Even if Rorty says that m Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity he wanted to show how things look if we treat the demands of self-creation and human solidarity as equally valid, but forever incommensurable, I do not think he meant that the main engagement of the has to be only with solidarity, and the mam engagement of the ironist only with self-creation. That is why he combined these two ideas in Ins creation of the 'liberal ironist' figure. As we know, Rorty borrows lus use of the word 'liberal' from Judith Shklar, according to whom liberals aie people who think that cruelty is the worst thing we do, but gives Ins own definition of the ironist as someone who faces the contingency of Ins or her own most central beliefs. He does not give us many clues at the beginning of lus book of why cruelty is the worst thing for a liberal. Only at the end of it, when talking about Nabokov's novels, does he give us a hint. A modem is someone who works for a future in winch cruelty will no longer be institutionalized.' The tiling the fears most is not cruelty per se but especially institutionalized cruelty; the cruelty against a group or a person made m name of a credo, an ideology, or a state politics. Tins sort of cruelty involves a majority, a collectivity, society at large.Tins is the cruelty Judith Shklar writes about in Ordinary Vices. There, she explains why seeing morality from the point of view of vices, and not of virtues, was an important step secular humain tail ans like Montaigne and Montesquieu made to get us outside of that divinely-ruled moral universe so that from then on we could put our minds to the common ills we inflict upon one another eveiy day. The intolerance for cruelty, the reason why it is the vice tlie liberals most hate, is that the willful infliction of physical or moral pain on a weaker being means the destraction of one's freedom. The victim's feelings of fear and anguish are responsible for her loss of autonomy and decisionmaking capacity. The evils caused by political and religious conventions such as the ones faced by the victims of the Spaniards in America are some of the past events of cruelty Shklar mentions in her book.For lus part, Rorty descubes a as someone engaged with solidarity and the social demands of justice, and broadens its meaning while associating it with what he calls liberal hope. The hope Rorty is urging us to pay attention to is not only the hope that in the future there will be less social and institutionalized cruelty, but also the hope that there will be less cruelty perpetrated among individuals, especially by those who are obsessively following their selfcreative impulses and who for the sake of art or for the sake of achieving an aesthetic bliss are not at all interested or even touched by the suffering they may cause to others around them. It is interesting to notice that although Roily emphasizes several times that the public and the private sphere are not reduced to one another - in fact, they constitute qmte different aspects of human life - he is nonetheless warning us about the risks of unethical behavior in the obsessive pursuit of autonomy. The private sphere is not a domain free from ethical worries. Certainly, ironists like Nietzsche would defend just the opposite: that society should support the autonomy and creativity of some superior spirits - in Rortyan vocabulary, of some strong poets - even at the cost of the lives and freedom of non-educated poor spirits. Strong poets are not necessarily liberals. The non-liberal strong poets have no interest in watching the world from the point of view of a person in a weak position.However, in order to avoid an oversimplification of the strong poet as an egoistic character isolated from society's search for social progress, we have to clarify Nietzsche's position a bit more. Although definitely not a - in fact for him equality had no relevance at all and freedom was a conquest of few - Nietzsche was a vehement critic of religious morality, of its so-called universality, of the imposition of its dogmas and prohibitions at the cost of our autonomy. …
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Jan 1, 2017
Shlomo Benartzi + 8
Open Access
