Final paper (without footnotes) for Political Liberalism, Prof. B. Douglass, Georgetown University, Fall 1997

General Contents

V. Richard Rorty 
No sense, no essence
Human solidarity: the new enchantment
Enchanted with himself, Rorty goes world-wide
Solidarity through fiction: a critique
The problem of interpretation
Liberal institutions endangered
The force of Rorty’s argument - conversing with Milosevic
Rorty: Liberalism’s ultimate messenger

V. Richard Rorty If the problem with Gauthier was the un-acceptability of his premises, Rorty's critique of Gauthier sounds refreshing: "Anybody who thinks that there are well-grounded theoretical answers to this sort of question ["why not be cruel"] - algorithms for resolving moral dilemmas ... - is still, in his heart, a theologian or a metaphysician."

No sense, no essence Rorty's own idea of freedom is the possibility of private perfection, to have a "self-created, autonomous, human life" which, in Rorty's "more comprehensive philosophical outlook" is combined with "justice and human solidarity". But this combination cannot be achieved "at the level of theory", because "the vocabulary of self-creation is necessarily private, unshared, unsuited to argument. The vocabulary of justice is necessarily public and shared, a medium for argumentative exchange."   So everything is about language and what it suggests, and language is contingent, is a Wittgensteinian game. Accordingly, all sense in this world is not found as pre-existent, but is merely a construct: "Truth cannot be out there - cannot exist independently of the human mind - because sentences cannot so exist, or be out there." - "Sentences are elements of human languages, and ... human languages are human creations."  If there is not truth, there is also no essence of man. Essence, in Rorty's equation, is no-sense. Historicist thinkers have "helped free us, gradually but steadily, from theology and metaphysics - from the temptation to look for an escape from time and chance" when they insisted "that socialization, and thus historical circumstance, goes all the way down - that there is no beneath socialization or prior to history which is definatory of the human."
Foundationalism, the effort to ground our language games in a truth out there that corresponds to the sense we have deliberately chosen to give a sentence, and to find "what all and only the featherless bipeds have in common" : a futile effort, necessarily. Not even worth reflection. The quarrel about human rights between Plato and Nietzsche, to whom the unalienable rights were "a laughable feeble attempt by the weak to fend off the strong" does not interest Rorty: "foundationalism is outmoded and irrelevant", human rights "naturalized", accepted by the post-Holocaust world, have produced a "human rights culture". Why bother to think about its origins - "We are much less inclined (than our ancestors) to take ontology or history as a guide to life"? Rorty advocates to simply and pragmatically accept the fact of the human rights culture, even though it is a "historically contingent", "cultural fact"  of our "lucky rich, literate democracies".  And if it is a "cultural fact", and others may call that "cultural relativism" because they still believe one needed to ground the respect for human dignity in some essence, then Rorty replies that in order to fight unflinchingly for one's convictions even though one knows they are contingent, one does not need to ground them. It is enough, and even increases the power and efficiency of our institutions when philosophy summarized "our culturally influenced intuitions", making us more aware of them, heightening "the sense of shared moral identity which brings us together in a moral community."  Taking the idea of freedom to it’s universal ultimate, liberal foundations crumble.

Human solidarity: the new enchantment Of course, philosophers as historians of ideas are not quite as powerful in creating that vocabulary of a shared moral community, which then compels us to human solidarity, which is "to be achieved not by inquiry but by imagination, the imaginative ability to see strange people as fellow sufferers.... Such increased sensitivity to the particular details of pain and humiliation of other, unfamiliar sorts of people" makes it more difficult to marginalize people different from ourselves by thinking 'they do not feel as we would'". To redescribe "others" as "one of us", and thus prompt ourselves to more sensitive re-descriptions, "is not a task for theory but for genres such ethnography, the journalists report, the comic book, the docudrama, and especially, the novel." Fiction, then, re-enchants the ‘other’, builds bonds of common humanity. "That is why the novel, the movie, and the TV program have, gradually but steadily, replaced the sermon and the treatise as the principle vehicles of moral change and progress." They make us stop being cruel, and stopping cruelty is what for Rorty, liberalism is all about.
So, finally a liberal philosopher who gives up on the supposed "essence" in man that not only has brought forward the human rights, but also the imperialistic attitude of David Gauthier, an old guard of liberalism. The new guards of liberalism  confess the truth - (insofar they dare to speak of "truth", but for the matter of playing the game with the rest of the crowd, one would have to use that term) - about the contingency of Enlightenment. Rorty is very much a man of his tradition to finally apply the tools of "critical reason and free discussion" to the own culture that produced this possibility. And Rorty, in effect, finds delight in his "post-modernist bourgeois liberalism", finds his "ironical self-reflective awareness of the contingency of liberal discourse, subjecthood and community"  an enhancement. The charme of his bourgeois liberalism lies in it's "enlightened and secular culture, through and through", "no trace of divinity remained", and we would have to turn to our own contingent selves, recognize each other, indeed: "derive the meanings of (our) lives from...  other, finite, mortal, contingently existing human beings" , and so recognize and strengthen our common humanity. In other words, the citizens of this world in all their miserable disenchantment cannot turn to God any longer for enchantment, and so turn to their fellow human beings, softening each other’s hearts (after having self-created themselves privately). As I read it, narrators of tales and history play a key role in promoting and advertising the new enchantment with one another, by providing the proper vocabulary and by "manipulating one another's sentiments".

Enchanted with himself, Rorty goes world-wide What does this lengthy exposé have to do with our issue of universalism of liberal thought? A lot. Rorty is charmed so much by fighting unflinchingly from the desk of his professoral garden for the new liberal utopia that stops people from being nasty to one another that he finds our culture "morally superior"  to other cultures, and worthy of promotion. "Producing generations of nice, tolerant, well-off, secure, other respecting students... in all parts of the world is just what is needed - indeed all that is needed - to achieve an Enlightenment utopia." People who kill others, like Serbs killing Muslims, are not acting irrational, they just "were not as lucky in the circumstances of their upbringing as we were", so they are deprived. In other words: if we bring about the conditions of a liberal democracy, all people would learn how to live more peacefully together, as we can afford to learn and do in North-Atlantic democracies.  Having now exposed Rorty's idea that in effect, two things have to come together: the material conditions of liberal practice that provide the opportunity to read and reflect, and the mechanics of solidarity through fiction , we shall discuss these two ideas critically.

Solidarity through fiction: a critique How effective are narratives in creating solidarity? Rorty's ideal narrative is one "which connect(s) the present with the past, on the one hand, and with utopian futures, on the other." It would be a narrative that captures the imagination of the people, one with powerful poetic language, one that has the ability to pervade the culture, or even different cultures, and bring them all together as... God's children? No. That's the bible, and that's about divinity, a no-no for Rorty. Too bad for him. True enough, the bible is easily the most powerful narrative of the western world, even providing a basis to recognize the fellow God's child in the Oriental Muslims and the Semitic people. True enough, the bible is the most successful book in history, and has been read to Western man for the two-thousand years now every seven days, and sometimes more often. True enough, the message of the bible has been lived in exemplary lives, and splendid attempts have been made throughout history to manipulate people's feelings to accord with the message of the "Book", including less subtle appeals to people's sense of self-preservation. True enough, it has brought together and integrated people from all continents, and the community of the people who read the book all over the world in the reading-circles that have a head-quarter in Rome, includes one fifth of mankind's total number. So, can Rorty point to the Bible to show he is right? No. The bible, in Rorty's reading, was part of turning people away from each other to some higher divine truths, instead of turning them to themselves. The appeal of this narrative that connected the past with the present, and with an utopian future , can bear no witness to Rorty's idea of solidarity through narratives, for it's appeal likely lay in it's transcendent, and thus enchanting quality. - So let us turn to what Rorty says created "sympathy" that's needed for solidarity: Uncle Tom's cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe. Did that book, did Martin Luther King's powerful speeches, the movie Malcolm X, do daily TV reports on racial poverty, will Amistad or the national dialogue on race created by the President improve the inhumane conditions in inner cities? Or did some matters improve because of affirmative action programs and some rulings of the Supreme Court that resulted in policy changes? I would suggest the latter . Rorty also cited the TV reports on Bosnia as furthering sympathy. Did it help at all? With the "first dead American soldier" on TV, the sympathy for Bosnia or Somalia usually dies.  - The impact of this "sentimental education" is, then, at least hard to find. What are sentiments, anyhow, in a secular enlightened culture that can produce David Gauthier's Morals by Agreement?

The problem of interpretation Even if we were allowed to take the Bible as example for an enchanting narrative - and isn't it, as Rorty loves it, a book about loving one another? -, the success of it is not so certain. What of the crusades? Saying that the dark Middle Ages were not an enlightened time, but pointing to the ancient Aeschylus play of The Persians as an example of creating sympathy may be coherent with Rorty's argument and his idea that in doubt, we do not take history as a guide to life anyhow. But to reject what happened in the dark Middle Ages would be to reject the observation that from a peaceful, persecuted little Jewish sect called the Essenes - people who passed on their story of Jesus as a parable of their own experiences - Christianity had the tendency to transform quite a bit, maybe because of it's universalist attitude. Too bad Rorty shares that attitude.  - But it points to one thing: narratives are a matter for interpretation, and different people read narratives differently. For example that great narrative of Nietzsche, his re-description of history, that Rorty is so fascinated with. Rorty claims he is not interested in Plato's quarrel with Nietzsche about human rights. He can only say that because Nietzsche denounced there was anything to quarrel about, by saying the human essence was just an invention by the weak. Rorty, a sophisticated North American professor, studiously ignores the violent undertones of Nietzsche, also in his reading of Nietzsche’s idea of self-creation, or "self-shaping". How intellectually sweet a notion for Nietzsche's idea of going "back to the innocent conscience of the beast of prey", leaving behind "custom, respect, usage, gratitude", and the "culture of the sick", to become "something perfect, wholly achieved, happy, mighty triumphant, something still capable of arousing fear!"  Of course, Nietzsche's violence and the violence of the dark ages don’t really fit Rorty's reading. But it shows how all narratives are subject to interpretation.
Consequently, I hold that Rorty's idea that reading narratives can sustain solidarity on the whole for wrong. Bill Cosby's show may change our prejudices about Black people a bit. But to believe that the right narratives at the right time, and Rorty's own examples included, will result in social change or moral progress is futile. - But let us assume it isn't. Let us say that maybe Rorty, for whatever reason, is right after all. Then he still relies on the democratic structures and institutions that provide for the tranquillity of reading and redescribing.

Liberal institutions endangered But how can these institutions be upheld when all the foundations are demasked as contingent, and truth dismissed as human construction? Only Rorty himself, the hopelessly cultured paradigm human being of his own self-created and naive no-sense tale, can believe this situation to be charming. In his book Jihad vs McWorld, Benjamin Barber illustrates how historically, human beings have become disenchanted and have reacted more violently to such a situation:

"More than one hundred years ago, Marx had observed that the breaking of the feudal bonds by modern capitalism had decisively fragmented traditional community...: 'All that is solid,' he warned, 'melts into air'. A half a century later modernist anxieties had become so popularized, so that one of American playwrights William Saroyan's characters could repeat over and over again in the pre-war stage classic The Time of Your Life, "no foundation, all the way down the line," and expect full sympathy from audiences already exasperated by modernity even before it had produced the Holocaust and the Atomic bomb. - In Germany they did not just whine about it: reacting against what they took to be the stultifying leveling (gleichschaltung) of bourgeois society, the Nazi party revived medieval myths of Teuton morality... and of Germanic identity".

Why this violent reaction to the perceived loss of foundation, to the perceived idea that some out-of-hand "international Jewish conspiracy", a conspiracy of strangers, was to undermine what Germans were all about? An answer may lie in the idea that finds "legal personhood too thin", sparking a revolt against "an evolution away from tradition, religion, and mystery towards contract, secularism and rationality whose final destination could only be what Max Weber called the disenchantment of the world."  While Gauthier could be charged with all of the three kinds of sins, Richard Rorty, in his conscious post-modern de-construction, would at least be responsible of the secular and the no-mystery sin. Taking away all foundations, and thus the rest of the enchantment we may quench out of  the secular idea of legal personhood on the basis of a common human or national essence, may be a matter of intellectual honesty, and delight, but also proves to have disastrous historical results,  instead of the turning of the world into a library. Once more, Rorty's selective historical ignorance is neatly on display when he sets the question of "What can we make of ourselves?" as pre-eminent on the intellectual's agenda. In that, he is not a man who has overcome his tradition. To a European like me, in his fixation on the future, he is quintessentially American.

The force of Rorty’s argument - conversing with Milosevic So even if Rorty was right, can we uphold his optimism that such kind of an Enlightenment was universally desirable and appealing, that disenchantment of the postmodern kind is worth being brought to others? I would think no. And even though he may well be right in his age-old insight that we know that we know nothing - on what basis would he spread this culture of our moral superiority? - For if we think of our disenchantment and our idea of ultimately and entirely unencumbered selves as desirable, we should surely promote it. But on what foundations? The universal ones are gone. How would pass Richard Rorty the human rights test? As we have worked out above, we need to give deprived war criminals the opportunity to re-describe their identities in the safe and cozy environment of the American-European kind. I can only assume that Professor for Humanities Richard Rorty would invite Mr. Slobodan Milosevic to join him in the garden of the University of Virginia, where together they would read the comic-book "Maus" about the Holocaust, which so elegantly makes obvious the de-humanization of man by depicting man as animals.  Professor Rorty might then proceed to lecture the Serb about "Nabokov on cruelty". Mr. Milosevic is the right person to talk to, for "our only hope for a decent society consists in softening the self-satisfied hearts" of" "those in power", and there is nothing such as the Kantian "unconditional moral obligation" . With that obligation gone - and also, with the divine command "Thou shalt not kill" gone (our not killing relies now on our "nicety") - how could we ever drag Mr. Milosevic to the war-tribunal in Den Haag? Wouldn't he argue, with Rorty, that our idea about autonomous identity and the totally unencumbered self may beg for his sympathy, but not for his obedience to law? On what basis could Richard Rorty ever convict human rights violators? And on what basis could he convince Mr. Milosevic, and for that matter, the whole rest of the world that has just powerfully been diagnosed to be caught up in wars on parochial identities , to adopt the ironist's "Gelassenheit" state of mind and the "bleeding heart" (Rorty on Owen and Engels) of a liberal who doesn't want to be cruel? Can he do anything for justice and solidarity when Iraq refuses to show Schindler's list, the powerful and, luckily for Rorty, secular sequel to that biblical story that invokes so much sympathy?

Rorty: Liberalism’s ultimate messenger He can't. In his honesty in facing up to the ultimate intellectual disenchantment of the Enlightenment, he is merely a man of his time. But in his appeal to the goodness in our hearts, he is even less a man of his time than Jesus was, in some decisive ways Rorty's unconscious role-model . Rorty's narrative just isn't enchanting enough. As for our concern about universalism, I can not see how he can uphold his claim for superiority, much less how he would want to enforce it. His theory may be the last step to self-recognition of the liberal project. But what he has to offer to a disenchanted liberal concerned about making a positive difference, is simply nothing.
And that was just the private difference Rorty cannot make. Moreover, his advice to political Liberalism is absolutely invalid, too. As for matters of practical advice to those in power to change the world, "it has condemned itself to political nullity" .  Rorty not only pervades private life with his no-notion of essence, demanding secularization and de-divinization, but comes back with his private self-creational exercise to pervade the political realm, and undermines it’s institutions. Rorty, on that account, is the ultimate dis-enchanter for liberals, liberty run wild, the ultimate messenger of liberalism - and worse: it’s desaster. His philosophical liberalism is wholly disarmed and of no use to political liberalism at all.
 
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