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 him. I’ll be taking Chapter Two slower because it’s more difficult work and some of it doesn’t sit well with me.
Rorty starts with the closing lines of a poem by the great, sad 20th century British poet Philip Larkin. His poem Continuing to Live closes this way:
And once you have walked the length of your mind, what
You command is as clear as a lading-list
Anything else must not, for you, be thought
To exist.
And what’s the profit? Only that, in time
We half-identify the blind impress
All our behavings bear, may trace it home.
But to confess, On that green evening when our death begins,
Just what it was, is hardly satisfying,
Since it applied only to one man once,
And that man dying.
Before I get to Rorty’s interpretation, I want to express who this poem reminds me of: Michel de Montaigne. These words sounds to me like something Montaigne could have used to close On Experience. The verses speak to a man who worked hard to catalog himself, and to steer a middle path between philosophy and poetry. But coming to the end, the writer has to wonder what good was it all? Even if he succeeded in fully examining himself and sharing the wisdom of that experience, what good is that wisdom to anyone else without the same experience?
Rorty doesn’t see it the same way. He interprets Larkin as lamenting the fact that his expression of himself dies with him and doesn’t leave behind a broad universal template for how to live, the work of a philosopher:
There we are told that it is “hardly satisfying” to trace home one’s own distinctiveness. This seems to mean that it is hardly satisfying to have become an individual – in the strong sense in which the genius is the paradigm of individuality. Larkin is affecting to despise his own vocation, on the ground that to succeed in it would merely be to have put down on paper something which “applied only to one man once / And that one dying.”
Rorty is juxtaposing Larkin against Frederich Nietzsche and his thoughts about self-overcoming and literary critic Harold Bloom’s thoughts about strong poets, who become something more than pale imitations of other writers and succeed in becoming distinctive. Rorty is doing this, because he doesn’t want to use either Nietzsche or Bloom as a template for how an individual can thrive in a contingent world, without a clear path for artistic heroism or moral goodness.
Why is he trying so hard to avoid these thinkers he relies upon so heavily? It’s because they both seem to care only about the creative artists (or the secular saints) of the world and have no interest or time for the vast majority of humanity that lack the talent or moral standards to occupy that space. Rorty believes that Nietzsche’s mission is too much for most of humanity:
To fail as a poet – and thus, for Nietzsche, to fail as a human being – is to accept somebody else’s description of oneself, to execute a previously prepared program, to write, at most, elegant variations on previously written poems. So the only way to trace home the causes of one’s being as one is would be to tell a story about one’s causes in a new language.
Only poets, Nietzsche suspected, can truly appreciate contingency. The rest of us are doomed to remain philosophers, to insist that there is really only one true lading-list, one true description of the human situation, one universal context of our lives. We are doomed to spend our conscious lives trying to escape from contingency rather than, like the strong poet, acknowledging and appropriating contingency.
This brings us back to Nietzsche’s concept of self overcoming—taking the relevant portion of the past, even your worst and most traumatic moments—and owning them to such a degree that you can proclaim that you willed them to happen. Those who succeed in this quest not only overpower any trauma that could enslaves their lives, it allows the person to give birth to oneself.
But Rorty isn’t going to accept Nietzsche as a practical template for anyone other than the creative soul. I find this disappointing, but perhaps that’s because I’m a creative person. I like to think that Nietzsche’s approach could possibly work for me.
He also rejects the moralistic path, taken up by Kant, because his concept of conscience requires a belief in innate righteousness deep within us. Rorty doesn’t accept that there’s anything innately in us.
As someone who admires Nietzsche’s high standards but tends to live by Kantian ethics, I’m disappointed by Rorty’s rather glib dismissal of both. But what’s genuinely disappointing in this chapter is Rorty’s alternate route to personal contingency—Sigmond Freud. I’m not opposed to using Freud as a model, but I find Rorty’s theory about him very hard to follow.
I’ll begin down this very rocky path in the next essay.
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