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Irony’s  Commitment:  Reading  Contingency,  Irony,  and  Solidarity      Bjørn  Torgrim  Ramberg,  CSMN,  University  of  Oslo.  (b.t.ramberg  @csmn.uio.no)    

The  point  of  Socratic  irony  is  not  simply  to  destroy  pretenses,  but  to  inject  a  certain  form  of  not-­‐knowing  into  polis  life.1  

Jonathan  Lear    1.  Irony  and  liberalism        Richard  Rorty  thought  that  philosophers  have  typically  expected  too  much  from  philosophy;  insight  into  the  essence  of  truth,  knowledge  and  justification;  an  understanding  of  the  nature  of  meaning,  intentionality,  and  rationality;  an  account  of  objective  value  that  will  allow  human  choice  and  action  to  stand—in  principle—justified  as  what  reason  requires  of  us  or  at  least  permits  us  to  do.  The  lectures  and  papers  collected  in  Contingency,  Irony  and  Solidarity2  form  an  integral  part  of  this  general  diagnosis,  in  so  far  as  CIS  aims  to  debunk  Platonist  and  Kantian  aspirations  with  respect  to  the  last  of  these  three  clusters.  CIS,  however,  is  not  merely  a  topical  deconstruction  of  the  pretensions  of  philosophical  theory  with  respect  to  the  practical  and  political  dimensions  of  human  life.  It  is  a  species  of  activism,  an  attempt  to  shape  and  promote  political  liberalism.3  Accordingly,  Rorty  right  at  the  outset  of  the  work  distinguishes  between  the  kinds  of  aims  and  ends  of  action  that  human  beings  can  have,  and  with  respect  to  which  we  may  raise  questions  of  justification  and  of  relative  worth  and  significance,  by  invoking  the  two  domains  of  human  activity  enshrined  in  the  liberal  tradition;  the  private  and  the  public.  The  target  he  takes  aim  at  is  the  thought  “that  a  more  comprehensive  philosophical  outlook  would  let  us  hold  self-­‐creation  and  justice,  private  perfection  and  human  solidarity,  in  a  single  vision.”  (CIS,  xiv)  Rorty  is  deeply  suspicious  of  this  idea  on  political  grounds;  he  agrees  with  Isaiah  Berlin  that  yielding  to  a  hankering  for  that  sort  of  unified  vision  is  to  display  a  dangerous  “moral  and  political  immaturity”  (CIS,  46).4    We  risk  disposing  ourselves  toward  imposing  authoritarian  restrictions  on  dissenting—in  theory  or  in  practice—groups  and  individuals.  Rorty,  then,  sets  out    

[…]  to  show  how  things  look  if  we  drop  the  demand  for  a  theory  which  unifies  the  public  and  the  private,  and  are  content  to  treat  the  demands  of  self-­‐creation  and  of  human  solidarity  as  equally  valid,  yet  forever  incommensurable.    (CIS,  xv)  

 Providing  that  vista  is  the  explicit  agenda  of  CIS.  The  burden  of  the  book  is  that  the  prospects  of  liberal  values—maximizing  freedom  for  all  persons  within  egalitarian  constraints  of  a  Rawlsian  kind—will  actually  be  improved  if  we  abandon  the  project  of  providing  theoretical,  universality-­‐aspiring  argumentative  foundations  for  liberalism.  How  can  it  be  that  we  strengthen  liberal  values  by  insisting  on  their  contingency?  The  principal  answer,  I  think,  goes  like  this.  In  Rorty’s  “historicist  and  nominalist  culture”  we  would  take  it  for  granted  that  sensible  responses  to  challenges  to  liberalism  take  the  form  of  narratives,  connecting  historical  experience  and  utopian  political  hopes  (CIS,  xvi).  

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This  means  that  the  case  for  liberalism  would  not  rest  on  anything  stronger  than  interpretations  of  particular  historical  experience.  But  by  that  same  token,  we  would  be  dismissive  of  any  challenge  to  liberal  commitments  that  pretended  to  rest  on  a  firmer  authority  or  draw  on  insight  of  a  different  order.  We  would  be  inoculated  against  the  temptation  to  let  theoretical  vision  override  the  lessons  of  practical  experience.  That  is  of  course  not  say  that  we  would  be  inoculated  against  authoritarian  politics.  But  Rorty’s  basic  hunch  is  that  if  the  playing  field  for  competing  political  visions  is  understood  as  practical  historical  experience,  as  a  contest  of  plausible  narrative  interpretations  of  experience  and  hope,  then  liberalism  will,  relatively,  stand  a  better  chance.  Recognition  of  contingency  is  good  for  liberalism,  because,  on  the  whole,  in  a  post-­‐metaphysical  culture  it  will  be  more  difficult  to  argue  for  its  competitors.  Rorty’s  liberal  project,  then,  crucially  involves  a  recontextualization  of  theory  and  the  needs  it  can  satisfy.  It  is  for  this  purpose  that  Rorty  turns  to  the  notion  of  irony.      In  Part  II  of  the  book,  “Ironism  and  Theory”,  Rorty  brings  on  his  protagonist,  the  liberal  ironist.  The  liberal  ironist  embodies  the  values  and  virtues  of  the  post-­‐metaphysical  intellectual  that  are  the  focus  of  Rorty’s  concern.  He  will  want  to  show  us,  his  readers,  what  these  virtues  are,  in  a  manner  that  convinces  us  that  they  are  indeed  virtues.  The  case  he  makes  cannot  take  the  form  of  a  new  theoretical  foundation  for  liberal  political  attitudes.  Rorty’s  appeal  will  be  directed  to  particular  people  in  particular  circumstances,  and  it  can  work  its  persuasion  only  by  connecting  with  their  own  interpretation  of  those  circumstances—that  is  to  say,  the  roughly  and  vaguely  defined  collection  of  practical  and  normative  challenges  that  left-­‐leaning  liberals  typically  face  as  they  work  out  their  political  commitments  and  their  implications.  Rorty  will  want  to  depict  a  kind  of  problem  situation  to  which  his  liberal  ironist  characteristically  and  paradigmatically  responds  and  he  will  want  us,  his  readers,  to  recognize  that  situation  as  our  situation.  Moreover,  he  will  want  us  to  perceive  the  characteristic  response  of  this  figure  as  displaying  a  kind  of  human  excellence  that  we  ourselves  could  be  normatively  oriented  by  as  we  work  out  the  salient  problems  of  our  situation.  This  undertaking  requires  both  telling  and  showing;  Rorty  must  characterize  and  he  must  illustrate  the  character  and  the  situation  of  the  liberal  ironist.  Thereby,  through  such  redescriptive  efforts,  he  must  aim  to  bring  about  a  recognition  in  the  reader,  an  acknowledgment  of  aptness.5  If  successfully  addressed  and  duly  responsive,  we,  Rorty’s  readers,  might  in  turn  be  brought  through  this  recognition  into,  or  closer  to,  the  perspective  Rorty  wants  to  advance.  That  is  a  perspective  from  which  we  may  be  actively  and  wholeheartedly  committed  to  the  liberal  ideals  of  justice  and  freedom,  and  firmly  disposed  to  distinguish  our  private  ends  from  our  public  duties,  while  no  longer  seeing  any  point  at  all  in  striving  to  provide  theoretical,  universalist  justification  for  these  commitments.      CIS  is  an  ambitious  transformative  undertaking;  with  it  Rorty  aims  to  contribute  to  the  large-­‐scale  cultural  maturation  project  that  he  describes  in  world-­‐historical  terms,  precisely  by  depicting  it  as  he  does,  in  the  terms  that  he  uses.  The  project  is  open  to  critical  assessment  at  several  levels.  Obviously  the  general  stance  toward  philosophical  theory  that  is  evident  throughout  Rorty’s  oeuvre  may  be  disputed,  or,  as  is  more  frequently  the  case,  rejected.  Alternatively,  those  

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sympathetic  to  the  kind  of  case  against  representationalist  epistemology  and  metaphysics  that  Rorty  makes  in  Philosophy  and  the  Mirror  of  Nature  (Rorty,  1979)  and  elsewhere,  may  still  doubt  the  far-­‐reaching  application  that  Rorty  gives  his  deconstructive  conclusions.  In  that  case,  one  may  well  be  unmoved  by  and  impatient  with  Rorty’s  efforts  in  CIS  to  be  self-­‐consciously  historicist  about  his  own  arguments  and  transpose  them  into  redescription  and  narrative.  And  further,  even  those  willing  to  give  Rorty  most  of  the  general  meta-­‐philosophical  points  he  marshals  in  his  challenge  to  the  aspirations  of  substantive  theories  of  target  notions  like  knowledge,  truth  and  goodness,  may  find  the  actual  descriptions  and  the  recontextualizations  of  liberalism  and  of  irony  in  CIS  unpersuasive,  or  misleading,  or  harmful.6  One  may  have  political  objections,  thinking  liberalism  itself  a  dubious  commitment.  Or,  even  granting  liberalism,  one  might  think  that  the  transformative  effort  undertaken  in  CIS  simply  does  not  work,  because  the  descriptions,  characterizations  and  demonstrations  are  not  apt.  The  challenges  of  liberalism  are  not  well  characterized,  the  suggested  response  ill-­‐suited  to  the  current  needs  of  political  liberalism.        One  pervasive  theme  of  criticism—one  that  recurs  in  responses  formulated  at  different  levels,  and  from  vantage  points  at  different  degrees  of  proximity  to  Rorty’s  standpoint—is  the  complaint  that  CIS  is  a  divided  work,  damaged  by  irreparable  tensions  and  irreconcilable  commitments.  Rorty’s  construal  of  the  private-­‐public  line  is  typically  the  focus  of  these  worries.  Of  course  the  interesting  complaint  here  cannot  be  that  Rorty  leaves  us  without  theoretical  tools  for  reliably  sorting  utterances  and  other  actions  into  their  appropriate  domain.  Nor  can  it  be  the  concern  that  Rorty  provides  no  way  of  normatively  ordering  duties  and  values  across  these  domains.  Both  points  are  correct,  but,  for  one  thing,  there  is  no  incoherence  or  tension  in  assuming  Rorty’s  position  here.    Secondly  and  more  importantly,  the  aim  of  CIS  is  exactly  to  instill  in  us  a  will  to  be  liberals  without  this  particular  sort  of  theoretical  backup.  The  interesting  complaint,  rather,  is  that  Rorty’s  own  aspirations  and  commitments  themselves  are  in  conflict,  and  that  these  tensions  express  themselves  as  incoherencies  in  the  depictions  that  he  provides  of  the  liberal  ironist,  and,  in  particular,  of  the  liberal  ironist’s  deployment  of  the  private-­‐public  distinction.7    The  more  interesting  complaint,  then,  accepts  Rorty’s  ambition,      

[…]  to  reformulate  the  hopes  of  liberal  society  in  a  nonrationalist  and  nonuniversalist  way—one  which  furthers  their  realization  better  than  older  descriptions  of  them  did.  (CIS,  44-­‐45)    

 The  charge,  however,  is  that  the  reformulation  is  fatally  cracked;  as  a  conception  of  a  way  of  being  liberal  it  fails  because  it  is  shaped  by  irreconcilable  intellectual  needs  in  Rorty’s  own  thinking  about  the  relation  of  the  political  to  other  aspects  of  life.  The  liberal  ironist  embodies  Rorty’s  conception  of  how  the  political  may  fit  into  a  human  life—is  there  a  disabling  split  in  this  figure?    That  is  my  main  interest  in  this  paper.  I  will  not  be  concerned  with  criticisms  of  Rorty’s  broad  stance  toward  what  he  regards  as  metaphysics,  nor  with  doubts  about  his  general  rhetorical  strategies.  What  will  be  at  stake  is  the  critical  claim  that  Rorty’s  liberal  ironist  is  fractured,  constitutionally  incapable  of  triggering  the  transformative  recognition  Rorty  aims  for,  and  so  ineffective  for  the  rhetorical  

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purposes  that  motivate  CIS.  This  is  an  issue  of  internal  practical  coherence;  whether  Rorty’s  figure  is  a  suitable  means  to  his  transformative  ends.  The  issue  turns  on  what  we  can  make  of  irony  and  its  complex  significance.      On  this  score,  Rorty  has  taken  a  beating.  The  depiction  of  irony  in  the  core  paper  of  CIS,  “Private  Irony  and  Liberal  Hope,”  gets  him  into  trouble  even  with  his  most  generous  and  amicable  readers,  such  as  Michael  Williams  and  J.B.  Schneewind.8  Indeed  the  trouble  is  deep  enough  that  Rorty  toward  the  end  of  his  life  is  brought,  by  his  friend  and  long-­‐time  interlocutor  Schneewind,  to  concede  that  his  “description  of  the  liberal  ironist  was  badly  flawed.”  (Rorty,  2010,  506)9  Moreover,  Rorty  grants,  it  is  flawed  along  just  the  lines  that  the  split-­‐chargers  have  been  attending  to:          

I  conflated  two  quite  different  sorts  of  people:  the  unruffled  pragmatist  and  the  anguished  existential  adolescent.  I  made  it  sound  as  if  you  could  not  be  an  antifoundationalist  and  a  romantic  self-­‐creator  without  becoming  as  Sartrean,  ever  conscious  of  the  abyss.  (ibid.)      

 Perhaps  the  sensible  thing  to  do,  in  light  of  this  concession,  would  be  just  to  close  the  book  on  the  liberal  ironist  and  move  on.  It  is  one  thing,  challenging  enough,  to  defend  Rorty  against  critics—but  when  he  himself  joins  them,  isn’t  it  time  to  say  goodnight  and  turn  out  the  lights?  Perhaps  it  is—even  probably.  But  let  us  note  this;  what  Rorty  admits  in  the  face  of  Schneewind’s  interrogation  of  his  definition  of  the  ironist  is  that  his  description  is  flawed.10  This  leaves  us  with  the  possibility  that  there  may  be  better,  more  effective,  descriptions  to  be  had  of  that  character.  Perhaps  Rorty  nevertheless  had  the  right  hunch.  It  may  be,  pace  Rorty  and  Rorty’s  critics,  that  the  notion  of  irony,  suitably  recontextualized,  is  rich  enough  after  all  to  sustain  the  transformative  ambition  of  CIS.      In  CIS  Rorty  in  fact  makes  a  case  for  irony  as  a  political  device,  pressing  the  recognition  of  contingency.  I  will  trace  that  case  below,  in  section  2.  Yet  Rorty  writes  as  if  there  is  more  to  irony  than  this.  And  that  is  where  he  gets  into  trouble  with  Williams  and  Schneewind.  The  point  pressed  against  him  is  that  irony  of  the  existential  kind  really  is  a  form  of  skepticism  or  relativism  that  can  only  weaken  a  commitment  to  liberal  values.    However,  I  believe  there  is  a  constructive  and  subtle  thought  lurking  exactly  in  those  controversial  and  troublesome  features  of  Rorty’s  ironist.  This  thought  concerns  the  relation  between  the  characteristically  liberal  commitment  to  self-­‐questioning  intellectual  openness,  and  the  peculiar  dimension  of  openness  that  is  characteristic  of  irony.  The  thought  may  be  worth  extracting—indeed,  I  am  betting  on  it,  since  it  will  embody  the  transformative  ambition  that  I  have  already  ascribed  to  CIS.  So  my  reading  depends  on  it.  I  will  have  a  go  in  the  third  part  of  the  essay.  There  I  acknowledge  the  case  pressed  by  Williams  and  by  Schneewind  against  Rorty’s  definition  of  the  ironist.  In  search  of  a  different  take  on  what  is  at  stake  in  Rorty’s  use  of  irony,  I  turn  to  Jonathan  Lear’s  recent  study  of  irony  as  a  mode  of  relating  to  one’s  practical  identity  (Lear,  2011).  Lear,  too,  is  critical  of  Rorty’s  explicit  understanding  of  irony.  Nevertheless,  I  think  that  Lear’s  notion  of  ironic  experience  can  be  used  to  reinterpret  Rorty’s  liberal  ironist.  Lear  emphasizes  what  is  central  also  to  Rorty,  namely,  an  awareness  of  

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the  double-­‐edged  nature  of  critical  reflection;  for  both  thinkers,  irony  involves  a  recognition  that  even  disciplined  use  of  reason  is  not  intrinsically  liberating.  However,  Rorty’s  definition  of  an  ironist  appears  to  present  this  awareness  in  epistemic  terms.  Lear,  as  I  read  him,  shows  us  that  irony  is  not  fundamentally  to  be  captured  in  this  manner.  And  while  I  grant  that  there  is  no  question  that  Rorty  uses  a  language  that  is  susceptible  to  this  reading,  I  claim,  against  Williams,  Schneewind,  and  also  Lear,  that  there  is  a  different  conception  of  irony  at  work  in  CIS,  one  that  dovetails  with  Lear’s  insights,  and  that  is  consonant  with  Rorty’s  ambition.  I  conclude  (section  4)  by  summing  up  how  the  project  of  CIS  looks  in  light  of  that  claim.  The  difference  this  reading  makes,  if  it  sticks,  is  the  difference  between  taking  CIS  as  an  overstated  and  overheated  debunking  of  metaphysical  pretensions  in  political  philosophy,  and  seeing  it  as  a  constructive  and  innovative  effort  to  make  Rorty’s  readers  into  better  liberals.  It  seems  worth  trying.        2.  Irony  and  the  problem  situation  Let  us  turn  now  to  consider  irony  as  it  appears  from  the  vantage  point  of  Rorty’s  politics.  For  that  purpose,  it  will  be  useful  to  distinguish  two  aspects  of  what  I  above  called  the  problem  situation—the  cluster  of  salient  trouble-­‐points  that  is  supposed  to  establish,  for  Rorty,  a  common  ground  with  his  readers.  Let  us  call  these  two  the  political  and  the  meta-­‐theoretical  aspects.  These  are  connected,  and  in  this  connection,  I  will  suggest,  is  where  we  find  the  initial  political  significance  of  irony.    The  point  can  be  brought  out  by  considering  the  view  Rorty  provides  us  with  in  the  four  short  pieces  grouped  under  the  heading  “Politics,”  in  Philosophy  and  Social  Hope11.    There,  in  “Love  and  Money,”  Rorty  takes  his  theme  from  the  epigraph  to  E.M.  Forster’s  1910  novel  Howards  End;  “only  connect…”.12    He  goes  on  to  deploy  Forster’s  famous  distinction,  drawn  in  his  Aspects  of  the  Novel  (1927),  between  “the  development  of  humanity”  and  the  “great  tedious  onrush  known  as  history”  (quoted  by  Rorty  (PSH,  224)),  to  state  his  view  of  the  situation  faced  by  late  20th  century  intellectuals  who  identify  with  the  political  and  moral  aims  of  liberal  social  democrats.  The  issue,  simply,  is  the  incompatibility  of  poverty  and  human  flourishing,  the  brute  fact  that  poverty  blocks  participation  in—Rorty  quotes  Forster—the  “’shy  crablike  sideways  movement’  towards  tenderness,  the  tenderness  which  connection  makes  possible.”  (PSH,  224).    Rorty’s  principal  point  is  that  for  liberals,  Forster’s  “Only  connect!”  expresses  an  imperative—reminiscent  of  Rorty’s  own  “Don’t  be  cruel!”—and  as  liberals  we  seek  to  give  that  imperative  universal  application;  we  take  it  to  be  our  duty  to  see  to  it  that  a  life  of  humanity  is  the  birthright  of  all.  However,  exactly  in  the  universalist  hope  embedded  in  the  imperative,  for  Rorty  undoubtedly  the  core  aspiration  of  a  fully  de-­‐divinized  political  liberalism,  we  are  frustrated;  ought  implies  can,  and  the  very  poor,  Rorty  states  with  Forster,  cannot.  Tenderness,  which  is  to  say  humanity,  only  has  a  chance  Rorty  writes,  “when  there  is  enough  money  to  produce  a  little  leisure,  a  little  time  in  which  to  love.”  (PSH,  224)      The  upshot  of    “Love  and  Money”,  and  of  its  three  companion  pieces,  is  that  the  trouble  with  liberalism  is  not  a  question  of  theoretical  resources.  Rather  it  is  fundamentally  challenged  by  the  dire  and  growing  need  of  the  have-­‐nots,  and  by  the  enormous  power,  material  and  discursive,  of  the  wealthy  minority  to  resist  

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redistributive  efforts.  As  liberals  we  must  remain  committed  to  a  hope  for  success,  but  equally,  we  must  stay  committed  to  the  idea  that  in  human  history  “money  remains  the  independent  variable”(PSH  228)13.  That  is  to  say,  liberals  must  resist  the  temptation  to  preserve  hope  by  abandoning  the  basic  insight      

[…]  that  love  is  not  enough—that  the  Marxists  were  absolutely  right  about  one  thing:  the  soul  of  history  is  economic.    All  the  talk  in  the  world  about  the  need  for  “New  values”  or  for  “non-­‐Western  ways  of  thinking”,  is  not  going  to  bring  more  money  to  the  Indian  villages  […]  All  the  love  in  the  world,  all  the  attempts  to  abandon  “Eurocentrism”,  or  “liberal  individualism”,  all  the  “politics  of  diversity”,  all  the  talk  about  cuddling  up  to  the  natural  environment,  will  not  help.  (PSH,  227)  

 Liberals,  then,  must  remain  hopeful  realists,  and  that,  Rorty  thinks,  is  very  hard  to  do,  since  under  circumstances  like  those  he  describes  these  two  attitudes  will  tend  to  work  against  each  other.  In  the  circumstances  that  Rorty  characterizes,  the  temptation  to  preserve  the  one  attitude  by  abandoning  the  other  may  be  overwhelming.14      Rorty’s  rhetoric  in  these  papers,  particularly  on  globalization  and  the  prospects  for  just  economic  development,  may  seem  dated  to  current  readers.  This  may  be  in  part  due  simply  to  the  advance  of  the  global  economic  power  shift  that  Rorty  also  saw  coming  but  that  now  is  a  reality  we  confront  in  a  number  of  ways  in  our  daily  lives.  Perhaps,  also,  20  years  down  the  line  from  Rorty’s  vantage  point,  the  economic  prospects  for  the  very  poor  actually  do  look  more  hopeful.  Concrete,  realistic  proposals  for  positive  change  may  be  more  than  pipe  dreams.15    We  can  acknowledge  these  reactions,  but  need  not  press  the  issue.  What  matters  for  the  argument  here  is  that  the  tension  Rorty  speaks  of  is  a  recognizable  concern,  even  if  in  updated  form.  As  long  as  the  stress  on  the  conjunction  of  hope  and  realism  is  felt,  we  have  a  motivation  for  the  connection  between  the  political  aspect  and  the  meta-­‐theoretical  aspect  of  the  problem  situation.      In  the  “Politics”  papers,  these  two  aspects  are  woven  together.  Consider,  for  instance,  the  lessons  that  Rorty  draws  in  “Love  and  Money,”  regarding  the  competing  claims  of  Marxism  and  liberalism.  “Seen  from  this  Forsterian  vantage  point,”  he  writes,    

[…]  the  distinction  between  Marxism  and  liberalism  was  largely  a  disagreement  about  whether  you  can  get  as  much,  or  more,  wealth  to  redistribute  by  politicizing  the  marketplace  and  replacing  the  greedy  Wilcoxes  [of  Howards  End]  with  government  planners.  It  turns  out  that  you  cannot.  Liberals  of  Forster’s  time  knew  as  well  as  the  Marxists  that  the  soul  of  history—if  not  of  the  novel  or  humanity—is  economic,  but  they  thought  that  history  had  to  be  guided  from  the  top  down,  by  the  gentlefolk.  The  Marxists  hoped  that  once  those  on  the  bottom  seized  control,  once  the  revolution  turned  things  upside  down,  everything  would  automatically  get  better.  Here  again,  alas,  the  Marxists  were  wrong.    So  now  Marxism  is  no  longer  of  much  interest,  and  we  are  back  with  the  

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question  of  what  top-­‐down  initiatives  we  gentlefolk  might  best  pursue.    (PSH,  225)  

 The  provocation  of  this  passage  (and  many  others  like  it)  points  to  the  meta-­‐theoretical  aspect  I  have  in  mind.  A  natural  reaction  to  Rorty’s  rendition  of  the  distinction  is  this.  If  the  issue  between  Marxists  and  Liberals  looks  to  you  like  an  instrumental  one,  regarding  the  means  that  will  most  effectively  realize  an  agreed-­‐upon  economic  end,  then  there  is  something  very  wrong  with  your  vantage  point.  The  dividing  issue,  and  here  traditional  Marxists  and  traditional  Liberals  will  agree,  is  what  it  is  to  live  a  worthwhile  human  life,  indeed  what  it  is  to  be  a  fully  realized  human  being.  Marxism  offers  a  theory  about  the  conditions  under  which  such  realization  is  possible.  Specifically,  it  is  a  theory  about  what  it  is  for  a  human  being  to  be  fully  free,  and  therefore  fully  human—and  derived  from  this  insight  into  what  human  beings  fundamentally  are  is  a  theory  about  how  those  conditions  may,  concretely  and  historically,  come  to  be  realized.  The  practical  failure  of  actual  revolutions  to  bring  about  the  utopia  of  freedom  articulated  in  The  Communist  Manifesto  cannot  be  taken  to  have  falsified  that  philosophical  understanding  of  human  nature.  That  understanding  must  be  confronted  at  an  altogether  different  level.  And  to  that  challenge  liberal  philosophy  will  rise,  with  its  emphasis  on  autonomy  and  individual  rights,  the  concomitant  distinction  between  the  private  and  the  public,  and  a  conception  of  justice  as  something  to  be  articulated  in  procedural  terms.  This  axis  of  disagreement  is  fundamentally  and  deeply  philosophical,  not  instrumental.          This  sort  of  reaction  to  Rorty’s  pronouncements  in  PSH  and  elsewhere  on  Marxism  specifically  and  political  theory  in  general  is  familiar  and  understandable;  Rorty  seems  to  be  willfully  superficial,  almost  frivolous  about  the  most  basic  issues  we  confront  as  political  beings.  However,  this  reaction  brings  into  view  exactly  the  point  we  are  after,  one  that  turns  on  a  critical  difference  between  Rorty  and  many  of  his  opponents  to  the  left  and  to  the  right.  For  what  is  the  Forsterian  vantage  point  from  which  the  disagreement  between  Marxists  and  liberals  appears  to  be  about  how  to  maximize  the  wealth  available  for  redistribution?    It  is  the  point  of  view  one  occupies  if  one  filters  out  all  commitments  to  philosophical  theories—or,  as  we  might  say,  with  Rorty,  deep  theories—of  human  nature.16      From  this  point  of  view,  one  will  read,  as  Rorty  does  in  PSH,  The  New  Testament  and  The  Communist  Manifesto  as  inspirational  texts  of  hope,  rather  than  as  reports  on  what  kinds  of  beings  we  are  and  of  what,  in  consequence,  forms  of  life  are  required  by  us  if  we  are  to  be  true  to  our  essential  nature.  With  the  deep-­‐theory  filter  in  the  on  position,  it  is  possible  to  read  these  and  other  texts  of  the  genre  as  proposals  for  what  we  may  perhaps  make  of  ourselves,  rather  than  as  expressions  of  knowledge  of  what  we  in  any  case  are  (when  fully  realized).  By  performing  this  filtered  reading,  one  thereby  places  such  texts  under  the  fallible,  conditional  authority  of  ordinary  human  experience.  One  transposes  them  from  the  mode  of  knowledge  into  the  mode  of  exploratory  and  perhaps  inspirational  narrative.  This  is  the  very  point  of  the  filter;  to  resist  super-­‐experiential  authorities.  That  is  what  Rorty  means  when  he  describes  his  project  as  the  substitution  of  hope  for  knowledge  (PSH,  23ff).  What  I  am  suggesting  is  that  this  

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very  substitution  is  an  element  in  Rorty’s  campaign  to  keep  hope  realistic  and  realism  hopeful.    This  last  might  strike  one  as  a  patently  absurd  claim;  surely  it  is  a  requirement  of  realism  that  political  action  not  be  based  merely  on  hope.  Substituting  hope  for  knowledge  seems  entirely  the  wrong  medicine  if  realism  is  your  aim.  This,  however,  is  a  terminological  misunderstanding.  The  contrast  Rorty  is  after  is  expressed  when  he  says,  in  “Globalization,  the  Politics  of  Identity,  and  Social  Hope”,  that,  “the  appropriate  intellectual  background  to  political  deliberation  is  historical  narrative  rather  than  philosophical  or  quasi-­‐philosophical  theory.”  (PSH,  231)  Of  course  it  is  granted  that  fallibilistically  construed  ameliorative  political  practice  should  be  empirically  based,  and  draw  for  its  formulation  and  argumentative  support  on  interpreted  experience.  But  this  kind  of  knowledge,  when  linked  up  to  diagnoses  of  ills  and  proposals  for  concrete  improvement,  is  what  Rorty  conceives  as  historical  narrative.  Rorty’s  point  is  that  this  is  exactly  what  politics  should  be  based  on—and  nothing  else.      Though  the  contrast  term  is  not  difficult  to  locate,  we  need  to  be  careful  not  to  take  Rorty’s  “general  turn  against  theory  toward  narrative”  (CIS,  xvi)  to  exclude  all  use  of  explanatory  theory.  Rather,  it  concerns  their  relative  significance;  parasitic  on  narrative,  theory  is  conceived  now  as  contextually  adapted  tools  for  specific  purposes.  As  Rorty  remarks  (in  “A  spectre  is  haunting  the  intellectuals:  Derrida  on  Marx”17),  “Contexts  provided  by  theories  are  tools  for  effecting  change  […]  to  be  evaluated  by  their  efficiency  in  effecting  changes”(PSH,  221).  What  Rorty  aims  to  displace,  is  a  tool-­‐transcending  idea  of  theory—that  is,  anything  that  counts  as  deep  theory.  This  is  the  point  at  stake,  for  instance,  in  an  interview  with  Chronis  Polychroniou,  entitled,  “On  Philosophy  and  Politics,”  where  Rorty  claims  that  his  philosophical  views  are  compatible  with  a  whole  spectrum  of  political  orientations.  This  might  seem  surprising,  given  Rorty’s  allegiance  to  the  primacy  of  democracy  to  philosophy,  to  politics  over  theory.  However,  the  reason  why  this  nevertheless  had  better  be  so,  is  that  for  Rorty  it  is  both  a  dangerous  practical  mistake  and  an  instance  of  theoretical  hubris  to  conceive  of  politics  as  resting  on  philosophical  theory.  The  persistent  threat  to  realistic  hope  or  hopeful  realism,  in  Rorty’s  view,  is  the  idea  that  political  proposals  should  be  warranted  by  the  same  kind  of  epistemic  authority  that  philosophy  in  the  Plato-­‐Kant  tradition,  in  Rorty’s  reading,  has  traditionally  aspired  to.      And  this  is  indeed  the  key  meta-­‐theoretical  theme  of  the  “Politics”  papers.  As  Rorty  puts  it  in  “A  Spectre  is  Haunting  the  Intellectuals;  Derrida  on  Marx,”  what  must  be  resisted  is  anything  like  a  “science  of  history”,  any  temptation  to  pin  one’s  hope  on  a  “big  discovery”  (PSH,  220).  What  must  be  filtered  out,  he  urges  in  “Failed  Prophecies,  Glorious  Hopes,”  are  appeals  to  the  kind  of  authoritative  knowledge  that  might  make  us  think  of  political  progress  in  terms  of  a  “single,  decisive  change  “(PSH,  208).  Deep  theories  of  human  nature  tempt  us  away  from  the  contingency  and  particularity  and  disputability  of  narrated  experience.  They  hold  out  the  prospect  of  connecting  utopian  hope  to  one  big  change,  worth  any  price,  that  we  can—or  must—bring  to  pass  to  finally  achieve  justice.      

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Substituting  hope  for  knowledge  here  means  protecting  the  critical  space  of  gradualistic,  fallibilistic,  ameliorative  political  experimentation  and  reform  against  blockage  by  claims  to  knowledge  of  something  more  authoritative  than  historical  narrative  and  specific  hopes.  This,  politically  speaking,  is  the  job  that  irony  is  designed  to  do;  ironism  is  Rorty’s  deep  theory  filter;  an  anti-­‐authoritarian  device.      This  aspect  of  the  ironic  stance  is  readily  apparent  in  CIS.18  It  dovetails  with  the  negative  naturalism  that  pervades  the  deconstructive  approach  to  metaphysics  that  is  a  hallmark  of  Rorty’s  work.19  In  CIS,  the  articulation  of  this  negative  naturalism  comes  principally  in  Chapter  1,  “The  Contingency  of  Language,”  where  Rorty,  drawing  on  Davidson,  swiftly  sketches  his  non-­‐representationalist,  anti-­‐essentialist,  use-­‐and-­‐communication  oriented  view  of  language.  He  makes  the  point  that  literal  language-­‐use  is  always  a  product  of  and  dependent  on  successful  deployment  of  metaphor.20  Any  vocabulary  we  deploy  thus  has  contingency  build  into  it.21  To  take  this  perspective  is  to  be,  in  Rorty’s  terms,  a  nominalist  (CIS,  87).  Intellectual  change  and  more  broadly  cultural  change  depend  on  changes  in  vocabulary  that  are  driven  by  imaginative  redescription  rather  than  by  arguments  from  premises  to  conclusions.  Thus,  nominalists  tend  to  be  romantics,  in  Rorty’s  sense.  This  is  familiar  Rortyan  territory,  and  it  need  not  detain  us  long.  I  rehearse  it  in  order  to  note  the  point  that  this  concoction,  when  imbibed,  will  make  deep  theory  seem  in  an  important  sense  obsolete,  myth-­‐based;  as  a  genre,  it  appears  blind  to  its  own  origins  in  and  expressiveness  of  particular  interpretations  of  human  life.  Deep  theory  is  thus  subject  to  historicizing  deconstruction.  That  deconstruction  is  the  ironist’s  special  job  and  joy.22  When  successfully  executed,  her  ironist  intellectual  practice  serves  liberalism  in  the  specific  sense  that  it  provides  an  antidote  to  the  temptations  of  radicalism  of  any  stripe.  Ironism  matters  politically  in  so  far  as  it  counters  the  urge  for  sweeping  social  change  guided  by  a  vision  framed  in  terms  of  deep  theory.      3.  Ironic  selves      On  the  picture  just  sketched,  irony  becomes  a  means  to  an  end,  an  antidote  to  metaphysics,  and  when  the  cultural  maturation  that  Rorty  hopes  for  is  achieved,  and  all  are  sensibly  secularized  nominalists,  there  would  be  no  object  for  the  ironist  to  practice  on,  and  no  point  to  irony.  Is  there  nothing  more  to  Rorty’s  irony?    An  indication  that  this  story  is  partial,  at  best,  is  the  varying  sense  given  to  the  term  irony  in  CIS.    Sometimes  all  citizens  of  utopia  are  ironists  (e.g.,  CIS,  xv;  61).  At  others,  it  is  explicitly  the  distinctive  characteristic  of  the  intellectual  (e.g.,  CIS,  87;  89;  96).23      Before  being  troubled  by  this  seeming  inconsistency,  however,  we  should  note  that  when  Rorty  characterizes  his  liberal  utopia  as  one  in  which  ironism  is  universal,  this  claim  is  qualified;  the  citizenry  or  the  utopian  community  is  uniformly  ironic  “in  the  relevant  sense.”  (CIS,  xv)  And  that  sense  is  made  entirely  explicit  later  on;  ironists,  Rorty  says,  summing  up  the  main  lesson  of  the  first  third  of  the  book  (“Part  I.  Contingency”)  pertains  to  people  who  have    

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[…]  a  sense  of  the  contingency  of  their  language  of  moral  deliberation,  and  thus  of  their  consciences,  and  thus  of  their  community.    They  would  be  liberal  ironists—people  who  meet  Schumpeter’s  criterion  of  civilization,  people  who  combined  commitment  with  a  sense  of  the  contingency  of  their  own  commitment.  (CIS  61)  

 The  variation  in  the  significance  of  the  term  irony  in  different  contexts  is  signaled,  if  not  explicitly  noted.  Still,  the  question  remains;  what  else  is  at  stake  in  irony?  How  does  ironism  beyond  naturalistic,  historicist  nominalism—in  a  sense  yet  to  be  pinned  down—figure  in  Rorty’s  picture?    The  place  to  look  for  a  sense  of  irony  when  regarded  from  what  I  will  call  the  existential  perspective,  is  the  famous—or  notorious—opening  of  “Private  irony  and  liberal  hope”:    “All  human  beings,”  writes  Rorty,  “carry  about  a  set  of  words  which  they  employ  to  justify  their  actions,  their  beliefs,  and  their  lives.”  (CIS,  73).  This  collection  of  words  constitutes  our  final  vocabulary  “in  the  sense  that  if  doubt  is  cast  on  the  worth  of  these  words,  their  user  has  no  noncircular  argumentative  recourse  .  .  .  there  is  only  helpless  passivity  or  a  resort  to  force.”    (ibid.)  Rorty  then  goes  on  to  define  the  ironist  in  term  of  her  relation  to  her  final  vocabulary,  and  specifically  as  meeting  the  following  three  conditions:    

(1)  She  has  radical  and  continuing  doubts  about  the  final  vocabulary  she  currently  uses,  because  she  has  been  impressed  by  other  vocabularies,  vocabularies  taken  as  final  by  people  or  books  she  has  encountered;      (2)  She  realizes  that  argument  phrased  in  her  present  vocabulary  can  neither  underwrite  nor  dissolve  these  doubts;      (3)  Insofar  as  she  philosophizes  about  her  situation,  she  does  not  think  her  vocabulary  is  closer  to  reality  than  others,  that  it  is  in  touch  with  a  power  not  herself.  Ironists  who  are  inclined  to  philosophize  see  the  choice  between  vocabularies  as  made  neither  within  a  neutral  and  universal  meta-­‐vocabulary  nor  by  an  attempt  to  fight  one’s  way  past  appearances  to  the  real,  but  simply  by  playing  the  old  against  the  new.    (ibid.)  

 This  definition  of  the  ironist  turns  on  two  salient  notions—final  vocabularies  and  radical  doubt.  A  distinction  between  the  existential  and  the  political  perspective  on  irony  will  depend  on  these,  since,  without  conditions  (1)  and  (2),  irony  as  summed  up  in  (3)  is  simply  the  recognition  of  romantic  historicism  that  is  at  the  heart  of  the  political  perspective  made  out  above,  These  two  notions,  however,  are  also  the  ones  that  draw  serious  fire,  as  Williams  and  Schneewind  forcefully  illustrate.      To  Williams,  Rorty’s  definition  of  irony  suggests  a  “clearly  discernible  […]  Humean  turn.”  (Williams,  2003,  78)  It  surprises  him  “to  find  Rorty  flirting  with  a  neo-­‐Humean  outlook.  This  outlook  involves  finding  a  kind  of  truth  in  skepticism.”    Williams  sees  Rorty’s  efforts  to  privatize  theory  as  a  variant  of  Hume’s  practical  containment  of  skeptical  doubts  to  the  study.  (ibid.)  It  is  not  only  the  invocation  

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of  radical  doubt  that  is  worrying.  The  very  idea  of  a  final  vocabulary  seems  hard  to  square  with  the  fundamental  moral  of  Rorty’s  earlier  work  on  behalf  of  nominalism  against  representationalism.  Here’s  Williams  on  this  point:    

A  consequence  of  the  relaxed  epistemic  holism  of  Philosophy  and  the  Mirror  of  Nature  is  that  there  is  no  essential  difference  between  the  way  we  argue  about  morals  and  politics  and  the  way  we  argue  about  “factual”  matters  […]  all  we  ever  do  is  reweave  the  web  of  belief  as  best  we  know  how  in  the  light  of  whatever  considerations  we  deem  to  be  relevant  […]  Nothing  is  immune  form  revision.  As  a  pragmatist,  Rorty  should  have  no  truck  with  the  language  of  “finality”.  (ibid.)  

   Williams  takes  Rorty’s  irony  to  be  “skepticism  under  another  name.”  (Williams,  2003,  76).    The  objectionable  move  that  Rorty’s  explicit  definition  of  irony  seems  to  enshrine  takes  us  from  awareness  of  contingency  to  a  sense  of  fragility.  This  sense  of  fragility  looks  like  a  lack  of  confidence  in  the  validity  of  one’s  commitments.    And  then,  if  that  is  what  Rorty’s  ironist’s  radical  doubt  amounts  to,  we  have  uncorked  an  intellectual  solvent  that  threatens  to  flood  all  compartments.  If  (per  impossibile)  taken  in  existential  seriousness  (not  just  in  theory,  in  the  privacy  of  the  study),  that  kind  of  doubt  would  render  liberal  commitments  themselves  vulnerable  and  fragile.  The  spill  could  be  limited  to  the  private  sphere  only  by  stipulation;  and  why  should  that  stipulation,  as  a  part  of  the  ironist’s  final  vocabulary,  be  any  less  vulnerable  to  “radical  doubt”?          We  might  sum  up  Williams’  reaction  as  insisting  that  all  liberals  should  ever  want  from  the  notion  of  irony  is  what  I  have  referred  to  as  the  political  perspective.  Ironic  practice  is  the  debunking  of  metaphysical  aspirations  toward  deep  theory  as  a  basis  for  politics.  It  is  not  a  self-­‐directed  radical  doubt  about  one’s  fundamental  outlook,  but  a  modesty-­‐inducing  fallibilism.  Relaxed  common  sense  incorporating  nominalist  awareness  of  contingency  buys  you  all  the  naturalistic  fallibilistic  inoculation  against  metaphysics  that  anyone  should  want:  “Contingency  is  the  friend  of  fallibilism  but  the  sworn  enemy  of  skepticism.”(Williams,  2003,  79).    Schneewind,  in  an  illuminating  exploration  of  Rorty’s  attitude  to  moral  philosophy,  tries  in  a  number  of  ways  to  bring  to  light  the  cash  value  of  the  radical  doubt  that  Rorty  postulates  without  assimilating  it  to  philosophical  skepticism.  But  his  doubts  about  the  radical  doubts  of  Rorty’s  ironist  cannot  be  allayed.  As  he  remarks,  “The  ironist  is  not  looking  for  truth  in  choosing  a  final  vocabulary.  She  is  creating,  not  discovering.  What  is  the  point  of  doubt  here?”  (Schneewind,  2010,  492).        Schneewind,  like  Williams,  sees  the  figure  of  the  liberal  ironist  as  retrograde:      

Beyond  revealing  nostalgia  for  a  sense  of  certainty  that  the  ironist  now  realizes  was  illusory,  the  doubts  make  no  pragmatic  sense.  Irony  as  realization  that  there  are  many  vocabularies  opens  doors  to  self-­‐creation,  but  irony  as  doubt  and  its  anxieties  changes  nothing  in  the  project.  Rorty  has  not  gotten  us  beyond  Mill.  (Schneewind,  2010,  593)  

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 What  we  need,  Schneewind  claims,  as  he  mounts  against  Rorty  a  broadly  pragmatist  and  entirely  historicist  defense  of  the  usefulness  of  moral  principles,  is  non-­‐nostalgic  fallibilists  wholeheartedly  debating  such  principles,  their  use  and  usefulness.  (Schneewind,  2010,  499).    If  the  existential  perspective  on  irony  is  nothing  but  a  fall  into  nostalgia,  a  response  to  a  threatened  slip  into  skeptical  paralysis,  then  Rorty’s  invocation  of  irony  adds  nothing  to  our  understanding  of  what  it  is  to  be  a  liberal—as  Schneewind  says,  he  “has  not  gotten  us  beyond  Mill.”    True,  the  ironist’s  intellectual  activity  may  still  have  the  salutary  political  effect  of  making  it  hard  for  anyone  to  take  deep  theory  at  face  value.  But  that  effect  is  incidental;  irony  as  a  strategy  for  living  with  real  radical  doubt  about  the  validity  of  the  terms  of  one’s  final  vocabulary  would  make  it  hard  to  take  any  commitment  at  face  value.  In  particular,  such  an  ironist  could  never  say,  with  Rorty,  that,  “hope  for  social  justice  is  nevertheless  the  only  basis  for  a  worthwhile  human  life.”  (PSH,  204)      Another  tack  is  called  for.  Perhaps,  in  spite  of  the  epistemological  connotations  of  the  phrase  “radical  doubt”,  what  Rorty  is  after  is  not  happily  thought  of  in  terms  of  an  attitude  to  the  validity  of  one’s  commitments.  What  Rorty  needs  from  irony,  if  that  notion  is  to  play  a  role  in  his  effort  to  bring  a  new  kind  of  peace  between  the  different  facets  of  the  soul  of  an  ironic  liberal,  is  a  description  that  will  highlight  and  motivate  a  certain  kind  of  creative  intellectual  behavior  that  is  not  a  constant,  self-­‐conscious  riff  on  skepticism.  This  form  of  intellectual  activity  will  serve  an  ironist’s  private  ends,  while  also  being  a  kind  of  behavior  for  which  liberal  communities  would  strive  to  make  room.  At  the  same  time,  this  characterization  of  irony  must  provide  ironists  with  a  self-­‐understanding  that  disposes  them  to  think  of  all  their  souls’  inclinations  as  well  served  by  liberalism—better  served,  at  least,  by  liberalism  than  by  alternatives  to  it.  So  the  liberal  polity  must  appear  to  promise  a  home  for  the  ironist,  which  is  to  say,  a  home  such  that  dwelling  there  imposes  no  obligation  to  feel  right  at  home.  For  Rorty,  this  space  is  just  what  the  private-­‐public  distinction  enshrines.  It  is  not  simply  a  proposal  for  how  to  defang  (politically)  troublesome  theory,  making  sure  that  theory  will  not  be  a  candidate  for  universality  and  depth.  The  distinction  is  also  meant  to  be  enticing.  As  someone  who  needs,  like  all  the  rest  of  us,  a  decent  place  to  stay,  but  who  also  really  dreads  being  asked  to  make  herself  comfortable,  the  ironist  should  have  a  reason  for  thinking  a  liberal  polity  a  good  dwelling  for  her  kind  of  person,  a  person  with  her  kind  of  project.      The  name  for  this  project  in  CIS  is  self-­‐creation;  Rorty’s  reinterpretation  in  narrative  terms  of  the  Kantian  liberal  ideal  of  autonomy.  The  contingent  narrative  weave  that  any  self  is,  may  take  itself  on  as  a  project.  This  undertaking  is  certainly  an  affirmation  of  contingency;  the  ironist,  as  Rorty  says,  will  remain  “content  to  think  of  any  human  life  as  the  always  incomplete,  yet  sometimes  heroic,  reweaving  of  such  a  web.”  (CIS,  43)  At  the  same  time,  and  critically,  it  is  an  effort  to  take  possession  of  that  contingency  as  a  distinctive  life.  Remarking  on  another  emblematic  figure,  the  strong  poet,  Rorty  continues:    

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We  shall  see  the  conscious  need  of  the  strong  poet  to  demonstrate  that  he  is  not  a  replica  as  merely  a  special  form  of  an  unconscious  need  everyone  has:  the  need  to  come  to  terms  with  the  blind  impress  which  chance  has  given  him,  to  make  a  self  for  himself  by  redescribing  that  impress  in  terms  which  are,  if  only  marginally,  his  own.  (ibid.)      

 Here,  I  suggest,  in  this  notion  of  self-­‐creation,  there  a  conception  of  irony  at  play,  just  below  the  surface,  that  cannot  be  captured  in  terms  of  a  skeptical  doubt  of  the  validity  of  the  commitments  embedded  in  one’s  final  vocabulary.  The  idea  of  coming  to  terms  with  contingency  through  redescription  presupposes  a  kind  of  distance  to  what  one  is,  or  has  become,  and  that  distance  has  everything  to  do  with  irony.  As  Rorty  remarks,  “ironism,  as  I  have  defined  it,  results  from  awareness  of  the  power  of  redescription.”  (CIS,  89)  But  here  we  would  do  better  to  stop  thinking  of  irony  as  a  matter  of  epistemic  attitudes  at  all.  For  the  ironist’s  form  of  awareness  of  the  malleability  and  lack  of  grounding  of  her  terms  of  evaluation—her  final  vocabulary—is  not  a  form  of  skepticism,  nor  of  nostalgia,  but  a  sense  that  it  is  not  yet  properly  her  own.  This  cannot  be  a  matter  simply  of  relaxed  nominalism  either,  since  that  attitude,  while  rendering  one  impervious  to  metaphysics,  motivates  no  particular  intellectual  behavior,  indicates  no  unconscious  need.    We  are  looking  for  a  notion  that  has  a  role  to  play  in  the  kind  of  creative,  exploratory,  disruptive  intellectual  behavior  that  contrasts  with  the  complacency  of  what  Rorty  calls  common  sense  (CIS,  74),  even  if  that  common  sense  is  nominalistic.  That  is  why  irony,  existentially  conceived,  never  ceases,  even  in  a  Rortyan  utopia  where  common  sense  is  entirely  free  of  divinizing  reifications.    Moreover,  the  intellectual  activity  characteristic  of  the  ironist  would  be  a  key  also  to  intellectual  change,  and  thus  cultural  and  political  openness;  it  is,  as  Schneewind  emphasizes,  a  creative  response—epistemic  validity  would  be  at  issue,  if  at  all,  only  once  the  deed  is  done,  so  to  speak.          Following  this  line  of  thought,  let  us  turn  to  Lear’s  “A  Case  for  Irony.”(Lear  2011).    Lear,  in  an  appendix  to  the  first  lecture,  uses  Rorty  to  illustrate  his  point  that  the  form  of  irony  available  to  moderns  is  an  impoverished  one,  where  “all  that  remains  is  irony  as  a  form  of  detachment.”    (Lear,  39)    According  to  Lear,  the  ironic  attitude  commended  by  Rorty  leaves  him  with  a  philosophically  debilitating  relativism  and  a  psychologically  debilitating  superficiality  of  commitment.    As  he  says,      

Rorty’s  ironist  is  not  an  ironist  at  all,  but  someone  confined  to  the  left-­‐hand  meanings  of  social  pretense,  misleading  himself  about  his  freedom  via  the  plethora  of  meanings  at  his  disposal  and  his  lack  of  commitment  to  any  of  them.  (Lear,  38)  

 Indeed  that  is  how  Rorty’s  ironist  looks  when  taken  in  an  epistemic  mode,  along  the  lines  suggested  by  Williams  and  Schneewind.  In  that  mode,  when  ironism  goes  existential  it  becomes  indistinguishable  from  relativism—or  skepticism.  The  existential  dimension  of  Rorty’s  ironist  then  appears  as  the  response  of  the  individual  subject  to  the  realization  that  final  vocabularies  stand  forever  unjustified—a  reaction  of  reflective  consciousness  to  an  epistemically-­‐framed  conundrum  that  leads  to  a  form  of  self-­‐detachment.  I  suggest,  in  stead,  that  the  

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existential  dimension  of  irony  as  it  figures  in  CIS  should  be  linked  rather  to  self-­‐creation—to  what  Rorty  calls  the  shared  unconscious  need.  That  is  to  say,  I  want  to  endorse,  on  Rorty’s  behalf,  Lear’s  basic  thought  that  “irony  is  revealed  […]  by  a  grasp  of  what  should  matter  when  it  comes  to  living  a  distinctively  human  life”  (Lear,  ix)  and  view  CIS  in  that  light.      A  fundamental  point  for  Lear  is  that  “ironic  experience,  by  contrast  [to  reflective  consciousness]  is  a  peculiar  form  of  committed  reflection.”(Lear,  21)  Thus,  ironic  experience  is  not  a  matter  of  being  brought  to  doubt  the  validity  of  the  terms  of  one’s  basic  normative  commitments.    It  is  a  sense  of  being  shaken  by  a  sense  that  one  does  not  have  a  grip  on  them.  Discussing  the  paradigmatic  ironic  question  of  Socrates—among  all  the  doctors  (shepherds/rhetoricians/etc.)  is  there  a  doctor  (shepherd/rhetorician…)?—Lear  writes,    

notice  that  Socratic  ironic  questioning  seems  to  maintain  a  weird  balancing  act:  simultaneously  (i)  calling  into  question  a  practical  identity  (as  socially  understood),  (ii)  living  that  identity;  (iii)  declaring  ignorance  of  what  it  consists  in.  (Lear,  24)    

Irony  operates  in  the  space  between  the  socially  available  practical  identities—operative  interpretations  of  our  commitments  to  was  of  living—and  our  sense  that  these  interpretations  fall  short:      

 When  irony  hits  its  mark,  the  person  who  is  its  target  has  an  uncanny  experience  that  the  demands  of  an  ideal,  value,  or  identity  to  which  he  takes  himself  to  be  already  committed  dramatically  transcend  the  received  social  understanding.    (Lear,  25)    

 Lear  is  here  pointing  to  a  kind  of  reaction  to  the  repertoire  (Lear,  31)  one  finds  oneself  with.    One’s  operational  understanding  of  one’s  practical  identities  stands  suddenly  revealed  as  pretense—which  is  what  they  of  course  and  inevitably  are.  Irony  is  not  a  rejection  of  pretense—pretense  is  inherent  to  any  being  with  a  self  and  a  social  life—it  is  a  recognition  of  it.  The  virtue  of  irony,  what  Lear  calls  ironic  existence,  is  “the  ability  to  live  well  all  the  time  with  the  possibility  of  ironic  experience.”  (Lear,  30)  The  ironist,  then,  is  characterized  by    

 […]  practical  understanding  of  one  aspect  of  the  finitude  of  human  life:  that  the  concepts  with  which  we  understand  ourselves  and  live  our  lives  have  a  certain  vulnerability  built  into  them.  (Lear,  31)  

 The  experience  of  irony  depicted  here  is  not  a  form  of  doubt  pertaining  to  he  validity  of  ones  principles  or  commitments,  not  a  nostalgic  mourning  of  certainty  lost.    What  Lear  captures  is  an  alertness,  to  what  is  tentative,  unfinished,  ungovernable  and  limited  in  any  and  all  of  the  concrete  ways  that  we  come  to  be    our  selves  and  answer,  to  ourselves  or  others,  the  question  of  what  we  are.    What  Lear  calls  pretense  is  a  way  of  making  use  of  socially  available  understandings  to  establish  a  self—of  any  kind  at  all.    Irony  is  the  self’s  acknowledgement  of  the  particular  and  contingent  (thus  transcendable)  shape  of  any  such  pretense,  any  version—its  beholdenness  to  what  is  already  available,  but  also  of  the  limit  of  

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this  beholdenness.    Or,  conversely,  irony  is  the  self’s  acknowledgement  of  its  freedom  to  take  a  stand  with  respect  to  any  particular  socially  available  understanding  of  practical  identity  and  at  the  same  time  of  the  limited  and  conditional  nature  of  this  freedom.  Self-­‐creation—switching  now  to  Rorty’s  terms—thus  operates  as  simultaneous  transformation  of  the  self  and  its  social  sources—the  repertoire  of  practical  identities  available  in  the  common  ground  of  community.  Irony,  thus  regarded,  becomes  an  experiential  awareness  of  the  responsibility  one  has  both  for  one’s  practical  identity  and  to  one’s  practical  identity—or,  Rorty’s  terms,  for  and  to  one’s  final  vocabulary.  Lear  sums  it  up  thus:    

Ironic  existence  […]  is  a  form  of  truthfulness.    It  is  also  a  form  of  self-­‐knowledge:  a  practical  acknowledgement  of  the  kind  of  knowing  that  is  available  to  creatures  like  us.    (Lear,  31)      

 If  the  experience  of  irony  calls  for  a  kind  of  exploratory  intellectual  action,  it  will  not  be  as  an  impulse  to  start  playing  with  ones  commitments,  trying  out  new  ones,  shelf-­‐picking  values.  Rather,  what  the  disruption  of  one’s  self-­‐understanding  calls  for,  is  a  tentative  move  toward  restating  one’s  practical  understanding  of  what  one  is  here  and  now,  and  what  one  may  be  in  the  process  of  making  of  oneself.    This  movement  can  only  be  tentative  and  exploratory,  in  so  far  as  one  senses,  in  ironic  experience,  that  one  may,  right  now,  be  falling  entirely  short  of  ideals  to  which  one  is  already  committed.  Perhaps  they  are  not,  and  perhaps  I  am  not,  what  I  have  thought.  That  openness,  when  given  intellectual  expression  by  the  ironist,  is  an  antidote  to  the  ongoing  petrification  that  is  an  inherent  feature  of  common  sense  in  any  form.            4.  Irony’s  transformation  What  is  at  stake  in  this  discussion  is  the  plausibility  and  effectiveness  of  Rorty’s  notion  of  the  liberal  ironist  as  a  vocabulary-­‐transforming  device.  The  nature  of  the  doubt  that  is  associated  with  Rorty’s  existential  irony  is  clearly  at  the  heart  of  the  issue.  In  the  previous  paragraphs  I  have  drawn  on  Lear’s  understanding  of  ironic  experience  as  showing  a  way  out  of  the  epistemic  language  that  hampers  Rorty  in  CIS.    Framing  the  characteristic  doubt  as  kind  of  argumentative  shortfall,  Rorty  makes  the  ironist’s  doubt  look  like  a  cognitive  conundrum,  and  thereby  invites  the  critical  response  articulated  by  Williams  and  Schneewind.    By  contrast,  Lear’s  ironic  experience  is  not  a  dialectical  position  at  all,  not  a  cognitive  stance—or  rather,  not  entirely.    And  exactly  what  cannot  be  defined  in  terms  of  a  distinctive  movement  of  reflection,  a  structure  of  beliefs  and  meta-­‐beliefs,  is  what  makes  irony  irony.    It  is  not  that  irony  is  ineffable,  but  that  it  can  always  be  missed.  Uncanniness  marks  this  fact.  Being  shaken  in  our  relation  to  our  own  practical  identities  is  not  principally  a  matter  of  undergoing  a  change  in  what  we  fundamentally  believe  about  ourselves  or  take  our  most  basic  commitments  to  be.  Rather  it  is  a  matter  of  experiencing  differently  what  it  is  to  be  a  self  of  which  those  beliefs  are  true  and  for  which  these  commitments  are  basic.      How  can  this  image  of  the  ironist  serve  Rorty’s  efforts  to  serve  liberalism?    We  have  seen  that  Rorty  sets  out  to  provide  liberals  with  a  de-­‐divinized  self-­‐

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understanding,  on  which  political  liberalism  appears  defensible  in  historical-­‐narrative  terms,  and  not  in  need  of  philosophical  or  scientific  underpinnings.  Even  this  is  a  somewhat  delicate  point;  the  claim  is  not  that  ironism  itself  should  tend  to  dispose  us  toward  liberalism.  That  would  clearly  be  contrary  to  the  fundamental  impetus  of  CIS.  Rather,  the  claim  is  that  a  vocabulary  built  around  this  interpretation  of  irony—a  vocabulary  in  which  the  requisite  notions  of  a  final  vocabulary  and  of  irony  figure  as  central  elements,  along  with  the  associated  way  of  distinguishing  the  private  from  the  pubic—would  be  one  in  which  liberal  aspirations  may  be  smoothly  articulated  and  robustly  defended.    The  worry  has  been  that  Rorty’s  existential  irony  undermines  this  project,  by  rendering  political  commitments  subject  to  a  doubt  blocked  only  by  stipulation.      My  claim  has  been  that  this  appearance  depends  on  giving  existential  irony  an  epistemic  reading.    As  an  alternative  to  this,  I  have  suggested  that  we  understand  irony  in  the  context  of  the  project  of  self-­‐creation;  here  skepticism  is  beside  the  point,  it  is  neither  cause  nor  effect  of  ironic  existence.  Ironic  existence,  as  a  way  of  encountering  and  contending  with  finitude,  has  nothing  to  do  with  circularity  of  justifications  or  the  inevitable  conditionedness  of  arguments.        Irony  as  I  have  depicted  it  is  private,  in  that  it  is  essentially  a  matter  of  a  self’s  way  of  being  a  self.  Still,  if  I  am  right,  the  existential  dimension  of  irony  is  an  integral  part  of  Rorty’s  attempt  in  CIS  to  serve  liberalism.  I  will  bring  out  this  point,  in  conclusion,  by  considering  a  remark  where  Rorty  connects  the  idea  of  solidarity—so  far  ignored  in  this  essay—with  his  notion  of  a  final  vocabulary.  Rorty  writes:    

My  position  entails  that  feelings  of  solidarity  are  necessarily  a  matter  of  which  similarities  and  dissimilarities  strike  us  salient,  and  that  such  salience  is  a  function  of  a  historically  contingent  final  vocabulary.    (CIS,  192)      

Here  the  idea  of  a  final  vocabulary  is  meant  to  do  some  work.  It  captures  the  feeling  of  the  definitiveness  and  the  naturalness  of  the  categories  that  at  a  particular  time  shape  our  solidarity.  In  accounting  for  our  differential  responses  to  other  beings,  we  employ  descriptions  that  sum  up  our  fundamental  stance  and  orientation  toward  others.  They  articulate  what  kind  of  people  (and  other  beings)  we  feel  in  some  way  connected  to  or  obligated  towards,  and  in  what  kinds  of  situations.  The  descriptive  resources  at  work  here  are,  for  each  of  us,  final,  in  the  existential  sense  that  Rorty  wants;  if  they  don’t  do  the  job  of  explanation  or  justification  that  may  be  invited  or  required,  then  we,  as  we  are,  just  don’t  know  what  possibly  could—we,  as  we  are,  have  no  further  appeal.  Of  course,  there  may  be  descriptions  that  would  do  the  job  better—but  once  we  ourselves  come  to  believe  that,  if  we  ever  do,  then  we  have  changed;  then  our  repertoire  of  ethically  relevant  kinds  has  been  altered.  The  finality  of  Rorty’s  final  vocabularies  is  not  the  finality  of  a  set  of  premises,  a  framework,  or  a  set  of  concepts.    It  mirrors  the  experience  of  the  concrete  individual  of  her  finitude—her  insufficiency  and  her  limited  powers.    Of  course,  good  pragmatists  are  holists,  and  they  know  that  there  is  always  more  to  be  said;  conceptual  resources  do  not  run  out,  there  are  no  argumentative  foundations  and  no  precipices;  justification  does  not  end—in  theory.  What  Rorty  is  trying  to  talk  about  in  CIS,  however,  is  a  

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practical  shortfall—our  experience  of  it,  and  our  coping  with  it.  Concretely  existing,  with  a  cultivated  ability  for  ironic  experience,  we  are  brought  up  against  the  finality  of  our  vocabularies  as  a  present  practical  limit.  The  ironist’s  self-­‐creating  response  to  this  is  to  effect  transformation.  With  this  transformation,  our  practical  identities  change,  our  final  vocabularies  become  different,  either  through  a  change  in  the  terms  they  incorporate,  or  through  a  change  in  what  those  terms  come  to  signify.  Interpreted  through  the  experiential  perspective  that  Lear  affords,  Rorty’s  existential  irony  emerges  as  a  feature  of  the  intellectual  that  keeps  her  perpetually  engaged  in  that  process  of  change.      Perhaps,  however,  it  is  wrong  to  say  even  that.  For  at  the  heart  of  the  matter,  actual  change  is  really  incidental.  Particular  changes  in  ones  moral  outlook,  one’s  self-­‐understanding  and  one’s  attachments  may  be  the  result  of  ironic  experience,  but,  as  Lear  points  out,  they  may  equally  well  not  be;  being  put  in  jeopardy  may  also  leave  the  particulars  of  one’s  life  largely  as  they  are—except  for  the  effects  of  having  been  put  in  jeopardy.  And  so  it  is  with  the  liberal  ironist;  to  keep  her  self  freshly  at  stake,  able  and  willing  to  undergo  change  if  that  is  what  is  needed,  that  is  the  ironist’s  métier.  Irony,  thus  conceived,  is  an  attitude  of  searching  moral  openness.  Rorty,  as  we  have  seen,  thinks  of  the  ironist  as  someone  who  engages  with  alternative  final  vocabularies—he  even  says  (cf.,  (1)  above)  that  being  impressed  with  other  final  vocabularies  is  what  causes  her  characteristic  attitude  toward  her  own.  From  Lear’s  perspective,  however,  this  appears  to  place  the  cart  before  the  horse.  The  ironist’s  characteristic  engagement  with  other  vocabularies  may  be  a  response  to  her  ironic  experience  rather  than  the  source  of  it.  The  voracious  engagement  with  alternative  ways  of  living  may  equally  well,  for  an  intellectual  who  is  also  an  existential  ironist,  be  her  way  of  understanding  and  re-­‐appropriating  what  lies  embedded  in  her  own  final  vocabulary  (to  use  Rorty’s  language  again).  By  getting  a  grip  on  her  self,  the  ironist  throws  new  light  on  currently  familiar  ways  of  being  a  self.  In  political  terms;  the  ironic  experience  of  liberal  values  is  not  a  sense  of  their  dubiousness,  their  lack  of  non-­‐circular  argumentative  support.    It  is  a  sense  that  in  the  midst  of  liberaldom  (Lear,  97),  our  grip  on  what  it  means  to  be  committed  to  a  project  of  universal  human  dignity  and  autonomy  may  be—a  pretense.    As  Lear  writes,  it  “is  as  though  there  is  an  internal  instability  in  the  signifier  human  dignity.”  (Lear,  101)  In  ironic  experience,  “a  sense  of  the  possibilities  of  human  dignity  starts  to  open  up  that  had  hitherto  been  foreclosed.”  (ibid.)    The  characteristically  ironic  challenge  to  liberal  society  is  not  directed  to  its  liberal  values,  but  to  our  tendency  to  take  for  granted  that  we  know  what  these  values  practically  commit  us  to.    The  challenge  arises  from  the  liberal  ironist’s  articulation,  not  of  her  doubt,  but  her  shakenness—her  experience  of  not-­‐knowing  what  the  normative  demands  embedded  in  her  own  practical  identity  actually  require  of  her.  This  is  where  the  existential  dimension  of  irony  connects  with  the  political.  Liberal  ironists  pry  open  available  practical  identities  as  liberals,  they  shake  our  more  or  less  implicit,  more  or  less  reflective,  understandings  of  what  it  is  to  be  committed  as  we  are.  Such  liberal  ironists  may  be  hard  to  be,  but  they  are  good  to  have  around.  With  CIS,  Rorty  is  trying  to  make  more  of  them.        

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 References:    Auxier,  Randall  E.  and  Hahn,  Lewis  Edwin  (eds.),  2010.  The  Philosophy  of  Richard  Rorty.    The  Library  of  Living  Philosophers,  Volume  XXXII.  Chicago  and  Lasalle,  IL:  Open  Court.    Forster,  E.M.,  1927.  Aspects  of  the  Novel.  Edward  Arnold.  Forster,  E.M.,  1910.  Howards  End.  Edward  Arnold.    Fraser,  Nancy,  1990.  Solidarity  or  Singularity?    Richard  Rorty  between  Romanticism  and  Technocracy.    In  Malachowski,      Gascoigne,  Neil,  2008.  Richard  Rorty.    Cambridge:  Polity  Press.  Guignon,  Charles  and  Hiley,  David  R.  (eds.),  2003i.  Richard  Rorty.  Cambridge:  Cambridge  University  Press.    Guignon,  Charles  and  Hiley,  David  R.  (eds.),  2003ii.  Introduction.  In  Guignon  and  Hiley  (2003i),        Lear,  Jonathan,  2011.    A  Case  for  Irony.    Cambridge,  MA:  Harvard  University  Press.  Malachowski,  Alan  R.,  1990.  Reading  Rorty.  Oxford:  Basil  Blackwell  Ltd.        Rorty,  Richard,  1979.  Philosophy  and  the  Mirror  of  Nature.  Princeton:    Princeton  University  Press.      Rorty,  Richard,  1989.  Contingency,  Irony,  and  Solidarity.  Cambridge  University  Press.    Rorty,  Richard,  1999.  Philosophy  and  Social  Hope.  Penguin.    Rorty,  Richard  (2006).  “On  Philosophy  and  Politics.”    Interview  with  Chronis  Polychroniou.  In:  Eduardo  Mendieta  (red.),  Take  care  of  freedom  and  truth  will  take  care  of  itself.  Interviews  with  Richard  Rorty.  (Stanford:  Stanford  University  press),  89-­‐103.  Rorty,  Richard,  2010.    Reply  to  Schneewind.    In  Auxier  and  Hahn,  506-­‐508.  Schneewind,  J.B.,  2010.    Rorty  on  Utopia  and  Moral  Philosophy.  In  Auxier  and  Hahn,  479-­‐505  Williams,  Michael,  2003.    Rorty  on  Knowledge  and  Truth.    In  Guignon  and  Hiley,  (2003i.,                                                                                                                          1  Lear,  Jonathan,  2011.    A  Case  for  Irony  (Cambridge,  MA:  Harvard  University  Press),  36.  2  Rorty,  Richard,  1989.  Contingency,  Irony,  and  Solidarity,  Cambridge:  Cambridge  University  Press.  Cited  hereafter  as  CIS.  3  Following  Rorty,  I  take  “liberalism”  here  in  its  American  designation,  roughly  synonymous  with  “social  democratic.”  Unlike  libertarians,  social  democrats  think  governments  should  play  an  on-­‐going  and  active  part  in  ensuring  the  well-­‐being  of  all  citizens  both  through  public  ownership  of  essential  resources  and  basic  infrastructure  and  through  redistribution  of  economic  resources  among  citizens.        4  Rorty  quotes  Berlin’s  remark  in  Two  Concepts  of  Liberty    5  Neil  Gascoigne,  in  his  excellent  book  on  Rorty  (Gascoigne,  2008)  observes  that,  “the  figure  of  the  liberal  ironist  represents  the  promised  new  self-­‐image  of  the  intellectual  […]  one  that  we  readers,  we  intellectuals,  are  invited  to  adopt.”  (Gascoigne,  2008,  180)  Gascoigne  makes  this  point  central  to  the  resolution  of  

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                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             his  interpretation  of  the  figure,  and  I  follow  him  in  this,  even  if  to  a  different  terminus.    6  Critics  of  the  first  kind  rarely  bother  with  CIS.    Some  may  have  felt  obligated  to  react  to  Philosophy  and  the  Mirror  of  Nature,  but  once  that  job  was  done,  and  the  world  yet  again  made  safe  for  metaphysics,  Rorty—understandably—could  be  of  no  further  interest.    Critics  of  the  second  kind  are  well  represented  in  the  collection  Rorty  and  his  Critics  (Brandom,  2000)—see  for  instance  the  contributions  by  John  McDowell  and  Donald  Davidson.  For  the  third  kind  of  critic,  focussing  e.g.,  on  the  substance  of  Rorty’s  conception  of  politics,  see  for  instance  Nancy  Fraser  (1990).  “Solidarity  or  Singularity?    Richard  Rorty  between  Romanticism  and  Technocracy.”  In  Malachowski.          7  Here  is  Guignon  and  Hiley:    “There  is  a  deep  tension  between  the  existential  and  pragmatic  strands  in  Rorty’s  thought—between  the  private  project  of  self-­‐elaboration  and  the  public  project  of  reducing  suffering  and  expanding  solidarity.”  (Guignon  and  Hiley,  2003ii,  29).  Michael  Williams,  while  on  the  whole  very  sympathetic  to  Rorty’s  deconstruction  of  representationalist  metaphysics,  thinks  of  CIS  as  retrograde,  as  falling  pray,  in  its  depiction  of  the  liberal  ironist,  to  skeptical  modes  of  thinking  that  Rorty’s  own  better  insights  militate  against.    (cf.  Williams,  2003,  69ff.)    He,  too,  finds  a  tension  in  Rorty  between  the  existentialist  (the  skeptic)  and  the  pragmatic  (the  sensible  fallibilist).  Nancy  Fraser  (1990)  takes  Rorty  to  task  for  enforcing  a  division  between  the  romantic  and  the  pragmatic  that  dangerously  depoliticizes  what  ought  to  be  subject  to  political  assessment  and  understanding.        8  “Private  Irony  and  Liberal  Hope,”  CIS,  73-­‐95.  Critical  discussions  of  this  paper  by  readers  who  are  close  allies  of  Rorty  on  a  wide  range  of  issues  are  Schneewind,  2010,  and  Williams,  2003.  9  Williams  reports  similar  admissions  from  Rorty  in  conversation  (personal  communication).  10  For  the  considerations  that  move  Rorty,  see  Schneewind,  particularly  491ff.    11  Richard  Rorty,  1999.  Philosophy  and  Social  Hope.  Penguin.  Hereafter  cited  as  PSH.  12  “Love  and  Money”  is  the  third  of  the  four  “Politics”  pieces  (PSH  223-­‐228).    13  This  is  an  insight  of  Marxism,  according  to  Rorty.    Another  is  the  unscrupulousness,  resourcefulness  and  will  mustered  by  the  privileged  in  their/our  efforts  to  hold  on  to  what  they/we  have  and  to  make  it  grow  at  the  expense  of  everyone  else.  (PSH    14  In  describing  this  tension  Rorty  comes  close  to  allowing  something  he  generally  disparages,  namely  a  use  for  the  idea  of  ideology.  Something  like  that  idea  is  present  in  his  criticisms  of  identity  politics,  the  fanciful  flights  into  ever-­‐fancier  theory,  the  contortions  we  intellectuals  go  through,  in  an  effort  to  conceal  from  ourselves  our  loss  of  hope  framed  in  terms  of  basic  liberal  political  aspirations  (see  in  particular  the  final  paper  in  “Politics”;  “Globalization,  the  politics  of  Identity  and  Social  Hope”,  PSH,  229-­‐239).    Another  possible  use,  perhaps  not  very  far  from  Rorty’s  own  concerns,  may  be  in  a  description  of  the  ways—beyond  physical  force—in  which  the  privileged  20  %  secure  the  acquiescence  of  the  majority.  What  we  then  describe  is  how  clusters  of  ideas,  specific  vocabularies,  serve  to  obscure  certain  attitudes  and  interests  that  nevertheless  operate  decisively  in  shaping  the  economics  of  a  society.  And  that  is,  

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                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             plausibly,  to  make  the  notion  of  ideology  (or  something  like  it)  after  all  “mean  more  than  ‘bad  idea’”  (CIS,  84,  fn6).  15  Though  even  if  that  were  true  in  some  specific  respects,  the  likelihood  that  effects  of  global  environmental  degradation  will  hit  the  weakest  the  hardest  is  high.  This  may  well  turn  out  to  be  a  greater  obstacle  to  practical  liberal  hope  than  the  challenges  that  held  Rorty’s  attention  in  the  80s  and  early  90s,  namely  the  difficulty  of  generating  economic  development  that  could  reliably  benefit  the  poorest  communities  and  their  poorest  members.    16  In  a  piece  called,  “Education  as  Socialization  and  as  Individualization”,  Rorty  criticizes  both  “the  left”  and  “the  right”  for  building  their  conceptions  of  education  around  “the  identification  of  truth  and  freedom  with  the  essentially  human.”  (PSH,  115)    “There  is  no  such  thing  as  human  nature,”  says  Rorty,  “in  the  deep  sense  in  which  Plato  and  Strauss  use  this  term.”  (PSH,  117-­‐118)  17  This  is  the  second  paper  (PSH,  210-­‐222)  in  the  “Politics”  section  of  PSH.  18  Throughout,  but  most  notably  in  the  “Introduction”  and  in  the  three  chapters  of  Part  II:  Ironism  and  Theory.  19  I  rely  on  the  term  negative  naturalism  to  distinguish  Rorty’s  use  of  Darwinian  considerations  in  his  campaign  against  representationalism  and  essentialism  from  varieties  of  physicalism  and  biologism  that  underwrite  programs  of  naturalization  of  problematic  entities  or  domains.  The  latter  give  rise  to  tasks  for  constructive  theory,  of  vindication,  reform  or  elimination  of  ranges  of  concepts.  Rorty’s  naturalism  definitively  does  not.  20  Recognizing  the  contingency  of  language,  Rorty  claims,  “leads  to  a  recognition  of  the  contingency  of  conscience,”  and  these  together  to  “a  picture  of  moral  and  intellectual  progress  as  a  history  of  increasingly  useful  metaphors.”  (CIS,  9)  21  Rorty  never  settles  on  any  precise  use  of  the  notion  of  a  vocabulary.    He  writes,      I  have  no  criterion  of  individuation  for  distinct  languages  or  vocabularies  to  offer,  but  I  am  not  sure  we  need  one…Roughly  a  break  of  this  sort  [indicating  distinct  vocabularies]  occurs  when  we  start  using  “translation”  rather  than  “explanation”  in  talking  about  geographical  and  chronological  distances.  (CIS,  7)    In  CIS  the  dominating  use  of  “vocabulary”  denotes  our  language,  as  it  is  at  some  period  in  time,  in  its  entirety.    This  is  the  use  that  fuels  Rorty’s  romantic,  anti-­‐rationalist  reading  of  the  history  of  culture,  for  instance  when  he  writes  that  “there  is  no  standpoint  outside  the  particular  historically  conditioned  and  temporary  vocabulary  we  are  presently  using  from  which  to  judge  this  vocabulary”  (CIS,  48).    Of  course  we  may  also  think—as  Rorty  also  does—of  vocabularies  more  narrowly,  as  a  way  to  characterize  particular  linguistic  practices  we  deploy  in  service  of  particular  needs  and  interests  among  the  various  we  may  have.  This  use  obviously  allows  an  “outside”  standpoint—in  this  sense  we  may  well  have  vocabularies  designed  to  evaluate  other  vocabularies.    But  not  all  of  Rorty’s  uses  fall  smoothly  into  the  one  category  or  the  other.    A  salient  example  of  this  is  the  very  notion  of  a  final  vocabulary.  It  cannot  mean  simply  our  language  (in  the  sense  of  that  term  which  Rorty  invokes  when,  for  instance,  he  cites  Davidson’s  claim  that  we  cannot  be  thinkers  without  language  (CIS,  50).    Nor,  however,  can  it  be  assessed  from  the  outside,  as  a  tool,  in  the  way  

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                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             that  a  particular  theory,  for  instance,  may  be  regarded  and  evaluated  as  an  explanatory  device.  22  Compare  Rorty’s  remark,  “The  topic  of  ironist  theory  is  metaphysical  theory.”  (CIS,  96)  23  Gascoigne  is  helpful  on  this.    See  Gascoigne  2008,  chapter  5,  particularly  section  7,  “The  last  ironist.”  Gascoigne,  however,  concludes  that,    irony  is  not  so  much  the  predicament  of  the  intellectual  as  a  certain  sort  of  intellectual’s  predicament,  one  derived  from  an  ongoing  concern  with  achieving  an  ‘outside  view’.    Perhaps  when  the  urge  for  such  a  view  is  no  longer  felt  we  will  have  seen  the  passing  of  the  last  ironist.  (Gascoigne  2008,  182)    I  diverge,  and  will  try  to  make  a  case  for  irony  as  a  virtue  of  intellectuals,  one  that  ought  to  be  preserved  in  our  intellectual  practice  as  well  as  in  our  self-­‐image.