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 being redescribed. What Hegel describes as the process of spirit gradually becoming self-conscious of its intrinsic nature is better described as the process of European linguistic practices changing at a faster and faster rate. The phenomenon Hegel describes is that of more people offering more radical redescriptions of more things than ever before, of young people going through half a dozen spiritual gestalt-switches before reaching adulthood. What the Romantics expressed as the claim that imagination, rather than reason, is the central human faculty was the realization that a talent for speaking differently, rather than for arguing well, is the chief instrument of cultural change.
That line about “half a dozen gestalt-switches before reaching adulthood”—I feel like we’ve had half a dozen gestalt-switches this summer alone. We no longer have to wait for words to redescribe reality, TikTok refreshes our global vernacular on a daily basis. None of this makes Rorty’s book, written in the late 1980s, any less relevant. In fact, his book seems geared to our times.
My favorite documentary of the last 10 years is Adam Curtis’s BBC film “HyperNormalisation.” The opening lines of the film capture the moment so well:
We live in a strange time. Extraordinary events keep happening that undermine the stability of our world … yet those in control seem unable to deal with them, and no one has any vision of a different or a better kind of future.
I think Rorty, who died about 8 years before “HyperNormalisation” was released, would just shrug at that statement. Why would we ever expect to fully understand the world we live in? And as for that vision of a better kind of future:
What political utopians since the French Revolution have sensed is not that an enduring, substratal human nature has been suppressed or repressed by “unnatural” or “irrational” social institutions but rather that changing languages and other social practices may produce human beings of a sort that had never before existed. The German idealists, the French revolutionaries, and the Romantic poets had in common a dim sense that human beings whose language changed so that they no longer spoke of themselves as responsible to nonhuman powers would thereby become a new kind of human beings.
We have old leaders in old institutions trying to govern a world of new human beings. That is why everything feels so out of control. And it should not surprise us that the new feels vaguely incoherent:
Interesting philosophy is rarely an examination of the pros and cons of a thesis. Usually it is, implicitly or explicitly, a contest between an entrenched vocabulary which has become a nuisance and a half-formed new vocabulary which vaguely promises great things.
Rorty saw a way out of this morass. Instead of being endlessly disappointed by our ability to fit new technologies and new ways of thinking into our established vocabulary of the world, we all need to become poets. We need to continually redescribe the world around us:
The method is to redescribe lots and lots of things in new ways, until you have created a pattern of linguistic behavior which will tempt the rising generation to adopt it, thereby causing them to look for appropriate new forms of nonlinguistic behavior, for example, the adoption of new scientific equipment or new social institutions. This sort of philosophy does not work piece by piece, analyzing concept after concept, or testing thesis after thesis. Rather, it works holistically and pragmatically. It says things like “try thinking of it this way” – or more specifically, “try to ignore the apparently futile traditional questions by substituting the following new and possibly interesting questions.” It does not pretend to have a better candidate for doing the same old things which we did when we spoke in the old way. Rather, it suggests that we might want to stop doing those things and do something else. But it does not argue for this suggestion on the basis of antecedent criteria common to the old and the new language games.
Or, to make this a critique of HyperNormalisation, of course the last generation failed. They failed most when they thought they had it all figured out, that there was an end of history, that the market had triumphed over all. But we should not judge their failure as any more destructive as that of the previous generation, that pushed us relentlessly into a terrifying Cold War that nearly annihilated the planet. Or the previous generation that won a World War and ended a depression only after sleepwalking into both, leading to millions of pointless deaths.
All generations write scripts that eventually need to be rewritten. We should hold them accountable for their hubris, but not for their imperfection, because our age will inevitably fail in its own ways too. Our vocabulary will fail us as well. That’s ok. When we need a new tool, we invent a new tool.
This is how Rorty sets up his initial argument. Next, he will turn his focus to the philosophy of language and the work of Donald Davidson.
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