On Democratic Experimentalism: Toward a Culture of Love and Non-Violence

Abstract

This essay rethinks democratic experimentalism from an ethical point of view, and look at its potential for the friture by drawing on two key thinkers of the late 20th and early 21st century: Richard Rorty and Luce Irigaray. I explore the experimentalist character in Irigaray's later thought and point to a link in her works, and then dynamize her original theory of sexual difference by pointing to G.H. Mead's symbolic interactionism. Then a revolutionary character of Irigaray's thought is defended by focusing on her interventions into the very core of Western philosophy and in particular its Hegelian heritage. By introducing Rorty into the debate, a pledge is made for a new democratic culture of love and nonviolence as a 'spiritual' mode of democratic experimentalism needed in our times. Finally, I show that Irigaray's and Rorty's thought share an affinity toward intercultural thinking, bearing important consequences for an ethicospiritual project of democratic experimentalism.1.One of the foremost tasks of our age, according to Fred Dallmayr, is to reconnect ethics with politics. This can mean, firstly, to push the liberal conception of politics towards the so-called ethical liberal democracy, and, secondly, to proceed ethically and politically towards a new world culture of non-violence, drawing also on rich intercultural knowledge of our times. For this purpose, Dallmayr invokes Dewey's idea of radical democracy as a conjoint mode of associated living.1 We can agree that it is within this idea of communal life, associated both with new ethical and intercultural visions that any future attempt of introducing ethics into politics (or reconnecting both in a new way) is to be grounded.This essay is an attempt to rethink the issue of democratic experimentalism from an ethical point of view and look at its potential for the future by way of drawing on, in my opinion, two key thinkers of the late 20th and early 21st century: Richard Rorty and Luce Irigaray. It is an attempt to bring both thinkers closer to the rich democratic ideals of Dewey and at the same moment to explore some possible further developments within pragmatism and feminism that would lead to a conceptualization of the idea of democracy as a way toward culture of love and non-violence. Although the original points of departure of Rorty and Irigaray could not differ more (analytical philosophy vs. Lacanian psychoanalysis) there still exists a common ground (especially in their later works) for putting them into a fruitful dialogue. Beyond the fact that both in fact entered the philosophical arena with a book on the role of mirrors and the criticism of the Eye of the mind in the history of Western epistemology and metaphysics (Rorty published his book Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature in 1979, and her seminal Speculum of the Other Woman Irigaray slightly earlier, in 1974), in their later works both Rorty and Irigaray are clearly and passionately committed to one sole goal: they see the progress of sentiments2 as a most useful way of hoping for any future ethics and culture of democracy. Both are also fervent critics of the classical vertical transcendence and pledge for a more sensible and pragmatist horizontal mode of our between-us as a mode of associated living. In the very first lines of one of her later works (Sharing the World), Luce Irigaray defends her philosophical project in a way that heavily resembles Dewey's ideals:When the world corresponds to the transcendence projected by a single subject ... [t]he intuition of the infinite can remain, but the dynamic, indeed the dialectical, relations between time and space somehow or other freeze.... And the proposal of new values is generally contested until the milieu becomes imbued with them and imposes them as an almost eternal reality of truth, after it has become immune to their novelty.3Irigaray defends the way of an infinite, and, we may add, experimentalist character of our becoming. …