Rorty,irony and the consequences of contingency for liberal society

Introduction

Richard Rorty views western philosophy since Plato to have been animated by the desire to identify a transcendental standpoint which might enable us to escape the contingencies of culture and history. He argues that what unites the most interesting philosophers of the last century is their recognition that this aspiration is a forlorn one. In his writings on political theory, Rorty investigates the consequences abandoning this project has for our lives and societies. His essay ‘Postmodernist Bourgeois Liberalism’ (1991b[1983]) argues that liberal freedoms should be seen as being justified by nothing firmer than an interpretation of our historical circumstances, but that they are none the worse for that. ¹ In a paper entitled ‘The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy’ (1991a[1984]), this understanding of liberalism is developed by drawing on John Rawls’ scattered remarks in A Theory of Justice about the historical background of that work. ² These Rorty separates from what he thinks of as Rawls’ misplaced but fortunately optional allegiance to Kant.

Rorty’s fullest account of an historically self-conscious liberal society is put forward in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. That book is in part a restatement of the position taken in Rorty’s earlier papers, but what is distinctive is its elaboration of the figure of the liberal ironist. Rorty does not mean irony in the standard sense of saying one thing while meaning its opposite. Rather, the ironist is the person who is aware that her beliefs are historically contingent. Ironists who are also liberals recognize the contingency of their commitment to freedom of speech, association, religion and so on (which Rorty sums up as the desire to avoid cruelty).

The figure of the ironist has attracted much criticism. Those sometimes labelled ‘postmodernists’ have objected that it blunts the radical potential of anti-foundationalism for politics. ³ From a different direction, some liberal theorists have claimed that Rorty’s account of irony has the effect of undermining commitment to liberal values and institutions. ⁴ If these and related criticisms hit their mark, those interested in Rorty’s writings on political theory should give up on Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity and confine themselves to the historicist description of liberal society offered in essays such as ‘Postmodernist Bourgeois Liberalism’ and ‘The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy’ – though even there they might do better to turn to Rawls’ Political Liberalism. And it must be said that were they to do so, they would find support from Rorty himself. In a comment replying to J. B. Schneewind published in 2010, Rorty writes that ‘My attempt to imagine a composite figure called “the liberal ironist” – half Mill, half Nietzsche – was misguided’. ⁵

Nevertheless, in this article I argue that there is something valuable in Rorty’s account of irony. Even if Rorty’s description of the liberal ironist, as he came to see it, was misguided, this leaves open the possibility (appropriately enough) for redescribing that figure. The article begins by suggesting that if we examine Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, it can be seen that Rorty’s description of the ironist groups together several related but ultimately distinct ideas. If we pay close attention to these ideas, we can tease out what is at stake with irony and why it might have positive social consequences. I am not the only commentator to have noticed tensions with Rorty’s presentation of the ironist, and I examine them with reference to these others, in particular William Curtis and John Pettegrew. Curtis and Pettegrew have both argued that Rorty conflates two quite different senses of irony, and that one is of value because it embodies a number of what Curtis calls civic virtues. Curtis captures something important in this understanding of irony which Rorty did not make explicit, and which I develop by examining the ironist alongside William Connolly’s account of agonistic respect. I then go on to argue that, in addition to viewing irony as a civic virtue, there is a further role that it might play, which emerges from Rorty’s view of self-creation. Pettegrew is critical of this aspect of irony, but I argue in contrast that the selves ironists create might benefit liberal society.

I Irony as a civic virtue

I want to argue that, rightly understood, Rorty’s notion of irony might play a valuable role in society. In order to show this, it is necessary to investigate Rorty’s presentation of the ironist, and to do so in the light of his intentions for describing this figure. For Rorty is I think not commending irony with a view to making us ironists. Rather, he is describing the situation in which he takes some people to find themselves; as he writes, ‘The ironist is the typical modern intellectual’. ⁶ His aim is to think through what follows from this situation. In the introduction to Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, the ironist is presented as having fully acknowledged contingency: the ironist ‘is the sort of person who faces up to the contingency of his or her own most central beliefs and desires – someone sufficiently historicist and nominalist to have abandoned the idea that those central beliefs and desires refer back to something beyond the reach of time and chance’. ⁷ Rorty goes on to identify liberal ironists as ‘people who meet Schumpeter’s criterion of civilization, people who combined commitment with a sense of the contingency of their own commitment’. ⁸

The ironist has attracted considerable critical comment. These criticisms, raised by writers from a number of different philosophical perspectives, revolve around the idea that ironism amounts to light-mindedness in which nothing is to be taken seriously and nothing is of value. Alasdair MacInyre argues for a connection between the possibility of moral reasoning and what he calls tradition-bearing communities, claiming that only a community of shared beliefs and practices can be a moral one, possessing enduring standards of justification and reason-giving. According to MacIntyre, irony fragments such a community and its beliefs: ‘Ironic detachment involves a withdrawal from our common language and our shared judgments and thereby from the social relationships which presuppose the use of that language in making those judgments’. ⁹ Arguing along similar lines, Susan Haack is critical of irony because she takes it to be nothing more than an attitude of self-indulgence. Haack allows that the ironist might be concerned with social and political matters, but thinks that this is contingent upon whether they are relevant to her aim of securing private perfection. It follows from what Haack believes to be Rorty’s rejection of truth that moral commitment, if it exists at all, is cynical: ‘“irony” reveals that Rorty’s supposed solidarity is no more than pro forma, cynical conformity with those [our local] practices’. ¹⁰

These objections rest on a misunderstanding of what Rorty means by irony. We can begin to see why this is the case by taking note of the role Rorty intends the figure of the ironist to play. The liberal ironist is central to his aim ‘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’. ¹¹ The reformulation consists as we have seen in highlighting the contingency of liberal values and institutions, and of our commitment to them. Contingency is assumed by many writers to threaten belief and commitment, but Rorty denies this. His claim is that if we come to see our selves, our languages and our societies as historically contingent instead of embodying truth or the word of God, this makes us less dogmatic and more tolerant of those different from us. As he writes in ‘The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy’, awareness of contingency ‘helps make the world’s inhabitants more pragmatic, more tolerant, more liberal, more receptive to the appeal of instrumental rationality’. ¹²

Among commentators on Rorty, William Curtis has done most to draw out of Rorty’s account of irony an understanding of the role it might play in social and political life. In his recent book Defending Rorty, Curtis offers an interpretation of Rorty as a virtue liberal. Virtue liberalism holds that a successful liberal society requires that its citizens possess a set of ‘habits or ethical character traits’ of a distinctively liberal kind, which include respect for pluralism, open-mindedness, experimentalism and support of the democratic process. ¹³ According to Curtis, these are the traits Rorty captures in his description of the ironist; irony is ‘the civic virtue that all liberal citizens should ideally possess because it helps them be tolerant, adaptable, and just’. ¹⁴ Possession of these traits means that we are more open to others and more willing to learn from them, and sensitizes us to their suffering. The ironist, far from being a cynic, is in fact a good liberal, embodying precisely the kind of virtue that liberal societies ought to welcome and encourage.

Curtis is insightful in highlighting those aspects of irony which he associates with virtue liberalism. The difficulty with his suggestion, however, is that it runs against what Rorty presents as the central point in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, the ‘firm distinction’ between one’s duty to society, and one’s duty to oneself. ¹⁵ Irony is on his presentation an individual matter, of no relevance to the public sphere or one’s behavior therein. The public–private distinction is one of the most widely criticized elements in Rorty’s work, and even writers otherwise sympathetic to his position have objected that it is not possible to distinguish firmly between one’s public and one’s private self; Neil Gascoigne sums up the concern when he notes that ‘Ultimately, public and private commitments are united in a lived life’. ¹⁶ This is correct, but rather than taking it to invalidate Rorty’s description of the ironist, I suggest that the public–private distinction should be set aside, and that doing so impacts positively upon his project.

In a few places in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Rorty himself can be seen to allow for this. For example, he writes that:

[A]s I am a liberal, the part of my final vocabulary which is relevant to [public] actions requires me to become aware of all the various ways in which other human beings whom I might act upon can be humiliated. So the liberal ironist needs as much imaginative acquaintance with alternative final vocabularies as possible, not just for her own edification, but in order to understand the actual and possible humiliation of the people who use these alternative final vocabularies. ¹⁷

I want to build on Curtis’ interpretation of the ironist as a virtue liberal by considering Rorty alongside a writer who criticizes him for missing an important aspect of contingency, William Connolly. Like Rorty, Connolly places contingency at the heart of his concerns, thinking it something theorists and philosophers have tried in various ways to avoid. However, Connolly thinks that Rorty is inattentive to the darker consequences of contingency. He observes that recognition that one’s identity rests on nothing firmer than the particularities of culture and history may encourage us to see different identities not as fellow contingencies which should be tolerated and respected, but as something which threatens us; in his view, this goes a long way to explain the recent resurgence of fundamentalist religious and ethnic identities. Connolly writes:

…if every identity is contingent, each contingent formation contains powerful pressures to destroy threats to its self-confidence once it has been constructed…One response to the experience of contingency in identity is affirmation and care for difference. Another is denial and repression of difference. Rorty alerts us to the contingency of identity. But he does not consider how to cultivate a response which affirms contingency and difference together. ¹⁸

II A public role for ironic self-creation

Curtis argues that some of Rorty’s remarks about the ironist can be seen in terms of the account of virtue liberalism developed in his book Defending Rorty. However, Curtis thinks that other comments about the ironist indicate that Rorty sometimes has a very different figure in mind; in his view, Rorty ‘inadvertently implies and conflates two different and conflicting senses of irony’. ²² The first sense is the ironist as virtue liberal which we have just examined, but according to Curtis this is not the same figure that emerges later in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. This second ironist ‘is an intellectually restless, seemingly neurotic character…She feels impelled to challenge and transform her final vocabulary by perpetually seeking out and comparing it to, and reweaving it with, alternative final vocabularies’. ²³ A similar distinction has been identified by John Pettegrew. In his paper ‘Lives of Irony’, Pettegrew argues that Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity contains two senses of irony, ‘moderate’ irony and a ‘Romantic’ or ‘pure’ form. The moderate ironist is the figure presented in the book’s early chapters, and is described by Pettegrew as ‘a pluralist, well aware of the contingency of consciousness and the variability of perspective’. ²⁴ Pettegrew suggests that this figure gives way to a second sense of irony, the ‘pure ironist, a caricature of nihilistic subjectivity’. ²⁵

Curtis and Pettegrew claim that these different senses of irony appear at different points in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, with the first sense appearing in part 1, and the second emerging in part 2. This second sense of irony is described most fully in chapter 4. There the ironist is presented as standing in a particular relation to their ‘final vocabulary’, that set of words with which an individual justifies his or her actions, beliefs and lives. That vocabulary is final because, as Rorty puts it, ‘if doubt is cast on the worth of these words, their user has no noncircular argumentative recourse. Those words are as far as he can go with language; beyond them there is only helpless passivity or a resort to force’. ²⁶ In this context, the ironist is defined in terms of three conditions. These are:

(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 that her vocabulary is closer to reality than others, that it is in touch with a power not herself. ²⁷

To do so, let us introduce a further objection to the ironist. Michael Williams fixes upon Rorty’s characterization of the ironist as the person who experiences ‘radical and continuing doubt’ and claims that it amounts to epistemic scepticism; as he sees it, ‘Rorty’s irony is skepticism under another name’. ²⁸ Williams points out that for pragmatists there is an all-important difference between scepticism and fallibilism: our beliefs find their roots in contingent and therefore fallible social practice, but this does not furnish reason for scepticism about either. According to Williams, Rorty elides this distinction in his definition of the ironist, to the detriment of the position he wishes to develop. And to be sure, the temptation to view the ironist as a sceptic is readily understood; epistemology is the central theme running through Rorty’s work, which focuses on the ethnocentric character of justification and reason-giving. This concern with epistemology (albeit a critical one) is readily carried over and imported into Rorty’s account of the ironist, where it seems to find support when one reads of her ‘radical and continuing doubt’.

One response to the kind of concern that animates Williams’ objection is to set aside Rorty’s three-point definition of irony, and focus on the first sense of irony identified by Curtis and Pettegrew in part 1 of Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. In his recent book Ironic Life, Richard Bernstein suggests the following as a corrective to Rorty’s presentation:

Instead of describing the ironist as ‘having radical and continuing doubts’ (which misleadingly suggests some sort of existential angst), Rorty would have been clearer – and prevented misunderstanding – if he had simply said that the ironist knows that her final vocabulary is the result of all sorts of historical contingencies, and that other contingencies generate other final vocabularies. ²⁹

Ironic doubt is a consequence of awareness of the contingency of our descriptions; Rorty writes that ‘Ironism, as I have defined it, results from awareness of the power of redescription’. ³⁰ This idea can be explained by turning to Rorty’s account of the figure he calls, following Harold Bloom, ‘the strong poet’, presented in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity’s chapter 2. Rorty describes the strong poet by locating her in the context of what Plato called ‘the old quarrel between philosophy and poetry’. In Rorty’s account, philosophy, or at least pre-Hegelian philosophy, took as its task the attempt to describe ‘the way things really are’; accordingly, philosophers thought of the poets as wasting their time and words on what they dismissively took to be mere idiosyncrasy. In contrast, poets give up the very idea of knowing the truth or the one true description out of the belief that there is no such thing to be known. The strong poet is the person who does not take over inherited descriptions, but rather seeks to create herself by offering a redescription of the contingencies that have made her who she is. For the strong poet, ‘To create one’s mind is to create one’s own language, rather than to let the length of one’s mind be set by the language other human beings have left behind’. ³¹

Viewed in the context of Rorty’s discussion of self-creation, the ironist’s ‘radical and continuing doubt’ is, I suggest, a misleading way of describing what is more accurately thought of (to use another Bloomian term) as a particular anxiety. The process of self-creation that Rorty develops from Nietzsche and Freud is tentative, and necessarily unfinished. As an achievement, the created self is fragile, always hostage to future contingencies. ³² This leads to a mixture of feelings, positive and negative, about the self that one has created.

I want now to indicate how this Romantic sense of irony might play a public role. To do so, let us turn to the key ideas of (1) ironic doubt, and (2) a final vocabulary. In terms of (1), ironic doubt, the ironist should not be thought of as ‘doubting’ society itself, but rather whether she (and by extension we) finally knows what her commitments – for example, to democracy or to equality – commit her to. Bjørn Ramberg captures this when he writes that what is at issue for the ironist is not ‘her doubt, but her shakenness – her experience of not-knowing what the normative demands embedded in her own practical identity actually require of her’. ³³ This point connects to Rorty’s description of liberals as people who think that cruelty is the worst thing we do. In itself, the injunction to avoid cruelty seems to tell us nothing about what cruelty is or how it is to be avoided. For this reason, some commentators have pressed Rorty to provide a definition of cruelty. ³⁴ However, as I read it, the point of Rorty’s use of the term ‘cruelty’ is that it is an open category. To specify cruelty’s necessary and sufficient conditions implies that we are able to give a final account of what is and is not cruel, but Rorty’s claim is that we are never in this position. ³⁵ The ironist can, I have been suggesting, be seen as potentially alerting us to new forms of cruelty by redescribing what had appeared to us as normal and natural.

Turning to (2), Williams writes of a final vocabulary that: ‘Nothing is immune from revision. As a pragmatist, Rorty should have no truck with the language of “finality”’. ³⁶ However, ‘finality’ does not mean ‘permanency’. Rather, finality indicates that we have gone as far as we can go with language for now, not that we will be unable to go further at some point in the future. ³⁷ The ironist as we have seen reacts to final vocabularies by redescribing them. And importantly, when the ironist does so, the result is that a vocabulary can no longer be viewed in the same way. We can see this in Bloom’s description of the strong poet. Bloom’s account of the anxiety of influence emphasizes that the new text reconstitutes the old text that it misreads (or, in Rorty’s term, redescribes). If it catches on, the ironist’s redescription becomes our description. So we can no longer think about, for example, religion in the same way after we have read Nietzsche’s description of it as a system of cruelties, or the family after reading Freud’s case studies.

We can underscore both of these points if we take up the alternative to irony, common sense. Rorty takes common sense to assume ‘that the presence of a term in his own final vocabulary ensures that it refers to something which has a real essence’. ³⁸ Rorty views metaphysics as the attempt to shore up common sense, assuming that there exists a fixed set of questions to be solved in language that is already available. The kind of uncritical or unreflective attachment that Rorty takes to characterize common sense is not something that we are likely to associate with genuine belief and commitment. In contrast, irony combines the ability to sustain a commitment to one’s beliefs while at the same time acknowledging some measure of doubt (or better, shakenness) about that commitment. Irony is then not, as MacIntyre, Haack and others have understood it, an attitude of self-indulgent frivolity, for it is only by standing back from our beliefs and practices that we are able to critically appraise them.

If this suggestion for the public role for self-creation is plausible, other claims in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity can be seen to support it. Although Rorty thinks that irony is a private matter, in chapter 2 he grants that the strong poet has a social role. Many strong poets (he has in mind Foucault) are alienated from their society, but Rorty’s suggestion is that in response to that alienation they protest ‘in the name of the society itself against those aspects of the society which are unfaithful to its own self-image’. ³⁹ Here again the contrast between metaphysics (as common sense) and irony is relevant. In an essay drawing on Catharine MacKinnon’s work, Rorty remarks that:

Universalist philosophers assume, with Kant, that all the logical space necessary for moral deliberation is now available – that all important truths about right and wrong can not only be stated but be made plausible, in language already to hand. I take MacKinnon to be siding with historicists like Hegel and Dewey to be saying that moral progress depends upon expanding this space. ⁴⁰

In making my argument for the public role for irony, I have followed Curtis and Pettegrew in teasing out different ideas contained in Rorty’s description of the ironist. Their work is valuable in identifying these different ideas, but I want to close with the suggestion that the distinction between the different senses of irony they find should not be drawn too sharply. Curtis supports his view that ‘Rorty conflates two different and conflicting senses of irony’ in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity by calling attention to an inconsistency there about precisely who, in the ideally liberal society, will be an ironist. ⁴² At some points, Rorty writes that every citizen of that society will be an ironist, whereas at others he associates ironism exclusively with intellectuals. Curtis takes this inconsistency to support his view that there are two quite distinct ironists: the former acknowledge that their final vocabularies are historically contingent and yet, for the most part, are content to rely on them; the latter in contrast are motivated to experiment with their final vocabularies by redescription. I agree that there appears to be a contradiction about who exactly will be an ironist in the ideally liberal society, but at the same time the two senses of irony that Curtis and Pettegrew find is not one that Rorty himself intended. To be sure, Rorty did come to think that his description of the ironist was problematic. He writes that in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity he ‘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 a Sartrean, ever conscious of the abyss’. ⁴³ However, notice that this is a slightly different point to the one made by Curtis and Pettegrew, for here ironic fallibilism (which is central to Curtis’ account of civic virtue) and Romantic irony (of which he and Pettegrew are more critical) are taken to go together and remain important; Rorty’s mistake, as he came to see it, rather was to associate ironic fallibilism and Romanticism with existentialism. For this reason, it seems to me that Curtis speaks more accurately when he notes that ‘the two senses of irony exist on a continuum’. ⁴⁴ We see this in that the various summaries of the ironist Rorty gives and which I have cited above do not conflict with one another. The three-point definition offered in the second part of Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity does not contradict what is said in the first part, but rather spells out in greater detail the consequences of a thoroughgoing awareness of contingency.

Conclusion

This article has examined the role that irony might play in liberal society. Liberal ironists combine commitment to their society with a self-reflective awareness of that commitment. In making my argument, I join and have drawn upon writers who have identified different elements in Rorty’s account of the ironist. Once identified, the different (though not conflicting) elements of irony can be spelled out to show how irony might play a positive social role. Curtis captures something important in the idea of irony which Rorty did not make fully explicit, and which I have examined by placing the ironist alongside Connolly’s notion of agonistic respect. In addition, Rorty’s account of self-creation suggests that there is a further role for irony. Curtis and Pettegrew are more critical of this aspect of irony, but I argue in contrast that the selves ironists create might potentially benefit liberal society, offering redescriptions which call into question received wisdom and alerting it to unnoticed forms of cruelty.