Abstract
This chapter reconstructs the overlooked concept of redemption in Rorty’s oeuvre. Its goal is to anchor Rorty’s entry into the debate on modern nihilism. The chapter begins with an interpretation of redemption as a motivational force behind his philosophical project, supported by his pragmatist critique of essentialism and the pursuit of edification. It then presents how Rorty remodels religious redemption to suit contemporary secular life. This modern version of redemption fits a pluralist and democratic literary culture, a culture that entails a new self-image and is freed from religious nostalgia.
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Notes
- 1.
Dreyfus describes the natural sciences as normal discourse and the social sciences as abnormal discourse. While commensurability is an ideal in the natural sciences, it usually means a call for hermeneutic help in the human sciences, indicating “an orthodoxy had gained control” (1980, 17). Taylor claims the two sciences require different kinds of understanding. Scientific understanding provides “an account of the world as it is independently of the meanings for human subjects, or how it figures in their experience” (1980, 31). Human understanding considers desirability conditions and subject-related terms of value such as emotions, aspirations, longings, and so on, which are the factors that natural scientists are expected to bracket out of their work.
- 2.
Half of the 85 essays in the biggest collection of secondary work about Rorty deal with mind, language, truth, metaphilosophy, and pragmatism (see Tartaglia 2010). Early compilations, for example, Malachowski and Burrows (1990), Saatkamp, Jr. (1995), and Brandom (2000), were responsive to his critique of analytic thought and neo-pragmatism. Recent collections better reflect what Habermas describes as “the peculiarly romantic, and very personal triple voice of metaphilosophy, neopragmatism, and leftist patriotism” in Rorty’s philosophy (2008); see Auxier and Hahn (2010), Gröschner, Koopman and Sandbothe (2013), Guignon and Hiley (2003), and Festenstein and Thompson (2001).
- 3.
Rorty focuses on the prominence of the Cartesian-Lockean-Kantian tradition in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Rorty suggests that the privileging of this triadic root of modern epistemology was not an inevitable philosophical turn; rather, it was more a product of historical contingency. Rorty thinks that Aristotle already had less use of methodology as he viewed knowledge as the union of subject and object, which would have annulled their gap. Descartes, however, chose to stick with the knower/known paradigm, and this core assumption thereafter dictated the linear flow of modern thought. For Rorty, the Western tradition can be better understood as a synergized combination of contingent events rather than a product of a rational historical progress. Rorty is thus sympathetic to alternative histories that could be borne out of contingency and has offered thought experiments of this sort in his writings. For example, he thinks that modern morality would have been more socially inclusive if we took our signal from Hume’s sentimentality over Kantian reason, since the former theory invites the development of imaginative identification rather than disinterested moral abstraction (1996, 48). If philosophy followed the Humean trajectory, our contemporary moral focus would have then been geared toward establishing fellow-feeling and cultivating sympathy. Rorty argues that in such a scenario, our obsession with finding a perfect rational standpoint for ethics would be tempered and dreams of conceiving a universal rational being abandoned.
- 4.
Note that Rorty is at times inconsistent or that he uses the distinction problematically. For instance, he sometimes amends his view of the systematic and edifying aspects of a philosopher’s work. An example is his account of the good and the bad Heidegger. According to Rorty, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Dewey were initially ensnared by the Kantian conception of philosophy. The search for objectivity was foundational in their early writings before becoming historicist and edifying philosophers (1979a, 5). Rorty changes his tune in “Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and the Reification of Language” (1991), where he says that the early Heidegger, who developed “the Dewey-like social-practice pragmatism of the early sections of Being and Time,” slipped back to escapist metaphysics in his later writings, unlike Wittgenstein who rejected the philosophical purity he admired in Tractatus (1921) in favor of contingency and history in Philosophical Investigations (1953). Another problem for Rorty’s use of the systematic/edifying distinction is that it risks undermining his metaphilosophical view: it implies that philosophy will lose its relevance if there are no more systems to react against. But this is not Rorty’s position at all. He thinks that Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger will continue to be read even if their ideas may play a different role in future discussion. While philosophy today is considered an epistemological discipline, it need not always be the case. It can have a new face, one which could move beyond construction and reaction, Platonism, and metaphilosophical scientism. In fact, it is already being understood in different ways in the contemporary period. Rorty, for instance, classifies the modern conceptions of Western philosophizing as Husserlian (or “scientistic”), Heideggerian (or “poetic”), and pragmatist (or “political”): projects that pursue different ends and ally themselves with different disciplines (1991. 9). He also points out the division between analytic/ahistorical and non-analytic/historical camps of philosophy. While both carry the name of the same discipline, they are radically different in terms of approaches and aims. As Rorty explains: “The analytic tradition regards metaphor as a distraction from that reality, whereas the non-analytic tradition regards metaphor as the way of escaping from the illusion that there is such a reality. My hunch is that these traditions will persist side-by-side indefinitely. I cannot see any possibility of compromise, and I suspect that the most likely scenario is an increasing indifference of each school to the existence of the other. In time it may seem merely a quaint historical accident that both institutions bear the same name” (1991, 23). Furthermore, Rorty thinks that there are always new puzzles and purposes that can be triggered by thinkers who, by sheer genius, are able to blaze new conceptual trails. Idiosyncratic thinkers—the likes of Derrida and Wittgenstein and Dewey—can appear out of nowhere and ignite lightning bolts to revolutionize philosophy. In short, philosophy is not at risk of “coming to an end” (1979a, 394).
- 5.
Rorty raises and reshapes metaphilosophical distinctions according to his purpose: “sometimes it is the difference between pure and impure philosophy, sometimes between professionalized philosophy and cultural criticism, sometimes between philosophy that is constructive and philosophy that is destructive, sometimes between capitalized Philosophy and uncapitalized philosophy” (Hiley 1988, 190–1). What is common among these distinctions is that the bad sort exemplifies the traits of ahistorical essentialism and the good ones do not.
- 6.
- 7.
The use of the concept “world-making” here is distinct from Nelson Goodman’s use of the term. For Rorty’s appraisal of Goodman’s view, see 1979b.
- 8.
The vertical-horizontal distinction in Rorty’s pragmatism will be discussed in Chap. 5.
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Llanera, T. (2020). The Concept of Redemption. In: Richard Rorty: Outgrowing Modern Nihilism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45058-8_3
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