
Richard Rorty: Life, Pragmatism, and Conversational Philosophy - Hooke
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/richard-rorty-life-pragmatism-and-conversational-philosophy/
======
woodandsteel
I have read a number of Rorty's books, and he is strangely contradictory. On
the one hand, he strongly supports democracy and the whole modern project. On
the other hand, his essay The Contingency of the Self in Contingency, Irony
and Solidarity presents a very Nietzschean view of the self as a nothing that
can be made into something only by creating by telling myths that fool others
into thinking you know something important.

As for the claim that democracy is based on the idea there is no objective
truth, and instead we create it through conversation, that is certainly not
what the American founding fathers thought.

~~~
JeuelyFish
In "Philosophy and Social Hope" I think he addresses what you and probably a
lot of people see as a contradiction.

He supports the Western views of democracy, the rights of individualism, etc
and points to the success of the western world as having to do with the result
of these ideas being whiled embraced. Yet, you're right, his views are also
very Nietzschean. So he can't say that the success of these ideas is because
of something "innate" or "universally metaphysical" behind them. They simply
were tools that were used to yield certain historical results.

It's been a while since I've read any Rorty, but I'm nearly certain that when
he is talking about this he uses some language about "fate" vs "luck". Where
we like to think that it was the fate of these western values to produce great
societies, when really it could be, from an epistemic viewpoint, just luck.

~~~
woodandsteel
Let me say a bit about where I am coming from. I see Rorty as an example of
what I call a "pseudo-anti-foundationalist" Authentic anti-foundationalism
holds there is a real independent reality, and we can say a great deal
definite about it, we just can never describe it entirely or with a single set
of concepts.

Rorty's Nietzschean pseudo-anti-foundationalism holds there is nothing
definite out there and so we are free to make our descriptions as we wish.
Many people like this idea because of the common claim that different cultures
think of reality entirely differently, but that is not true. In fact there are
enormous commonalities, and this is because there are real, independent
realities that we all have to deal with to survive, like the necessity to eat,
and what counts as food.

As for liberal democracy, I see it as based on a more authentic practical
anti-foundationalism that was developed before academic philosophy got there.
So for instance, if you can't capture all of reality with a single set of
precise concepts, then you need to have lots of different people working on
understanding it and contributing to making decisions, which is why you need
free speech and various other characteristics of liberal democracy. Which is
what Dewey, a much more sincere anti-foundationalist, said.

>It's been a while since I've read any Rorty, but I'm nearly certain that when
he is talking about this he uses some language about "fate" vs "luck". Where
we like to think that it was the fate of these western values to produce great
societies, when really it could be, from an epistemic viewpoint, just luck.

Yes, that is an important point.

------
utanapishtim
Happy to see Rorty showing up on hn. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature is a
must read. Even if you disagree with his views, the value comes in hearing out
one strand in the lineage of Kuhn.

------
gt_
"Although Rorty’s polemical tone in his books and articles might suggest that
he had a robust temperament, he was the opposite: gentle, shy, withdrawn, and
sensitive."

His tone actually comes off as the latter to me. His work is intelligent but
ultimately that of a weak pushover. I'm glad nobody is discussing this old-
fashioned neoliberal. He was smart, but did not do what this writer seems to
think he did.

~~~
throwawayjava
_> neoliberal_

Rorty was not a neoliberal in any honest sense of the word. He was a liberal
and a progressive, to be sure, but was decidedly not a neoliberal.

If you're confused about what "neoliberal" means, think "the intersection of
things that Clinton and Reagan had in common", not "the things right-wing US
commentators call liberal". Most true neoliberals in Congress are on the red
team, for example.

Literally the only place I can find Rorty himself described as a neoliberal is
in some Marxist critique of something or other. And those authors doesn't even
make it through their criticism of Rorty without a blatant grammatical error,
leading me to believe they don't take their characterization very seriously.

