I was reading a book by Richard Rorty and I found this article that summarizes his position pretty well. I was just wondering if anyone would consider themselves an "ironist."
The "ideal citizen" of Rorty’s liberal utopia is someone who eschews the need for foundations and is fully conscious of the contingency of his or her "language,...conscience,...morality, and...highest hopes."19 While such a citizen may be privately Nietzschean20, he or she is publicly committed to a political order that fosters individual creativity while at the same time minimizing cruelty. Now, Rorty is often (but not always) careful to distinguish this simple awareness of the contingency of one’s condition from ironism, liberal or otherwise.21 In his ideal liberal society, ordinary citizens would be "commonsensically nominalist and historicist," but not ironic about their situations; that is, they would not feel "any particular doubts about the contingencies they happen to be."22 Ordinary citizens would not look to nature or reason to justify or test their allegiance to their community; for them, their community and its "values" would provide their lives with meaning. To this extent, postmodern non- or anti-foundationalism would seem to support a kind of ethnocentricity that supports citizenship.23 On the other hand, ironism is and would continue to be reserved for intellectuals, who have "continuing doubts about the final vocabulary [they] currently [use]," realize "that argument phrased in [their] present vocabulary can neither underwrite nor dissolve those doubts," and do not think "that [their] vocabulary is closer to reality than others."24 In short, in Rorty’s ideal liberal society no one--not citizens, not political leaders, not public or private intellectuals--would seek to make an appeal to the "laws of nature and nature’s God," to justify in universal or transhistorical terms the principles or habits in accordance with which they happened to live.25 What does and should move ordinary citizens of liberal societies, however, is the concrete "hope that life will be freer, less cruel, more leisured, richer in goods and experiences, not just for our descendants but for everybody’s descendants."26
In other words, a Rortian liberal society will apparently for most of its citizens be justified, not by some reference to God or nature, but by a pragmatic and progressive "philosophy of history" (if that is not a contradiction in terms).27 Such a "story" can be buttressed and, needless to say, undermined only by "facts," or, if you will, references to the events of history.28 To the extent, however, that recent history does not seem to support our hopes, to the extent that life does not seem to be getting better and better for all of us, we may well come to regard "the last few hundred years of European and American history...as an island in time, surrounded by misery, tyranny, and chaos."29 The hope that grounds the allegiance of ordinary people to liberalism would thus seem to be at the mercy of "contingencies." If Rorty’s bleak vision of our age is plausible, then the very century in which for the first time a liberal utopia might be possible (because of the allegedly growing nominalism and historicism of the general population and the growing ironism of the intelligentsia) is also the one in which the devotion of most people to the principles of liberalism is most at risk.
There are two ways out of this apparent political conundrum. The first is to depend upon the intelligentsia to "redescribe" our circumstances so as to sustain hope. The question here is whether ironists who are so full of doubts would be willing or able to do so. A second avenue is to reject Rorty’s description of the political psychology of liberal hope. Let us briefly consider the second before returning to the first.
Rorty’s claim that ordinary allegiance to liberalism depends upon a progressive account of history that may be subject to "factual" refutation turns on the argument that for most contemporary liberal citizens hopes for the afterlife have been replaced by hopes for the this-worldly future. We care now more for the happiness of our grandchildren than for the salvation of our souls.30 In Rorty’s world, religious faith has declined, probably irretrievably and certainly for the better. By most other accounts, however, "American religion today is thriving, activist, and diverse," with 94% of Americans professing "a belief in God or a universal spirit" and about 70% believing in life after death.31 Now, these "metaphysical" commitments are not necessarily inconsistent with belief in a progressive account of this-worldly history. Indeed, I have suggested elsewhere that Kant’s philosophy of history requires some sort of faith in an extra-historical guarantor of the hoped-for outcome.32 It is possible to argue, in other words, that hope for this world as well as for the next depends upon faith in a Supreme Being. From the point of view of perpetuating liberalism, the advantage of religiously-grounded hope over a purely secular account of historical progress is that it is more resistant to apparently contrary facts. It enlists the inscrutability or "semi-scrutability" of God’s will and the confidence in divine beneficence on behalf of our temporal hopes, even against the best available "empirical" evidence. Needless to say, it is also possible to offer a variety of other religiously-derived "metaphysical" arguments on behalf of liberalism.33
Of course, the work it would take to appropriate religion on behalf of liberalism will have to be undertaken, if at all, by intellectuals. That Rorty himself is not about to take on this task is abundantly clear; for him, a "postreligious culture" is as desirable as a "postmetaphysical culture."34 He further implies that there is no necessary connection between ironism--the current stance of most intellectuals--and liberalism.35 The kinds of doubts that ironists entertain do not arise only in liberal societies nor are only those who begin as liberals subject to them.36 In addition, he assumes that ironists have a certain kind of intellectual integrity. They cannot be "‘progressive’ and ‘dynamic’ liberals" because they "cannot offer the same sort of social hope as metaphysicians offer." In their view, the ability "to conquer the forces which are marshaled against you...is a matter of weapons and luck, not a matter of having truth on your side, or having detected the ‘movement of history.’"37 Just as ironists cannot believe, wholeheartedly or otherwise, in God or nature, so also can they not believe in any sort of providential history.38 Indeed, for Rorty a philosophy of history is merely "a large blurry object around which to weave our concrete local fantasies."39 What, then, is the current connection between ironism and liberalism? Why might ironists wish to support liberalism? And, finally, how would they offer their support?
Rorty’s answer to the first question is that some ironists like himself happen to have been born in liberal societies and raised as liberals. A liberal ironist is an ironist who happens to be a liberal, but who apparently also is not convinced by or satisfied with the principles upon which his or her society is supposed to be based. The question of why in the face of this dissatisfaction the liberal ironist remains a liberal or conditions the pursuit of personal perfection on the limits imposed by liberalism is not one that Rorty explicitly addresses. Part of the answer may, however, be constructed from the following consideration. According to Rorty, ironism is essentially privatistic; for ironists, "theory has become a means to private perfection rather than to human solidarity."40 Because the ironist cannot wholly invest him- or herself in any common project, because the ironist will always have doubts about the "final vocabulary" in accordance with which the project is justified, he or she will always keep a certain distance from his or her fellows. The ironist’s goal is autonomy understood as self-creation.41 To the extent that this is a genuinely private goal, it probably can most easily be pursued in a society that is tolerant, makes minimal public demands on its citizens, and offers as great as possible a range of opportunities for individual self-fulfillment.42 Thus there is an essentially selfish strategic ground for ironists to make common cause with liberalism, so long, presumably, as their attempts to promote or perpetuate liberalism do not overburden their efforts at self-perfection.
