Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity

A Visit With Richard Rorty

I attended a philosophy conference last month on the theme of "Metaphysics and Political Thought" and heard many thoughtful papers including a paper about the American philosopher Richard Rorty (1931 -- 2007). I learned a great deal from Rorty's "Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature" many years ago. The presentation I heard at the conference focused on Rorty's 1989 book "Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity" which I purchased while attending the conference and tried to read carefully after returning home. I was interested because I had presented my own paper at the conference which described an approach more sympathetic to the role of metaphysics in politics than I found in Rorty. An ultimate goal would be to integrate his insights into my own thinking.

Rorty's book fuses together two sets of lectures he gave in 1986 and 1987 and it has a disjointed feel. Still, the book is lucidly written, challenging and difficult. Part of what Rorty tries to do, emphasized by the presentation I heard, is to draw a distinction between "public" and "private" thought. Public thought is akin to political thinking and to the shared values of people living together. Private thinking is creative, purposeful, and idiosyncratic in which each individual creates and explores what gives most meaning to his or her life. Rorty understands the goal of philosophers from Plato through Kant as integrating the public and the private. They did so by trying to discover the ultimate nature of reality underlying and giving meaning to experience, both public and private.

Rorty maintains that this philosophical quest has proven futile because there is no such ultimate reality and the philosophical/metaphysical search has been for chimeras. His main reason for this is that human thought is always language-based and based on how we learn to use and change language. We have no access to a separate underlying reality but only to reality expressed in what following Wittgenstein has come to be called a "language game". Human thought is contingent based on time and society. When thought changes, as from, say, a religious outlook on life to an outlook based upon science and reason, as expressed in the Enlightenment, it isn't so much that one set of arguments rebutted another as that people learned to use a different language and to ask different questions so that a former way of seeing ultimates, or what Rorty sometimes calls a final vocabulary was changed and by-passed for another. He wants to look at questions of the meaning and individual gives to one's life and the nature of a good society as discussed temporally and historically within a particular language with no ultimate reality available as an appeal and no particular connection between the private and the public. There is a dialectic in Rorty's approach. Broadly, he sees society in the West as first attempting a religious understanding to questions of meaning. This was displaced by science and the Enlightenment. Over a long history, he argues that it has been shown untenable to look to either religion or science for ultimate explanations beyond human language. Thus Rorty argues for the contingency, finite character, and changeability of whatever people take to be their ultimates in private and political life. Rorty also sees contemporary philosophy, particularly political philosophy as taking the approach of an "ironist" because it holds certain values strongly, such as the need to avoid cruelty to others, with a recognition that even the most strongly felt values are contingent and cannot be defended by an appeal to metaphysics against alternatives. So to the sense of solidarity and shared human feeling is something people create in their lives rather than discover in a realm of absolute, unchanging reality. While studying the history of philosophy can help certain individuals with their understanding, Rorty argues that a more useful approach is through literature, novels, poetry, history, ethnography and the like. This helps us understand other people and cultures by broadening our perspective and expanding sympathy rather than through argument.

The book is written in the large parts each with chapters. I found the first part the most interesting and important part of the book as Rorty explores the nature of contingency and rejects the metaphysics of appearance and reality as applied to human language, the nature of the human self, and the nature of a liberal community.

The second part of the book develops the distinction between the private and the public and argues that confusion results when people try to apply the need for self-creativity and development in their own lives to shared community with others. Rorty also develops and explains his understanding of irony and of being an ironist.

The third part of the book discusses both private and public life in the context of literature and tries to show how literature and broad reading into great works which create sympathy for the lives of others can help create a sense of human solidarity to a greater degree than can appeals to principles or abstractions.

The book shows the great erudition and broad reading that Rorty recommends to his readers, both in philosophy and literature. The philosophical characters in the book include Donald Davidson, Heidegger, Hegel, Derrida, Nietzsche, John Rawls, Habermas, and more. Literary and cultural figures receiving attention include Freud, Proust, Nabokov, and Orwell. Oddly enough, I learned more from Rorty's discussion of philosophers than from his literary criticism. Perhaps this is because I am on the whole more familiar with the philosophers he discusses than with the novelists he finds of critical importance.

There is a lot to be learned from this book. I had something of the same reaction to it that I had from reading "Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature" long ago. The book made me think about reading metaphysics and philosophy as in part akin to poetry rather than abandoning what Rorty sees as the philosophical enterprise. Also, I think Rorty practices metaphysics more than he lets on. He rather blithely assumes in this book the futility of both religion and science in doing the work that he sees metaphysics as trying to do. His understanding of "contingency" may in part be arbitrary and in part narrower than it needs to be. Particularly, there seems to me a lot of room in Rorty for smuggling religion in through the back door, so to speak, at least as it affects what he sees as the "private" side of the "public", "private" distinction. I say this with some sympathy for what I think Rorty is trying to do.

Contrary to what might be the intent of his book, Rorty makes me think more and more seriously about philosophy rather than less. His work makes me think of a partial redirection rather than an abandonment and it made me feel the love of reading and thought. As I understand the book, it commendably, and perhaps surprisingly, encourages a sense of moderation on the political spectrum. His book and the paper I heard at the conference helped me reframe my own thought and helped me think through as well the value, if any, of what I was trying to do.

Robin Friedman