Reading Rorty’s “Ironist Philosophers” as Post-Ironists

Richard Rorty believes that each of us has a relatively stable, “final” vocabulary in terms of which we describe (for both ourselves and others) our most basic beliefs and, more generally, tell our life’s story (1989, 73). The terms of such a vocabulary would make up a kind of personal metanarrative. However, the truth or efficacy of much of the language in terms of which such personal metanarratives have traditionally been expressed has been called into question by those philosophers Rorty labels ironist theorists. ¹ In Rorty’s ideal society even the liberal democratic intellectuals, who would also be ironists, would have to cope with nagging doubts arising from their philosophically reflective awareness of the general collapse of effective socially unifying metanarrative expressions of traditional values and, given the public nature of language, with the impact of this collapse on their own lives. Thus, the ironist intellectual’s final vocabulary would be especially troubled.

I will focus on two specific parts of Rorty’s description of ironist theorists: his ascription to them of ironist doubt and his claim that they have final vocabularies. In the context of a redescription of the aspects of ironist theory that are relevant to these two issues, I will argue that, for the most part, those Rorty calls ironist theorists are not plagued by ironic philosophical doubt about the validity of their beliefs and, furthermore, do not have ultimate, or inescapably “final,” vocabularies by means of which they express their most basic beliefs. My redescription of these aspects of ironist theory will show, in this regard, that it is not incompatible with a public philosophy of socially liberal democracy, but rather that it facilitates dialogue in a democracy.

The key to my claims that ironist theorists are not ironists in Rorty’s sense and that they do not have final vocabularies is to be found in a partial redescription of the ironist philosopher’s understanding of, and relation to, language. For present purposes, I will, as Rorty has, lump together six or seven philosophical writers as being representative of ironist theory (see note 1). Most of the work of most of these writers reflects, to some degree, the following characteristics: holism, a privileging of the individual as resistant to reduction to descriptions of larger groups (entailing a kind of subjective relativism), the primacy of lived meaningfulness over the meanings of words, and the view that language is primarily effective rather than essentialist-representational and is continuous with (and thus a part of) reality as a whole. In light of this “family resemblance,” I will refer to the ironist theorist (or philosopher) and what he or she believes.

I will address and redescribe three ideas raised in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity that are central to the ironist philosopher’s relation to language: philosophical irony, description itself, and final vocabulary. I will try to show that those Rorty calls ironist theorists are not really ironists in Rorty’s sense, that some views on proportioning description to reality are consistent with ironist theory, and that ironist philosophers do not have final vocabularies in Rorty’s sense.

1. Philosophical Irony?

Most of those Rorty labels ironist theorists make occasional stylistic appeal to irony, and some employ the device more than others. However, the degree to which irony plays a constitutive role in their philosophical positions is quite limited. The primary examples of such constitutive use of philosophical irony are to be found in some of Sartre’s ontological formulations, in some of Zizek’s more abstract claims following the formulations of Lacan, and, more marginally and diffusely, in the work of Foucault and Derrida (since they believe there is no clear distinction between rhetorical effects and propositional meanings in the writing of philosophy). But the vast majority of what these writers have to say is not expressed ironically. For the most part, these writers do not Socratically pretend ignorance or veil the intent of their writing in incongruities. Rorty, however, does not define ironist in terms of writing style, or even in terms of formally constitutive elements in the philosophical positions of ironist theorists.

Rorty asserts that one cannot get outside of one’s final vocabulary in order to provide it with a noncircular foundation (1989, 73–78). Rorty believes the inability to transcend one’s final vocabulary to be a continuing source of worry to individuals—primarily intellectuals—who see both the contingency in their own beliefs and the merit in beliefs that are different from their own. The continuing philosophical worry is what Rorty calls ironist doubt (xv, 73, 75). Ironist theorists, then, for Rorty, are ones who have “radical and continuing doubts” about their most basic beliefs, so that he or she is “never quite able to take [himself or herself] seriously” (73). However, we are hard pressed to find exhibited to any unusual degree this kind of doubt or uncertainty in the work of those Rorty takes to be the paradigm proponents of ironist theory. Perhaps they feel freer to change their minds, or to take off in new directions, than most modernist thinkers, but they certainly do not manifest any special degree of doubt about what they say. In fact, all of them write with a tone of authority that many regard as presumptuous. The tone issues from a confidence that is based more on a poetically descriptive and expressive ability than on an ability to discover and elaborate noncircular epistemological foundations. ² Nor is there any reason to believe that, as philosophers, these writers are “never quite able to take themselves seriously” (73). Rorty seems to have projected onto these philosophers themselves the doubt he believes them to have caused in others; and he sees them as having caused “cruel,” if not literally unjustified, doubt in the minds of nonintellectuals.

The ironist doubt from which Rorty would protect those who are susceptible to its cruelties appears to arise as a result of the inability to digest or negotiate language that brings one’s basic values seriously into doubt while at the same time being unable simply to give up the language, or particular verbal formulations, in terms of which these values are commonly expressed. The ironist theorist, however, is not heavily reluctant to give up traditional verbal formulations. The ironist theorist can, as easily as not, understand philosophical irony as an artifact of the assumption (one that he or she does not share) that language does or should, more or less, simply and completely represent reality.

Philosophical irony arises through the juxtaposition of relatively narrow and often intentionally misplaced concreteness of representation with a more revealing, if indirect, presentation of a context that elicits or exposes the incongruity of the former representation. Thus, such irony can readily be interpreted as being due to an overcommitment to a particular representation of, or way of understanding, a segment or aspect of reality. The ironist theorist believes that we have somehow been misled to think that language should and can adequately and stably sustain a representation of all that is most important to us, and that it has done so for a long time. The ironist theorist recognizes that faith in the representational adequacy of language to do this has begun to crumble. Twentieth-century existentialism is, in part, a response to this collapse of faith, as are nihilism, structuralism and poststructuralism, postmodernism, and, apparently, Rorty’s ironist views. Rorty’s ironist theorists have shown us that this faith has been misplaced. ³

In general, for philosophical theory, irony is no more than an indication of a problem to be solved or dissolved. Irony, however useful as a rhetorical device or however pleasing as an intellectual or elitist form of humor, dissolves under sufficiently (even if more or less idiosyncratically) holistic abstraction of thought and proportioning of language to reality. With the dissolution, we are left with a relatively full disclosure of simple differences of expression that may or may not reflect more deeply lying differences. Given a sufficiently and realistically restricted notion of the utterable “truth” of “reality,” irony, in the sense that Rorty uses the term, dissolves into something no more disturbing than a playful, sometimes only marginally discernible, difference between what is said and what remains unsaid. Only insofar as one is committed to the belief that language can fully represent discrete portions of reality does one feel disturbed rather than titillated by so-called “philosophical irony.” Thus Rorty’s label of ironist theorist is a misnomer.

The fact that all texts are open to interpretation might readily be used to justify much of the “strong misreading” in which Rorty admittedly engages. Still, the merits of such misreading must be weighed against those of more broadly coherent readings of the same texts. By referring to, or describing, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, Foucault, Derrida, and Zizek (if not also others) as ironist philosophers, Rorty trivializes the general significance of their work. In fact, these philosophers would be more aptly described as anti-ironists, or post-ironists, since they try to dispel the perceived philosophical depth of the discrepancy between appearance and reality and to understand this discrepancy as an incongruity arising from the juxtaposition of different contexts. Whatever incongruity escapes such an account would then be better understood simply as being due to something we do not yet understand, rather than as something philosophically ironic, which would risk opening the door to a social effect analogous to the effect that a contradiction has in logic.

Although Rorty’s use of the term ironist theorist is convenient, it is insufficiently descriptive and fosters misunderstanding. Rorty’s ironist theorists are not ironists in Rorty’s sense. Thus, throughout the remainder of this paper, I will refer to those Rorty calls ironist theorists (philosophers, etc.) as post-ironists. ⁴

In order to better orient and externally context the view offered herein, and before continuing to develop the post-ironist theorist’s relationship with language, it might be helpful to address briefly some contemporary texts—by David L. Hall (1994), Linda Hutcheon (1995), and Hayden White (1987, 104, 145)—that offer views on the philosophical status of irony.

For Hall, as for the post-ironist, “It’s not our intuitions, but the account of them, that presents us with the dilemmas” that irony reflects (Hall 1994, 139). But Hall, unlike the post-ironist, sees no way for our accounts to avoid these dilemmas. For him, the relationship between human life and reality is inherently and inescapably ironic. The fact, however, that not everything fits together under a single method of representation, or in terms of one’s preferred way of rendering an account of a part of reality, need not be experienced as ironic incongruity. Rather than being attributed to some quality inherent to human reality, “the incongruity between life’s tragic and comic, its serious and lightminded, elements” (146), which for Hall constitutes irony, can more promisingly be understood according to the model of the ambiguous figure. The two aspects of Wittgenstein’s duck-rabbit, for example, need not paralyze one’s interpretive abilities. With sufficient exposure, one can learn to see the duck-rabbit simply as a duck-rabbit, without privileging either aspect, even though the general public perception and public language may lag behind this, insofar as the duck-rabbit does not come to occupy a paradigmatic place in public awareness. Since there is nothing against which to measure what reality should be like, except more reality, whatever is initially identifiable as being philosophically ironic is susceptible to losing its ironic quality with the elaboration of context that sufficient exposure makes possible. Except to the extent that one wants to cling to such irony, or to a particular method of representation that does not allow the recognition of intermediate cases, human understanding admits an ongoing proportioning of language to reality (however idiosyncratic this might be in each case) that serves continually to drain off any buildup of philosophically ironic incongruity.

Despite her intentional refusal to get entangled in philosophical issues, Linda Hutcheon’s balanced and interesting study of irony offers many philosophically relevant insights. According to Hutcheon, “[I]n interpreting irony there is a rapid oscillation between the said and the unsaid” (Hutcheon 1995, 60). Also specifically referring to the duck-rabbit figure, she agrees (vs. Gombrich 1969, 5) that “our minds almost can experience both readings at the same time” (Hutcheon 1995, 59–60). In discussing her experience of Shakespeare’s Henry V through both reading and seeing movie renderings, Hutcheon admits the oscillation is so rapid between heroic Christian and Machiavellian interpretations of Shakespeare’s characterization of Henry V that she “constantly perceive[s] both the duck and the rabbit” (70).

In the final chapter of her book, Hutcheon addresses the furor provoked by an exhibit entitled “Into the Heart of Africa,” which was presented by the Royal Ontario Museum during 1989 and 1990. The context of the exhibit was intentionally ironic, the “edge” cutting against the racial prejudice of an earlier time. But the complex, multifaceted public response to the exhibit’s treatment of politically sensitive material illustrates the inherent elitism of irony, in that its message is too dependent on subtle attitudes normally implicit only within a limited range of discourse communities. Granted, some attitudes against which an ironic edge might bear are unjust, even though they may be shared by nearly an entire discourse community. However, when irony tries to be inclusive (Hutcheon 1995, 47) and yet is understandably interpreted by a “featured” discourse community as being insensitive (overly familiar, intrusive, etc.), then that community sees the irony as being elitist despite the intention of inclusivity. Such a failure of inclusivity can be seen as reflecting a certain arrogance of ironic intention. The title of the final chapter of her book suggests Hutcheon’s own appropriately ambiguous attitude toward irony—“The End(s) of Irony: The Politics of Appropriateness” (176).

In “Foucault’s Discourse: The Historiography of Anti-Humanism,” Hayden White asserts that “there is no center to Foucault’s discourse” and that “it is all surface—and intended to be so” (White 1987, 105). However, he then goes on to offer clear and penetrating expositions of many of Foucault’s books, finding not just more than surface, but a multifaceted continuity. White claims that “[Foucault’s] own discourse stands as an abuse of everything for which ‘normal’ or ‘proper’ discourse stands. It looks like history, like philosophy, like criticism, but it stands over against these discourses as ironic antithesis” (115). However, insofar as one agrees with Foucault that all language is catachretic (116), the apparent philosophical irony that results from Foucault’s refusal of labels and his refusal to abide by all of the “proper” traditional standards becomes unnoteworthy, if not simply nonexistent. Much the same can be said for philosophical irony in the work of Derrida and the other post-ironists.

Hutcheon agrees with White’s assessment of Foucault as an ironist; however, when the quotation from Foucault’s The Archeology of Knowledge she offers in support of this view is put into proper context, the appearance of irony vanishes. Hutcheon states, “Foucault himself defined his archeological project in what I see as structurally ironic terms as erecting ‘the primacy of a contradiction that has its model in the simultaneous affirmation and negation of a single proposition’” (1995, 209, n. 49; qtd. from Foucault 1976, 155). In the part of The Archeology of Knowledge from which Hutcheon draws, however, Foucault is defending his archeological method against methods employed by the history of ideas and, more particularly, he is addressing the difference in how the two methodologies approach contradiction when they come across it as a part of a discursive formation. What Foucault is saying is that archeological analysis tries neither to mystify contradictions nor to explain them away, but rather “to map . . . the point at which they are constituted,” since “its purpose is to maintain discourse in all its many irregularities” (Foucault 1976, 155–56). The point, then, shifting to the words of Wittgenstein, would be “to get a clear view” in order to assess “the civil status of a contradiction” (1958, #125).

Hutcheon claims that “[t]he power of the unsaid to challenge the said is the defining semantic condition of irony” (1995, 59). However, post-ironist philosophers use the said to challenge the unsaid, in the sense of challenging something forth, in an effort to elicit something new or newly effective—as poetry does, but also as theoretical language does. Insofar as this succeeds, a new association is set up between language (or the said) and experience (or the unsaid). Such a said-unsaid complex is neither irreducibly ironic, since it can be further clarified (and indefinitely so, in theory), nor mundanely ineffectual or empty. (There is often an edge, but, ideally, one that invites participation in theoretical thinking, rather than one that intentionally risks alienation, social unrest, etc.).

Due to the holistic perspective within which post-ironist philosophy operates, the said and the unsaid, or the linguistic and the extralinguistic (and at another level, the relevant and the irrelevant, or the proper and the improper), are not clearly separable; nor are they in need of any general theoretical separation “so long as we avoid misunderstandings in any particular case” (Wittgenstein 1958, #48). Yet it is the chronic threat, whether real or imagined, of a breakdown in communication that makes distinguishing between the said and the unsaid, in particular cases, ongoingly problematic.

One way of interpreting the intended effect of post-ironist theory is to see it as loosening and broadening what is considered proper and normal by way of exposing the relativity of limits that were thought to be absolute (although Rorty, among others, sees such exposure as sometimes dangerous). However, the attempts of post-ironist philosophers to legitimize the efficacy of poetic language or of catachresis and other tropes in philosophical contexts means, not that they seek to reduce philosophy to these modes and aspects of language, but rather, most generally, that they would urge us to recognize the potential of the improper to give birth to the proper.

If philosophy is to continue to aspire to theoretical generality and abstractive simplicity, the thinly veiled judgmentalism of irony, with its dependence on in-group and out-group thinking (“the exclusionary potential of irony” [Hutcheon 1995, 194]), is inappropriate as a philosophical method. And to read post-ironist philosophers as being primarily ironic is to deny them this aspiration, which, on other and more extensive grounds, is clearly reflected in their writing. Irony that carries philosophical significance would tend to contribute more to divisiveness than to understanding, through pointedly setting a language segment in opposition to key aspects of the meaning-providing circumstances that surround it. But the philosophical efforts of post-ironists are aimed precisely at trying more thoroughly to integrate, or render compatible, linguistic understanding and extralinguistic (and primarily social) circumstances.

The general view of language held by post-ironist theorists serves to relativize irony in such a way that it can be found almost anywhere. Furthermore, the extent to which it appears clearly and pointedly in a particular case of philosophical discourse is matched by an equally full reducibility to ordinary description— not exhausting every trace of irony, but consigning its remainder to the margins of philosophical language without denying its effective potential. On one hand, philosophical irony calls for clarification, since otherwise it tends to be appreciated only by certain communities and to be seen as gratuitously offensive by others; on the other hand, since it may appear anywhere and is ultimately just a part of the linguistic contingency and polysemy that entangles writer, reader, language, and world, irony has no special philosophical significance or function.

Still, one might ask, what is wrong with describing human reality as ironic? Why should we want to dispel philosophical irony? Admittedly, the degree of irony one allows into one’s philosophical views is a matter of individual taste and style. But to employ the concept of irony as being accurately descriptive of human reality is to claim validation for serious incongruity, if not inconsistency, and thus to set up a roadblock to further understanding, while to admit a philosophical problem is just to admit to a lack of understanding, and not to assert the impossibility of it.

Thus irony best remains at the level of a rhetorical device that exploits the fact that different forms and modes of expression are best suited to different practical purposes and sets of circumstances. We cannot get outside, in order to get an overview, of all practical purposes or all contingencies of circumstance.

2. Describing and Proportioning

When one looks to describe (or redescribe) something, one must selectively emphasize some parts or aspects of what is being described above others. Insofar as that which we would describe has value for us, it also has what we understand to be its own internal integrity. This is something we try to preserve, rather than violate, in our description, though often there are no adequate public criteria to guide us.

In Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Hume, through the character Philo, makes the point that claims about inferred “cause[s] ought . . . to be proportioned to the [observed] effect[s]” (1980, 35). This can readily be seen as a practical or aesthetic principle that has a close affinity with Occam’s Razor. The art of Humean proportioning can be applied wherever hypothetical or descriptive claims are made. Since we lack any direct access to, or privileged perspective on, the reality of things, the minds of other people, and even ourselves in many publicly relevant ways, we must continually proportion our descriptions—in their evidential requirements, degree of detail and abstraction, specificity and scope of generalization, effect on others, risk of error, relative emphases, and so on—to the demands and degrees of freedom of the particular situation in which, and about which, those descriptions are offered. Since there is nothing ultimately quantifiable relating such proportioning to the circumstances and presumed objects of description, its practice has the quality of an art (and not the phenomenological science for which Husserl had hoped). Considering the inherently public nature of language, and thus of description, together with the lack of any ultimate and purely objective criteria by means of which to assess the degree to which a description fits reality, success in the proportioning of description to circumstances is largely a function of what works for those who are affected by the particular description.

Some of the more object-oriented descriptive factors that most often pertain to careful proportioning of description to circumstance include elaboration of presuppositions and of context beyond what one might initially take to be the immediately relevant parameters of the object-situation (consistent with the general principle of holism), pursuing precision or magnification of detail of what is already well-contexted only as far as the actual circumstances require, adjusting methods of representation to the particularities of circumstances whenever feasible, and suspending judgments insofar as they can be foreseen unduly to risk establishing an undesirable prejudice.

Since the deeply public nature of language thoroughly encompasses its descriptive capacity, there are more specifically subjective or communal factors that can facilitate the proportioning of description to circumstances. Among these are carefully weighing the desires of individuals against group inclination and seeking an appropriate balance of emphases, trying to anticipate sources of misunderstanding or conflict, negotiating toward a fuller range of what is desired by affected parties, using language that is as morally neutral as can appropriately be tolerated, not insisting on too many things at once, and not being too insistent on any particular verbal formulation. Since any number of different descriptions might be consistent with the facts, it will remain at least marginally problematic that one can never be completely assured that one’s own presumably impartial view is truly as fair as possible to those who might be affected by it. However, allowing language naturally to grade into imprecision, metaphor, abstraction, or even something nonverbal as one employs signs in order to understand what is increasingly too thinly contexted to justify very precise literal expression (whether because it is provisionally too central, or local, to oneself or externally too unknown) frees one to discuss more openly and experimentally what hovers in these vague realms and to listen more carefully to what others have to say about what is important to them.

As Hall suggests (1994, 108, and 260, n. 109), and as Rorty seems to agree when he is in his “ironist” persona, there are ways of communicatively interrelating with others that are not satisfactorily reducible to what clearly belongs to natural language. Yet, in the debate over the status of metaphor, Rorty sides with Davidson, who sees metaphor as sometimes being effective in creating new literal language, but not being itself communicative (Davidson 1984, 245–64). ⁵ Thus, for Rorty, “tossing a metaphor into a conversation is like suddenly breaking off the conversation long enough to make a face, or . . . displaying [a photograph], . . ., or slapping your interlocutor’s face, or kissing him.” “All these,” Rorty continues, “are ways of producing effects on your interlocutor or your reader, but not ways of conveying a message” (1989, 18). In this claim we see the residual influence of an essentialist-representationalist view of language, according to which a preexisting and implicitly verbal thought is represented, and thus conveyed, in literal words. Such a model may reflect well enough many instances of communication. But more generally, communicative behavior, whether literally linguistic or not, both is directly rather than representationally effective and is the very vehicle of the intention to communicate. The analogs, or similes, of metaphor that Rorty mentions are part of the larger context of communication that is a necessary condition in order for more literal language to be communicatively effective. Making a face, displaying a photograph, and so on, can belong to language in the same way that, according to Wittgenstein, samples can (1958, #16, #50, #53). Just as samples can be misunderstood, so can the most literal language. Perhaps, for the purposes of human interaction, it makes no practical difference whether we include metaphor as a part of communicative language or not. But the exclusion of it cannot justify neglecting its relevance to the responsibilities of one who would try to communicate with and understand others.

The contexts and purposes to which many of Rorty’s categorizations and claims could be supported and proportioned are not clearly and stably manifested in Rorty’s writings. Rorty assumes that philosophy must be either absolutist or dangerously ironist (see 1990, 644; Rosenberg 1993, 203). It is only in terms of absolutist, or essentialist, standards that Thrasymachus cannot be answered and that “there is no answer to the question ‘Why not be cruel?’” (Rorty 1989, xv; see also Rorty 1991, 197). Employing false dichotomies and straw men as rhetorical tools, Rorty suggests that, since there are no absolute answers to difficult philosophical questions, there are no answers at all, thereby pretending that we do not already know that there are often better questions, dissolutions of many difficult questions, and partial and probabilistic answers that satisfy most of our practical purposes. Even though such answers may not fulfill the demands of all preconceived dogmas, they need be neither ironist nor dangerous.

Another of Rorty’s dichotomies that seems to be ill proportioned to the circumstances is his “ideal” division of people into ironist-tending intellectuals and ploddingly dull and dutiful citizens (1989, 34–35, 87). There are far too many dull and dutiful ironist intellectuals and interesting and undutiful non-ironist nonintellectuals for this briefly descriptive distinction to stand on its own. Nor does the primary use to which Rorty puts this dichotomy, the use that provides its major contextual elaboration, that of urging the post-ironist to privatize theoretical writing in order to protect the general public from its cruelty and dangers, do anything to further encourage its acceptance. Being verbally cruel or dangerously provocative to someone who loves you or otherwise holds you in high esteem, and who is thus vulnerable to your careless words, is something most worthy of guarding against. But no such personal relationship exists between the typical reader and the typical writer of post-ironist theory. Rather than asking post-ironists to privatize what would otherwise have been post-ironist philosophy, Rorty might more reasonably have suggested putting warning labels on works of post-ironist theory—“WARNING, the ideas expressed herein, although not addressed to you personally, may cruelly unhinge your metaphysics.” And actually withdrawing post-ironist philosophy from the bookshelves and classrooms would perhaps only tend to mystify it, and thereby to exaggerate the very effect that Rorty seeks to eliminate. Also inappropriate is Rorty’s suggestion “that we distinguish books which help us become autonomous from books which help us become less cruel” (141). Unlike learning math and other specialties within life that are best treated in books, we learn things about life, autonomy, cruelty, and such, in much finer verbal gradations than are represented in units of books. For the most part, we learn these things independently of books, even though we may learn much of the language we employ in speaking about them from books.

But does each of us, as Rorty claims, have a final vocabulary that “we cannot help using” (1991, 37), a vocabulary that consists of “the words in which we tell . . . the story of our lives” (1989, 73) and that would thus severely limit the flexibility of linguistic commitment necessary for proportioning our descriptions to particular sets of circumstances? How “final” and how necessary is such a vocabulary?

3. No Final Vocabulary

Rorty agrees with post-ironist philosophers that language is generally more tool-like, or effective, than representational. However, he sees one’s final vocabulary as being an exception to the tool-like nature of language. ⁶ For the post-ironist theorist, however, the language that one might use to describe oneself has no extraordinary status. ⁷ He has nothing that can meaningfully be called a final vocabulary.

As Davidson’s notion of the “passing theory” (1986, 441–44) suggests, both in interpreting the words of others and in speaking to others, if one’s effort is to be sincere and respectful of the other, one must take into consideration what one knows about one’s interlocutor—“character, dress, role, sex, . . ., and whatever else has been gained by observing the [other’s] behavior, linguistic or otherwise” (441). Thus, one sometimes needs different words (and different acts in general) in order to say the “same thing” to different people. This is part of the contingency of language ignored by Rorty, although he favorably acknowledges Davidson’s views in this regard (Rorty 1989, 14–15). With sufficient diversity of experience, one realizes there is often no objectively right way of saying something, although in relation to actual circumstances there are better and worse ways.

The inherent publicness of effective natural language, together with the fact that one sometimes needs different words in order to say the “same thing” to different people and with a self that both naturally changes and finds itself in vastly different circumstances at different times, work together for the post-ironist theorist to free him or her from all but consciously rhetorical or provisional commitment to a final vocabulary or to any particular verbal formulations. For the post-ironist writer, as language becomes more theoretical (and less narrowly practico-instrumental—as in “bring me a hammer”) it becomes more like art (see Nietzsche 1990, 19; Johnston 1993, 104–11). In place of saying the “same thing” in a sufficiently diverse number of ways for it to be understood by many different people, the post-ironist philosopher (or any verbal artist) must try to proportion his or her words to many different ears at once while resisting the temptation to oversimplify. The post-ironist philosopher is aware that he or she must “want to see differently,” and that he or she must “control [his or her] Pro and Con . . ., so that [he or she] knows how to employ a variety of perspectives and affective interpretations” (Nietzsche 1969, 119). One’s understanding of oneself cannot, for Nietzsche, be an exception to this floating perspectivism, since for him the self is a multiplicity of conflicting instincts that one must continually strive to mold into a livable consistency (see Nietzsche 1968a, 483, 495, 545–46; 1968b, #480, #490, #634, #715).

The post-ironist theorist is not reduced to “futilely twisting around inside the circle of [a final vocabulary]” (Rorty 1991, 38) anymore (or anymore often) than the artist is reduced to twisting around inside a single work. All vocabularies are tools, but they are tools that the post-ironist lives through in connection with his or her projects, with what is meaningful for him or her. ⁸ Wherever his or her commitments lie, the post-ironist refuses to be trapped into compromising them merely because of some intractability of words. This does not mean that the post-ironist is insensitive to reason, or that the post-ironist will be a saint one day and indifferently cruel the next; rather, it means only that the post-ironist’s ways of understanding himself or herself and reality in general tend to change in a measured response to what time brings and that the post-ironist is sensitive to more than he or she can equally effectively put into words or recognize in the words of others. The post-ironist philosopher has a number of overlapping contingent vocabularies that he or she continually revises in the course of describing and redescribing, deconstructing and reconstructing—we only have to note the changes in the key theoretical and other favored terms employed across the careers of most of those Rorty refers to as ironist theorists. Nehamas claims that Nietzsche “depends on many styles in order to suggest that there is no single, neutral language in which his views, or any others, can ever be presented. His constant stylistic presence shows that theories are as various and idiosyncratic as the writing in which they are embodied” (1985, 37). In a note, Nehamas adds, “we cannot easily describe Nietzsche’s various writings as each presenting the same idea in a different mode” (241, n. 21).

Since he or she has a robust sense of the contingency of language, the post-ironist knows he or she cannot have a final vocabulary, because to have a contingent final vocabulary is just not to have a final vocabulary. For the post-ironist, the “death of God” (Nietzsche 1974, #125, #343), for example, is primarily a loss of the efficacity of a particular way of saying something. It thus calls for certain verbal adjustments. In general, such adjustments respond to the recognition of an increasingly mobile, more intensely temporal, relation between language and reality and between self and other, which better enables language users to cope with change.

More or less constantly discovering and rediscovering what works, or still works, at the time, the post-ironist theorist seeks no a priori exclusions of what is not “relevant to cruelty,” or of what is not “relevant to autonomy” (Rorty 1989, 142). As the post-ironist theorist considers things from within his or her own changing experience, he or she tries out different “passing theories” without any real commitment to finding the one vocabulary that fits all occasions or all auditors. In light of this ongoing proportioning of language to the changing reality of experience, the post-ironist theorist feels no need to try to put into words, as if to capture within narrowly confined conceptual parameters, the “story of” himself or herself.

Whatever markers one tries to secure for oneself and to protect—including spoken or written language segments, pieces of music and other works, mementos, and psychic and material possessions of all kinds—serve to integrate and preserve one’s sense of identity. If a marker is lost, the recathecting one then undergoes might be more or less traumatic and leave one more or less a “different person.” But the markers cohere and work holistically, and a certain flow of change is natural and common. ⁹ What is functionally “final,” in the sense in which Rorty speaks of “final vocabularies,” comes, if at all, from the full gamut of one’s practices and relationships. Vocabularies are among these, but the degree to which they serve as “final” varies considerably across individuals, and post-ironist’s are among those for whom the need for “finality,” or permanence, of vocabularies is minimal. The collection of markers in which one’s identity is secured may include much or little natural language, and one may be more, or less, aware of what most of these markers are. Ultimately, if one is to feel “safe,” one must grade into unconscious abstraction what is mostly beyond one’s critical reach at any given time, ¹⁰ what precedes all specific doubts, and what holds one securely in tradition, or in love, or one with reality. The stability, and therefore the apparent rigidity, of final vocabularies, wherever they are found, may result largely from the stability of the circumstances of one’s life, the regularity of one’s habits, the harmony of one’s family, the satisfaction of one’s work. It is to these, collaterally with language, that the social stability Rorty attributes more exclusively to particular verbalizations, or final vocabularies, and to a “banal moral vocabulary” (Rorty 1991, 196), should actually be attributed. Certain contingencies in the life of a philosopher, however, may push him or her in the direction of commitment to a final vocabulary. Among these are the exigencies of teaching, pressures to defend past publications and formulations of positions, and professional associations with “schools” and specialties known by more or less standard descriptions.

Much of what Rorty sees as being unacceptable ironist doubt arises out of the excessive verbal claims of overly rigid final vocabularies and the obstinacy of belief that results from or coheres with them, which are undisciplined by a critical self-awareness. ¹¹ More than the doubts that the post-ironist might raise, it is the rigidity of the final vocabularies of many Rortean ironists (and other non-post-ironists) that both humiliates, by imposing redescriptions on others that they do not accept, and renders the holders of such vocabularies themselves susceptible to such humiliation. The lurching vacillation with which Rorty shifts between traditional and ironic vocabularies, and between poles of strained dichotomies, can be seen as residual linguistic manifestations of the hysteria Hall associates with much Anglo-analytic philosophy (Hall 1994, 193). It is the one whose “truths” extend across and condemn the ownmost possibilities of others who cruelly humiliates, not the post-ironist philosopher, who tends more to question the range of extension of particular claims.

For the post-ironist philosopher, words are readily detachable from their usual, traditional moorings, but meaningfulness and individual lives are not thereby set adrift. The post-ironist philosopher is not typically a cynic and is as capable as anyone else of respecting the beliefs and commitments of others. It is just that the post-ironist puts less stock in the tie of particular verbal formulations to anything beyond the exigencies of particular situations. For the post-ironist, a more highly cathected communicative desire in general correlates with a weaker cathexis of, or commitment to, any particular verbal formulation (Nietzsche 1968b, ##809-11). He tries not to let any particular terms or verbal formulations (whether ubiquitous or parochial [Rorty 1989, 73]) bear too much descriptive or theoretical weight.

Rorty describes the ironist liberal as one who

spends [his or her] time worrying about the possibility that [he or she] has been initiated into the wrong tribe, taught to play the wrong language game. [He or she] worries that the process of socialization which turned [him or her] into a human being by giving [him or her] a language may have given [him or her] the wrong language, and so turned [him or her] into the wrong kind of human being.

(75)

But this characterization does not fit the post-ironist theorist, as Rorty intends. The post-ironist has an awareness of the contingencies of self and language that is more complete and more thoroughly digested and integrated with his or her life as a whole than Rorty attributes to him or her. The post-ironist theorist “worries about” the same kinds of common, everyday contingencies that others worry about. Whatever doubts he or she may have about his or her provisional vocabularies are not inherently philosophical self-doubts. ¹² This would concede too much to linguistic representationalism. Rather, they are doubts about the efficacity of his vocabularies or about his relative competence to find satisfactory expressions when needed for particular purposes.

4. Conclusion

I have argued, in opposition to Rorty’s descriptions, that those he calls “ironist theorists” and I have termed post-ironists neither are plagued by philosophical irony nor have final vocabularies. Characteristic views, particularly regarding language, central to most post-ironist philosophy tend both to relieve ironist doubt and to wash away rigid adherence to any particular self-descriptive vocabulary. The post-ironist’s radical holism and understanding of language as an effective part continuous with the rest of reality, rather than as primarily representational of reality, lead to a creative provisionality and nonfoundationalism (or metaphysical restraint) that combine to defuse any language-reality contrasts sharp enough to cause specifically ironist philosophical doubt. Consistent with the post-ironist’s view of language, an ongoing proportioning of language to the rest of reality that is consciously responsive to the contingencies of changing circumstances helps make him or her resistant to dependence on particular verbal formulations.

This resistance, when read as a kind of “speaking” silence, can easily be mistaken for intentional philosophical irony. In reading Foucault’s “What Is Enlightenment?” Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow observe that, for Foucault, “[m]aturity consists in not only a heroic but what Foucault calls an ironic stance toward one’s present situation” (1986, 117). Dreyfus and Rabinow go on to say that

[w]hat Foucault means by ironic is not simple. . . . It is an abandonment of traditional seriousness while preserving active engagement in the concerns of the present. It seeks to avoid preserving some special status for truth which grounds serious involvement, and also to avoid the frivolity which arises when one abandons all seriousness to dance on the grave of god, or logos, or phallo-centrism, etc.

(117)

The issue of Foucault’s so-called irony is something Dreyfus and Rabinow “discussed with Foucault on a number of occasions, and it . . . is so close to the centre of his work and life that he was not often clear about it” (113). “The ironic stance results in seeking in the present those practices which offer the possibility of a new way of acting,” since “there are ways of being human worth opposing and others worth strengthening,” and since Foucault “was, . . . in his last works, providing the elements of a modern ethics” (117, 113, 118).

What Foucault refers to, following Baudelaire, as the “ironic heroization of the present” (1984, 42) is “ironic” only because it does not designate some unconditional commitment, but rather is circumscribed by the contingency of other perspectives. Yes, there is a heroic aspect to the funereal formal dress of Baudelaire’s day, but there is much else, including humor. ¹³ Irony that shows through the linguistic creativity of post-ironists is an artifact of the thinness of language vis-à-vis reality as a whole, an artifact of the refusal to commit oneself to particular verbal formulations, as if they were essentialist ends rather than means or tools. ¹⁴

Too often the philosophies embedded in our nationalisms, moralisms, religions, and other institutions have caused us to hate or despise those who are different from us. Post-ironist philosophy undermines such systematically sustained reasons to hate or despise others while “private” commitment to rigid final vocabularies tends to block communication with those who are “unlike us.”

Although Rorty sees a theoretical incompatibility between post-ironist thought and liberal democratic values, the aspects of post-ironist philosophy redescribed here suggest that it is consistent with a socially liberal democracy. According to Stephen Macedo, “Those in whom liberal sensibilities are highly developed will be friendlier and more open to outsiders or strangers, but also less exclusively committed to . . . localities . . . and narrow allegiances” (1990, 268). Macedo holds that in a liberal society it is appropriate to encourage people “to regard their commitments and ideals as contingent and vulnerable, as apt to become outmoded or trivial in an unpredictably changing world” (267).

At the beginning of “The Principle of Identity,” Heidegger warns that “[w]hen thinking attempts to pursue something that has claimed its attention, it may happen that on the way it undergoes a change. It is advisable, therefore, . . . to pay attention to the path of thought rather than to its content” (1964, 23). ¹⁵ Moreover, “ The lasting element in thinking is the way” (Heidegger 1982, 12). The reason for subordinating content to direction of thought applies as well to what Rorty calls “final vocabularies.”