Rortian Irony and the Humility of Right Reason

I

The more one pursues the similarities, the more the parallels between pragmatic antirealism and life in Plato’s Cave strike the mind. Just as in that gripping parable of a strange people “like us” who feast on nothing but shifting images and shallow goods, so pragmatists like Richard Rorty paint a picture of “a world without substances or essences”¹ in which linguistic descriptions are self-consciously nothing more than “useful tools” for limitless self-invention. The world once understood to be constituted by stable natures and given actuality by intelligible form is, according to Rorty, “a world well lost.”²

That this is a fait accompli in the mind of the Rortian antirealist does engender one marked difference between his condition and that of the Platonic prisoner of doxa. For the postmodern ironist, there is no way out of the cave of appearance, preference, and manipulation. Rorty is “convinced that the Platonic quest, the attempt to get behind appearance to the intrinsic nature of reality, is hopeless.”³ Thus, there is no possibility of ascent up to the daylight of intelligible essences, final causes, or first principles. There is no Good in itself, only the useful to me; no Beautiful in itself, only the pleasing to me. The rational struggle to grasp the elusive, but enrapturing, splendor of intelligible form has given way to ungrounded advocacy of the maximization of emotivist preference in the global bazaar of secular, social democracy.

When pressed on the matter, however, Rorty concedes that the assertion concerning truth’s impossibility (a theoretical claim) is really in the end only an expression of its undesirability (a practical claim). “Pragmatists see the Platonic tradition as having outlived its usefulness.”⁴ In the Rortian world of irony and autonomy, recognizing an even potential opposition between public reality and private desire is not deemed fruitful for pursuing one’s aesthetic experiments. This is why Rorty states that the distinctions between reality-appearance, nature-convention, finding-making, and truth-power are just “not useful,” and thus are more profitably abandoned. Such distinctions get in the way of personal “fantasizing” which, to get to the heart of the matter, is “the end product of ironist theorizing.”⁵

Thus, it is not, Rorty explains, that the traditional philosophical distinction between the in se and the quoad nos turned out to be incorrect. It simply does not serve the felt needs and desired ends of Rorty’s “light-minded aestheticism”⁶ and moral “experimentalism.”⁷ Rorty is quite to the point: “The best, and probably the only, argument for putting foundationalism behind us is the one I have already suggested: it would be more efficient to do so, because it would let us concentrate our energies on manipulating sentiments, on sentimental education.”⁸ Such education does not constitute a movement from the false to the true, or from the disordered to the ordered. The accent, rather, is on the nonrational manipulation of sentiment, an expanding capacity for which creates a tolerant indifference to other people’s projects of fantasy and self-creation.

All the same, while it is important to realize that Rorty’s willful repudiation of the reality-appearance distinction is self-consciously grounded in aestheticist preference, and not in theoretical judgment, this desire is nevertheless paradoxically accompanied by a sense of residual obligation not to speak in a contradictory manner. To avoid such self-contradiction, Rorty rightly refrains from making the nonperspectival, nonpragmatic truth claim that all truth claims are perspectival and pragmatic expressions of utility and desire. Accordingly, Rorty concedes that his antirepresentationalism isn’t the real account of things that finally liberates us from the false belief in objective truth, for that would still presuppose the mind’s capacity to get at a truth that is more or less adequate to reality, somehow closer to how things really are, which is exactly what Rorty prefers us to stop wanting and attempting. Realism isn’t the appearance and pragmatism the reality, for that would be a contradiction in terms:

Our opponents . . . think of us as saying that what was previously...