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The Problem of Public and Private Spheres
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- How Rorty Kills the Possibility of Change
The Problem of Public and Private SpheresThe first problem with Rorty’s philosophy is that he relies on a distinction between the private, subjective, sentimental thinking which is able to call capitalism “evil,” and the public life, wherein we ought only to act on small changes and should not demand revolutionary upheaval. In other words, I can privately “reject capitalism” but publicly I should simply try to make the conditions of poverty more bearable. I can privately “reject patriarchy” but publicly I should simply attempt to improve the state of women’s rights. Systemic criticism, for Rorty, is indistinguishable from religion. Just as I can be “Catholic,” “Muslim” or “Mormon” in my private mind, but should not impose those beliefs on others in public, so can I be “anti-capitalist” or “anti-imperialist” in my private mind while not insisting that others publicly reject capitalism or imperialism. His distinction has as much to do with how we talk about that distinction and those philosophies as how we act on them: “Rorty’s romantic version of liberalism is expressed also in the distinction he draws between the private and the public. This distinction is often misinterpreted to imply that certain domains of interaction or behaviour should be exempted from evaluation in moral or political or social terms. The distinction Rorty draws, however, has little to do with traditional attempts to draw lines of demarcation of this sort between a private and a public domain—to determine which aspects of our lives we do and which we don’t have to answer for publicly. Rorty’s distinction, rather, goes to the purposes of theoretical vocabularies. We should, Rorty urges, be "content to treat the demands of self-creation and of human solidarity as equally valid, yet forever incommensurable." Rorty’s view is that we should treat vocabularies for deliberation about public goods and social and political arrangements, on the one hand, and vocabularies developed or created in pursuit of personal fulfillment, self-creation, and self-realization, on the other, as distinct tools” (http://setis.library.usyd.edu.au/stanford/entries/rorty/). At first glance, the distinction seems either harmless or desirable. After all, it is just as well that we don’t “force” our comprehensive beliefs onto others, and we ought to participate in projects where people of varying beliefs can come together to do some good. However, there are several problems with the distinction. First, as much as Rorty would like to avoid admitting this, his values are just as transcendent, just as metaphysical, and just as “idealistic” as any ideas that he would relegate to the “private” realm. Rorty believes poverty is wrong. Why? “It just is,” because we cannot rely on any comprehensive moral principles to say why. But this is impossible and incoherent. If Rorty himself cannot draw on his own metaphysics, his own comprehensive views of right and wrong, to justify his statements that we “ought” to try to (incrementally) make the world a better place, then it is difficult to say where those ideas come from at all. As conservative writer Jenny Teichman points out: “Everyone is a foundationalist. Everyone has to take some propositions as bedrock. Rorty himself is a foundationalist in that he takes it completely for granted that the universalization of liberalism and democracy and human well-being is not to be questioned. But because he supposes himself to be an anti-foundationalist he cannot openly say that his values are self-evident or undeniable. Neo-pragmatism has no room for the idea of the undeniable. Yet although he cannot say his moral beliefs are foundational, he nevertheless treats them as such. Well, meaning is use, as Wittgenstein almost suggested. Belief is behavior, as old-style pragmatists used to teach” (http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/17/sept98/teichman.htm). Second, the dichotomy between public and private has exacerbated injustice throughout history. In the guise of the “private” realm, men have abused women, bosses have abused their workers, and so on. Rorty might reply that he believes exploitation and abuse are obviously wrong, and ought to be confronted as such. But in encouraging citizens to keep their comprehensive thoughts to themselves, Rorty cannot help but endorse the idea that undesirable thoughts, comprehensive views of the world that really do place men above women or capitalists above workers, should remain unchecked by interaction and confrontation with the liberation of others’ thoughts. Finally, his distinction between private thoughts and public actions is philosophically unsound. It rests on a distinction between “self” and “other” that, however vindicated by modernist thinking, really begs the question of where the self ends and others begin. Our concepts of ourselves are largely determined and influenced by the interactions we have with others; by the histories and contexts we inherit; even by the language we use to describe ourselves, languages which are collective in nature. To say that we should keep our thoughts about the world private is really impossible, since those thoughts are the product of our interactions with society. How Rorty Kills the Possibility of ChangeHere I argue that, although Rorty’s pragmatism holds that genuine progressive change can only happen incrementally, such a dismissal of revolutionary change actually undermines the most healthy perspectives which inspire that change: utopian thinking, systematic critique, and revolutionary perspectives. It is as if Rorty places himself in a position to say: “Make the world a better place, but don’t go to far…especially, don’t go any further than I deem acceptable.” I have already argued that Rorty has (well-hidden) metaphysical beliefs of his own which, whether he likes it or not, influence his ethical maxims. I want to argue further that, insofar as these metaphysics make Rorty discourage utopian thinking, the possibility of real human progression is undermined. Let me give an example: Suppose Richard Rorty is a famous American pragmatist, with the same ideas he has today, only he is alive one hundred and fifty years ago. Imagine that Rorty confronts the evil of slavery the same way he presently confronts the evils of economic exploitation. Judging by what he presently says about the latter, I would venture that his recommendations for the former would go something like this: “Yes, slavery is a great evil. But it is not evil because of some metaphysical truth that says all persons should be equal. Instead, it is evil because, as any good liberal ironist would know, it makes us feel bad. That is all we have the right to say. Therefore, John Brown should not conduct a violent raid on Harper’s Ferry. Abolitionists should not try to change the entire system of slavery. Instead, they ought to do whatever they can to make the lives of individual slaves better than they currently are. Perhaps abolitionists should even purchase the freedom of a few slaves, whatever they can individually afford. But they should not base their strategies on any comprehensive doctrine that slavery is wrong.” Similar examples abound. How would Rorty have behaved during the period leading up to the American or French Revolutions? How would he have handled the challenges of Galileo and Copernicus? It is easy for liberals to be “non-utopian” now, because things seem “better” than they were a hundred and fifty, or two hundred, years ago. But one can only guess what sorts of everyday practices today will seem barbaric in a hundred and fifty years. Those concerned with social justice today ought to look at labor exploitation or women’s subordination, or latent racism, or capital punishment, and so on, with the same “utopian” critical perspective that John Brown looked at slavery, or that Jefferson and Madison looked at colonialism. In Rorty’s universe, this is undesirable. In my view, that demonstrates that Rorty is too trapped in his own historical niche to realize his own contingencies. 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