Richard Rorty

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Sorry for the long hiatus in my blogging. As some of you know, I've just started graduate school and that has been consuming a large amount of my time. I'm hoping to begin posting again fairly frequently, but mostly regarding what I'm currently working on. This may make the posts somewhat less accessible - given that they will make reference to particular texts and thinkers - but hopefully they will still be of some interest to folks.
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This is a response to Richard Rorty’s essay “Private Irony, Liberal Hope” in his book “Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity.” (Many of the thoughts are also related to an unpublished manuscript by another author, though I will not discuss this text explicitly here.)
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Rorty draws a distinction between the metaphysician and the ironist. Metaphysicians search for something like a universal final vocabulary - that is to say, they search for the “most adequate description of reality.” Ironists, on the other hand, reject the idea that our final vocabularies can ever be grounded, that there can ever be something like a “most accurate description of reality” (or, even, that there could ever be criteria for determining what counts as something of this sort). Instead, they hope to expand their repertoire of final vocabularies, such that they can “get inside” as many Weltanschauung (worldviews) as possible. Moreover, these ironists craft their own final vocabulary in light of the diverse vocabularies they encounter as well as their own socially-inherited vocabulary. In what follows, I question the validity of Rorty’s distinction and show that his misreading of the philosophical tradition on which he leans ultimately undercuts the appeal of something like the “ironic viewpoint.”

Let’s begin by examining Rorty’s motivation for drawing a distinction between metaphysicians and ironists. There are, I think, two principle reasons that Rorty wants to draw such a distinction. First, he is impressed with the idea that finite beings are bound by our vocabulary, or to put it in other terms, bound by our perspective. There is, as a result, no ultimate court of appeals that can (authoritatively) resolve conflicts between these competing vocabularies. As such, any criticism is a criticism from yet another perspective. He concludes from this that there is, strictly speaking, nothing like a “most adequate description of reality” or even something like some vocabularies being “better” than others (although he often uses terms that would indicate the contrary). At the end, we have perhaps, only recourse to an aesthetic and a maximization criteria. Thus, we can say that a particular vocabulary is at most a personally appropriate vehicle for self-(re)creation, and provides individuals with the greatest possible freedom to pursue such vocabularies privately. Second, he wants to account for our changing commitments. That is to say, his primary dispute with the metaphysician is that the metaphysician is a blowhard. That is to say, although the metaphysicians conceptions are charging, this change is viewed as a progression towards an ultimately stable end - an accurate conception of the world. Moreover, the metaphysician assumes not only that the telos of his trajectory is Truth, but that his current conception of the world is superior to other competing conceptions. So what Rorty wants to preserve is an openness to genuine change, to a radical shift in our conception of the world. The ironist is supposedly open to such uncanniness.

(To be continued... stay tuned.)