What comes after irony?

Richard Rorty was the most admirably plain-speaking of American philosophers. Since reading Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1987) as an undergraduate, I’ve thought of myself as a Rortian like Rorty thought of himself as a Deweyan. In short, Rorty’s ironist is someone who “has radical and continuing doubts about their final vocabulary” and “does not think their vocabulary is closer to reality than others.” Personally, it made sense for me to give up questions I viewed as unproductive – especially after reading John Rawls, whose premises begin where I don’t want to end up (i.e., as an unencumbered self, devoid of peculiar values). Rorty the ironist gave me a philosophical vocabulary for responding with a “yes, I see your point, but anyway, I am what I am and like what people like me do, and so it seems for those other people too.”

It took me years at Stanford to realize myself and how fortunate I am to begin my career where Rorty ended his. So, over the past couple weeks, I ducked into the archive to go through his papers. What I read deepened my appreciation for the man, who, with an iconoclastic gait, walked his own path and inspired me to walk mine.

We have our differences. Rorty struggled to “hold reality and justice in a single vision,” in my view because he never developed a good alternative to liberal elites’ dissociation. He acknowledged that “lucky Christians for whom the love of God and of other human beings are inseparable, or revolutionaries” might not feel the reality/justice split. But Rorty’s milieu was at once too continental and too pragmatic for him to be unironically hopeful.

That never stopped him from speaking as though we could achieve our imagined possibilities. Rorty became a popular philosopher by saying that Americans, like philosophers, often ask the wrong questions. That made space for hope, for people to ask their own rather than respond to suppositions. As for himself, Rorty wrote in a memo re: Richard Posner’s pragmatism:

Disassociating the higher, in the sense of what breaks with the way things merely happen to be, from the blindingly clear and from the universal – from the models of mathematics –
What is there that might serve as a source of moral obligation? That is the only question that philosophers discuss that intrigues non-philosophers.

Rorty saw the dualisms in Western thought as attempts to answer the obligatory question: pure/impure, subject/object, sacred/profane, etc. He wrote that “The source of moral obligation must itself be perfectly pure.” It’s odd, but I think explainable, that Posner the legalist spurred this realization. Rorty concluded that “the imagination” or “poetry” is that pure source of obligation.

Lastly, I quote from a two page memo Rorty wrote for himself on Laclau and Moffe’s Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985). Judging by the folds and tatters on those two pages, Rorty brought the memo with him from the University of Virginia to Stanford. In it, he wrote:

The difference between us here is probably not worth arguing, because the difference between saying "we want everybody to have the same opportunities" and saying "we believe everybody has, by virtue of being human, the right to equal opportunities" is too thin to matter. I tend to regard the latter formulation as suspiciously metaphysical, but this may just be a symptom of over-sensitivity.

Laclau agrees with me that once the Philosophical is succeeded by the Political we will get narratives instead of philosophical systems, even of the relatively weak Habermasian "transcendental pragmatic" sort. Given this agreement, the only question that remains is whether "ironist" is the right word for somebody willing to affirm the groundlessness of the beliefs she dies for. Perhaps not. I may be trying to make this word do too much work; it seems to me right for Derrida in Paris, or even in jail in Prague, but I agree that it's probably not right for somebody at Auschwitz.

Is there any plain and honest word for an ironic urge to make something meaningful, or to make up something sacred? Eliade’s “hierophany” is honest but not plain. What about Milan Kundera’s “kitsch”? As ever, I come back to Japanese aware and aesthetics. The next things for me to read are David L. Hall’s “Rorty, Whitehead, and the Return of the Exiled Poets” (2012) and Steve Odin’s Tragic Beauty in Whitehead and Japanese Aesthetics (2016).