Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity
Richard Rorty's 1989 case for private irony and public solidarity against cruelty.
At a glance
Key ideas
The contingency of language, Final vocabulary, The ironist …
See all 5Criticism
An elitist hero
Connections
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- Rorty argues that language, selfhood and liberal community are all contingent, and that truth belongs to human descriptions, not to the world.
- He describes the ironist, who doubts her own final vocabulary but cannot appeal to anything outside vocabularies.
- He separates private self-creation, exemplified by Proust, Nietzsche, Heidegger and Derrida, from the public aim of reducing cruelty, illustrated by Nabokov and Orwell.
- Solidarity grows by widening who counts as "we".
Why it matters
- It is Rorty's most widely read statement of his philosophy and his first sustained political vision.
Key facts
- Author
- Richard Rorty1
- Published
- 1989, Cambridge University Press1
- Origin
- Two sets of lectures, at University College London and Trinity College, Cambridge1
- Parts
- Contingency; Ironism and Theory; Cruelty and Solidarity1
- Reviews
- By Jenny Teichman (The New York Times), Bernard Williams (London Review of Books) and Alasdair MacIntyre (The Journal of Philosophy)1
Key ideas
-
The contingency of language1
"Only descriptions of the world can be true or false."
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Final vocabulary1
Each person's set of beliefs whose contingency they mostly ignore.
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The ironist1
Has radical doubts about her own vocabulary, which arguments in that vocabulary cannot settle.
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Cruelty2
A diverse community bound by opposition to cruelty; there is "no noncircular theoretical backup for the belief that cruelty is horrible".
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Expanding "we"1
Solidarity grows by including ever more people in "we".
Criticism
-
An elitist hero2
Critics have called the ironist an elitist figure.
Connections
Written by
Links
Sources
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