Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity

by Richard Rorty

In this book, major American philosopher Richard Rorty argues that thinkers such as Nietzsche, Freud, and Wittgenstein have enabled societies to see themselves as historical contingencies, rather than as expressions of underlying, ahistorical human nature, or as realizations of suprahistorical goals. This ironic perspective on the human condition is valuable but it cannot advance liberalism's social and political goals. In fact, Rorty believes that it is literature and not philosophy that can do this, by promoting a genuine sense of human solidarity. Specifically, it is novelists such as Orwell and Nabokov who succeed in awakening us to the cruelty of particular social practices and individual attitudes. Thus, a truly liberal culture would fuse the private, individual freedom of the ironic, philosophical perspective with the public project of human solidarity as it is engendered through the insights and sensibilities of great writers. Rorty uses a wide range of references--from philosophy to social theory to literary criticism--to elucidate his beliefs.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Politics, Theory, American, Criticism, Literary Criticism

220 pages, Paperback

First published February 24, 1989

About the author

Richard Rorty (1931–2007) developed a distinctive and controversial brand of pragmatism that expressed itself along two main axes. One is negative—a critical diagnosis of what Rorty takes to be defining projects of modern philosophy. The other is positive—an attempt to show what intellectual culture might look like, once we free ourselves from the governing metaphors of mind and knowledge in which the traditional problems of epistemology and metaphysics (and indeed, in Rorty's view, the self-conception of modern philosophy) are rooted. The centerpiece of Rorty's critique is the provocative account offered in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979, hereafter PMN). In this book, and in the closely related essays collected in Consequences of Pragmatism (1982, hereafter CP), Rorty's principal target is the philosophical idea of knowledge as representation, as a mental mirroring of a mind-external world. Providing a contrasting image of philosophy, Rorty has sought to integrate and apply the milestone achievements of Dewey, Hegel and Darwin in a pragmatist synthesis of historicism and naturalism. Characterizations and illustrations of a post-epistemological intellectual culture, present in both PMN (part III) and CP (xxxvii-xliv), are more richly developed in later works, such as Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989, hereafter CIS), in the popular essays and articles collected in Philosophy and Social Hope (1999), and in the four volumes of philosophical papers, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth (1991, hereafter ORT); Essays on Heidegger and Others (1991, hereafter EHO); Truth and Progress (1998, hereafter TP); and Philosophy as Cultural Politics (2007, hereafter PCP). In these writings, ranging over an unusually wide intellectual territory, Rorty offers a highly integrated, multifaceted view of thought, culture, and politics, a view that has made him one of the most widely discussed philosophers in our time.

Reviews

[Trevor · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was at work a week or so ago and my boss got me to track down a quote by this guy and then to read over the article the quote was from. The article is here:

http://web1.uct.usm.maine.edu/~bcj/is...

Anyway, I’ve tended to avoid American pragmatists since a bad experience in my undergrad degree. But I’ve been reading lots of Dewey – you sort of have to if you are going to be doing anything around the sociology of education – and then the article above was so interesting that I thought I might read a bit more of this Rorty guy.

This was also interesting. I’m very fond of Hegel – look, I know he was a reactionary old fart and all that. All the same, I like that he saw change as the fundamental thing you need to know about the universe and that standard logic, that is, logic that is based on identity, simply cannot help us to gain a deep understanding of how the world works because identity is the wrong end of the telescope for understanding the world. We need a kind of dialectical logic to really understand the world – a dialectical logic that sees change as the thing to focus on, not identity. The thing that is most obvious about the world isn’t that it is always the same – it is rather that it is always changing. Having a philosophy that is based on the premise of the eternal unity of the universe (Plato, say) can only take you so far in understanding a universe that is fundamentally in constant flux. That Plato had to invent a world of forms where these unchanging things could go on unchanging and to thereby assert that this world we live in is ‘unreal’ probably ought to have been a bit of a give away.

Now, I’ve gotten into trouble saying this sort of thing before here on goodreads and I have even had to block someone who would fly into irrational rants at the mere mention of Hegel’s name – someone who proudly said that the night he had torn one of Hegel’s books to pieces was one of his favourite memories. Such is the nature of philosophy, I guess – nothing like a good book burning to warm the soul. Still, my credo is that everything is related to everything else and change is the only absolute – and as both of these ideas come from my mate Hegel, what can I say? And Rorty, as with most of the American pragmatists, is rather fond of Hegel too.

Hegel haunts this book. Right from the introduction we are told that the author is much more interested in the idea of a contingent human nature – that is, something born of Hegel’s historicism – than of a Platonic or Kantian human essence.

But if there is no true and deep human essence doesn’t that make all of our opinions and hopes relative and meaningless? How does one avoid the abyss of nihilism if there is not a grounding truth to human nature? How, to make the case more relevant to Rorty who here wants to assert the value of liberalism, can we assert such a view if there is no human nature to ground it with?

In some ways these are the same arguments that religious type people make against atheists. ‘Why don’t you just rape and kill and steal and cheat if you don’t believe in God?’ – to which the only answer is, “You mean, the only reason you don’t do those things is because you’re afraid of what God might think?” Gosh.

Rorty has a very particular notion of what being liberal means. He says, “I borrow my definition of "liberal" from Judith Shklar, who says that liberals are the people who think that cruelty is the worst thing we do.” Now, again when I was an undergraduate I wrote a short story for my professional writing degree which played with very similar ideas. Clearly, people aren’t all equal – in many ways the least interesting things to say about people are to point out those things that make us all the same. But at the time I thought that one of the things that proves our common humanity is the revulsion we feel when we see someone being tortured. I was young and didn’t realise at the time that people get around this problem by defining whole groups of others as less than human – and then anything can happen to 'them' as 'they' don't count at all.

So, I quite like this definition of liberal, but I also have reservations. That is, there is a naivety about it that reminds me of my own naivety (and nothing repulses us more…)

Not only does Rorty see our definition of human as being contingent, but he also says that all contingency boils down to how we go about using language. Ironically enough, Rorty therefore sees language as being the main way we might go about fixing these problems. Language allows us to redefine problems and so to make one of those Kuhnian paradigm shifts. And the people who are best able to do that with language are certainly not philosophers – but rather poets (in the broadest sense of the term).

I guess my quick and dirty summary of this book is – we need to be taught how to feel compassion for people who aren’t ‘like us’ and the best way we have to learn how to feel compassion is to read fiction. For God sake, we even learn how to feel compassion for a guy who has been turned into a cockroach if we read particularly good fiction – so, how could that not make the world a better place?

The things I liked about this book were that it was fairly easy to read, it said interesting things about Foucault, Nietzsche, Hegel, Habermas and Nabokov and things that were sympathetic to their core ideas (and not just pointing and laughing or shrugging shoulders in disregard). It was clear Rorty had engaged with their ideas in ways that were much more than can be obtained from a quick glance over.

So, this leads me to what I’m going to make of all of this. I guess I have the same problem with Rorty as I do with Foucault. After reading them it is as if I have been shown all of the things that are wrong with the world, but am not shown a way out of the labyrinth. Foucault’s point, I guess, is that there only is labyrinth, not a way out. But the attraction of Marxism, say, is that it offers a clear way out – even if that way out to date has lead either to nightmare or nowhere.

The book ends, more or less, with a discussion of Orwell – particularly his 1984. My fear is that we read 1984 as if it was a vision of a communist future which we have avoided and so which is no longer relevant except as history – it is important to remember that 1984 was set in a future England. Society has become much better at controlling populations than the Soviets or the Nazis were ever capable of. As Postman points out, we do this by something closer to Brave New World than 1984. Sartre says that it is impossible to write a truly great novel premised on anti-Semitism. But we can and do make endless numbers of crap films based on anti-Islam. As much as we might hope that art might bring us to a more compassionate world – it seems just as capable of bring us to a more divided one too. Perhaps philosophy isn’t the answer – we have seen far too many philosophers line up and essentialize the whole of the Muslim world as if everyone living under a crescent moon was immediately identical. Art has been too often tragically silent in all this too - that is, it has been either silent or complicit. Far too rarely has it lived up to Rorty's high estimation.

This was a much better book than I thought it might have been. But I thought the essay I've linked to at the top of this was possibly as good as this entire book. If you are unfamiliar with Rorty I would highly recommend you have a look at that.

[Ryan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book as a challenge to myself. An engineering education tends to engender a Manichean sensibility, as solutions are either correct or incorrect. When Richard Rorty died in 2007, I read a slate.com profile that classified him as that worst pariah of American middle-class sensibility - a relativist. But, there was a definite measure of respect for the positions he took. So I decided to give him a try, hoping to open my mind, but expecting to dance gleefully on his bleeding heart.

Sadly, I wasn't able to dance as this book completely captivated me by throwing aside many notions I had about "truth". This book was a tough read for me - at best, I'm but a dilettante when it comes to philosophy, but with some Wikipedia assist, I could keep up. I just think it's a very well written, very well thought out book. And Rorty seems to actually care about what happens in the world, with people. This opposed to some abstract philosophical construct that we should aspire to. That gives the book a good deal of it's power, because it's talking about things we can do to make life a little better.

[robin friedman · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Visit With Richard Rorty

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Robin Friedman

[Beauregard Bottomley · Rating 2 out of 5]

I felt the author was mocking his reader and had contempt for their intelligence.

Rorty makes the true, the good and the deserving contingent on the vocabulary and the metaphors subscribed by the current crop of intellectuals which become subject to being subsumed and replaced until a cleverer set of word games come in to vogue. Contrary to Rorty, I would state that reality is complex, and that our beliefs are not just the result of clever word games as Rorty tries to convince his reader.

By making our beliefs relative to the vocabulary of the moment, Rorty allows for no defense against a demagogue coming along and creating an alternative universe and claiming that all news that doesn’t support him is ‘fake news’ and claiming only he, the demagogue, has access to the truth because the truth is what he says it is and changes daily according to his whims of the moment or that mornings batch of tweets. I have no problem saying such a person is wrong and I am right, because when it comes to fascist, tolerance, understanding, respect and consideration are not required. Ultimately, Rorty’s version of pragmatism would not be able to refute a simpleton when he says ‘both sides are to blame when a Nazi rides his car into peaceful protestors’, or ‘Climate change is a Chinese hoax’.

I can’t really recommend this book and would recommend that a reader just read any of the 200 or so authors, philosophers, scientist or thinkers he quotes from instead including Galileo and especially his ‘Dialogues Concerning Two Chief World Systems’. Rorty took a different lesson from Galileo than what I did. For the most part, I found his summaries inadequate and at times intentionally misleading as if he had contempt for my intelligence or as if he had assumed I had not read most of the philosophers, scientist or thinkers he was citing.

Rorty likes Nietzsche and Heidegger’s philosophy except for their illiberalism. In his language they are ironist and he would say ‘irony is the opposite of common sense’, where common sense is metaphysics. Once again, I would recommend Nietzsche (who’s fun to read) or Heidegger (who’s painful to read) over reading Rorty’s misleading synopses. As I was reading this book, I was concurrently reading Derrida’s ‘Heidegger: The Question of Being and History’. Rorty talked a lot about Derrida and Heidegger within this book and at times I would cringe at how different (wrong?) Rorty’s take was on Derrida or Heidegger or even Derrida’s take on Heidegger.

In a footnote in the Nabokov section, Rorty did something that really irritated me. He mentioned that ‘Kinbote’s homosexuality was made so plausible and charming’ within Nabokov’s novel and that ‘sexual obsessions are just handy examples of a more general phenomenon’ (as if homosexuality is a ‘sexual obsession’! would anyone ever say that being straight was a ‘sexual obsession’?) and later in the chapter outside of the footnote he tells me Kinbote is a pedophile. That logic reminds me of when people called the Catholic Priest ‘homosexuals’ when in reality they were pedophiles as if ‘homosexuality’ had anything to do with those monstrous actions committed by those Catholic Priest. Rorty also made a snide remark on Proust (who was gay) for not being able to ‘self create’ himself correctly. I’ve read Proust and I would not insinuate that he lacked self creation of any kind.

Sartre had long sections on Proust and why he was important to existentialism in his book ‘Being and Nothingness’. I wonder why Rorty thought it was necessary to repeat much of the same material in his chapter on ‘Proust, Derrida and Heidegger’.

Rorty does mention Kierkegaard though he definitely does not seem to be a fan of his. Kierkegaard said ‘irony is jealous of authenticity’. That’s a better way of thinking about irony than the way Rorty does. Obviously, Heidegger comes later than Kierkegaard, but ‘authenticity’ is a key to understanding Heidegger. Rorty gets at ‘authenticity’ by his ‘contingency’ and ‘time and chance’ and with feelings and imagination as rediscovered by the Romantics but one would be better served just by reading Heidegger’s ‘Being and Time’ instead.

Rorty does not like the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment rejects myths and preferred reason as the gateway to justified true beliefs instead of relying on our feelings and imagination. Rorty wants to embrace the myths of the ironist until the next set of myths comes along, and he prefers the feelings and imagination as espoused by the Romantics. He refers to our changing conceptions of the world as ‘irony’ and would categorize all metaphysics as a common sense myth of intentional last words on a subject (Heidegger will say metaphysics ended with Hegel, and Rorty will basically agree with that).

In this book, Rorty liked ‘Dialectics of Enlightenment’ for the most part. I despise that book and it is the foundation for the Frankfurt School and for one of my least favorite books, ‘Closing of The American Mind’ by Alan Bloom, a book published 2 years before Rorty’s book, and it had been a mega best seller. There is a straight line connection from the Frankfurt School to Jordan Peterson, and I think Peterson epitomizes shallowness. Rorty is opening up a ‘pragmatic’ version for myths, feelings and imaginations leading our political discourse into a dangerous and a wrongheaded territory.

I don’t think there was anything of substance in this book that I had not read elsewhere. Rorty seemed to be incredibly sympathetic towards Freud and used him as an exemplar for what he was getting at. Freud is fun to read but in the end his brand of functionalism led to blaming ‘refrigerator moms’ for autism. Rorty doesn’t seem to accept that we are all idiosyncratic individuals born differently be it with autism, schizophrenia, manic-depressive, gay or straight and so on. Freud’s reworking and redefinitions led to almost nothing worthwhile and Rorty does not get that.

Individuals idiosyncratically exist making reality complex and we are not easily enlightened by clever word games as Rorty wants his reader to believe. The greatest thing of all about being human is that it is up to the individual to discover what is true, what is ethical and what is most deserving of our own consideration and devotion. Even if we do live in a clever word game, one is best served by acting as if we don’t.

I’m always amazed that the right wing mostly ignore Nietzsche, Heidegger and the argumentation style of Rorty, because it would give them an ontology for their beliefs that would be hard to refute, and ridiculously they latch on to the shallow Ayn Rand, Jordan Peterson or regurgitate Fox News or get their daily batch of truth from Donald Trump’s morning set of contradictory tweets in 144 letters or less. (Yes, I know Rorty is said to be a ‘leftist’ but his argumentation could easily be adapted by the ‘rightist’ of today. That makes me wonder if Rorty was just punking his readers with this book. As for me, I would not devote a chapter to Orwell as a paradigm of liberal thought even though he wrote so elegantly against fascism and communism, because I think it’s possible to think of Orwell in different terms from what was presented at length by Rorty).

[Imme van der Boom · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gelukkig heb ik eindelijk een (voorlopig) antwoord op de vraag: 'En wie is dan je favoriete filosoof?'!

[Shane Eide · Rating 5 out of 5]

www.emergenthermit.com

The late Richard Rorty scandalized people with his ‘relaxed attitude’ when it came to truth. He was often charged with terms like ‘flippant’ and ‘relativistic.’ To rest at such a description of Rorty as a thinker would be to ignore his contribution to the dialogue of liberal thought, and also, to entertain the most refined prejudice of one contingent vocabulary. Contingent vocabularies are what this book is all about. In Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Rorty sets out to create a dialogue in which people who think that being cruel is the worst thing that one could do will gather together and find a way to eliminate the highest amount of suffering possible.

For Rorty, foundationalism and metaphysics are out of the question. As Wittgenstein revealed, there are no mechanics that put an idea in closer proximity to ‘truth.’ Philosophical problems are not cosmic problems but problems of grammar. But the problem with getting the grammar right is that all vocabularies are contingent, so all of our ‘knowledge’ belongs to a specific language game within a set of inherited rules.

There are two strains of thought that occur often in western philosophy. They are ‘private irony’ and ‘liberal hope.’ Through most of the book, Rorty relies as much on novelists as cultural models as he does on philosophers. It has been the ‘liberal hope’ of thinkers to come up with a way to make things better for everyone around them. It has been the ‘private irony’ of other thinkers to find a means of self-recreation. This latter kind of thinker is an ‘ironist’—one who recognizes the contingency of her own vocabulary, trusts no vocabulary that claims to be ‘final’ (though she doesn’t think it possible for any vocabulary to be final).

The ironist sets out to create her own vocabulary in order to find a place amidst the other recognized vocabularies. Rorty posits that, this private irony, though capable of bringing people to personal transformation, is seldom capable of providing any reliable model for society as a whole. Rorty relies on little to back his statement up other than providing aggregate examples of ironists and their horrific views of society, rather than providing a direct incompatibility that private irony has with liberal hope. To exemplify (quite convincingly) some of the failures of ironists to provide this liberal hope, he presents us with Nietzsche’s disastrous culture modeled after the ‘will to power,’ paired with Foucault. Derrida and Proust don’t seem to have much to say about society at all, though they provide spectacular personal mythologies.

As Rorty lays out, there is obviously a need for private irony, just as there is a need for liberal hope, but he feels it important to separate the two in practice. The vocabulary of ‘I’ cannot always agree with the vocabulary of ‘We,’ and it is the ‘We,’ vocabulary that affects each ‘I.’

Rorty argues that, for the most part, what moves the masses is not some new language game or system of thought, but something that people can relate to: in this case, art. Rorty uses novelists as models for liberal hope, for they don’t waste inordinate amounts of time trying to figure out essences or approximations that certain ideas have to reality. They simply represent something that is affecting their world and so get close to their readers.

The two models of liberal hope that he goes into at length are Nabokov and Orwell. Rorty is perhaps revolutionary in his use of Nabokov as a vehicle for liberal change, for most of Nabokov’s readers simply take him at his word when he says of his own work that he has absolutely no message to convey and no moral goal to achieve. Nabokov may have believed this of himself, but Rorty gives us some cogent reasons to suspect that Nabokov was terrified of suffering and thought that cruelty was the worst thing a human could do. He cites examples from Lolita, arguing that Humbert Humbert’s indifference to the suffering of those around him offers a far more complicated moral than the simple idea that ‘pedophiles are bad.’ Rorty cites examples from Nabokov’s other masterpiece, Pale Fire, and has a very easy time convincing us that the moral of both novels are very similar. In both of them, he challenges us to be aware of what’s around us, and often, you will find that someone is suffering.

In Orwell, we see the faultiness of absolutes in the name of a cultural idea. Though Orwell didn’t write masterpieces of English prose, his work was a more conscious vehicle for liberal hope which saw danger and addressed it directly in a time when others didn’t see it.

It is important to note that Rorty finds it equally important to have both private irony and liberal hope, but his whole book sets out a means of separating them in a way that will keep each where it can be utilized best. Rorty seeks to do away with ‘Kantian distinctions’ like ‘content versus style’ and bad questions like, ‘is art for art’s sake?’ For Rorty, all different kinds of art can do all different kinds of things.

Though Rorty does come dangerously close to the same kinds of foundationalism that he rejects when he slips into using words like ‘mistake’ to refer to contingency—as if there was some foundation in which culture would be grounded if it weren’t for this ‘inherited’ set of circumstances we’re always thrown into—he offers ‘solidarity’ as a brilliant synonym for truth, at least in terms of liberal hope.

He says:

If we are ironic enough about our final vocabularies, and curious enough about everyone else’s, we do not have to worry about whether we are in direct contact with moral reality, or whether we are blinded by ideology, or whether we are being weakly “relativistic.”
For Rorty, an idea’s proximity to some ‘out there’ truth is not even something worth determining or fixing. He is concerned with the truth that is best for all of us. He says that the better question is not ‘Do you believe and desire what we believe and desire?’ but, ‘Are you suffering?’

In the end, he argues that if we want private irony and liberal hope, it is possible to have both.

In my jargon, this is the ability to distinguish the question of whether you and I share the same final vocabulary from the question of whether you are in pain. Distinguishing these questions makes it possible to distinguish public from private questions, questions about pain from questions about the point of human life, the domain of the liberal from the domain of the ironist. It thus makes it possible for a single person to be both.

www.emergenthermit.com

[Intery · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Случайност, ирония и солидарност" не дава ясни и точни отговори, а предлага още една посока на мислене как можем да бъдем по-добри. В утопията на Рорти хората са либерални ироници. Либерални, защото смятат, че жестокостта е най-лошата човешка черта; ироници, защото са осъзнали случайността на убежденията и мирогледа си. Книгата е разделена на няколко части, всяка от които аргументира или разширява тази идея.
Една от частите е отделена за обяснение как истината не е "там отвън", а е конструкт върху човешките изказвания и не може да съществува като понятие извън тях. В друга глава иде реч за различните страни на случайността ни. Авторът тълкува Хайдегер (който за мен си остава също толкова неразбираем и когато бъде обсъждан), Ницше (който деконструира европейската цивилизация, без да я разглежда като нещо неслучайно) и Пруст, който деконструира самия себе си, осъзнавайки случайността си.
Друга основна теза на Рорти е, че литературата, а не философията, е по-ефективна в това да прави хората по-малко жестоки. Литературата може да ни покаже гледната точка на хора, много различни от нас, и да ни направи любопитни към техните виждания и съпричастни към болката им. За него Дерида е писател, не философ, особено с оглед на The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond.
Последните двама автори, които книгата разглежда, са Набоков и Оруел. И двамата правят жестокостта видима, но по различен начин. Героите на Набоков са страшни с това, че не забелязват чуждата болка. Цитиран е един момент от "Лолита", в който главният герой се дразни от безкрайното бръщолевене на бръснаря относно сина му спортист и кипва, когато бръснарят казва, че сина му е мъртъв от десетки години. В предговора на някое издание Набоков споделя, че този бръснар му е отнел цял месец, със съзнанието, че читателите няма да го забележат, точно както не го прави и героят. Според Рорти най-големият страх на Набоков е бил да не се окаже, че несъзнателно е причинил някому болка или не е забелязал страданието у някого, с когото се е сблъскал. Затова и такава е темата на няколко от произведенията му.
И докато Набоков ни показва жестокостта у индивидите, а и у нас самите, Оруел ни показва (потенциалната) жестокост в институциите. Тук се разгръща и друга основна идея в "Случайност, ирония и солидарност" - "...Чувството ни на солидарност е най-силно, когато тези, относно които я изразяваме, са смятани за "едни от нас", където "нас" означава нещо по-малко и по-локално от човешката раса. Ето затова "защото тя е човешко същество" е слабо, неубедително обяснение на някоя великодушна постъпка." За автора един подходящ признак за идентифициране на другите хора като твои себеподобни е способността им също като теб да изпитват болка от унижение. Това е и смисълът на мъчението в "1984". Най-голямата болка, която можеш да причиниш на човешко същество, е да го накараш да каже/направи/мисли нещо, с което дори след края на физическата агония няма да може да се примири. "Така можеш да разрушиш неговия свят, като направиш невъзможно този човек да използва език, за да опише себе си какъвто е бил". Спойлер за "1984": Уинстън може да си създаде разказ за това как при тези особени обстоятелства е признал, че 2+2=5, защото е нямал реален избор да го отрече. Случаят не е такъв с момента, в който гласно е предпочел главата на Джулия да отиде в клетката с гладни плъхове, не неговата. "Фактът, че някога е поискал те да направят онова с Джулия, не е нещо, около което може да се създаде разказ... Уинстън трябва да види как сам става на части и едновременно да осъзнае, че никога няма да събере тези части отново."

Есенцията на книгата може да се изрази с цитата "Ако се грижим за свободата, истината може да се грижи сама за себе си. Ако сме достатъчно иронични по отношение на пределните си речници и достатъчно любопитни по отношение на всеки чужд речник, не трябва да се безпокоим дали сме в пряк досег с моралната реалност, или сме заслепени от идеология, или сме болнаво "релативистични"." Според Рорти не е възможно да се аргументира защо жестокостта е нещо лошо, без да се изпадне в кръгови обяснения. За него идеята не е да си задаваме въпроси по сократически, за да си изясняваме същности, а да измислим какво да правим, след като сме се съгласили, че жестокостта е зло.

[Kamakana · Rating 4 out of 5]

if you like this review, i now have website: www.michaelkamakana.com

070813: fascinating meta-philosophy critique, about entire tendencies in thought towards metaphysician- here a bad thing- and the ironist- generally a good thing- but I can see how he could annoy those who are searching for some kind of holistic certainty, some way of thought that is atemporal, usually given capitals whether thick or thin, according to your particular final vocabulary...

so he does not refer to my favourite philosopher, so he gets things out of Heidegger, Nietzsche, even Kant, which I do not know, so he refers to Nabokov, so he gets theory-thick on Orwell, so he valourizes the ironist and never allows enquiry, doubt, freedom to talk, any rest...

Hegel suggests fiction and poetic work will soon be surpassed by Philosophy, here Rorty argues the other way round, heartening for artists, denigration of idea thinkers and all those who believe in the value of love of wisdom. for me, suspended somewhere between these ways of being, there is always already value in both styles of life- rather than deflationary dissolving, resolving, the equation of life, I like to believe life is ambiguity to be lived and not problem to be solved...

but then I am reading Heidegger at the moment, and the only commonality in all these attitudes towards Art, is that it is Important. I hope so... I am enjoying Heidegger's ideas about art as calling forth works of art, rather than the work all building up into a catalog of art...

[Paul Ataua · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a book I read about every five years, and for some reason, it always feels fresh. If I made a Venn diagram of Rorty’s and my ideas, we would probably share a space of about thirty percent, so there is a lot of disagreement there, but that isn’t the point. The book is not easy , but it is accessible, and virtually every page stimulates thought. A mind-blowing trip through Davidson and Wittgenstein on language, Freud and Nietzsche on identity. Foucault and Habermas, Proust, Heidegger, Derrida, and finishing with Nabokov and Orwell on Cruelty. I love reading Rorty because he always helps me to get clearer about what I think.

[Wolf · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wie wel eens graag Hegel, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Heidegger de late Wittgenstein en Derrida in 1 bepaalde maatschappij en persoon verwerkt zou willen zien: dit is een mooie poging. De Ironicus van Rorty, de manier waarop hij aan filosofie doet en het privé-publiek probleem aanpakt!

[Thomas Bundy]

Rorty posits a philosophy that in internally inconsistent, and ultimately, cowardly. To the degree that people can create their own ironic selves, they will necessarily tend to destroy solidarity. His notion of solidarity contradicts the contingent, ironic existences he argues that we have. He just doesn't LIKE that self-creators will come along that will increase suffering, so he creates a scheme that rejects their projects.

The purpose of this ideal liberal society is to eradicate cruelty and suffering and to improve the day-to-day lives of the weakest and least fortunate human beings among us. He correctly notes that this scheme is completely incompatible with the self-creation involved in the private sphere. If anyone was permitted to bind his private self-creation program upon others, humiliation and destruction of freedom (the autonomy produced by recognition of contingency) would result. Rorty, being as liberal as he is ironic, can’t help but to tell us the good we ought to do; he cannot countenance true contingent irony. If he was honest he would have to admit that contingency removes any basis for community. The only thing human beings have in common is their vulnerability to suffering, but that is no basis for solidarity. The ability to feel pain is also what we share with animals, which is why Rorty’s solidarity, as Nietzsche correctly forewarns, would reduce us to a herd. While he says, “there will be no higher standpoint to which we are all responsible and against whose precepts we might offend,” (CIS 50), he nonetheless provides an ordering of society, based not on justice but on compassion, which Nietzsche and Aristotle both recognize as NOT being a virtue. Nietzsche says, “Error (faith in the ideal) is not blindness, error is cowardice” (Ecce Homo).

[Laura · Rating 1 out of 5]

The arrogant musings of a left-wing social philosopher who essentially divides people into three categories: dumb bunnies, common-sensers, and people who have the deep insight to agree with him. The only take-home message worth taking home was that philosophy is not as effective a vehicle for ideas as literature, which I knew beforehand.

[philosovamp · Rating 4 out of 5]

As someone better versed in the Continental tradition, my perception of what I was told was "analytic" philosophy has varied from curiosity, to hesitant respect, to disdain. I can now say that, insofar as this book is an "analytic" work, it is expansive, eclectic and eye-opening to what sorts of philosophy can be done; it has especially piqued an interest in me for Pragmatism. If you know way more about Heidegger than Wittgenstein and feel that's a good thing, I urge you to read this.

As for the book, the part that matters, I must say that Rorty packs very much into very crisp, clear sentences. As a result, much of the work is being done in the background - between the lines, in Rorty's other essays, and in other texts. This book demands re-reads and re-descriptions to do it justice, and Rorty admits that the justifications for his particularly idiosyncratic readings of authors like Freud or Derrida must be sought elsewhere. Thus, some major confusions or qualms I have about Rorty's project here might be irrelevant until I've read further.

Before that, I can only describe Rorty's crystallization of diverse streams of thought into a broad and identifiable view of the world, ironism, as masterful and personally influential. His rejection of both metaphysical thinking and charges of relativism is confident and convincing, and his unwillingness to collapse autonomy or solidarity to the other is daring. And the network of thinkers he draws upon is exciting in its scope, going from Wittgenstein to Kuhn to Foucault.

But Rorty is not just describing ironism, he's describing liberal ironism. It'd be a tautology to say that his very rigid separation of the private and the public is typical of an advocate of liberal political ideology. He provides a more thorough case for that separation than anyone else I've seen, but I was dogged by a suspicion of it; why this distinction and where does it come from, if not the Plato-Kant continuum? Rorty writes that "socialization goes all the way down," so why is it a coherent means of describing groups as comprised of individuals having their own inviolable domain with such a sharp distinction? Of course, the response could be: there is nothing true or necessarily externally coherent about the rigid demarcation of the private and the public, it is a useful re-description for the "we" group of liberals. Well, being, probably, in at least one community other than Rorty's where this description is used, I can only claim skepticism. But this rigid demarcation between the private ironist and the public liberal, where you don't necessarily care at all for others in your private libidinal fantasies, and surrender that on the entrance into the public sphere, leads him to pretty startling claims like: Foucault, Nietzsche, Heidegger or Derrida are immensely important figures for the private ironist, and completely useless for liberal society. He thus goes back and flattens the work of these writers, not only suggesting they are useless but for your individual projects, but, I think, insinuating, that they were mistaken to try to do anything other than Proust did in the first place. I find that difficult to swallow and not quite defensible.

At a more particular level, Rorty's claim that science and philosophy has fallen far behind literature in giving meaning and excitement to lives in liberal societies I find strange, as science and technology have an importance growing in scale and complexity the world over. That more people could recognize Hawking or Tyson than Nabokov demonstrates this at least a little. Rorty's neglect of science, while also making frequent referral to ideas derived directly from a study of philosophy and history of science via Kuhn, is either an omission of brevity's sake or a blindspot. This is especially important in that Rorty cites the capacity for suffering as essentially a replacement for reason or goodness as the essential natural quality of all humans (and animals); that he could do this on any but a physiological and psychological basis, somehow outside of our languages, would be curious if not contradictory; yes all people seem to suffer, but as Rorty acknowledges the most profound forms of suffering, humiliation, are engineered - they're socialized. Another alternate viewpoint I would have liked to see considered is in the Nabokov/Orwell section; he draws on these two novelists (poets, rather) to discuss cruelty as a private question (Nabokov) and a social ill (Orwell). I would have much rather seen Rorty tackle someone like de Sade, who rather than prodding at personal cruelty or appalling at its social extremes, embraced it in both spheres. That cruelty is, for de Sade, not just the frightening trait of even the intelligent, but every single powerful or intelligent person in the West, is a tougher problem for Rorty. As a final short ancillary remark, I wish I knew if Rorty would be so optimistic about his predictions of the power of literature in liberal society; a lot less people are getting their moral instruction from Orwell as from Rowling. What a monster the culture machine is.

The final, and probably bigger question, is at the very end: is ironism and solidarity more useful for liberal society than metaphysical thinking? Rorty doesn't dare ask: what's useful for other communities? I am not sure how he would approach that question were he alive today, a very different West from that of 20 years ago when this was published. Certain actors in liberal society today wield, it could be argued, ironism as a social force, not a private one, to attack institutions; human solidarity as Rorty perceives it giving way to apparent sectarianism unlike that seen in decades; and a ballooning of metaphysical thinking, such as in scientism or "true/fake news" all suggest that ironism and solidarity are not inviolably useful tools for even Rorty's "we's" aims.

[Darran Mclaughlin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Outstanding. This is the closest that a work of philosophy has ever come to reflecting my own personal beliefs. Rorty was an analytical philosopher in the Anglo-American tradition that had a 'road to Damascus' conversion to Continental philosophy. His writing is in the tradition of Nietzsche, Heidegger and Derrida combined with the Pragmatists, but he writes very clearly. He writes in such a way as to express exactly what he means to say, without ducking behind vague and complex language like many of the Post-Modern or Post-Structuralist philosophers.



Rorty believes that the best way for human beings to understand life, the world and other people is through literature, and so do I.



He provides a coherant defence of Liberalism.



He reconciles his (and my) liking of various antithetical thinkers, writers and ideas. For example, I love Nietzsche, but I wouldn't want to live in the kind of world he seems to want to create, and this book shows how that is possible.



I shall need to re-read this book to fully understand and appreciate it, but Rorty has already entered my pantheon of guru's.

[Matthew Gallaway · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rorty's conception of language and fiction changed my life. Five fucking stars.

[Joseph Stieb · Rating 4 out of 5]

5 stars for the argument but 3 for the delivery. I don't know why philosophers have to write like this; Rorty spends more time telling you what his argument isn't than what it is, and the chapters on Derrida, Foucault, Proust, and Nietzsche are almost unreadable (like the writings of those dudes themselves). Admittedly, I skimmed those chapter to get the gist.

However, once you wade through all of this, you actually get to a pretty interesting and important argument. The core of this book is the problem of reconciling postmodernism and liberalism. Here's the problem: postmodernism holds that there is no essentially good or bad human nature, no necessary pattern or direction of history, and that we have a radical ability to construct our identities and the world around us. Rorty goes further than this than I would, but I as a historian I certainly agree with the "constructedness" of a great deal of the social/moral world, including the idea of morality as a construct. The problem here is if you take these premises, how do you embrace/follow a liberal morality/politics based on objective concepts like human rights and human equality. Rorty's book is really more about showing that you can't do this; that you liberals have to embrace irony and contingency. The contingency part is the undeniable fact that the morality I hold and the perspective with which I see the world is contingent on historical developments that are directionless and on being born into a certain culture/time. The irony is that I (liberals) have to live out our moral code not because it holds some deep truth about human beings (if it did, why did it take so long to emerge historically?) or about the universe (which is morally patternless) but because it recognizes the evil of suffering and humiliation, things that all people do have in common. Rorty's liberalism is the liberalism of fear, to borrow from Judith Shklar; it is a liberalism of uncertainty in the good but greater confidence in avoiding the bad (especially cruelty).

Now, of course, there's a trap in every postmodern argument: how is that suffering, cruelty, and humiliation that we are supposed to avoid any less constructed than concepts like rights or basic equality? Rorty doesn't really answer that question directly, but his overall philosophy suggests a response. When we adopt different moral or epistemic vocabularies throughout history, we change the way human suffering is looked at, and we change our definition of who is human (who is "us" as Rorty puts it), and we expand our capacity for solidarity. We don't become "more human;" someone torturing another person is as human as someone selflessly rescuing another person. Instead, we stand on that contingency (a new vocabulary, in his somewhat awkward phrase), and we see the world differently. Rorty makes a fascinating case that moral progress is not driven by systematization of thought but by imagination; imagining the suffering and inner lives of others differently. He explores this with some very interesting chapters on cruelty and dominance in Nabokov and Orwell. I think there's lot of historical evidence he could pull from too, like the importance of a more literate culture in fostering the Enlightenment and the rise of abolitionism.

So here's the big question: Should you read this book? If you aren't used to reading philosophy or political theory, probably not. This isn't me saying that I'm so smart and awesome; this is just a dense and technical book (although not too long, at 200 pages). Still, this perspective is definitely worth thinking about. Let me leave off with a quote from Rorty that I really liked:

"I take Orwell to be telling us that whether our future rulers are more like O'Brien or more like J.S. Mill does not depend...on deep facts about human nature. For, as O'Brien and Humbert Humbert show, intellectual gifts-intelligence, judgment, curiosity, imagination, a taste for beauty-are as malleable as the sexual instinct. They are capable of as many diverse employments as the human hand."

[Joeri · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rorty makes a sympathetic case for a liberal utopia in which we should realize that the vocabularies we use (e.g.: our value, and beliefsystems as mediated by our socialization and language) are contingent and must be kept open to revision. This makes them equal, because no vocabulary is privileged, nor can a vocabulary be legitimized from a neutral, objective standpoint. There are thus no "true"meta-vocabularies.

We should therefore not base our beliefs and actions about for instance solidarity on (philosophical) foundations concerning human nature, which are flawfully essentialistic, but on the ability to see others as susceptible to pain and humiliation. This is what it means to be a liberal ironist, for Rorty.

Though progressive and emancipatory as this might seem, vocabularies are not, I think, as equal and contingent as Rorty argues. Some are still being priviliged over others and we are disciplined to embrace some, which can be very harmful. Also, seeing things as contingent might make it harder to strive for social progress, in stead of making it easier.

[Sharifa · Rating 5 out of 5]

An absolute must-read for any student (or fan) of the analytic tradition in Western philosophy.

Rorty criticizes not only basic assumptions in the Enlightenment tradition's approach towards examining meaning, speech and truth but also how this approach that we've inherited is flawed in understanding itself and other systems of thought. If all this sounds excessively obtuse, I hope you take my word it isn't. The implications of these ideas range not only from the political and sociological but also to the interpersonal and deeply metaphysical. If nothing else, this book is sure to impart a discomforting but illuminating sense of self-awareness.

[Andrew]

Oh my, this was an interesting one. So much of what Rorty said, I agreed with to a T. Things that seem so obvious, but in the ordinary sphere of discourse are always clouded by metaphysical bullshit. The one thing he said that I couldn't jibe with (and I don't know whether I disagree with it or not, it was certainly disconcerting) was his notion of a divide between private ironism and public non-ironism. Either way, his whole thesis is very interesting and thought-provoking, and, to phrase it in a Rortian way, necessitates a vocabulary shift for all of us.

[Aggrey Odera · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book that shattered every notion of objectivity or truth that I've ever had, and then attempted to build (perhaps a bit unsuccessfully) a framework through which, since I no longer believed in truth, I could engage with the world without just being a massive, cynical arsehole (private irony; public solidarity). This is not my favourite book (that's The Power Broker by Caro), nor is it the book I've enjoyed reading the most (that's Anna Karenina), but if asked, this is the one book I'd recommend to everyone as the book that has impacted my thoughts about philosophy and life the most.

[Nick Wellings · Rating 4 out of 5]

            The publication of Contingency Irony, Solidarity seems to have been a major event in philosophy. It seems that many philosophers were scandalised, angry or offended by the text and its position. It was true to say that to read CIS was to encounter an intellectually brave and morally novel work like nothing I have read before. Why?
 
Rorty wants to show us a preffered state of society. To do this Contingency Irony Solidarity (CIS) thumbs its nose at a lot of sacred cows. Rorty attempts to pull the rug out from under most of our seemingly sacred principles, many of which seem unassailable, necessary and true.

METHOD AND TRUTH
 
Rorty's Method

As with genealogy of families, intellectual genealogy thrives on the assumption of 'purity' the surety that comes from secure and unchallenged unbroken descent. To be able to prove through the branches back to the root of things, one obtains legitimacy. Rorty shows us the parochial nature of our historical situation by tracing these lines of "purity" (my scare quote marks, Rorty is too subtle t lend value judgement to his ideas) which have become second nature, part of our mental and cultural furniture. In histroicising, Rorty "de-divinizes" them, flinging back the cultural curtains to disenchant our Oz.

Seen this way, many of our ideas on politics, freedom, selfhood turn out to be historically contingent narratives, part of the cultural milieu, the phrases and concepts part of what Rorty calls our final vocabularies. To so disenchant, to destablise and in so doing, disabuse us of certain institutions and of Truth in general, Rorty's aim is to build an internally consistent plausible model from which liberalism (his preferred government/life style - and by extension, he hopes, ours,) can find a foothold. The chief target of Rorty's deconstructive gaze is one of the hoariest in philosophy: Truth.
 
TRUTH:
 
Contra X-Files, Rorty asserts right from the start of CIS that the Truth is not out there. (In this respect I would classify him as a deflationist*.) Instead we are makers of our own cultural and personal truths. This is where many commentators got angry - Rorty was charged with being a Relativist, tantamount to saying he was an intellectual anarchist or terrorist. He defends himself in the book and elsewhere against this, knowing it is an issue that sinks his epistemological ship if the shot is true. Further, Rorty's is a thoroughly postmodern philosophy, analytic thought with Continental flavours, cooked up by American hands. (Quelle horreur!)
 
To return to Irony and to simplify: Rorty explains via Wittgenstein that our language games are all that is the case: they are our truth. These vocabularies are amenable to transformation. It seems that our words can be our projects. Once this is realised we can narrate a radical (liberal) future to ourselves.
 
CONTINGENCY:
 
If our historical narratives (one is reminded of Lyotard) are contingent, Rorty asks us to realise that our notions of self, place in society are also. Contingecy here means not so much parochialism obtaining from chance historical patterns (which is mere tautology), event subtending event, life with life, but more to do with malleability: in thinking of historical coutnerfactuals, we may be more responsive to those times when we have choice of action, and may be able to change our life trajectories. After all, every philosopher and most people realise that they are temporal beings. In Heideggerian terms, we are "thrown" into Being, but have the means to catch ourselves. (As an aside, I am reminded that Bloom tells us our modern consciousness emerged with Shakespeare, the solliloquy a device of "self-overhearing", this overhearing a mark of Modern mind...)
 
Rorty's solutions to contingency (irony, solidarity) here are to my mind, peculiarly American: the transformative element through irony, the idea of American Dream (coined 1931, the year of Rorty's birth) the self-help and Landmark fora type elements which say (correctly) that one must change ones life - to use as Rorty does, Nietzsche's dictum: we must become who we are.
 
Therefore we have so far the Contingency of self and society explained. Next follows Irony. Realising our contingency we are gifted through irony to change our selves and society. Lastly comes Solidarity.


SOLIDARITY:
 
With Truth deflated and our cultural projects seen as contingent, we are left in a precarious position. If one dispenses with an idea of any privileged truths and trutholders one becomes lost in competing truths. Rorty's solution is to accept this plurality but to cheerlead for liberalism, hoping it's historical track record and status as "pretty good so far!" makes it a favourite in the footrace of Western narratives. I suspect he may have done this to foreground the fact that those blessed with agency and freedoms are able to chose its structure a preferable state of order for their existence.
 
My thoughts:

I really liked how he used Proust Heidegger and Nietzsche to buttress his argument. Some cogent and subtle criticism throughout those sections. I especially liked how Proust is given to us as exemplar of irony, a master at realising his self's nature.
 
Though I am unschooled I did have some felt objections to some of his concepts (felt as in, a twinge of doubt and not so much intellectually expressed argued thoughts). Let's put it that at the end of the book I was less than convinced. Rorty's own Grand narrative of ironic liberalism seems to ignore the microscale, as if he is saying let the little things sort themselves.
 
I had further issues with how Rorty chooses to illustrate his moral/ethical ideas. CIS's ethical politics are drawn from Sklar's dictum that cruelty is the worst thing we can do to one another which is fine by me. I did not agree that the way in which he aims to remind us of this through art was the best course of action.

Rorty says that our most profound artists are alive to their own contingency, their stance is ironic, their perspective larger than ours. One conventionally calls this wisdom, but Rorty shies away from this (remember how he likes to disenchant? Is wary of value judgements?). Nabokov and Orwell are yoked in to reinforce his ethical rules: Nabokov and cruelty and Orwell on dangers of totalitarianism.  We must, qua Rorty, read from our betters to learn how we must act. Working to work away from cruelty, we forge solidarity. Having read Orwell, we are aware of the danger of collective agency given collective solidarity (anarchy, totalitarianism?).

This seemed a little flimsy to me. One does not live by books.  Our cultural gatekeepers may be mandarins, we follow their examples by the fictions they read privately or present to us publicly, but in the world as it is, who governs book in hand or mind? The bible or Quran might be texts most suited to this but then the spectre of fundamentalism rears its head.
 
One might ask why for instance that the work of Goya (specifically his Disasters of War series) does not suffice to educate or warn us? Painting could arguably be more democratic than reading as, seeing is available to most of us, and we can confront the visual message therein whereas not everyone can read. The same for say, Midnight Express or Papillon which must educate us against the horrors of imprisonment as Shawshank Redemption tries to show us how sweet liberty is to those deprived of it, or as Paths Of Glory or To Kill A Mockinbird shows us danger of injustice and Guess Who's Coming To Dinner warns us about racism*. I can't recall reading why Rorty chooses books over film but I think he was a professor of comparative lit too. An objection here might be that in our age there is ongoing debate around the idea that brutal films seem only to debase us and our offspring, corrupting our morals and such like, and its harder for books to corrupt minds.
 
Problematic too I thought was that in Rorty's world, whither basic decency? It's not mentioned in CIS. It seems truly that anything goes - as long as it is ironically mediated, working for liberal principles. This is to ignore a great weight of evidence that the Golden Rule was expounded by Jesus and Confucius, that it seems pretty pancultural not to aggravate ones neighbour and to generally be nice.Cruelty may be the worst thing we can do but decency perhaps the best. To me it seems that in CIS the baby of decency is thrown out with the bathwater of Enlightenment tropes. I favour the philosophy of Levinas where encounter with Other is key to existence, morality and selfhood. Self mediated through encounter. Rorty's Others seem to be only fictional (Orwell's Winston, Nabokov's Humbert) his morality equated with these fictional representations. There must be some kind of concession to "common sense". We do not abhor murder because Brutus and his conspirators knifed Julius Caeser. Nor because it was done in public. (Perhaps I am reading him wrongly. There are very likely 'more things dreamed of in his philosophy....'etc.)

Rorty problematises the gulf between private irony and liberal expectation a little too much for my liking too.
 
Last thoughts: I found the chapter on Nabokov veered a little into pure literary criticism. The Orwell chapter stronger as more directly and convincingly linked to Rorty's argument. The Solidarity chapter and concluding remarks a bit rushed/crammed and not as conclusive as I would have liked. Rorty essentially entreats us to expand our notions of togetherness to include others we would not normally include in the idea.
 
Overall though, a fun book! Rorty's style is relaxed and even though I had trouble with a few sentences or ideas here and there, it wasn't a big deal. Anyone who likes to engage with thought on self and society will find a lot to ruminate on in here.


Notes
* Deflationism: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deflat...

* I realise some of these film choices are not the best paradigmatic fits.

Further reading:

For a far better review than mine try Dennis Dutton's!

http://denisdutton.com/rorty_review.htm

[Lucas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Geez, I loved this. I can’t remember the last time I felt like a book spoke so directly to me.
The book obsesses over those who justify unimaginable cruelty and who manage to blind themselves to the pain they cause onto others. Another obsession of the book: the fear that we—him, me, you—could be these people.
Rorty wants us to listen to the details of others' lives and sensitize ourselves to their pain and humiliation. He wants this listening to have no bounds, from what I can tell. The book made me want to talk to everyone—esp. those I dismiss/dislike—and read every book.
I'm so obsessed with having conversations with strangers now GOD. Next read: How to be Less Shy.

[Thomas Becker · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ein wirklich fantastisches Buch und absolut Zeitlos.

Ich verstehe persönlich auch gar nicht warum der Neo-Pragmatismus von Rorty so eine Randexistenz fristet wo er doch so gut in die jetzige Zeit passt. Ich kann es mir fast nur so erklären, dass sich viele andere (v.a. Philosophen) von Rortys Thesen angegriffen fühlen.

Auf jeden Fall sehr empfehlenswert und interessant.

[Jeffrey Howard · Rating 5 out of 5]

Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity includes several of Rorty's most important contributions to philosophy: final vocabulary, ironist, liberal (in the Rortian sense), and the roles of literature/philosophy.

Just a few quotes that jump out from the text.

-"On this view, great scientists invest descriptions of the world which are useful for purposes of predicting and controlling what happens, just as poets and political thinkers invent other descriptions of it for other purposes."

-"We need to make a distinction between the claim that the world is out there and the claim that truth is out there. To say that the world is out there, that is it not our creation, is to say, with common sense, that most things in space and time are the effects of causes which do not include human mental states. To say that truth is not out there is simply to say that where there are no sentences there is no truth, that sentences are elements of human languages, and that human languages are human creations."

-"Conforming to my own precepts, I am not going to offer arguments against the vocabulary I want to replace. Instead, I am going to try to make the vocabulary I favor look attractive by showing how it may be used to describe a variety of topics."

-"We should restrict ourselves to questions like 'Does our use of these words get in the way of our use of those other words?' This is a question about whether our use of tools is inefficient, not a question bout whether our beliefs are contradictory."

-"Another way of making this point is to say that the social process of literalizing a metaphor is duplicated in the fantasy life of an individual. We call something 'fantasy' rather than 'poetry' or 'philosophy' when it revolves around metaphors which do not catch on with other people—that is, around ways of speaking or acting which the rest of us cannot find a use for."

-"I said in the first chapter that the problem with this comparison is that the person who designs a new tool can usually explain what it will be useful for—why she wants it—in advance; by contrast, the creation of a new form of cultural life, a new vocabulary, will have its utility explained only retrospectively."

-"The know-nothings include religious fundamentalists, scientists who are offended at the suggestion that being 'scientific' is not the highest intellectual virtue, and the philosophers for whom it is an article of faith that rationality requires the deployment of general moral principles of the sort put forward by Mill and Kant."

-"The idea that liberal societies are bound together by philosophical beliefs seems to me ludicrous. What binds societies together are common vocabularies and common hopes."

Rorty's thought is as intellectually electrifying as ever in this short-ish book. If you're looking to dig into Rorty's works, here's my recommended order of reading.

-Achieving Our Country
-Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity
-Consequences of Pragmatism
-The Future of Religion
-Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature

(I'm only including his books I'm familiar with here.)

[Mohammad Sadegh Rasooli · Rating 2 out of 5]

My review in Persian: http://delsharm.blog.ir/1396/12/09/rorty

[Fraser Kinnear · Rating 5 out of 5]

This strange title is actually a remarkably concise summary of the entire book. We can pair Rorty’s three nouns “Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity” with “Problem, Solution, Application”. What to each of these words mean to this author?

Rorty uses ideas from pragmatist,continental and analytic philosophy to argue that our understanding of the world is contingent on the limitations of our language (Wittgenstein / Donald Davidson), as is the purpose of our own life and the source of our morality (Nietzsche / Freud), as are the values and goals of our community (Hegel / Foucault).

Aren’t such ideas an excuse for pretty anti-social behavior? They smack of a kind of amoral relativism disparaged by polite society. On the face, yes, but Rorty argues that, faced with such conclusions, we are left to form an ironic perspective about this contingency. If philosophies, or even simple opinions and perspectives, are just statements inside of vocabularies that aren’t necessarily any more or less true than other vocabularies, then hopefully we are inspired to seek out progressively newer and more relevant vocabularies.

Such an ironist sustains a degree of humility that the vocabulary that colors their world could be improved upon, and is always on the look-out for other perspectives.

We can allow this ironism to color our own private philosophy, while we adhere to whatever public philosophy of the community we live in. This is the solidarity that Rorty expects his readers to pragmatically support. For Rorty and his intended audience, this means supporting liberal democratic values, with the understanding that they may conflict with our own private philosophies.

Rorty accepts some form of relativism at the private level as inevitable, but then at the public level argues for universals, such as suffering is bad and should be avoided. These values inevitably conflict, and Rorty accepts their irreconcilability, thereby sidestepping virtually the entire tradition of political philosophy. I frequently bristled against Rorty’s comfort with this inconsistency. Allowing for a contradiction between “private” and “public” philosophies feels like no way to live, as much as it feels truly unavoidable. This book is an astonishing blend of the infuriating and utterly sensible, often in the same paragraph.

After an interesting synthesis of these philosophies, Rorty somehow finds time for really remarkable literary criticism based on his ideas. He totally turns three authors on their heads for me. Derrida becomes an ironically self-aware jester of the contingency of language. Nabokov becomes a great moralist of the evils of in-curiosity. Orwell becomes an antiintellectual moralist. Rorty’s read of Lolita in particular has convinced me to attempt the book again, after abandoning it years ago out of sheer squeamishness.
Page-for-page, this has been the most rewarding book I’ve read all year.

[Geoffrey Fox · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rorty is a delightfully stimulating conversation companion, starting a conversation in my head as I read and recognize many observations and have to puzzle over others. In three major sections, he presents his view of how we humans can struggle for personal liberation — he calls it autonomy, which I think is good — without losing sight of our commitment to the well-being of others, that is, solidarity. Our only way of doing either is through language, by which we create our descriptions of the world. Which is what we call "truth": "Truth cannot be out there — cannot exist independently of the human mind — because sentences cannot so exist, or be out there. The world is out there, but descriptions of the world are not."
The ironist recognizes that his/her truth is not final or absolute, but contingent. New experience will require a new description, or at least an adjustment of our old vision. When so many adjustments are needed as to make that older version practically useless, we must create a new one. By changing our language, using old words but with new meanings and when necessary inventing new words, we change our worlds — as Copernicus did to Ptolemy, Darwin to a whole theological tradition, or Orwell (in Rorty's fascinating analysis of "1984" — did to a complex language of the Left. I am thankful for his recognition of the revolutionary function of writers, the original ones like Nabokov, Orwell, Nietzsche, Dickens, Heidegger (yes, even despite his Naziism), Habermas, Derrida, to mention only those Rorty here discusses in detail.

[Jake · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rorty's main contribution in this book is to give us a ladder to climb above the metaphysics of Enlightenment Liberalism that much of our shared political languages inherits, while salvaging the bones of Liberalism that continue to serve us well. As an example: Rorty gives the leash to quibble with the accuracy of the statement "that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights" while still drawing the line before the illiberal view that should consider things like "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness" as conditional. His writing weaves together disparate yarns of history, philosophy, and political thought together in a clear manner. His yield is a surveyor's view of much post-enlightenment political philosophy while also charting a course forward. His clarity and accessibility are unrivaled among 20th century philosophers with a pragmatic style that sets him apart from his continental contemporaries. Both philosophical and abstract yet striking at a deeply personal, I can't recommend this book enough.

[Charlie Key · Rating 5 out of 5]

V good. Still not sure I totally go with Rorty’s arg that all vocabularies and truth claims are entirely produced and thus open to question - there’s still a bit of Burke in me that believes some claims, hard-learned and developed gradually, do describe some basic truisms or commonalities. Nonetheless, I defo accept that this ground is much shakier and that very little is inevitable - the Orwell chapter is incredible on this. And, as is my hobby horse, I think the conclusions of such ideas are distinctively conservative ones.

[Pieter Buskens · Rating 5 out of 5]

Zo vaag en alomvattend als ik het begrip contingentie altijd vond, zo scherp en amuserend brengt Rorty dit concept tot leven. Ik zou er zelf bijna een Rortiaanse “ironische liberaal” van worden, was het niet dat ik mezelf en iedereen om me heen volledig zou clown als ik me opeens als liberaal zou identificeren.