ethics news & views: Changing the subject: Richard Rorty on irony and moral hope

February 01, 2001

Changing the subject: Richard Rorty on irony and moral hope

How should we organize our private and public lives in an ironic, mass media world? How can we even go about being ethical persons? Richard Rorty imagines a world where we can be as ironic as our culture and still be profoundly ethical.

For Rorty, the ethical person succeeds by changing the subject, imagining new questions and answers that existing moral worldviews cannot adequately describe. This is not to completely throw away the older worldviews: Rorty sees them as providing significant advances in their own right. The problem is that our more familiar moral worldviews were not designed to answer all the new questions we come up with, often contradict each other, and worse, sometimes cannot even find a way to communicate with each other at all.

Rorty argues that our newest questions beg us for even newer moral languages. That is, success will come not through refining the intricate grammar of existing moral languages, but through the creation of new moral languages upon the foundation of those older moral tongues we have come to know and love.

But creating new moral languages is no mean deal. Faced with this tough task, we should become “personal ironists.” The personal ironist is painfully aware that her own moral language is not quite up to par and doesn’t try to argue her way into more sure footing. The trick, for Rorty’s ironist, is to make a leap of moral imagination, to quit diagramming sentences and start writing new moral poems.

We must actively imagine greater solidarity with others, not by pretending that they are just like us—that they share (or should share) our assumptions about the world and our reactions to it—but by finding in the raw details of their lives some similarities with ourselves. Rorty offers a bottom-up approach based upon a personally experienced solidarity with others, girded by a democratic society designed to minimize the most serious of ethical lapses.

Rorty argues that contemporary democracy functions upon a hope that a certain moral vocabulary—one that speaks of things like freedom, justice and liberty—in fact works, not upon a belief in certain philosophical explanations of things like human nature, truth, or goodness. A hope that we can avoid cruelty and humiliation motivates the democratic consensus: though pure rationality will not save the world, democracy might at least make it less cruel. When we are cruel to one another, Rorty argues, it is because we let one description of a person (an alienating description) outweigh another description of that person (an empathetic description).

Rorty lifts up George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm as successful moral re-descriptions of life in the Soviet Union (for Rorty, the novelist is better equipped than the theorist). An effective re-imagination will help us see in new ways how others are harmed and how we harm others. It lifts up another person’s image of good or true, “noticing whether they think of it as something round and creamy and flushed, or perhaps as something prism-shaped, jewel-like and glistening” (159). It puts us in a position where we, too, can long for Sugar Candy Mountain against our better interests or insist to O’Brien that two plus two always equals four, and thereafter see Communism and totalitarianism in a new light.

Contingency, irony, and solidarity. By Richard Rorty. Cambridge University Press, 201pp. $20.95.

[ Posted by Chance Hunter at February 1, 2001 08:04 AM |