Liberal Ironist Research Articles

Rorty on Science and Politics

Rorty on Science and Politics In my paper I will prove my overall thesis that Rorty consistently enforces his politically saturated liberal ironic standpoint in the fields of science and politics from his "Contingency" book (1989). As a neopragmatist thinker he gives priority to politics in the sense of a liberal democracy over everything else. Even philosophy as "cultural politics" serves this purpose. He did not want to create a detailed political philosophy, but the main motive of his philosophy is political. He is charged with complacency, relativism and misinterpreting traditional pragmatism, but I show that this is mistaken. Rorty offers "only" a non-systematic, but logical and permanently developed interpretation of our present world on the basis of knowledge he appropriated and improved by building bridges between pragmatism, analytic and continental philosophy. I will analyze briefly in the first part his neo-pragmatist thoughts on science in connection with his political views. In the second part I will interpret Rorty as a liberal ironist who regards almost everything as contingent, except democracy. He outlines a liberal utopia that means first of all a just society in a Rawlsian sense, but he also develops his idea further in a neo-pragmatic way.

Postmodern Liberal Literature: Richard Rorty's “Liberal Ironists”

Summary This article explores the notion of postmodern liberal literature through the filter of the political theory of Richard Rorty. It is generally assumed that the rival claims to validity of liberalism and postmodernism are mutually contradictory and therefore irreconcilable. Rorty's work, however, is characterised by the attempt to accommodate the most valuable insights of postmodern theory within the political ideals of liberalism. For Rorty, it is perfectly possible to be both a political liberal and a postmodern sceptic, or “ironist”, at the same time: hence his coinage of the term “liberal ironist”. Rorty argues further that the figure of the liberal ironist is best represented by writers of literature, in the narrow sense of poets, dramatists, and especially novelists. Ironist writers are, in Rorty's view, primarily interested in the private goals of self-creation and redescription within the context of an acute awareness of the contingency of their belief system. Nevertheless, in so far as their work also concerns itself imaginatively with issues of human pain and suffering, it will have utility within the public sphere of political action, and so influence moral progress. Even if Rorty's ambitious project is ultimately unsuccessful as a political theory per se, many of the insights which he provides may nonetheless be shown to have great value and significance for contemporary cultural and literary studies. To demonstrate this, the article will consider a number of writers, from a variety of backgrounds, whose work displays the characteristics, on Rorty's terms, of liberal ironism.

Richard Rorty: pragmatism and political liberalism

Chapter 1 Introduction Chapter 2 Chapter 1. Pragmatism as Anti-representationalism Chapter 3 Chapter 2. Pragmatism and Imagination Chapter 4 Chapter 3. The Public Side of Pragmatism Chapter 5 Chapter 4. The Liberal Ironist Chapter 6 Conclusion

Suffering in Silence— Or in English

Suffering in Silence—or in English Ian Almond (bio) Ramu Nagappan. Speaking Havoc: Social Suffering and South Asian Narratives. Seattle: U of Washington P, 2005. vii + 246 pp. Amin Malak. Muslim Narratives and the Discourse of English. Al bany: State U of New York P, 2005. ix + 180 pp. Ramu Nagappan's informative book poses what seems, at first, to be a fairly standard question: how do South Asian writers confront, represent, and ultimately work out the question of social suffering? What follows is an illuminating series of approaches to three texts—Amitav Ghosh's The Shadow Lines, Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance, Salman Rushdie's Shame—as well as the short stories of S. H. Manto and the films of the Tamil director Maniratnam. A pressing concern to show how the mechanisms of texts such as The Shadow Lines and A Fine Balance close down avenues of hope and agency, either by ending in "benign self-absorption" or a "downward spiral . . . [of] overheated pessimism," also tries to show how fictional reenactments of social trauma, even in such moments of political resignation and impotency, paraodoxically supply not only relief, but a new series of choices for the reader (61, 198). The metaphor of "decompensation" that Nagappan uses to examine this Janus-like function of the text really deserves to be foregrounded in the title, and not buried away in the middle of a paragraph on page 149: [End Page 578] The physiological term "decompensation" can refer to the failure of the heart muscle to maintain adequate blood circulation; in the case of fiction, the term denotes a phenomenon marked by the failure of language to circulate, to signify meaning in the face of catastrophe. The result is that Speaking Havoc is a book interested, more than anything else, in the failure of language; how texts (and films) fail to represent trauma, how they fail mimetically to do justice to injustice, to resolve the causes of the social suffering they observe, and the positive effects such textual/cinematic failure has for its audience. This Rortyian emphasis on the constructive function of irony as an awareness of such failure (Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity is cited several times) inevitably explains why writers such as Rushdie and Ghosh do so well in the book—and why a more conventional text of social realism such as A Fine Balance is seen as depending on nothing more complicated than a "Dickensian mode of exaggeration" (62). Nevertheless, what follows are some very pertinent readings of all five figures. Ghosh's book is presented to us as a text that "charges [us] with representing the world" and therefore discovers a new kind of post-metaphysical responsibility—the role, says Nagappan, of Richard Rorty's liberal ironist, a "paradoxical, self-critical stance" (44, 54). In the very act of decompensation, The Shadow Lines compensates with the narrating of this failure. The Shadow Lines's absence of closure, in other words, its recourse to solipsism and "benign self-absorption," is itself a way of dealing with the impossibility of its task. Unsurprisingly, this level of redemptive decompensation (if you will forgive the oxymoron) at its most sophisticated is not extended to A Fine Balance, "a novel which tries to provide aesthetic compensation for trauma" (64). There is an impatience in Nagappan's treatment of Mistry that at times seems unfair—even though the critic correctly observes a recurring anxiety of impotence and emasculation in the novel, and even if it is difficult not to agree with the "narrative of unremitting tragedy" that always runs the risk of transforming into melodrama. If Ghosh's dismantling/reassembling of metaphysical consolation is explicit, A Fine Balance reiterates this gesture, one can't help feeling, on a more basic, unreflective level—no Joycean examination of mimesis, then, just a good Dickensian yarn. The work of S. H. Manto is read, perhaps a touch predictably, as "explod[ing] the key terms 'territory' and 'nation' that underlay . . . the construction of national consciousness," (88) although Nagappan provides an interesting semibiographical interpretation of Manto's outsider status in South Asian literature (transforming the Forties' writer, it has to be said, into a kind of Liberal-Ironist-Before...

Reconsideration of Rorty's View of the Liberal Ironist and its Implications for Postmodern Civic Education

Reconsideration of Rorty's View of the Liberal Ironist and its Implications for Postmodern Civic Education

Decentering music: a critique of contemporary musical research

As a work of cultural criticism that recalls the concerns of Foucault, Hayden White, Zizek, and others Decentering Music examines the struggle for the authority to speak about music at a time when the humanities are in crisis. By linking the institutions that support musical research, including professional associations and universities, to complex historical changes such as globalization and the commodification of knowledge, Korsyn undertakes a critique of musical scholarship as an institutional discourse, while contributing to a general theory of disciplinary structures that goes beyond the limits of any single field. In asking a number of fundamental questions about the models through which disciplinary objects in music are constructed, Korsyn suggests unexpected relationships between works of musical scholarship and the cultural networks in which they participate. Thus David Lewin's theory of musical perceptions is compared to Richard Rorty's concept of the liberal ironist, Susan McClary's feminist narrative of music history is juxtaposed with T.S. Eliot's dissociation of sensibility, and Steven Feld's work in recording the music of the Kaluli people is compared to the treatment of ambient sound in contemporary cinema. Developing a framework for interpretation in dialogue with a number of poststructuralist writers, Korsyn goes far beyond applying their thought to the analysis of music; by showing the cultural dilemmas to which their work responds, Korsyn suggests how musical research already participates in these ideas. Rather than impose any single method, Decentering Music empowers readers to choose for themselves by interrogating their own values and ideological commitments, exploring the enabling conditions for statements about music. By demonstrating the complicity of opposing positions and challenging readers to reexamine their own values, Decentering Music will surely provoke debate, while appealing to readers in a variety of fields, and to anyone concerned about the crisis in the humanities.

'Hold the Being'

In this paper (which deliberately imitates Rorty's style), I take issue with the plea for liberalism advocated in his Contingency, Irony and Solidarity by turning a number of his own arguments against him. In particular, I show how Rorty's tendency to think of the 'liberal ironist' as the 'hero' of that book rhetorically obfuscates that the trust of his own argument would rather seem to point to a 'non-ironic non-liberal' indi vidual in the role of the hero. I suggest that what has prevented Rorty from coming to such a conclusion himself, is not just his predilection for 'liberal ism', but also a confusion between two notions of ethnocentrism - to which he pointed himself in later writings, without, however, drawing the necessary consequences.

Where Epistemology Meets Ecology: Can Environmental News Reporting Survive Postmodernism?

Several scholars have recently proposed that Richard Rorty's (1979, 1982, 1989, 1991, 1998) liberal ironist epistemology might be appropriate for journalists. In this article, I investigate the ramifications of such a move. I suggest that once Rorty's thought is placed in the context of the abandonment of logical positivism, it is seen as a rather extreme reaction in regards to both ontology and axiology. One way of making such extremity evident is by investigating the applicability of Rorty's ideas to the specific field of environmental journalism. Although Rorty claims that liberal irony will help us learn to be less cruel to each other, we should thoroughly question whether his ideas will help us know our impact on the natural world or make positive changes based on that knowledge. I conclude by suggesting that before abandoning logical positivism in favor of postmodernism, the journalistic community should seriously consider alternative epistemologies.

The Liberal Ironist, Ethics and International Relations Theory

The Liberal Ironist, Ethics and International Relations Theory

The Postmodern Self and The Politics of Liberal Education

Richard Rorty is one of the principal architects of a new way of thinking about liberalism. He calls his way “liberal ironism”: it is a postmodern liberalism, without Enlightenment rationalism, without the hopeless and finally enervating aspiration to discover an a historical philosophical foundation (“natural rights”) for liberal principles and practices. The postmodern liberal ironist, unlike the classical liberal rationalist, “faces up to the contingency of his or her own most central beliefs and desires,” says Rorty, including the characteristic liberal belief that “cruelty is the worst thing we do.” Such postmodern liberals frankly admit the apparently unhappy consequence of that essential “contingency,” that “there is noneutral, noncircular way to defend” liberal ways, no good argument to deploy against “Nazi and Marxist enemies of liberalism”; but no such argument is needed, says Rorty, since loyalty to one's own community is morality enough, even where that loyalty is without foundation. Here, I begin with a few words about Rorty's postmodern liberalism, as preface to a discussion of the effects of postmodern doctrines on liberal moral psychology.

Voices in Conversation: Philosophy and Politics in the Work of Michael Oakeshott

It is commonplace to suggest that Michael Oakeshott maintained a strict separation of philosophy from politics throughout his work. I challenge this prevailing view by suggesting that Oakeshott abandoned his early idealism on which the strict separation was based. I argue instead that from the 1940s onward, Oakeshott cautiously conceived of a more contingent and open relationship for theory and practice. This relationship is best typified by his adoption of the image of voices in conversation. Finally, I suggest that this understanding of Oakeshott's skeptical and ironical character lends support to Richard Rorty's appropriations of Oakeshott as a fellow liberal ironist.

Can an Historicist Sustain a Diehard Commitment to Liberal Democracy? The Case of Rorty's Liberal Ironist‘

Can an Historicist Sustain a Diehard Commitment to Liberal Democracy? The Case of Rorty's Liberal Ironist‘

Neoliberalism in Rorty and Forster

Developed at length in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1990), Rorty's idea of the illuminates the most characteristic act of the central character and liberal heroine of Howards End, Margaret Schlegel, who responds to the downtrodden Leonard Bast's climactic death by, as Rorty might write, redescribing it; in Margaret's hands, petty modern Squalor becomes a rich Tragedy (261).2 An absurd death having punctuated an ethical travesty, the harsh ironies thus redoubling, Margaret nonetheless refuses to neglect her social responsibility as a liberal humanist. Which is to say, Margaret behaves as Rorty's liberal ironist would behave. A Rortian reading reveals two luminous details that Forster's more suspicious critics tend to overlook: first, that Margaret does not perceive a tragedy but rather wills one-she turns tragedian knowing well that no tragedy has occurred; second, that

Bookmarks

Bookmarks To say that Richard Rorty has written a book attempting to provide a theoretical grounding for a liberal society would, of course, be exacdy wrong, for it is his purpose in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge University Press, $34.50) to show how such a society—a "liberal utopia," in fact—would look without any philosophical foundations. The hero of his postmodernist Utopian narrative is the "liberal ironist." Rorty borrowsJudith Shklar's definition of liberals as people who view cruelty as "the worst thing we do." But liberal ironists aren't just sentimental, for unlike "liberal metaphysicians," they have the strength to face up to the contingency, the arbitrary historical conditions of their "own most central thoughts and beliefs." They're able to dispense with the illusion of an ultimate metaphysical truth about the Self, Knowledge, or the Good which might usefully validate science, politics, and morals. For Rorty, the history of science, politics, and morals is a history of successive redescriptions, and the more redescriptions and re-redescriptions we experience , the less hold any of them has on us. He remarks that "it somehow became possible, toward the end of the nineteenth century, to take the activity of redescription more lighdy than it had ever been taken before ... to see redescription as a tool rather than a claim to have discovered essence . . . The One Right Description." Thus the spirit of"playfulness and irony" characteristic ofthe liberal ironist, who's not only againstcruelty, but all in favor ofdemocracy, free speech, and education. However, the ironist realizes that philosophy will never be able to discover or legislate—via "arguments"—the reasons why we ought to avoid cruelty or put an end to it where we can. The ironist is content to see his language, conscience, morality, and highest hopes "as contingent products, as literalization ofwhat once were accidentally produced metaphors." It is such a "self-identity which suits one for citizenship" in Rorty's liberal utopia. There is an instructive section where Rorty plays himself off against Foucault ("an ironist who is unwilling to be a liberal") and Habermas ("a liberal who is unwilling to be an ironist"). Though Rorty has much in common with the latter, he faults Habermas for succumbing to the metaphysician's temptation of imagining that "universal validity" might result from undistorted, domination-free communication. For Rorty, a liberal society "is one which is content to call 'true' (or 'right' or just') whatever the outcome of undistorted communication hap232 Bookmarks233 pens to be, whatever view wins in a free and open encounter." Hence Rorty's concern for political freedom: if we take care of it, "truth and goodness will take care of themselves." Private self-creation, the development and salvation of the individual, is at odds with the public demand for human solidarity, but this contradiction, according to Rorty, is one we must face without hoping to overcome. While advocating a skeptical, alienated detachment for intellectuals, he admits that he "cannot imagine a culture which socialized its youth in such a way as to make them continually dubious] about their own process of socialization. Irony seems inherendy a private matter." In fact, most nonintellectuals still believe either in a religion or in "some form of Enlightenment rationalism" of the varieties Rorty rejects. However, he holds that a "postmetaphysical culture seems to me no more impossible than a postreligious one, and equally desirable." So ifthe philosophers, anyway the metaphysical ones, can't tell us much that's important or that makes a difference in life, then who can? Well, there are ironist theorists, such as Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida, and Rorty presents frank, realistic, and yet dioroughly appreciative sketches of all three. In one of his more drastic claims, he calls Heidegger "the greatest theoretical imagination of his time (outside the natural sciences); he achieved the sublimity he attempted." Then Rorty immediately adds, "But this does not prevent his being entirely useless to people who do not share his associations." It seems on the reckless side to praise the theoretical powers of a thinker whose appeal is then admitted to rest on exciting readers, like Rorty, who share his associations. This makes his thought more poetry for...