Richard Rorty: Politics and Vision (review)

This book tries to present Richard Rorty’s work in a way that makes it relevant to and beneficial for political theory. While the author may have accomplished the former, it’s not clear that he pulled off the latter, though I suspect this is more Rorty’s fault than the author’s. In what started as a doctoral dissertation at the New School, Voparil presents a charitable—one might say an overly charitable—interpretation of Rorty’s work. Along the way, he offers the gentle nudges and tugs of immanent criticism, but he seems mostly sympathetic to neo-pragmatists like Rorty. Readers who are less sympathetic will keep thinking of certain familiar objections that Rorty often faced. Voparil’s book invites some of the same sorts of objections; and as with Rorty, it doesn’t sufficiently address them.

In the first chapter, Voparil discusses Rorty’s infamous redescription project as importantly related to William James’s idea that the history of philosophy is first and foremost a clash of temperaments. Voparil, following Louis Menand, reads pragmatism as maintaining that our temperaments and personal visions precede our argumentative capacities. “First we decide, then we deduce,” Voparil says (12, 14). Rorty is no exception here. Voparil reads Rorty’s essay, “Trotsky and the Wild Orchids,” as an autobiography of sorts, the moral of which is that Rorty’s professional quest has been to locate philosophical views that most square with his own temperament and personal vision (20). Apparently, the upshot of this is that what some of us like to think of as reasoning is a just a matter of ex post facto rationalization about our deep-seated preferences and partialities. And, given the primacy of these personal visions and temperaments, leftists seeking change are better off trying to reshape a man’s temperament by causing him to see things in a new way than trying to win him over by giving reasoned arguments that claim to “get it right,” as Voparil puts it. This, he asserts, is because, “beliefs are rarely formed through rational processes” (11). So, if we want to make the world a better place, our aim should be to “alter habits and self-images,” and to not become “more rational” (11). Here, Voparil overlooks the fact that, even if folks can be more easily persuaded by a good story than by a good argument, this hardly shows the bankruptcy or even inferiority of the rational process; rather it suggests a shortcoming of agents who fail to employ their rational faculties properly. So, we need more intellectual virtue, not less. And, there is the nagging question that Rortyans seem unwilling or unable to answer: why should one think any particular redescription is worth accepting? Exactly what does the Rortyan have recourse to when asked this very question?

According to Voparil’s second chapter, Rorty does the kind of political theory Sheldon Wolin pictures. In the language Voparil is prone to using, Rorty is offering a kind of visionary political theory that seeks to employ “imaginative writing,” not to show the inaccuracies of someone’s view of political reality—apparently a hopelessly truth-based project—but to affect gestalt shifts in people and “open unforeseen possibilities” through making non-leftist views “look bad by portraying them in a different light” (36–40). The role of politically charged narratives, then, is central to Rorty’s political theory. For, the point is to promote political action and change by crafting attractive looking views, and not to uncover truth or provide foundationalist justifications for liberalism. Presumably, the point of all this redescribing is something like this: if non-leftists are redescribed well enough, they will come to hold new views about what it means to be human, what communities can look like, and so on—and this “can bring about greater inclusion and less hostility to difference” (42f).

Voparil may be right that Rortyan redescriptions can bring about greater inclusion, but at the end of the day one wonders whether they actually do. Redescriptions...