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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