My project is slowing down, so you might wonder what’s up. Chapter 3, “The contingency of a liberal community” is what’s up … and it’s a very difficult slog.
Given that I basically buy the premise of Rorty’s first two chapters, this one should be right up my alley. Coming up with a fresh vocabulary for broad, social communications is what I do for a living. Then why does this chapter come across as so dry for me?
If you’re going to make statements like this:
The ideal citizen of such an ideal state would be someone who thinks of the founders and the preservers of her society as such poets, rather than as people who had discovered or who clearly envisioned the truth about the world or about humanity. She herself may or may not be a poet, may or may not find her own metaphors for her own idiosyncratic fantasies, may or may not make those fantasies conscious. But she will be commonsensically Freudian enough to see the founders and the transformers of society, the acknowledged legislators of her language and thus of her morality, as people who did happen to find words to fit their fantasies, metaphors which happened to answer to the vaguely felt needs of the rest of the society.
… then you better give me some examples of this new rhetorical poetry that is going to replace the Founding Fathers’ enlightenment-based foundation for the United States. Otherwise, every paragraph is going to come across as theory-theory-theory-philosopher name drop-theory-philosopher name drop-critique of the enlightenment.
Rorty also has this belief that democratic societies need to replace debate with poetic redescriptions of everything, and anyone who knows me also knows that this argument is not going to fly with me. What Rorty is describing here is what’s wrong with contemporary politics, having no foundation for understanding, so contests are little more than finding the right words to rally the base. Rorty may very well have won this point, but it has not been a positive development. People who understand the value of debate also know how to forge compromises with people they hold fundamental disagreements with … and that’s the foundation of a healthy democracy.
But just consider this a preview of the discussion, not a dismissal of Rorty’s points. On first read, he hasn’t convinced me that his approach is correct. However, I do feel that he pretty accurately saw where American democracy was going when he wrote this 35 years ago, even if that’s very disappointing to me.
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