Category: Rorty

The problem with plowing through a book like “Contingency, Irony and Solidarity” is it’s no fun. The book is all theory all the time and while I enjoy bringing theory into the things I’m writing about, it’s a dry subject on its own. The rest of the chapter about irony and politics seems like a…

Rorty’s next chapter is a juxtaposition of Marcel Proust and Frederich Nietzsche, all about self creation. And it’s also very boring because writing about Proust with the assumption that all of your readers know his work backwards and forwards is ridiculous. Who is Rorty writing for, five people who live in Cambridge? I enjoy writing…

The other half of this chapter for Rorty is about Nietzsche, and these days whenever I come across the name, I think that there can’t possibly be anything new or interesting for me to write about him. Too many writers and philosophers are obsessed with him and at times that has included me. But I…

I forgot for a few days that I was still working on this project. After all, I skipped the chapter on Derrida altogether and then advised everyone to ignore what Rorty says about using Nabokov and Orwell as guides on cruelty, use Montaigne instead. And then I returned to my Montaigne project as if I…

Having set up language as having this power to reshape everything—to the point of creating new human beings—Rorty now comes back to earth to explain the basis of his argument: I begin, in this first chapter, with the philosophy of language because I want to spell out the consequences of my claims that only sentences…

I gave the impression in my last essay that I was done explaining Davidson’s core theory. Not only is that not the case, the most difficult part lies ahead, so my apologies. I’m about to deal with a very thorny issue in communications theory—one where Rorty’s theory is quite controversial—and to fully grasp it, you…

As mentioned in the last essay, this section of Rorty’s book strikes me the wrong way. I understand and appreciate his setup. There is something unattainable about Nietzsche’s self overcoming. And to live a purely Kantian existence feels like following God without God. We can’t all be secular saints and strong poets. Rorty believes there’s…

By Dan Conley I’ve decided to spend my next chunk of blogging time examining the writing of American philosopher Richard Rorty. For those unfamiliar with Rorty (and, I should point out, it’s very hard for me to write his name often without sometimes accidentally writing Rotary,) I suggest staying away from his Wikipedia page and…

Let’s go back to the mid 1980s when Richard Rorty was writing “Contingency, Irony and Solidarity.” At that point in history, Ronald Reagan was in his second term as President. With the exception of Jimmy Carter’s one term in the late 1970s, Republicans had held the White House since 1968. In 1986, the Democrats retook…

I mentioned Rorty’s opening paragraph in my opening essay. Only four pages into “Contingency, Irony and Solidarity,” he feels the need to restate and elaborate on it: What was glimpsed at the end of the eighteenth century was that anything could be made to look good or bad, important or unimportant, useful or useless, by…

How do people discover Internet memes? Do they watch a weekly program that updates the vocabulary of web images? Are there Internet influencers assigned to explaining and popularizing the memes? No. People discover memes and then share them experientially. They come across them, relate in some way, then share, to the point that the meme…

Now that we’ve worked through Rorty’s thoughts on contingent language, it’s time to move on to chapter two, where he examines why individual lives are just as contingent as languages. I have to admit: chapter one came rather easy to me because I have an intuitive understanding of Rorty’s argument and I largely agree with…

All of this examination still leaves the basic question: why is Freud essential to understanding morality, the quest for people to become their best possible selves? Rorty finally gets to this question by dispensing with the alternative models. Descartes keeps the mind in exactly the same place as the ancients and the Christians, as beings…

Moving on to the second section of Rorty’s book, the part about irony, I want to start by pointing out my favorite story that I came across this week, a piece in the Wall Street Journal about the dark humor residents of Tel Aviv, Beirut and Tehran have adopted this summer in the face of…

Shortly after I began my Montaigne Project, I started to question why I was doing it. What was it about Montaigne’s essays and the type of writing they inspired appealed to me, given that I hadn’t previously taken up this style? In this chapter, Rorty has a surprising answer for me: because I’m emulating the…

Returning to chapter two of “Contingency, Irony and Solidarity,” Richard Rorty is making the strong claim that Sigmond Freud has done for morality what revolutionary thinkers like Copernicus, Newton and Darwin did for science. I continued to struggle with his argument. Then I came across this footnote in the text: I have enlarged on this…

Rorty’s next chapter is about Jacques Derrida, who I consider to the be the most tedious, annoying philosopher I’ve ever come across. The chapter is even worse than that, it’s a juxtaposition of Heidegger and Derrida, which I’m in no mood to explore. I’ve read a little Derrida, enough to keep me from reading more….

In the last post, I mentioned Harold Bloom’s New York Times Book Review piece about Freud and noted some similarities between it and this chapter of Rorty’s book. To start this essay, I’d like to point out a major difference between Bloom and Rorty. Bloom, while calling Sigmond Freud the greatest modern writer, has no…

Now let me try to synthesize Proust and Nietzsche in the context of Rorty’s book. I’ve been thinking and writing about Rorty’s thoughts, especially as they related to Nietzsche, for more than 13 years now. I closed my Montaigne Project at the time by examining Michel de Montaigne’s essay On Experience and led off with…

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…