Blind Spots in Richard Rorty's Ironical Liberalism: from Posture to Re-creation

Résumé du document

Under the influence of the Marxist materialist historicism, numerous authors have deemed Modernity as the historically necessary and unavoidable result of the development of economies and trade relations that has occurred in the Western World since the late Gothic Ages and the Rinascimento. However, such an explanation can be thought of as erroneous when one acknowledges the fact that previous economic and commercial progress had been achieved in other civilizations without transforming them into modern societies. In all awareness of this contradiction, other authors have sketched an alternative genealogy of Modernity. They generally hold that the true specificity of 16th and 17th Century Europe is the unique duration and magnitude of a peculiar form of conflict: the Religious Wars or Civil Ideological Wars. This enduring and arduous situation of stasis divided families, opposed neighbors and scotched friendships, thus threatening the mere concept of polity. Such a clash brings them to contemplate the birth of the modern political project that was later epitomized by Liberalism. It was developed as the direct consequence of a collective yearning for putting an end to this new form of historical crisis.

Extraits

[...] One could not expose more clearly the difference in approach used by Richard Rorty when engaging with the private and the public realms. Pragmatically, it can be asserted that so compartmented-a-view of liberalism along with the difference of treatment of the private and public spheres would eventually entail the death of the public sphere. First of all, because Rorty's public sphere is no longer the place where theories of better societies can arise, where collective quests for options or policies that would best fit the situation of the polity at a given moment in time can unfold. [...]

[...] From Contingency to Irony: Richard Rorty's Post-Modern Temptation Richard Rorty begins Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity with a staunch critique of the “foundationalist and metaphysical aspirations of philosophy”. He grounds his critical assessment on the acknowledgement of various types of contingencies that render any attempt to grasp or attain the Good, the Truth or the Valid irrelevant. Building on the works of Pragmatists ranging from Dewey to James, linguists such as Wittgenstein or Davidson and Freudian and Jungian psychoanalysis, he demonstrates that the appraisal of the world out there by our consciousness is intrinsically constructed, biased and subjective and that therefore, we make reality rather than discover it. [...]

[...] If Chesterton was right in claiming that modern world is a world filled with Christian ideals that have degenerated”, then we can still hear the command of the Gospels: “Judge not and ye shall not be judged”[20]. This might be the achievement of genuine of post-metaphysical irony, and perhaps the utmost realisation of the yearning for neutrality that has driven liberalism since the beginning, nevertheless, “liberals are also people who are concerned with the more workaday and prosaic virtues, with fair dealing and simple justice, with arbitrary and capricious authority wherever it occurs”[21]. Indeed, in Richard Rorty's public sphere, how is one to address political questions such as the liberalisation of drug-usage, prostitution, blasphemy or sadomasochism? [...]

[...] Modern liberalism was therefore founded on the aspiration to metaphysical neutrality and the “institutionalisation of moral scepticism”[3]. Two centuries after the advent of Modernity, and following the endeavour of post-modernist[4] authors, Richard Rorty tries to go even further, attempting to ground his political liberalism on post- metaphysical insights and considerations. In his essay, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, he advocates a “liberal ironism” that would genuinely fuse his ironical views about knowledge and the self and his political commitment to a certain form of liberalism. [...]

[...] In order to attempt to find solutions to the flaws exposed above in Rorty's political liberalism, it would be of greater interest to situate ourselves in the same post- metaphysical mindset and assume that we have accepted the post-modern temptation previously exposed. First of all, in order to avoid the spread of a feeling that “anything goes” and to re-introduce incentives to look for a “better society” through choices that refute the idea that is randomness, change and, at best, probability”[14], pragmatist liberals ranging from Dewey and James to Peirce and Schiller, propose a set of methods that, although assuming that our system of thought is contingent and that we should overcome simplistic metaphysics, still “keep open the possibility that we might indeed be uncovering the underlying order of things”[15]. [...]