RORTY’S PRAGMATISM UNDERMINES POSITIVE SOCIAL CHANGE

RORTY’S PRAGMATISM UNDERMINES POSITIVE SOCIAL CHANGE

1. RORTY’S PHILOSOPHY LACKS ANY HOPE OF SOCIAL CHANGE

John Dunn, professor of political theory, University of Cambridge, THE TIMES HIGHER EDUCATION SUPPLEMENT, October 6, 2000, p. 24.

Whether or not this is the best way in which to see philosophy, it is certainly a little under-specified as a means of envisaging social hope. What it omits is most of the non-philosophical obstacles that lie in the same path. Some of these, the more Augustinian, the endless human capacity for cruelty, cowardice and sheer stupidity, for tawdriness and inanity, may be excluded in Rorty's case by imaginative will in the first instance, although scarcely to the advantage of anyone's political judgment. (It would not be good for it to turn out that this is what social hope means: pretending what we well know not to be true.) Others (economic, ecological, military) are noted en passant by Rorty himself, but treated as essentially extrinsic to the utopian imagining.

John Dunn, professor of political theory, University of Cambridge, THE TIMES HIGHER EDUCATION SUPPLEMENT, October 6, 2000, p. 24.

But some of the most fundamental derive from politics itself. It was largely these obstacles – the animosities arising from the irremediable partiality of human judgment, from the deep conflicts in our material interests, and the special problems of cooperating with one another in face of these divisions -

which the utopian genre, along perhaps with philosophy itself, was largely invented to clarify and resolve. For Rorty, social hope is just the bare hope that these problems can somehow be resolved. But should a pragmatist approve of this way of seeing or describing the matter? Does it not threaten the contrast between cheerfulness and plain giddy irresponsibility? Judging how, and how not, to hope has always been one of the central tasks of politics. Must we not try to do better than this?

Scott Roulier, professor of political science at Dowling College, JOURNAL OF INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDIES, Vol. 9, 1997, p. 19.

Rorty's pragmatist account of liberalism's rise to fame and its continued popularity is Darwinian: liberalism is the "fittest." What is true about liberalism is that it seems to be an incredibly successful and resilient form of government for many societies. The battlelines are clearly drawn. Rorty, under the authority of his own pragmatist-conjured "takings clause," has severed the concepts of equality, freedom, and human dignity from their philosophical and religious foundations and appropriated them for public use. This action ignores the enduring and vital connection that exists between these traditions and values. It also disregards the stubborn resistance of these private (objectivist) parties whose counter-claims for (joint) custody tarnish Rorty's dream of a pure, anti-foundational liberal public.
2. RORTY MISUNDERSTANDS HISTORY

Alan Johnson, lecturer in social sciences at Edge Hill College, NEW POLITICS, Summer 2000, pp. 106-7.

Rejecting the idea that we can assess, or at least approximate, reality by enquiry, a reality against which we can assess our claims, Rorty thinks that “rational and nonrational methods of changing people’s minds” are equivalent. Anyone who thinks that sentimental manipulation may be the “best weapon we have” should be read with great caution when he is writing history for a political purpose. That history writing is likely to be—if it is judged this will gain the desired sentimental effect—prosthetic, false, sad and sentimental, employing the looser rules of the literary mode. And boy, can Rorty write poor history; glib, superficial and sentimental, full of little heroes and villains.

RORTY EMBRACES A DESTRUCTIVE PRIVATE-PUBLIC DICHOTOMY

1. RORTY’S DISTINCTION BETWEEN PRIVATE AND PUBLIC IS UNTENABLE

Scott Roulier, professor of political science at Dowling College, JOURNAL OF INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDIES, Vol. 9, 1997, p. 19.

Contrary to the goal Rorty sets for his liberal utopia, this essay suggests that the public Rorty describes is not separate from, but instead is corrupted, by the private, that is, suffused with highly personal concerns. Specifically: (1) The tenets of liberalism which Rorty appropriates for the erection of his public edifice are not easily wrested from non-public and non-political discourses like philosophy and religion; and (2) Rorty's own peculiar preferences and prejudices pervade his purportedly neutral, "public" vision.

Scott Roulier, professor of political science at Dowling College, JOURNAL OF INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDIES, Vol. 9, 1997, p. 19.

Yet Rorty's public is contaminated by the presence of very private convictions. First, one might clarify exactly how Rorty uses the terms "public" and "private," to ensure that there is conceptual symmetry. In order to define Rorty's view of the public, one must identify the principles of justice he believes should guide our "togetherness" in a liberal democracy. Rorty proposes that a liberal conception of justice requires public neutrality toward competing life projects, so long as these private visions injure no one else. Indispensable to this liberal utopia is the notion that the public arena does not rest on metaphysical supports. There is no verifiable resemblance between soul and city, cosmos and constitutionalism. Rather, the justification for a liberal political culture is self-consciously circular, taking its own historical experience as reliable and worthy of veneration.
3. IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO ESTABLISH BOUNDS BETWEEN PUBLIC AND PRIVATE PHILOSOPHY

Scott Roulier, professor of political science at Dowling College, JOURNAL OF INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDIES, Vol. 9, 1997, p. 19.

Rorty seems to invoke the theoretical equivalent of a right of eminent domain, appropriating for his liberal idyll concepts like equality and individual rights from long-standing objectivist traditions such as Lockean liberalism, Christianity, and Kantian transcendental idealism, without compensation. Contending that he and his liberal ironists are the only worthy proprietors, Rorty revokes objectivists' entitlement to these concepts. In fact, the ownership or guardianship of key liberal ideas is disputed. Rorty's public and its authority are tainted by the many private claims brought against it by the heirs of philosophy and religion. In brief, delineating the boundary separating the public and private is more problematic than Rorty allows.
4. RORTY’S PUBLIC/PRIVATE DISTINCTION IS STRUCTURALLY UNSOUND

Scott Roulier, professor of political science at Dowling College, JOURNAL OF INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDIES, Vol. 9, 1997, p. 19.

The dike Rorty builds between the public and private is structurally unsound. What Rorty treats as exclusively "public" tenets of liberal justice are suffused by the "personal" and non-political character of their paternity. Having problematized this rigid, binary opposition in Rorty's own vocabulary, one is left to ponder why such an undertaking was required in the first place. Why is Rorty unwilling to take advantage of philosophy or religion in his liberal utopia, even to employ them as "noble lies"? It would make more pragmatic sense to embrace the porous border that presently divides public and private realms. But, Rorty stubbornly resists this option.