Rorty’s Virtuous Ambivalence toward Art

Abstract

Richard Rorty sacrifices high art on the altar of freedom, tolerance, and equality, although novelists like Dickens awaken his hope for the greatest possible improvement in our cultural well-being. Essentialist artists and philosophers of misery strike him as loathing ordinary humans and their foibles. His populist aesthetics owes to his belief in pragmatism as redemptive “knowledge about how things really are.” Still, he rejects some progressive works as artistic failures while embracing other art forms that ignore culture altogether. Rorty’s advocacy of art for the common good situates him in an ethical aesthetic tradition imbued with many of the ironies presented by Plato, although in the final analysis his progressive neo-pragmatism safeguards all forms of art.