Richard Rorty / Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity
I shall define an
"ironist" as someone who fulfills three conditions: (1) She has
radical and continuing doubts about the final vocabulary she currently uses,
because she has been impressed by other vocabularies, vocabularies taken as
final by people or books she has encountered; (2) she realizes that argument
phrased in her present vocabulary can neither underwrite nor dissolve these
doubts; (3) insofar as she philosophizes about her situation, she does not
think that her vocabulary is closer to reality than others, that it is in touch
with a power not herself. Ironists who are inclined to philosophize see the
choice between vocabularies as made neither within a neutral and universal metavocabulary
nor by an attempt to fight one's way past appearances to the real, but simply
by playing the new off against the old. I call people of this sort
"ironists" because their realization that anything can be made to look good or bad by being
redescribed, and their renunciation of the attempt to formulate criteria of
choice between final vocabularies, puts them in the position which Sartre
called "meta-stable": never quite able to take themselves seriously
because always aware that the terms in which they describe themselves are
subject to change, always aware of the contingency and fragility of their final
vocabularies, and thus of their selves.
The metaphysician is still
attached to common sense, in that he does not question the platitudes which
encapsulate the use of a given final vocabulary, and in particular the
platitude which says there is a single permanent reality to be found behind the
many temporary appearances. He does not redescribe but, rather, analyzes old
descriptions with the help of other old descriptions. The ironist, by contrast,
is a nominalist and a historicist. She thinks nothing has an intrinsic nature,
a real essence. So she thinks that the occurrence of a term like "just"
or "scientific" or "rational" in the final vocabulary of
the day is no reason to think that Socratic inquiry into the essence of justice
or science or rationality will take one much beyond the Ianguage games of one's
time. The ironist spends her time worrying about the possibility that she has
been initiated into the wrong tribe, taught to play the wrong language game.
She worries that the process of socialization which turned her into a human
being by giving her a language may have given her the wrong language, and so
turned her into the wrong kind of human being. But she cannot give a criterion
of wrongness. So, the more she is driven to articulate her situation in
philosophical terms, the more she reminds herself of her rootlessness by
constantly using terms like "Weltanschauung,"
"perspective," "dialectic," "conceptual framework"
"historical epoch," "language game," "redescription"
"vocabulary," and "irony."
Metaphysicians then go on to
embed this distinction within a network of associated distinctions - a
philosophical theory - which will take some of the strain off the initial
distinction. This sort of theory construction is the same method used by judges
to decide hard cases, and by theologians to interpret hard texts. That activity
is the metaphysician's paradigm of rationality. He sees philosophical theories
as converging - a series of discoveries about the nature of such things as
truth and personhood, which get closer and closer to the way they really are,
and carry the culture as a whole closer to an accurate representation of
reality. The ironist, however, views the sequence of such theories – such interlocked
patterns of novel distinctions - as gradual, tacit substitutions of a new
vocabulary for an old one. She calls "platitudes" what the metaphysician
calls "intuitions." She is inclined to say that when we surrender an
old platitude (e.g., "The number of biological species is fixed" or
"Human beings differ from animals because they have sparks of the divine
with them" or "Blacks have no rights which whites are bound to
respect"), we have made a change rather than discovered a fact.
The ironist's preferred form of
argument is dialectical in the sense that she takes the unit of persuasion to
be a vocabulary rather than a proposition. Her method is redescription rather
than inference. Ironists specialize in redescribing ranges of objects or events
in partially neologistic jargon, in the hope of inciting people to adopt and
extend that jargon. An ironist hopes that by the time she has finished using
old words in new senses, not to mention introducing brand-new words, people will
no longer ask questions phrased in the old words. So the ironist thinks of
logic as ancillary to dialectic, whereas the metaphysician thinks of dialectic
as a species of rhetoric, which in turn is a shoddy substitute for logic. I
have defined "dialectic" as the attempt to play off vocabularies against
one another, rather than merely to infer propositions from one another, and
thus as the partial substitution of redescription for inference.
For us ironists, nothing can
serve as a criticism of a final vocabulary save another such vocabulary; there
is no answer to a redescription save a re-re-redescription. Since there is
nothing beyond vocabularies which serves as a criterion of choice between them,
criticism is a matter of looking on this picture and on that, not of comparing
both pictures with the original. Nothing can serve as a criticism of a person
save another person, or of a culture save an alternative culture - for persons
and cultures are, for us, incarnated vocabularies. So our doubts about our own
characters or our own culture can be resolved or assuaged only by enlarging our
acquaintance.
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. The vocabularies are,
typically, parasitic on the hopes - in the sense that the principal function of
the vocabularies is to tell stories about future outcomes which compensate for
present sacrifices.
