On the ‘Logic’ of Rorty’s Imaginative Liberalism: Utopia, Solidarity, and the Private-Public Distinction

Miklós Nyírő

1. Introduction

In my attempt to reconstruct some of the most significant aspects of Rorty’s postmodern version of liberalism in connection with his rather philosophical, neopragmatist views, I hope to prove what I begin with, namely, the assumption according to which Rorty’s philosophical projects are motivated, throughout, by his political philosophy. Such a reading of his work is also underpinned, I think, by his autobiographical essay titled “Trotsky and the Wild Orchids”, and what I’d like to show is a kind of “logic” inherently being at work in his over-all thought, some major points of structural interconnections between his political and more philosophical views.1 Since Rorty’s political philosophy is basically of utopian nature, it may be instructive and even advisable to find out how his utopias, both national and global, look like, what the main features of such forms of utopian coexistence are. We are in a lucky position in this regard, insofar as in a short writing Rorty has sketched his utopian vision concerning American society. Recapitulating this national utopia of his (2. section) will make us able to focus on its critical points, also with a view to his global utopia. As we will see, however, the latter cannot simply be understood as an extention of the former: the viability of the global egalitarian utopia defended by Rorty poses problems on an entirely new level. Exposing their main aspects (3) and then enumerating their philosophical prerequisites via reconstructing Rorty’s relevant argument (4) will shed light, as I try to show, on several further issues central to his work (5), among them the one concerning his famous private-public distinction, to which I devote a separate section (6). As a conclusion, I attempt to situate Rorty’s political-philosophical views, highlighting chief points of connections between these two sides os his work.

2. National Utopia Built on Fraternity

In his essay, titled “Looking Backwards from the Year 2096”, Rorty envisions some of the crucial traits of his utopian society.2 Although this vision concerns the US’ future, it also has consequences to Rorty’s global egalitarian utopia. Looking backwards, history necessitated two major and interconnected changes in the US by the end of the 21st century. First, a shift occurred in the politicians’ convictions regarding the main task of political bodies, and it led to a considerable change in the over-all political vocabulary. Second, a parallel shift took place in the general estimation concerning the relation between the economic and the moral orders. According to this vision, such changes were effected by a breakdown of present democratic institutions, by a collapse which resulted from the widening gap between the poor and the rich under the increasing pressures of a globalized world economy. Above all, it was the steady process of loosing pride in fraternal ideas combined with the collapse of trust in government, that is to say, the loss of social hope that drove desperate men and women into a revolution. Since social hope can primarily rest on institutions embodying fraternity, the most important lesson to be learned for the US was that “the first duty of the state is to prevent gross economic and social inequality”, whereas formerly “the government’s only moral duty was to ensure ’equal protection of the laws’”.3 For political discourse centering on the notion of “rights” makes room for huge and immoral social and economic inequalities, as in Rorty’s example “’the

1 right to a job’ (or ‘to a decent wage’) had non of the resonance of ’the right to sit in the front of the bus’ or ‘the right to vote’ or even ’the right to equal pay for equal work’”. 4 After all, it was due to the socially unjust and morally unacceptable, although legally permitted employment conditions and gap between employees’ incomes that − under pressure − social revolt emerged. Even the so-called “Rights revolution” in the second half of the 20th century addressed only the situation of racial, ethnic or sexual groups, and didn’t do much for what was at the time above all desirable, namely, economic rights. The alternative to contemporary capitalist democracy, which primarily depends on economic prosperity, is of course not the ill-fated socialist way of merging economy and state. In Rorty’s view, it is rather a morally and politically reformed capitalist democracy, where reforms within the frames of existing democratic institutions extend not only to the introduction of vital economic and social rights, but also and above all to reoriented political aims and corresponding public vocabulary. Under such conditions, inequalities should be regarded not as regrettable necessities but as examples of “evident moral abominations”.5 Accordingly, emphasis would shift from mere economic aspects to that of moral considerations, “talk of rights” would give way to talk of unselfishness, political discourse would draw on literary examples of brotherhood rather than on social science and political theory, and “parties of selfishness” would become more and more marginalized as voters gave mandate to political groups realizing programs of fraternity.6 Such programs would include at least a strong policy of state-redistribution, and perhaps also new forms of control (by trade unions) and ownership (by the workers). The price to pay for such prospects would probably be a consistently lower rate of productivity. It might well be that all this would relegate the US to the position of an “isolationist, unambitious, middle-grade nation”.7 The point, however, is the restoration of social hope, and that of fraternity as the “most cherished ideal” on which this morally reformed democracy primarily depends.8 Rorty’s national utopia culminates just in that.

3. Global Egalitarian Utopia and the Problem of Solidarity

In this vision, the term “fraternity” is used by Rorty in an ethnocentric sense, as something that distinguished America from early on: “The whole point of America − he writes − was that it was going to be the world’s first classless society”, and the ideal of such a society springs up, of course, from the fraternal feelings of its citizens, presumably having their ground in the historically unique circumstances of this nation’s formation.9 In America’s case, this ethnocentric feeling has furthermore a world-historical importance, insofar as this nation, at least for a period of time, “cast itself in the role of vanguard of a global egalitarian utopia”. 10 That promise of American life, coupled with such a mission, is the soul and spirit of the US in Rorty’s view. Those fraternal feelings toward fellow-citizens, however, which sustain social hope in Rorty’s national utopia, cannot apply to the global scale without further ado. Their ethnocentricity seems to be incompatible with their possible globalization. Yet, an equivalent of them is required, by analogy, for the viability of a global egalitarian utopia. Therefore a closer examination of the possibility and conditions of such a cosmopolitan alternative to ethnocentric fraternity seems to be inevitable. In his Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity Rorty names and examines the notion of solidarity as the supporting pillar of hope in global egalitarian utopia.11 The question is, however: how can solidarity as a moral duty towards others be saved in a post-metaphysical era, that is to say, within the circumstances of pure historicity and contingency? Accordingly, Rorty refuses every form of grounding it in a universalistic manner, such as e.g. the Kantian notion of moral law. He also regards as untenable any ideas such as e.g. “essentially human”, the “core of the self”, the “nature of society”, or the like. If we take historicity and contingency to heart, there will be indeed no standard accessible for us to tell what is human and what is not human “by

2 nature”. Even the formerly presumed “natural” gap between human beings and animals or human beings and robots will dissolve, and only a texture of similarities and differences − available in descriptions − will remain for our orientations. Within such circumstances it is a matter of historically emerging intersubjective validity to judge, publicly, what is what. Rorty’s point, underpinned by the “Linguistic Turn”, is that in a fully de-divinized context there can be “no source of authority other than the free agreement of human beings”.12 Therefore, it has a special significance that utopia seems to be not only the form of Rorty’s thought, but also that of the supporters of a morally reformed national and global democracy. For the primary function of such utopian thinking is that it embodies a definite conviction which is capable of regulating action. It is indeed one of the main points of Rorty’s pragmatism, that inasmuch as such a conviction becomes predominant, we do not need ultimate principles and corresponding philosophical fundationalism any more in order to argue for that conviction. In fact, theory in general must lose its primacy as a regulating factor of social praxis in his view, and its place should be taken by social hope. Truly, hope and fraternity are not things about which one should or even could give a theoretical account. That is why utopian political discourse should be dominated by literary examples of fraternity. For such feelings are inclinations that we learn, if at all, by being able to recognize ourselves in others through our capacity of imagination. Imagination, then, must – and in fact will − play a crucial role in Rorty’s utopia, and what is more, the utopian thought itself must also be regarded as a focus imaginarius, that is to say, an outstanding example of human creativity, serving as a contingent yet regulating vision. Having said so and returning to the chief question of how solidarity as a moral duty can be saved, first we examine the notion of morality. In the context of radical contingency a person’s moral duty has its ground in the accepted practices of a community to which that person, at all times, belongs. It is an issue of our “we”-intention, as Wilfrid Sellars has put it, where this “we” is always an empirical community, in contrast to the ideal notion of humanity in general.13 The so-called “moral principles” are in fact “reminders of, abbreviations for, [… but] not justifications for” extant social and political practices.14 “Moral duty” can be taken only to mean the “voice of the community”, in the sense of a call for taking into account its interests. This “we” has a binding force whenever one intends it, but even then, its force is never absolute or “categorical”. Thus, moral duty always remains part and parcel of our deliberations, and as Rorty repeatedly emphasizes, one cannot demand its “automatic” precedence over against private motives.15 The traditional distinction between pure morality and utilitarian deliberation thereby proves to be outworn, and the conflict between communal and individual motives takes its place. We are supposed to arrive at a decision via deliberation, without any non-contingent criteria, by paying heed to the details of the actual case. Meanwhile the conflicting interests remain rivals of one another, and the best and most reasonable thing deliberation can do is “to make a deal – find some compromise”.16 Furthermore, our feelings of moral obligations are the strongest when they pertain to someone who is “one of us”. This “we” means a particular community that stands always already in an opposition to a “they”, and its significance parallels the contrastive power inherent in its particularity. There is no way for our “we”-intentions to get beyond their particular, or more generally, ethnocentric character − although such an ethnos may include e.g. that of a locally dispersed research team. The ethnocentricity of our “we”-intentions or morality jeopardizes, again, the notion of global solidarity as a moral duty. Nevertheless, Rorty points to imagination as the only viable source of solidarity. For solidarity is not a thing to be found, but rather, it must be “generated” or created. In a sense one can even learn to feel that way in Rorty’s view, and that is what happened to us also in a historical sense. Inasmuch as this inclination has to be created, “constructed out of little pieces”, it is most of all imagination that can help it to come about.17 It is so because the cultivation of

3 imagination can help to recognize similarities, and thus, it can help expanding our “we”- consciousness. “[…] feelings of solidarity − he writes − are necessarily a matter of which similarities and dissimilarities strike us as salient, and […] such salience is a function of a historically contingent final vocabulary”,18 where “the human self is created by the use of such a particular vocabulary”.19 The point, however, that imagination would be the source of solidarity is not immediately convincing. Namely, if solidarity depends on recognizing similarities and that on our “final vocabularies”, than global solidarity seems to require that we expand ours to include all other people’s contingent vocabulary, which is of course not tenable. And indeed, in Rorty’s exposition we can read sentences fluctuating, through pages, between circumscribing the requirement of expanding our “we”-consciousness and what Rorty calls the “curse” of ethnocentrism. He emphasizes the importance of detailed empirical descriptions as means of improving our moral imagination, and for that reason praises literature rather than philosophical or religious argumentations. But even if we can improve our ability to recognize similarities, what sort of similarities, which always depend on our particularity, should support a global solidarity? Nevertheless, Rorty stresses that “we should try to notice our similarities” with those people “whom we still instinctively think of as ‘they’ rather than ’us’”.20 Meanwhile, on a point he claims that solidarity in the sense of “identifying ourselves” with others is not possible in his view. Perhaps we can find a clue when − all of the sudden − he seems to appeal to a different sort of imaginative achievement, to our ability of considering “more and more traditional differences (of tribe, religion, race, customs, and the like) as unimportant when compared with similarities with respect to pain and humiliation”.21 He ascribes that ability to liberal ethnocentrists who regard cruelty as the worst one can do to the others, to “an ethnocentrism of a ’we’”, however, that is composed of “the people who have been brought up to distrust ethnocentrism”.22 From that a requirement of “loosening ethnocentrism” follows, but that again seems to run counter, as we have seen, to our “we”-intentions and sense of morality. To sum up: The problem seems to reside in the “empirical” notion of “global” as such, which on the one hand stands in tension with our presumably unsurpassable empirical particularity, and on the other hand contradicts ideal universality. The question is, whether the notion of “similarities with respect to pain and humiliation” is able to solve this problem, and if yes, how?

4. Rorty’s Argument

In my view, Rorty’s argument can be summarized as follows: 1. We should not talk about such a thing as the “intrinsic nature” of this or that, for whatever is accessible for us is accessible only via a linguistic description of it, and therefore its presumed inner “nature” is dependent on those historical and contingent descriptions of ours. 2. Accordingly, we should not talk about such a thing as the common “nature” of man. Human beings differ from animals only in the one respect that they invented a tool, namely language, the use of which makes them a more successful animal concerning adaptation than the other living beings. The individualization of human beings, in turn, is due to the differences in our linguistically constituted web of convictions, purposes, etc., our “final vocabularies”. Thus, the Darwinian view must hold sway and all the traditional approaches suggesting a distinctively human feature must be rejected. 3. Within such conditions, “moral duties” are in fact always contingent “we”-intentions, which means that it is up to our deliberations whether we intend them or not. Fraternal feelings, as one kind of such “we”-intentions, are by definition ethnocentric. One cannot have true feelings of sister- and brotherhood towards an ideal notion such as that of “humanity”.

4 4. The global egalitarian utopia needs a viable notion of solidarity as the pillar of its vital global hope. One of the available approaches to maintain such notion seems to be that we examine the possibility of “expanding fraternity”. However, the effort to expand such inclinations contradicts the fact that our “we”-intentions and moral obligations are the strongest when they pertain to “one of us”. Expanding them would mean eliminating them. 5. Thus, solidarity cannot stand in continuity with fraternity. If it is to be possible, it must have its ground in something that is common to everybody on the earth and, nevertheless, not distinctively human (for no such thing exists). We need an empirical, yet, common feature, beyond the human beings’ linguistic individualization. According to Rorty, this feature is suffering. It is a condition common to us, not particular, still, empirical, and not universal (in an ideal or transcendental sense). 6. It is imagination that is the most suitable for preparing us to recognize similarities, and ultimately the common condition of suffering.

5. Several Consequences

I’d like to emphasize several points which follow from this argumentation: 1. Rorty’s notion of an utopian (global) society with institutions embodying (solidarity or) fraternity which in turn feed(s) on imagination enables him to debunk both sides of the alternative of either deducing social bonds from reason or refusing that by appealing to some “other to reason”. It is so because these ways, in their exclusiveness, lead either to a rational or to an irrational picture of society, but anyhow, both forms threaten basic social needs, either that of pluralism and individual freedom, or that of social justice. Compared to these, his imaginative utopia offers an − at least in principle − viable alternative. 2. Rorty’s claim that imagination is the source of both solidarity and private autonomy corresponds furthermore to his insistence that today we experience the “rise of a literary culture”, overruling the rationalist one.23 3. Since suffering is a common issue to all of us, acknowledging this fact will teach us, in spite of our being ethnocentrists, to distrust ethnocentrism, to doubt − as Rorty writes − our “own sensitivity to the pain and humiliation of others, doubt that present institutional arrangements are adequate to deal with this pain and humiliation”.24 4. In this sense his conception urges an ethics of good inclination, countering rational ethics or that of a good will, or an ethics of communal values. Even an ethics of practical deliberation is surpassed by that notion, since solidarity springing from the recognition of common suffering is in itself not a matter of deliberation, still, it has strong ethical consequences. One of the main features of such an ethics is that it applies to our relations to every living being and not only to human beings. It applies to our whole living environment. Also, the notion of humiliation, as Rorty uses it, cannot apply exclusively to human beings, contrary to the word’s etymology. 5. Suffering is the only condition common to all human (and living) beings. Therefore – and this is the most important point here −, the public-private distinction must be based on that issue. Namely, the ultimate issue of public concerns must be that of suffering, and since it is cruelty which causes unnecessary and avoidable suffering, the ultimate guiding line in public affairs must be the avoidance of cruelty. In turn, questions of final vocabularies and pertaining differences and similarities should be regarded as being a private matter. This distinction is underpinned, furthermore, by the observations that suffering is not something linguistic, and as Rorty claims “there is no such things as the ’voice of the oppressed’ or the ’language of the victims’”, and again, that animals do not use language as we do but are exposed to suffering, whereas the human self is linguistically constituted in Rorty’s view.25 6. Contingency, Freedom, and the Private-Public Distinction

5 It is one of Rorty’s central theses that via acknowledging and facing the indicated contingency of our morality we acquire freedom: the freedom of being responsible only to ourselves and to each other. In the context of the individual this means a freedom for creating an autonomous self. As Rorty suggests, however, we must make a sharp distinction between two versions of grasping individual autonomy, namely, between the romantic and a so-called ironic ones. A romantic notion of self-creation is inclined, according to him, to divinize the depth of self, and regards imagination as the medium in which some superhuman “other to reason” finds its expressions. For such an approach autonomy is in a sense always already “there”, but it is more or less repressed by socialization and needs to be emancipated, via an imaginative effort of self- identification, merging into some “infinite”. To this romantic notion Rorty responds with a post-metaphysical alternative. For the real issue is not so much rebellion against universal agreement as it is the case by the romantics, but rather, rebellion against ahistorical legitimacy which is characteristic of both universalism and romanticism. The problem is that both kinds of legitimacy are one-sided and frustrate from its own side what is most needed, namely, a balance between two corresponding needs overly dramatized by them, the need for “intersubjective agreement” and the “need for novelty, to be imaginative, searching for the meaning of life”. An acknowledgement of these two equally basic needs requires their adjustment to each other, rather than their synthesis, which would inevitably lead to the submission of the one to the other. In an effort to make such an adjustment possible, Rorty introduces his “ironic” notion of self-creation. For an ironic individual autonomy is not something that has always already been “there”, it is rather something to be achieved and created, by means of looking for new purposes and coming up with future projects and new metaphors for their description. Ironic individuals are historicists and nominalists enough to think that they cannot pass beyond the element of contingent descriptions of things from which their autonomy must be re-woven. They are pragmatists in the sense that they are convinced: “experimentalist tinkering with ourselves is all we shall ever manage”.26 For ironics are, as Rorty describes them, well aware of the fact that in their self-creation they cannot rely on anything beyond their contingent makeup. It is this ironic notion of individual autonomy, with its awareness of contingent self-identity, which furthermore fits the needs of a liberal society: a society where we also manage to grow up to and take seriously the contingency of our coexistence, leading to the freedom of being responsible only to each other.

7. Conclusion: Situating Rorty’s Imaginative Liberalism

This prospect would of course follow from a fully-fledged secularism, initiated by the Enlightenment. In this regard, Rorty’s philosophical project aims at completing the Enlightenment’s de-divinization process, by trying to get beyond representationalism in order to secure the conditions of desirable human self-reliance. The use of Rorty’s philosophical anti- representationalism must be understood in the light of his diagnosis about contemporary democracies. He would most probably agree with critics of the prevailing forms of liberalism that they go through a crisis, and also, more generally, that “the forces unleashed by the Enlightenment have undermined the Enlightenment’s own convictions”.27 However, he refuses to draw a conclusion which would call into question the very project of Enlightenment. This way he is far from trying to give an apology of present conditions, and compares his own critical project to “refurnishing a house”, rather than “propping it up or placing barricades around it”.28 His point is that it is the very vocabulary of the Enlightenment’s original project, taking the natural scientist as its cultural hero, that became an obstacle in the way of contemporary democratic

6 developements. It is time, he suggests, to radicalize the original intentions of liberalism, and this radicalization must take the form of getting rid of its outworn forms of thought embodied in its traditional, representationalist and rationalist vocabulary, simply because this kind of vocabulary is suitable for defining certain, rather rationalistic purposes, but it is much less appropriate for sustaining other, primarily moral goals. Accordingly, it is not the original project itself, but its self-understanding and self-description, that seems to be on the way to become bankrupt in his view. By way of stripping its rhetoric and replacing its notions of truth, rationality and moral duty with an other vocabulary, “one which revolves around notions of metaphor and self- creation”, Rorty aims at setting free the inner potentialities of Enlightenment, the unpredictable dynamics of imaginative freedom inherent in modern individualism.29 This utopian image is supported, as we have already mentioned, by a tendency within the cultural sphere that Rorty depicts as the rise of a literary culture. His understanding of liberalism is underpinned by a version of postmodernism. It is due to his postmodernist emphasis on imagination and literature that Rorty is able to refuse the attempts of synthesis between the private and public realms, yet, is also able to envisage a viable utopian democracy which promotes rather an adjustment of those spheres. For tolerance, in the sense of making room for the acceptance of plurality, difference, and individual freedom also in matters of convictions, believes, and intellectual projects, as opposed to demanding one standard of rationality in every context, requires a distinction between the needs of society and that of individuals. This way he is able to refuse the rational-irrational opposition by pointing to a notion of dialogical, communicative reason in the form of argumentation which is essential for projects of social cooperation, and in turn, to an imaginative freedom in private matters. The viability of his distinction between the private and public spheres depends, however, on an acknowledging gesture, that is to say, on the acceptance of the requirement that those willing to participate in a debate about public concerns should leave their private aspirations at home. Rorty’s utopia comes full circle at this point, for the type of intellectual makeup which is most likely to accept this requirement and acknowledge thereby the private-public distinction is the one he characterized as ironic liberals. In other words, the practical realization of that distinction depends on how far ironically enlightened are those who participate in public affairs. This state of affairs points to the importance of education, and to the role of the humanistic intellectuals. Compared to traditional liberal principles, Rorty’s utopian liberalism remains in complete agreement with most of the traditional convictions, such as those concerning individual freedom and the tasks of government assigned accordingly. However, it differs in one major respect, namely, he utilizes the possibilities inherent in postmodern anti-rationalism, in order to make room for a moral of fraternity – and possibly: solidarity – that is hardly compatible with that rationalism. Even so, this project should not be regarded as a merely moralizing effort. For it aims at taking into account all the contemporary social, political, and cultural developments, and judges its own suggestions according to the strictest criteria of pragmatic utility. In my view, it is according to this criteria that he urges the restoration of social – and possibly: global – hope.

NOTES

1. Richard Rorty, “Trotsky and the Wild Orchids”, in Philosophy and Social Hope, London, New York, Victoria, Toronto, Auckland: Penguin Books, 1999 (in the followings: PhSH), pp. 3-22. 2. Richard Rorty, “Looking Backwards from the Year 2096”, in PhSH, pp. 243-251. 3. Ibid. p. 246. 4. Ibid. p. 243-244. 5. Ibid. p. 243. 6. Ibid. p. 249.

7 7. Ibid. p. 250. 8. Ibid. p. 249. 9. Ibid. p. 259. 10. Ibid. p. 234. 11. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Cambridge, New York, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1989 (in the followings: CIS), especially pp. 189-198. 12. Rorty, PhSH, p. 237. 13. Wilfrid Sellars, Science and Metaphysics, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968, chaps 6 and 7, discussed in Rorty, CIS, pp. 59-60, and p. 190. 14. Rorty, CIS, p. 59. 15. Ibid. p. 194. 16. Richard Rorty, “Universalist Grandeur, Romantic Profundity, Humanist Finitude”, talk on the conference “The Place of Philosophy in Culture” held in Pécs, Hungary, 2004 (in the followings: „UG”). 17. Rorty, CIS, p. 94. 18. Ibid. p. 192. 19. Ibid. p. 7. 20. Ibid. p. 196. 21. Ibid. p. 192. 22. Ibid. p. 198. 23. See especially Richard Rorty, “The Decline of Redemptive Truth and the Rise of a Literary Culture”, www.stanford.edu/~rrorty, and also “UG”. 24. Rorty, CIS, p. 198. 25. Ibid. p. 94. 26. Rorty, „UG”. 27. Rorty, CIS, p. 56. 28. Ibid. p. 45. 29. Ibid. p. 44.

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