The Ethics of Richard Rorty

Moral Communities, Self-Transformation, and Imagination

Susan Dieleman, David E. McClean, Paul Showler, Susan Dieleman, David E. McClean, Paul Showler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000586411
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Pragmatism in Philosophy

This book contains diverse and critical reflections on Richard Rorty's contributions to ethics, an aspect of his thought that has been relatively neglected. Together, they demonstrate that Rorty offers a compelling and coherent ethical vision. The book's chapters, grouped thematically, explore Rorty's emphasis on the importance of moral imagination, social relations, language, and literature as instrumental for ethical self-transformation, as well as for strengthening what Rorty called "social hope, " which entails constant work toward a more democratic, inclusive, and cosmopolitan society and world.

Several contributors address the ethical implications of Rorty's commitment to a vision of political liberalism without philosophical foundations. Others offer critical examinations of Rorty's claim that our private or individual projects of self-creation can or should be held apart from our public goals of ameliorating social conditions and reducing cruelty and suffering. Some contributors explore hurdles that impede the practical applications of certain of Rorty's ideas.

The Ethics of Richard Rorty will appeal to scholars and advanced students interested in American philosophy and ethics.

Part I Creating Moral Communities and Creating Selves

1 Reading Rorty in Tehran, or What Happened When I Road-Tested Rorty’s Philosophy of Life Inside an Iranian Prison

Kian Tajbakhsh

DOI: 10.4324/9781003208150-3

I am not a philosopher by training, but Richard Rorty changed my life.¹ It began when his ideas bolstered my decision to return to Iran and then again when my interpretation of those ideas got me arrested in Iran—and imprisoned under threat of execution for treason. In 2009, I was accused of promoting Western liberal democracy and human rights and thereby endangering the national security of the Islamic Republic. At the time, I was the representative of George Soros’s Open Society Foundation in Iran. Of course, I was guilty as charged—the charges aligned precisely with Soros’s audacious, romantic project of promoting open societies and personal liberty around the world. I had left academia and joined Open Society in part because of the conceptual path Rorty’s ideas had cleared for me.

Let me try to explain how all this came about. Consider it a story with three acts.

Act One

I first encountered Rorty’s ideas in the late 1990s when I was a junior faculty member at the New School for Social Research. I had been trained as a political scientist and urbanist, and I was working on a book about the promise of the modern city and the deficiencies of the then-fashionable Marxist approaches to modern urban life. The final chapter was proving difficult to write because I couldn’t see how to weave together some of the ideas that I was advancing—including deconstruction, Habermas’s critical theory, feminism, and liberal democracy—as superior to Marxist approaches. Over coffee one day, a colleague listened attentively to my description of my block, then said, “I’ve got just the man for you. You had better have a look at Rorty.”

I had not read anything by Rorty at that point, but I knew him as a left-leaning American philosopher with a soft spot for traditional labor class politics. My first encounter with Rorty’s ideas involved some controversy. Because the incident I wish to recount has, as far as I am aware, not been fully covered in the published reports, it is worth recalling, if only for having it enter into the historical record. I had first heard Rorty when he spoke at my alma mater Columbia University in October 1996 at an event billed as “The Fight for America’s Future: A Teach-In with the Labor Movement.” The event featured quite a lineup of academic and intellectual luminaries, including Cornel West, Betty Friedan, Todd Gitlin, Orlando Patterson, and Katha Pollitt, as well as John J. Sweeney, the new president of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations. The event created, unexpectedly, something of a stir. I was one of over 1,700 people crammed into the grand Low Rotunda; outside in the cold, an overflowing crowd listened on loudspeakers while Socialist Workers Party activists were trying to sell their newspaper. The event was widely covered; Malcolm Gladwell summarized the event in The New Yorker as a “Labor Love In.” The most memorable part of the evening for me was when Rorty threw the proverbial cat among the pigeons. I distinctly recall being riveted as Rorty sounded the most strikingly politically incorrect note of the evening. (It turns out I like political incorrectness.) He excoriated the members of the American New Left, many of whom were now safely ensconced in academic centers such as Columbia, for having damaged the cause of social justice by undermining the democratic promise of the United States. He criticized them for supposedly unpatriotic acts such as writing America with a “K” and for spitting on returning Vietnam vets—and ultimately for abandoning class politics for the fashionable cultural politics of academia, which for him was no more than a chimera. (Unfortunately, as a graduate student in the late 1980s, I had been seduced by the false promise of “radical philosophy”—so fashionable at that time—and so was sympathetic to the charge of its fatuousness.) First, the hall went silent. Then the hisses and boos rose in volume. Looking down from the rafters, I heard someone (I think it was Gitlin) shout out, “But we stopped the war!” Rorty had first aired these ideas a few years earlier in a New York Times editorial titled “The Unpatriotic Academy.” A year after the Columbia event, they would form the substance of Achieving Our Country, a book wherein he reminded his contemporaries, “Outside the academy, Americans still want to feel patriotic. They still want to feel part of a nation which can take control of its destiny and make itself a better place” (AOC, 99). All the points in this polemic would return with great significance for me as my own struggle with national belonging and identity unfolded over the following decade.

But for now, prompted by my colleague, it was time to plunge into Rorty’s wider body of work as a way to make sense of my own evolving ideas about political theory and philosophy. Soon, I was engrossed in his writings, and a new world opened to me; it was as if I had turned the kaleidoscope of ideas and suddenly a coherent pattern emerged into view. Rorty’s ideas became an important element in the evolution of my self-understanding and political orientation in three main ways. First, they showed me a philosophically compelling way to be a liberal. I accepted Rorty’s cheerful ironism and secularism as the best private vocabulary. It fit with my cosmopolitan upbringing as a native-born Iranian raised in Europe and the United States. Rorty also showed me a respectable way to be an American, and then by extension an Iranian, having pride in “our country.” Those two words in the title of his book on American culture were at first shocking to my ingrained cosmopolitanism but soon became appealing. Finally, his ideas showed me a respectable way to be an internationalist—an American liberal internationalist no less. His heartfelt advocacy of the moral duty of “us” Westerners to support the expansion of democratic freedoms in foreign countries (as opposed to sending them jet bombers and predatory Wall Street practices) was just the encouragement I needed (Rorty 1999). Having completed the book, I decided to leave academia and return to the country of my birth to pursue just that agenda.

Within months I had accepted an offer to work for the Open Society Foundation in Iran. To the job, I brought Rorty’s innovative approach to the public-private split, his striking re-description of the conundrums of morality in his essay “Justice as a Larger Loyalty,” his view of ideologies as competing vocabularies and descriptions, and the irrelevance of much academic theoretical debate to the cause of democratic politics and justice. I threw myself into the task of supporting the growth of a liberal democratic civil society in Iran and throughout the Middle East. I finally met Rorty in 2004 and told him how important his work was to me when he traveled to Iran and boldly presented his argument about the “priority of democracy over philosophy” to an audience of eager students and middle-class professionals. At a dinner held in Tehran for him and his wife, I was fortunate to be able to chat with him. Rorty said something that has influenced me ever since—namely, that social scientists should model themselves more on journalists than scientists in a laboratory. His presence in Iran was an act of solidarity with those fighting for pluralist and liberal ideals under difficult circumstances. Yet the space for reform in Iran was closing rapidly. My colleague at the small nongovernmental organization we both worked in, who organized the event, Ramin Jahanbegloo, would be arrested in 2007 for promoting liberalism and secularism and bringing Western thinkers such as Rorty to Iran.

Act Two: The Crisis

The crisis came with my own arrest a few months later. Sitting in a solitary cell in Evin Prison, I sought desperately for a way—emotionally, intellectually—to make sense of my predicament. Among the tools I found were the Psalms and the works of Reinhold Niebuhr, who became a foil for Rorty. By comparing their ideas, I began to glimpse answers to questions I desperately needed answered; together these answers became the new music that led me, Orpheus-like, out of hell.

Foremost in my mind as I sat in my prison cell was the bewildering anachronism of a theocracy in the modern world. The world’s only official theocratic state might execute me; I had to take this theocracy seriously, as I had thus far failed to do so. The alternative was to treat my jailers as aliens and barbarians—but to do so would be the way of madness. If these men were incomprehensible, then everything I had assumed to be worthwhile and true would prove to have been illusory. Rorty was little help here. His starting point was how best to envision a future in a society that had already “shoved aside” religious traditions and in which Enlightenment principles had already become a force. But Niebuhr could help me. Because he interpreted the present against the backdrop of 2,500 years of Judeo-Christian history, he could do justice to what he saw as the “moral ambiguities of government”—ambiguities that were facing the religious reformers in Iran. This passage from The Nature and Destiny of Man seemed particularly pertinent to me:

According to [one passage in the Old Testament], government is an ordinance of God and its authority reflects the Divine Majesty. According to another [passage] the “rulers” and “judges” of the nations are…subject to divine judgment and wrath because they oppress the poor and defy the divine majesty.²

(Niebuhr 1996, 2:269)

Replace God with the people, and this was the political struggle that the reformists and I were caught up in.

Just as pressing as the need to take the theocracy seriously was a stark existential question I confronted for the first time in my life. It was my cellmate, Mustafa, a leader of the Islamic Reformist movement, who posed the question to me: “Kian,” he said, “you have to figure out who you are.” He explained that knowing who I was meant knowing what I was willing to give up. Here, the cheerful, easy ironism Rorty advocated failed me.

The “proof” of the inadequacy of such an insouciant ironism, which was personal and painful, included the actions of a person, let’s call him X, who in many ways personified the worse version of a Nietzschean ironist. He had long told friends and family of the pointlessness of adopting any final commitment in life because of the impossibility of assuming metaphysical certainties; accordingly, he advocated a life built on “brief habits” liberated from any authority the past might hold over your present. In such a way, X argued, one could say of any transformation “thus I willed it” without “pain or paradox.” He vehemently denied the qualitative distinction between human beings and animals—so much the better to excuse our animal instincts. He downplayed faith as fantasy and neuroses. I could go on. In any event, X was reluctant to disrupt some personal plans and left our family when we most needed support. X did not balance his Nietzschean ironism, as Rorty did, with deeply held concern for alleviating the suffering of others. Still, this experience of what ironism could look like in practice stained my view of the possibilities of such a cosmopolitan ironism.

I had once been enthralled by Rorty’s endorsement of the ironist’s private search for self-enlargement: “[T]he life of unending curiosity, the life that seeks to extend its own bounds rather than to find its center” (EHO, 154). I now realized what was missing was an answer to Mustafa’s question: what are you committed to? What forms your center? I began to see what was missing from my centerless life that had led me to suffer. As the Psalmist said,

I am poured out like water,

and all my bones are disjointed.

My heart is like wax; it melts away within me.

My strength is dried up like a potsherd.

Only later outside prison, after I pursued a footnote in Niebuhr referencing Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Anxiety, did I find an alternative framework questioning Rorty’s paradigm of ironism, which Rorty confidently affirmed was precisely “the ‘aesthetic’ life” that Kierkegaard criticized. But I could no longer believe such aestheticism to be compatible with living a human life of the highest order; later, I came to agree with critics such as Jonathan Lear in finding aestheticism to be a tactic for escaping commitment. I was missing what even Rorty recognized as the “seriousness” of a final vocabulary (CIS, 112) built on commitment and, yes, risk, including the risk of failure—of obvious relevance to someone sitting in a dungeon. (By final vocabulary, I mean the ultimate concerns that define who you are and whose loss would lead to the loss of your world—and if a “new Isaac”—i.e., object of commitment—cannot be found, insanity.) Rorty’s reasoning seemed to undermine the possibility of the risk of commitment by viewing final vocabularies instrumentally—that is, as a means toward the end of “increasing our power” to get what we want (CIS, 115). By means of Hubert Dreyfus’s and Charles Taylor’s notion of the unrationalizable background, which they gleaned from Heidegger’s Vorhabe and Merleau-Ponty’s concept of context, I became familiar with the idea that we are always already partly constituted by the affirmation of that to which we are called from within the culture into which we are born. This resonated with me, and indeed Rorty recognizes the tension between the awareness of our contingency and the inevitability of adopting a final vocabulary. Yet he recommends we shrug the tension off. But I don’t think it is possible to shrug it off. Or at least, if we could, the resulting combination of private autonomy and public solidarity would be a less powerful poem than one that tarried with the tension. Putting his cards on the table, Rorty wrote of Kierkegaard’s three existence spheres: “C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la guerre.” (“It’s magnificent, but it’s not war”; PCP, 169). But for me, not only are they magnificent, but they also describe precisely the terrain where the greatest battles of life are waged.

It seemed to me that there was an ambiguity in Rorty’s understanding of commitment that he left unresolved; this worry remains even if we follow Bernstein in distinguishing theoretical from practical commitment. On the one hand, Rorty endorsed the idea that “what makes us moral beings is that, for each of us, there are some acts we believe we ought to die [for] rather than commit” (AOC, 33). He illustrated the force of this idea in one of his most powerful passages wherein he recalls what was really at stake in O’Brien’s torture of Winston Smith at the end of Orwell’s 1984. Rorty related his critique of nihilism to metaphysics rather than what concerned me, meaningfulness. Yet at the same time, one consequence of his critique of nihilism, I felt, was to undermine the significance of a fundamental commitment. For instance Rorty counsels us to be “dubious about total dedication and passionate commitment” and recommends that we

educate the citizenry in the civic virtue of having as few compelling interests, beliefs, and desires as possible, to get them to be as flexible and wishy-washy as possible, and to value democratic consensus more than they value almost anything else.

(Rorty 1998)

Thus he defended a minimalist liberalism. I also believe in the priority of democratic consensus and the intention of thwarting fanatical coercion in favor of persuasion. But this solution too hastily and easily shrugs off the tension between individual and community. My experiences in prison reinforced my sense that the contradictions and tensions between the two are enduring and that this understanding must also be incorporated in the heart of the story of liberal ironism, in a way that goes beyond a calculation of utility.

Rorty’s easy...