as cruelty. For that reason, Rorty prefers literature to
philosophy as the paradigmatic intellectual enterprise. Philosophy, he claims, has the
tendency to systematise, to become ahistorical. Hegel, Nietzsche and Heidegger,
Rorty argues, could have been prime examples of ironist intellectuals had they not
been tempted to see their redescriptions as the final and true descriptions of the world,
thinking that they themselves can never be redescribed.97
Poets and novelists, on the
other hand, are free from the temptation of the strong poet. Because literature and
poetry are in essence pluralistic art forms, they are more hospitable to the idea of
multiple, incommensurable point of views, and therefore would be better for
enlarging the moral vocabulary.
It is through this character of the liberal ironist, I suggest, that Rorty is dissolving the
apparent contradiction between the negative liberalism of 'leaving people alone' and
96
'Pragmatism as Romantic Polytheism', PCP, p. 27-42. Rorty notes that 'Isaiah Berlin's well-known
doctrine of incommensurable human values is, in my sense, a polytheist manifesto' (p. 30). 97
CIS, pp. 96-122.
43
the liberal moral imperative of avoiding cruelty. As I argued in 3.1, Rorty sees Millian
liberalism as the final conceptual word in political philosophy, as it allows each to
pursue his own self creation, his own edifying description of himself. But this
freedom also allows intellectuals to argue for contesting redescriptions of the world,
which can sometimes describe what was considered to be a norm or a virtue as cruel.
The liberal ironist, who is constantly worried she is oblivious to cruelty, is the source
of these new descriptions that offer Rorty's society with the best chances of moral
progress.
That being said, there are two problems with Rorty's description of the liberal ironist
that need to be addressed. The first problem, which Rorty himself notices, is that
ironic redescription is in itself potentially humiliating. When the ironist offers new
descriptions of the public final vocabulary, she in a sense is telling others that their
own final vocabulary – the basis of their self image – is up for grabs, that it is not as
sound as they have supposed it to be. While the non-ironist intellectual also
redescribes, he is somehow less prone to be perceived as humiliating because he
offers access to a truth about the world or one's core self, offering a 'redesription
which presents itself as uncovering the interlocutor's true self… suggest[ing] that the
person being redescribed is being empowered'.98
But this is an option that is not open
for the ironist. To solve this, Rorty proposes that the liberal ironist will maintain a
distinction between her private ironic self and her public self. In the project of her
own self-creation, she can redescribe as much as she wants, but her public language
must be the language of common sense.
98
CIS, p. 90.
44
Rorty's private-public distinction has been criticised from practically every
conceivable angle. For some critics, the distinction between private fantasies and
public consensus will have unfavourable political consequences, as it does not explain
why the ironist would be loyal to democratic values, or that it will disable any
meaningful political discussion or moral progress. Other critics have suggested that
the kind of firm distinction Rorty is suggesting is untenable.99
It seems reasonable to
accept the second line of criticism while dismissing the first one. Rorty, I think, was
wrong to suggest that irony is to be wholly restricted to the private sphere, and in any
sense, his spatial metaphor of separation is both unfeasible and undesirable.100
Instead, I argue that the private-public separation should be read as a moral
possibility, as a separation not between spheres but between the ironist's
responsibilities to her own self creation and her responsibilities to diminishing
suffering and humiliation. In suggesting the distinction between the private and
public, Rorty is better read as cautioning his fellow liberal ironists: 'be aware that your
ironic redecriptions are potentially humiliating. Be sure, therefore, to separate
between those that are of use to the public goal of diminishing suffering and those
which are your private fantasies'.101
99
For examples of the first kind of criticism, see for example Alasdair MacIntyre, Dependant Rational
Animals, (London,: Duckworth, 1999): 152-3 ; Simon Critchley, 'Deconstruction and Pragmatism – Is
Derrida a Private Ironist or a Public Liberal?' in Chantal Mouffe (ed.), Deconstruction and Pragmatism
(London: Routledge, 1996): p. 25; Nancy Fraser, 'Solidarity or Singularity? Richard Rorty Between
Romanticism and Technocracy' in Alan Malachowski (ed.), Reading Rorty, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990):
pp. 303-322. For the second kind of criticism, see for example William Connolly's critique in Terrance
Ball et al, 'Review Symposium on Richard Rorty', History of the Human Sciences, vol. 3, no. 1 (1990):
pp. 101-22; Chantal Mouffe, 'Deconstruction, Pragmatism and the Politics of Democracy' in
Deconstruction and Pragmatism: pp. 1-13; Honi Haber, Beyond Postmodern Politics (London:
Routeledge, 1994): p. 44. 100
I borrow part of this argument from Frazier, 2006. 101
I develop this argument further, as well as dealing with the critique of the private-public distinction
in more detail, in my 'The Public- Private Split in Richard Rorty's Political Thought' (unpublished MPhil
Essay)
45
The second problem is Rorty's implicit elitism. Some critics have read Rorty as
suggesting that only intellectuals can retain a critical, private language while the rest
should be conformists.102
Again, Rorty does little to relieve this concern. When he
describes his 'liberal utopia', he proclaims that while everyone would be historicists
and nominalists, only a few would be ironists, and it is clear that by these few, he
thinks of the intellectual elite.103
Rorty seems to me to be overly narrow in stating his case, but I argue that his
suggestion does not necessarily connote elitism. If we take the private-public split to
be a moral possibility, it is a possibility that is potentially available to everyone.
Rorty's argument here is that it is impossible for all the members of society to be
ironic about that society's values, and I think that this argument is greatly improved if
we add 'in the public sphere'. Rorty might be singling out intellectuals because he
thinks they are more likely to be well-versed in more than one moral vocabulary, and
therefore the kind of ironic doubt will be more available to them. But even within
Rorty's writing we can find a tension between elitism and universalising irony. It
seems at least possible to argue that in Rorty's utopia, everyone would be liberal
ironists.104
To conclude this chapter, I want to argue that Rorty's theory of the self, as described
in chapter 1, offers a valuable resource for understanding Rorty's vision for a liberal
utopia. Rorty's view of the dignified human life is that of the self-described life, and
102
Haber, pp. 53-54; Fraser, p. 308. 103
CIS, p. 87. 104
See Bacon (2005). Cf. Rorty remark that, in his liberal utopia 'ironism, in the relevant sense, is
universal' (CIS, p. xv). Also, see 'Kant vs. Dewey: The Current Situation of Moral Philosophy', PCP, pp.
183-202; 'Education as Socialization and as Individualization', PSH, pp. 114-127 on higher education
as universalizing irony.
46
his utopia is one where people are left alone to create and describe their own worlds.
Through the character of the liberal ironist, Rorty seeks to solve the apparent
contradiction between freedom and avoidance of cruelty. As I understand it, Rorty
argues that the minimal liberal society is the best political structure for allowing ironic
doubt and creation of new moral vocabularies, which sensitise people to the suffering
of the voiceless.
47
Chapter 3: The Boundaries of Solidarity
Let us now return to the arguments put forward in the previous chapters. I have
argued that Rorty presents a historicised, localised account of human dignity, which
he sees as related to one's ability to construct one's self-creation through belonging to
a moral community. I then showed that Rorty's ideal moral community, his liberal
utopia, holds the dual principles of leaving people alone and avoidance of cruelty. It is
through the freedom of the liberal ironist to challenge the community's self-image and
to sensitise it to neglected cruelties that enables society to live up to its creed.
The purpose of this last chapter is to discuss Rorty's position on the boundaries of the
moral community. I argue that Rorty sees the boundaries of the moral community as
historical and contingent, as well as malleable through moral progress. I will then
discuss his suggestions for expanding the boundaries, and see if these solutions can do
the work Rorty thinks they can.
3.1 Between Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism
In the last chapter on Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, Rorty offers the following
description:
If you were a Jew in the period when the trains were running to Auschwitz,
your chances of being hidden by your gentile neighbours were greater if you
lived in Denmark or Italy than if you lived in Belgium. A common way of
describing this difference is by saying that many Danes and Italians showed a
sense of human solidarity which many Belgians lacked.105
105
CIS, pp. 189.
48
Rorty, however, denies that such acts of solidarity are the result of the Italians and
Danes recognising their common humanity with the Jews they hid. It is not, he claims,
that they thought the Jews are to be saved because they were fellow human beings,
but because they thought of the particular Jews they saved as 'one of them' – 'a fellow
Milanese, or a fellow Jutlander, or a fellow member of the same union or profession,
or a fellow bocce player, or a fellow parent'. Being a member of the human species,
Rorty argues, cannot be thought of as having the same force as these descriptions. 'I
want to deny that 'one of us human beings' (as opposed to animals, vegetables or
machines) can have the same sort of force as any of the other examples. I claim that
the force of 'us' is, typically, contrastive in the sense that it contrasts with a 'they'
which is also made up of human beings – the wrong human beings'.106
To proponents of moral universalism, this passage is of great concern. As many of
them read it, Rorty here claims that there is no ground to see the Danes or Italians
who saved Jewish lives as, in any moral sense, better than those who cooperated with
the Nazi regime. They are different only in that they saw one arbitrary attribute of the
person in front of them (being a fellow Jutlander, etc.) as more important than another
arbitrary attribute of him (being a Jew).107
It surely doesn't help Rorty's case when he
argues that American liberals are better off arguing that the poor young blacks in the
106
CIS, p. 190. 107
Rorty's suggestion that 'a fellow bocce player' is a strong identity group in the same way 'a fellow
Milanese' is, seems to me to be an unnecessary (and somewhat insensitive) overstatement. See Jean
Bethke Elshtain, 'Don't Be Cruel: Reflections on Rortian Liberalism' in Charles Guignon and David R.
Hiley (eds.) Richard Rorty (Cambridge: CUP, 2003): p. 152. In a later correspondence, Rorty writes: 'I
think I overstated my case in those pages, and now regret them'. ('Response to Norman Geras' in
Critical Dialogues, p. 175).
49
city slums deserve help because they are fellow Americans, rather than fellow human
beings, and accuse the academic left of not being patriotic enough.108
Rorty's critics, specifically after the publication of Achieving Our Country, took him
to argue that moral universalism is to be dismissed, and that our moral concerns
should be confined within the boundaries of the nation-state. In an influential essay,
Martha Nussbaum asks: 'What is it about the national boundary that magically
converts people toward whom our education is both incurious and indifferent into
people to whom we have duties of mutual respect? ... Richard Rorty's patriotism may
be a way of bringing all Americans together; but patriotism is very close to jingoism,
and I'm afraid I don't see in Rorty's argument any proposal for coping with this very
obvious danger'.109
Terry Eagleton sarcastically suggests that 'America' is still a too
vague of a concept to identify with:
Personally, I only ever display sympathy to fellow graduates of the University
of Cambridge... Once one begins extending compassion to graduates of
Oxford too, there seems no reason not to go on to Sheffield, Warwick, and the
Lower Bumpstead College of Agricultural Science, and before one knows
where one is one is on the slippery slope to universalism, foundationalism,
Juergen Habermas, and the rest.110
This reading of Rorty, I argue, is fundamentally wrong. It is, arguably, the result of
conflating what Rorty sees as ideal with what he sees as the best approach to achieve
this ideal. While Rorty doubtlessly sees himself as an American patriot, he does not
argue for isolationism, or see the boundaries of the nation as intrinsically important
108
CIS, p. 191; 'The Unpatriotic Academy', PSH, p. 252-255. 109
Martha Nussbaum, 'Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism' in Joshua Cohen (ed.) For Love of Country:
Debating the Limits of Patriotism. Boston: Beacon Press, 1996, p. 3-20. 110
Terry Eagleton, 'Defending the Free World'. The Socialist Register 26 (1990): pp. 85-93. Similar
arguments are made by Bernstein, pp. 230-257; Michael Billig, 'Nationalism and Richard Rorty: The
Text as a Flag for Pax Americana', New Left Review 202, (November/December 1993): pp. 69-83.
50
morally. Rather, I suggest that what Rorty argues for is a cosmopolitan moral
community, where everyone could be seen as 'one of us'.
To do so, I want to return to Rorty's concept of 'ethnocentrism' as briefly discussed in
the first chapter. It is first important to notice that Rorty's use of 'ethnos' is
metaphorical, and should not be understood solely as a national or racial group. The
limits of the ethnos are the limits of the community of speakers who share common
values, a common final vocabulary. For Rorty, ethnocentrism is simply the logical
conclusion when the distinction between truth and justification is collapsed, when one
realises that there are no trans-cultural or non-human criteria for rationality.
Ethnocentrism, pace Rorty's leftist critics, is not what Rorty prescribes or aspires to. It
is already a condition of our rootedness in various cultural norms, practices and ideas
that define what we are, what we desire and what we can believe.
What Rorty does want to advocate is a position he calls 'anti-anti-ethnocentrism'111
, or
in Thomas McCarthy's more elegant term, 'frank ethnocentrism'.112
Frank
ethnocentrism can be understood as the acceptance that our beliefs and ideas are
necessarily couched in the vocabulary of our culture, and stand for these beliefs and
values nonetheless. To be a liberal is to have an ethnocentric belief in the superiority
of the liberal values of liberty and avoidance of cruelty, but it is also to have a
suspicion of ethnocentrism. Frank ethnocentrism, I argue, can be seen as the
complementary sentiment to irony in the character of Rorty's liberal ironist. It is irony
that prevents ethnocentrism from deterioration to bigotry and narrow-mindedness,
111
'On Ethnocentrism: A Reply to Clifford Geertz', ORT, p. 207. 112
Thomas McCarthy, 'Private Irony and Public Decency: Richard Rorty's New Pragmatism', Critical
Inquiry 16, No. 2 (1990): pp. 355-370.
51
while ethnocentrism prevents the ironist from becoming a relativist. Rorty
approvingly quotes Joseph Schumpeter that, 'to realise the relative validity of one's
convictions and yet stand for them unflinchingly, is what distinguishes a civilised man
from a barbarian'.113
What Rorty criticises the academic left for is not that it is insufficiently patriotic, but
that it succumbed to ironism while refusing to realise the prevalence of ethnocentrism.
What the Foucauldians and Derrideans in American universities fail to notice, he
argues, is how important the notions of common values and hope, of national pride,
are for Americans. It is, Rorty argues, an important part of their self-description.114
The role of intellectuals, as I have shown in chapter 2, is to show where the nation has
betrayed its values, and sensitise people to kinds of cruelty they haven't thought of
before. But when the academic left argues against the values themselves, it is in fact
denying people of the hope for a better future. 'National pride is to countries what
self-respect is to individuals: a necessary condition for self-improvement', writes
Rorty. 'Too much national pride can produce bellicosity and imperialism, just as
excessive self-respect can produce arrogance. But just as too little self-respect makes
it difficult for a person to display moral courage, so insufficient national pride makes
energetic and effective debate about national policy unlikely'.115
The interesting thing about this quote, if read through the perspective of Rorty's
theory of the self, is Rorty's analogy between the nation and the individual. When the
113
CIS, 46. Rorty quotes from Isaiah Berlin's Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1969), p. 134. 114
Whether Rorty himself sees national pride and patriotism as an important part of his self-
description is, however interesting, irrelevant. For an enlightening research on Rorty's self image as a
patriotic American leftist, see Neil Gross's Richard Rorty: The Making of an American Philosopher. 115
AOC, p. 3.
52
individual is humiliated, denied the ability to explain his actions in a meaningful way,
he is in effect denied agency. Similarly, when a nation is without pride, without a
narrative of progress and virtues, it cannot make sense of its faults. Rorty is not,
however, arguing that the nation can be thought of as an individual with a sense of
self-worth. The nation is just another moral community, a collection of individuals
involved in a common project. But this project is, at least in how Rorty understands
the United States, a major part of these individuals' own self-description. Recall that
for Rorty, one's dignity is intertwined with the dignity of his moral community, with
what makes that community better than others.
Rorty links this notion of identity with his account of morality. In an essay titled
'Justice as larger loyalty', he argues that we cannot think of morality as a set of
abstract, impersonal laws that one obeys. His argument, following Annette Baier's
Moral Prejudices, claims that morality springs not from reason, but from the
sentiments. It is first a reciprocal trust among the members of one's family, the people
one knows the most and forms the major part of his socialisation. It is only through
the expansion of such sentiments to larger groups – one's extended family, friends,
city, nation, or species – that one sees a reason to behave morally towards them.
Borrowing from Walzer, Rorty argues that as these groups get bigger, it is likely that
their place in one's self description would be smaller: 'you know more about your
family than about your village, more about your village than about your nation, more
about your nation than about humanity as a whole'.116
The clash between one's loyalty
to two groups (say, one's loyalty to his family and his loyalty to his nation) should not
116
'Justice as a Larger Loyalty', PCP, p. 46.
53
be thought of as a contrast between sentiments and reason, loyalty and justice, but as
two competing sentiments.
Nussbaum, Eagleton, Geras and others argue that Rorty is inconsistent. If one can
expand his moral sentiments so dramatically, to open the boundaries of what he
considers being his moral community to include all members of the American nation,
why is it not possible to identify with humanity as a whole? As Geras argues, 'it is just
not credible that the significant threshold in this matter, where compassion and
solicitude will go no further, lies somewhere beyond several hundred million
people'.117
If my reading is correct, however, there is no reason to think that Rorty
would not agree with this statement. As he explicitly writes, 'my position entails that
feelings of solidarity are necessarily a matter of which similarities and dissimilarities
strike us as salient, and that such salience is a function of a historically contingent
final vocabulary'.118
The boundaries of the moral community are man-made, and
therefore malleable. It is mere historical contingency that for Americans in the late
twentieth century, being an American resonates strongly with one's moral
sensitivities, while being human less so. Rorty's argument against the radical left is, as
I understand it, that the identity 'American' is useful, because it is the widest possible
in our current moral vocabulary. But this doesn’t mean that identifying with a larger
or smaller group is impossible or irrational.
This view is not incompatible with cosmopolitanism, and indeed, Rorty is a firm
supporter of a global liberal polity. In one of many examples, he describes his hope
for 'a specific kind of cosmopolitan human future: the image of a planetwide
117
Geras, p. 78 118
CIS, p. 192. Cf. PMN, p. 38.
54
democracy, a society in which torture, or the closing down of a university or a
newspaper, on the other side of the world is as much a cause for outrage as when it
happens at home'.119
But it is Rorty's view that such a cosmopolis cannot be achieved
through abstract arguments about inherent human dignity. As human dignity is about
being part of a moral community, Rorty does 'not see much point in saying that they
[all humans] now, before such a society has been achieved, all equal in dignity... Let's
try to figure out what kind of utopia we want, and let the truths about us be whatever
we have to believe in order to work together for its creation. To put it crudely, let your
view of human dignity fall out from your politics; don't milk your politics out of such
a view'.120
Global human solidarity is a desirable ideal, Rorty argues, but it needs to
be created rather than discovered. The question to be asked is how he suggests
attaining this ideal.
3.2 Love and Money
How can one's solidarity with the members of his moral community expand beyond
the boundaries of that community? Rorty first attempt to address this question was in
his 1983 essay 'Postmodern Bourgeois Liberalism'. It is in this essay that he first
suggests that human dignity is not an intrinsic attribute of humans, but a localised and
historicised feature of belonging to a moral community. One of the objections to this
claim is, as Rorty presents it,
That on my view a child found wandering in the woods, the remnant of a
slaughtered nation whose temples have been razed and whose books have
been burned, has no share in human dignity. This is indeed a consequence, but
it does not follow that she may be treated like an animal. For it is part of the
119
'The Future of Philosophy' in Herman Saatkamp (ed.), Rorty & Pragmatism: The Philosopher
Responds to His Critics. Nashville and London: Vanderbilt University Press, 1995:p. 203. 120
'Response to Appiah' in Matthew Gibney (ed.) Globalizing Rights: The Oxford Amnesty Lectures,
1999 (Oxford: OUP, 2003): p. 233.
55
tradition of our community that the human stranger from whom all dignity has
been stripped is to be taken in, to be reclothed with dignity.121
Our liberal tradition, with its universal Judeo-Christian values, argues Rorty, can and
will be invoked by 'free-loading atheists'. In other words, it is not necessary to think
that there exists something like 'human dignity' outside of historical moral
communities. It is sufficient to accept that our own, Western and liberal culture takes
universal human dignity as a basic premise.
This solution is problematic for several reasons and, in my opinion, unconvincing.
First, Rorty is evading the fact that the history of the West, despite the values of the
Judeo-Christian tradition and of enlightenment liberalism, is ripe with examples of
treating people outside the moral community as less than people (slavery, crusades,
etc). It is peculiar, then, that he sees that tradition as a sufficient basis to treat the lost
child morally. Second, I agree with David Hollinger that Rorty's example is an
extremely rare and unrealistic case. In a sense, it is easier for Rorty to consider a child
without a culture as a potential member of the moral community than someone who is
of culture which is foreign or even antagonistic.122
But even if we suppose Rorty is
talking about an idealised version of contemporary America where moral
universalism is the dominant position, where every human being is considered equally
important, the example is not satisfying. For to achieve the goal of a global moral
community, it is obvious that non-Western cultures would also have to somehow
accept that the expansion of their moral boundaries is a desired goal. Yet if Rorty
thinks that the basis for that is solely the Judeo-Christian tradition, this can only be
121
'Postmodernist Bourgeois Liberalism', ORT, p. 201-202 (emphasis in original) 122
David Hollinger, 'How Wide the Circle of the "We"? American Intellectuals and the Problem of the
Ethnos since World War II', The American Historical Review 98, no. 2 (1993): pp. 317-337.
56
achieved by at best convincing the non-Westerns of the universal validity of 'our'
tradition, or worse, by cultural imperialism.123
Rorty later refined his position. In his 1993 Amnesty lecture, titled 'Human Rights,
Rationality, and Sentimentality', Rorty argues that moral philosophy has for too long
focused on the 'rather rare figure of the psychopath', the person who has no concern
for other human beings but himself. Philosophers have tried to convince the
psychopath (Thrasymachus or the rational choice calculator) that through reason one
can find an answer to the question 'why should I be moral?'. But in doing so, moral
philosophy ignored 'the much more common case: the person whose treatment of a
rather narrow range of featherless bipeds is morally impeccable, but who remains
indifferent to the suffering of those outside this range, the ones he thinks of as pseudo-
humans'.124
The real question that needs to be answered, he argues, is 'why should I
care about a stranger, a person who is no kin to me, a person whose habits I find
disgusting?'125
Rorty's point is that the answer to this question cannot be one formulated by
arguments or claims for a common human nature. Elsewhere he writes: 'Moral
development in the individual, and moral progress in the human species as a whole, is
a matter of re-marking human selves so as to enlarge the variety of the relationships
which constitute those selves'.126
The only way to achieve this moral progress, what
Rorty calls, following Baier, 'a progress of sentiments', is through sentimental
education. It is only by telling 'long, sad, sentimental stories' that people are able to
123
See for example, Haber, p. 44. 124
'Human Rights, Rationality and Sentimentality', TP, p. 177. 125
'Human Rights, Rationality and Sentimentality', TP, p. 185. Cf. 'Kant vs. Dewey', PCP, p. 199. 126
'Ethics without Principles', PSH, p. 79.
57
identify, to feel sympathy for the suffering of others and to imagine themselves in the
others' shoes.
It is important to notice that this process of moral progress – the expansion of our
moral community to include people previously considered quasi-human – is for Rorty
the way things work both within the national borders and beyond. There is no
qualitative difference in Rorty's eyes between stretching the moral imagination to
include the 'others' within one's own nation (women, racial and religious minorities,
homosexuals) and a more global expansion (to include members of other nations,
speakers of other languages, or perhaps non-human animals). The latter is more
difficult than the former not because of any substantive difference, but because the
levels of interaction and overlapping values that facilitate sympathy are not as salient.
Moral progress, then, is what José-Manuel Barreto cleverly calls 'global moral
warming'.127
In a response to an article by Peter Singer, Rorty argues against the idea
that moral universalism can be achieved through the rational understanding of moral
principles, and that philosophers have privileged access to these principles. The
expansion of the moral community is achieved not by reason, but by imagination.
'The advantage that well-read, reflective, leisured people have when it comes to
deciding about the right thing to is that they are more imaginative, not that they are
more rational... these people are able to put themselves in the shoes of many different
sort of people'.128
127
Jose-Manuel Baretto, 'Rorty and Human Rights: Contingency, Emotions and How to Defend Human
Rights Telling Stories' Utrecht Law Review 7, no. 2 (2011): pp. 93-112. 128
'Kant vs. Dewey', PCP, p. 201.
58
There are, of course, several critiques that can be raised against this description. First,
one can argue that the basic premise of the discussion is wrong. Susan Mendus writes
that 'one of the less honest features of Rorty's account that he tries to force upon us a
choice between seeing others as like ourselves and concluding that their suffering
does not matter'.129
Michael Bacon, in his sympathetic account of Rorty's political
philosophy, argues that Mendus takes Rorty's notion of 'like ourselves' to be thicker
than it actually is. Rorty, he argues, wants to separate the question 'do you believe and
desire what we believe and desire?' from the question 'are you suffering?', and
therefore identifying someone as being 'like ourselves' simply means to identify his
susceptibility for pain and suffering. Bacon argues that 'on [Rorty's] view, there is a
two-way relation between identification and suffering. We might attend the suffering
of others because we identify with them, but equally, we might come to identify with
them because we notice their suffering'.130
While I don’t disagree with the way Bacon formulates Rorty's thesis in this quote, it
seems to me that he has missed Mendus's point as well as a crucial aspect of Rorty's
theory. It is true that 'we might come to identify with them because we notice their
suffering', but Bacon's argument would be better if he had put more emphasis on the
word 'might'. For, as I have argued in the second chapter of this work, it is not
physical pain which is of moral importance in Rorty's view, but suffering – pain as
perceived through language. 'If pain were all that mattered', writes Rorty, 'it would be
as important to protect the rabbits from the foxes as to protect the Jews from the
129
Susan Mendus, ''What of the Soul was Left, I Wonder?' The Narrative Self in Political Philosophy' in
John Horton and Andrea Baumester (eds.) Literature and the Political Imagination (London:
Routledge, 1996): p. 62. 130
Bacon (2007), p. 72.
59
Nazis'.131
While Bacon is right in arguing that to recognise suffering does not require
us to think that we and the sufferers share the same beliefs and inclinations, we still
need to be able to think of their pain as suffering, to understand it in our own moral
vocabulary. We might identify with them when we notice their suffering, but noticing
their suffering necessarily means that that suffering needs to be intelligible to us.
That, I think, is the point of 'sad stories' and sentimental education – to make the
suffering of others meaningful in our eyes.
I think Mendus is right, therefore, when she argues that Rorty's strict separation
between 'us' and the 'others' needs to be more qualified. 'It would be more honest to
concede that the suffering of those who are not like us has a different significance'.132
It is not that we don't realise that other beings which are not 'us' are able to feel pain,
but that their pain is of different significance, because their pain is perceived as purely
physical. When we can't imagine ourselves having a conversation with the other, his
pain can no longer be considered morally relevant.133
A second critique that is raised against Rorty is that 'sad and sentimental stories'
would not necessarily elicit sympathy towards the sufferer. 'Critics have reason to
know... the inconclusiveness of sad and sentimental stories', writes Bruce Robbins,
'we also know how often stories have functioned to 'make strange' rather than produce
recognitions of sameness, and sometimes – one thinks of those unverified but highly
131
'Ethics without Principles', PSH, p. 86. 132
Mendus, ibid. see David Morris, 'About Suffering: Voice, Genre, and Moral Community', Daedalus
125, no. 1 (1996), p. 40. 133
Cf. PMN, p. 190: 'Pigs rate much higher than koalas on intelligence tests, but pigs don’t writhe in
quite the right humanoid way, and the pig’s face is the wrong shape for the facial expressions which
go with ordinary conversation. So we send pigs to slaughter with equanimity, but form societies for
the protection of koalas'.
60
functional anecdotes that set off rampage – to produce horrors rather than fend them
off'.134
Rorty himself recognises this danger when he writes that in hearing the stories
of murder, rape and torture, we tend to exclude not only the perpetrators but also the
victims from the group of 'us'. 'We think of the Serbs or Nazis as animals, because
ravenous beasts of prey are animals. We think of Muslims or Jews... as animals,
because cattle are animals. Neither sort of animal is very much like us'.135
One can
also recall Nazi propaganda films, where the wretchedness of Jewish life in the ghetto
served to propagate seeing them as vermin. There is, in other words, an undeniable
danger in bringing emotions into moral discourse.136
A possible answer to this critique would be somewhat similar to the one I presented
above. Sentimental education, for Rorty, is not simply causing an emotional reaction.
It is also important to frame the story being told in an appropriate manner, to create
the right response. If I read Rorty correctly, he is not saying that moral progress is
achieved through recounting cruelty and suffering, for the same reason that being
aware of someone being in pain does not necessarily elicit solidarity. There is, in a
way, a translation of the suffering, of making the sufferer's experience relatable to the
listener.
Sentimental education alone, however, is not enough. Rorty argues that the reason
Western culture has developed universal moral values is related to the West's
134
Bruce Robbins, Feeling Global: Internationalism in Distress. (New York: NYU Press, 1999): p. 141.
Cf. Martin Hollis, 'The Poetics of Personhood' in Alan Malachowski (ed.), Reading Rorty. Oxford:
Blackwell, 1990: p. 232. 135
'Human Rights, Rationality and Sentimentality', TP, p. 168. 136
I am not suggesting that emotions are a priori distinct from moral discourse, only that normally
liberal moral discourse tended to ignore emotions, or at least relegate them to a a place of secondary
importance.
61
technological superiority and material wealth, as 'the assumption that our moral
community should be identical with our biological species, could only have occurred
to people who were lucky enough to have more material goods than they really
needed'.137
However, our loyalty to large groups will 'weaken, or even diminish
altogether, when things get really tough. Then people whom we once thought of as
like ourselves will be excluded'.138
As Rorty puts it, security and sympathy go
together. The reason why some cultures don't view all members of the human species
as part of their moral community is not because they are deprived of truth, but
because such moral universalism would be potentially dangerous for themselves and
their families. 'Sentimental education', concludes Rorty, 'works only on people who
can relax long enough to listen'.139
Poverty and the lack of security are, then, preconditions for sentimental education.
But extreme lack of material and physical security is not only devastating to the poor's
sense of sympathy, but also to the rich's sympathy towards them. Rorty quotes E.M.
Forster's Howards End to argue that 'we are not concerned with the very poor. They
are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet'.140
The only
way the rich see themselves as being in the same moral community with the poor, he
argues, is 'by reference to some scenario that gives hope to the children of the poor
without depriving their own children of hope'.141
But Rorty argues that when faced
with extreme poverty, when depravation is such that they can't imagine this kind of
137
'Who are We? Moral Universalism and Economic Triage', Diogenes 173, no. 44/1 (1996):p. 9 138
'Pragmatism as Romantic Polytheism', PCP, p. 42. 139
'Human Rights, Rationality and Sentimentality', TP: 180. 140
'Love and Money', PSH: 224. 141
'Moral Universalism and Economic Triage', 12. Robbins criticizes Rorty on this point for supposedly
proposing a 'rich man's identity politics' (Robbins, 137). But this is simply the mirror image of the
effects of poverty on the poor.
62
scenario, the rich will be unable to think of the poor and themselves as belonging to
the same 'we'. It is not possible, he argues, to have a sense of identification with
people whose suffering you see no way of alleviating. Moral identification, or
sympathy to the suffering of others, is 'empty when it is no longer tied to habits of
action'.142
Expanding the boundaries of the moral community, therefore, requires both sympathy
and security. This, I think, is the crux of Rorty's critique of the 'cultural left'. While
Rorty recognises the achievements of the post-war left in expanding the moral
community to women, minorities and homosexuals, he nevertheless argues that the
prevalence of 'cultural recognition' as a leftist goal can be destructive. First, it
emphasises difference rather than commonality. For Rorty, the insistence on cultural
difference is antithetic to the kind of sentimental education he sees as promoting
solidarity. Moral progress, after all, is the increasing ability to see differences
(formerly considered as fundamental) less important than similarities in the
susceptibility to pain.143
Secondly, the academic left's obsession with identity politics
has diverted attention from the traditional leftist focus on material inequality. This is
dangerous, Rorty argues, because no change in attitude can sustain itself without a
material basis. The left, in America and elsewhere, should return to 'class politics', to
the struggle for preventing 'the rich from ripping off the rest of the country'.144
142
'Moral Universalism and Economic Triage', p. 12. 143
'Human Rights, Rationality and Sentimentality', TP, p. 181; cf. Rorty, 'Is Cultural Recognition a
Useful Concept for Leftist Politics?', Critical Horizons 1, no. 1 (2000): pp. 7-20. Rorty, of course,
stresses that both the differences and similarities are banal, contingent, and do not imply a 'common
human nature'. 144
'Back to Class Politics', PSH, p. 261.
63
Rorty, to conclude, sees a global moral community, encompassing all human beings,
as a desired utopian ideal. This is an ideal that Rorty admits will be very difficult to
attain, 'and likely to happen only when, for example, our race is attacked by
extraterrestrials, or when competition between human communities for scarce
resources has somehow ceased'.145
It is only through a process of economic
redistribution, technological progress, and a greater sensitivity to the common
suffering of others, that the idea of human dignity can be thought of globally.
145
'Response to Cochran' in Critical Dialogues, p. 201.
64
Conclusion
In this dissertation, I have argued that Richard Rorty's writings can offer important
insights to liberal political theory. Through a close reading of his works, including his
later writings of the 1990s and 2000s and with a focus on his account of the self, I
have argued that one can find insightful comments on questions of human dignity,
humiliation and cosmopolitanism. My analysis offers a new perspective on this often-
neglected aspect of Rorty's writing and is thus a contribution to Rorty scholarship. Yet
I want to suggest that this way of understanding Rorty's politics is of significance not
only for the understanding of Rorty, but also for seeing his relevance for political
theory. Critics of Rorty, as I have illustrated throughout this dissertation, usually tend
to dismiss the political significance of his philosophy. Contingency, Irony and
Solidarity is often read as advocating a kind of solipsistic, individualistic approach
that is almost anti-political. Achieving Our Country is read as a conservative attack on
radical politics and as an apologia of the status-quo. For many critics, Rorty's writings
has been read as, at most, an exemplar of a political ideology (American patriotism or
irresponsible postmodernism, depending on the critic), but not as a useful resource for
constructing a political theory. It is my contention, however, that reading Rorty
through the prism of his theory of the self can be of use to political theory.
In the first chapter, I showed that through a creative reading of Darwin, Nietzsche and
Freud, Rorty offers an account of human dignity not as an intrinsic attribute of the
human species, but as a contingent feature of humans' use of language, and their
ability to provide meaning for their life through creative self-description. This self-
description is bound to the identification of the individual with a moral community
and, at the same time, is the ability to reinvent this community. Rorty thus present a
65
unique position on human dignity, by rejecting the universal and ahistorical
interpretations of the concept while accepting it in a localised and historicised form.
Rorty's view of the self, as argued in the following chapters, serves an important role
in understanding Rorty's politics. Taking this notion of localised and historicised
human dignity into account, as I argued in chapter 2, helps in easing the apparent
contradiction between the two imperatives of Rorty's liberal utopia – leaving people
alone and avoiding cruelty – as both imperatives serve the goal of allowing self-
description. Rorty perceives humiliation as the worst kind of cruelty, as it denies the
possibility of self-description and, in essence, dehumanises its victim. A society that
leaves people alone to pursue their own self-creation, Rorty argues, must also provide
the material and symbolic ability to pursue this self-creation. It is through the account
of the self, I argued, that Rorty provides a defence of American liberalism.
It seems to me that Rorty's contribution might be most important in the discussion of
cosmopolitanism I presented in chapter 3, where the expansion of the moral
community is linked with the idea of self-creation. If my reading of Rorty is correct,
his account of human dignity and how moral communities grow and shrink points to a
significant lacunae in the discourse of moral universalism. While proponents of
universalism argue that the ubiquity of notions such as the value of life and human
dignity point to underlying universal principles, it is through the work of Rorty that
we realise that it is not the content of these values, but their scope, that matters. As he
convincingly argues, the creation of a global moral community is not about
convincing people to act morally, but rather expanding their identification with
foreign groups. The question that Rorty wants us to ask is not 'what are we', that hints
66
at some universal moral basis that we should recognise, but 'who are we', which is a
question of solidarity. I take this to be one of Rorty's most important contributions to
political thought, as it provides thought-provoking insight into the nature of morality,
and of possible tactics for expanding our moral community.
I agree that Rorty does not provide, in the strictest sense, a systematic political theory.
In his discussion of liberalism, for example, he hardly discusses the place of
institutions, public policy or government in any rigorous manner. But perhaps this is
not the right thing to look for in Rorty's writing. What he does offer, I suggest, is an
account of the culture of politics – not the rational, abstract structure of theory, but an
account of the importance of emotions and emotional states in human lives. Rorty's
emphasis on hope, fear, pride, humiliation and sympathy as politically relevant can be
seen as a valuable addition to theories of politics.
67
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