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Richard Rorty's Unfulfilled Humanism and the Public/Private Divide

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 July 2017

Giuseppe Ballacci
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Abstract

Rorty's separation between self-creation and political commitment is at the same time one of the pillars of his political theory and one of its most criticized elements. In this paper I offer a novel criticism of this separation, elaborating a comparison between him and the rhetorical-humanistic tradition of Cicero, Quintilian, the Italian Humanists, and Vico. If many have emphasized the deep humanism of Rorty's thought, still unnoticed is the fact that his version of humanism contradicts a basic tenet of that tradition: the idea that the mastery of communicative skills is key to the development of the person both as individual and citizen. As I will show, Rorty's conclusion about the necessity to neatly separate the two realms is in contradiction not only with that tradition but also with the general scope of his own project and the very humanistic picture he himself draws of culture, society, and the intellectuals.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 79 , Issue 3 , Summer 2017 , pp. 427 - 450
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 2017 

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References

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47 Richard Rorty, “The Humanistic Intellectual: Eleven Theses,” in Philosophy and Social Hope, 127–30.

48 Ibid., 127.

49 Rorty, CIS, 80; Richard Rorty, “Redemption from Egotism: James and Proust as Spiritual Exercises,” in The Rorty Reader, 392–93.

50 Rorty, “Philosophy as Science, as Metaphor, and as Politics,” 18.

51 Richard Rorty, “Ethics without Principles,” in Philosophy and Social Hope, 82; Rorty, “Redemption from Egotism,” 247.

52 Rorty, CIS, 80–81.

53 Ibid., 87. Cf. Richard Rorty, “Philosophy as a Kind of Writing,” in Philosophy and Social Hope, 90.

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58 E.g., Giambattista Vico, “Dell'antichissima sapienza degli italici,” in Opere, 292, 303.

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60 E.g., Cicero, , De oratore, trans. Sutton, E. W. and Rackham, H. (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1942), 2.102CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Quintilian, Institutio oratoria 1.2.30, 6.2.29–31.

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62 Richard Rorty, “Human Rights, Rationality and Sentimentality,” in Truth and Progress, 176.

63 Those who aspire to become good orators and politicians should be “reading and listening to everything, and busying themselves with every fitting pursuit and with general culture” (Cicero, De oratore 1.256, p. 169; see also 1.218, 3.72). Cf. Rorty, PMN, 360.

64 Arendt, “Crisis in Culture,” 226.

65 E.g., Rorty, “Feminism and Pragmatism,” 220; Richard Rorty, “Professionalized Philosophy and Transcendentalist Culture,” in Consequences of Pragmatism, 66.

66 Danish, “Absence of Rhetorical Theory,” 162.

67 Quintilian, Institutio oratoria 12.5.1–2. The ideal based on this comprehensive conception of eloquence proved very influential on the Renaissance Humanists. See, e.g., Garin, L'Umanesimo italiano, 27ff., 94–97; Rice, Eugene, The Renaissance Idea of Wisdom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), chap. 2Google Scholar; Seigel, Jerrold, Rhetoric and Philosophy in Renaissance Humanism: The Union of Eloquence and Wisdom, Petrarch to Valla (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968)Google Scholar.

68 Rorty, CIS, xv. Cf. Rorty, “Trotsky and the Wild Orchids,” 6–8, 13.

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70 Cf. Curtis, Defending Rorty, 101.

71 Rorty, CIS, xiii–xiv.

72 Ibid., xv. Cf. Rorty, “The Humanistic Intellectual,” 127–28.

73 Rorty, CIS, 97.

74 Rorty, Nystrom, and Puckett, Against Bosses, Against Oligarchies, 62–63.

75 Rorty, CIS, 88.

76 E.g., Rorty, introduction to Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, 13; Richard Rorty, “The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy,” in Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, 182.

77 Rorty, CIS, xii, 84ff., 142, 198; Richard Rorty, “Pragmatism as Romantic Polytheism,” in Philosophy as Cultural Politics, 29, 40; Richard Rorty, “Moral Identity and Private Autonomy,” in Essays on Heidegger and Others, 196–97.

78 As he says on one occasion, “we need a constant supply of wild-eyed visionaries to keep coming up with fresh descriptions” since “practice changes only because there are uncommon men and women who suggest how things might be done differently” (“Reply to Raymond D. Boisvert,” 572).

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82 Rorty, CIS, 87.

83 Ibid., xiii–xv; Rorty, “Trotsky and the Wild Orchids,” 12–13.

84 Rorty, “Priority of Democracy to Philosophy,” 190.

85 Cf. White, Ethos of a Late-Modern Citizen, 107. On Rorty's elitism see Wolin, Sheldon S., “Democracy in the Discourse of Postmodernism,” Social Research 57, no. 1 (1990): 5–30 Google Scholar; and Fraser, “Solidarity or Singularity?”

86 Cf. Curtis, Defending Rorty, 96–99.

87 Rorty, CIS, 73–74.

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90 Rorty, “The Humanistic Intellectual,” 127–28. On Rorty's esotericism see Rogers, Melvin, “Rorty's Straussianism; Or, Irony against Democracy,” Contemporary Pragmatism 1 (2004): 95–121 Google Scholar. Despite his concerns about the harm irony could cause to society and its orders, however, Rorty also recommends that “the crust of conventions… should be as superficial as possible” and “the glue which holds society together… as flexible as possible” (Rorty, “Philosophy as Science, as Metaphor, and as Politics,” 18). This ambivalence testifies to the conundrum in Rorty's thought about the relationship between change and order, consensus and critique.

91 Rorty, CIS, 90.

92 Ibid., 93.

93 Rorty, “Human Rights, Rationality and Sentimentality,” 272–73.

94 E.g., Richard Rorty, “Postmodernist Bourgeois Liberalism,” in Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, 201; Richard Rorty, “Justice as a Larger Loyalty,” in Philosophy as Cultural Politics.

95 Rorty, CIS, 48, 60, 84. Rorty's essay “Feminism and Pragmatism” provides one of the most well-elaborated accounts of how, for him, the process through which a society changes its self-image by introducing new vocabularies that come from marginalized groups occurs. Here we can see how Rorty describes the mutual interplay between a rhetoric of difference, necessary for questioning the normal vocabulary of society, and one of consensus, through which the new, extended vocabulary is progressively accepted and normalized. See above, note 14.

96 Rorty, PMN, 360. Cf. Voparil, “Taking Other Human Beings Seriously,” 91.

97 Rorty, PMN, 360, 366, 372. This form of practical reason is what, for instance, makes us realize that the expression “corresponds to how things are” is “an automatic compliment paid to successful normal discourse” that cannot be extended to abnormal discourse. The attempt “to extend this compliment to feats of abnormal discourse” therefore is “a lack of tact” (ibid., 372).

98 E.g., Cicero, Orator, 70 and also 102–6, 108–11, 129–33; De oratore 3.208ff.; Quintilian, Institutio oratoria 6.6.11; Isocrates, Panathenaicus, in Isocrates in Three Volumes, 30.

99 On the importance of decorum in Cicero see, for instance, Kapust, Daniel, “Cicero on Decorum and the Morality of Rhetoric,” European Journal of Political Theory 10 (2011): 94Google Scholar; Leff, Michael, “Cicero's Pro Murena and the Strong Case for Rhetoric,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 1 (1998): 61–88 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Michel, Alain, Les rapports de la rhétorique et de la philosophie dans l'oeuvre de Cicéron, 2nd ed. (Louvain: Peeters, 2003), 130–33, 310–18Google Scholar.

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101 Cicero also distinguishes between two kinds of discourses: one adapted more for philosophical conversation among friends, which commands a more rational and impassioned style (sermo), and another public, aimed at action, interested in concrete questions, emotively charged and with a not-too-complex style (contentio). His ideal orator has to be proficient in both. See Cicero, De officiis, trans. W. Millis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1938), 1.37.132.

102 Cicero, De oratore 2.18–20.

103 Rorty, CIS, 97.

104 Rorty, PMN, 366.

105 His criticism of what he calls the “Foucauldian Left” can be read precisely in this sense: as a reminder to those who think that giving an essential contribution to society occurs by creating more and more sophisticated theories, that in truth they are devoting more to themselves than to society. See, e.g., Rorty, “Nineteenth-Century Idealism and Twentieth-Century Textualism,” 158; Richard Rorty, “A Spectre Is Haunting the Intellectuals: Derrida on Marx,” in Philosophy and Social Hope, 220.

106 Llanera, “Rethinking Nihilism”; Rorty, “Redemption from Egotism.”

107 Ferrara, “Unbearable Seriousness of Irony,” 83, 99–100; Ernesto Laclau, “Deconstruction, Pragmatism, Hegemony,” in Deconstruction and Pragmatism, ed. Critchley and Mouffe, 65; Elshtain, Jean B., Real Politics: At the Center of Everyday Life (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 322Google Scholar; Jürgen Habermas, “Richard Rorty's Pragmatic Turn,” in Rorty and His Critics, 32–33; Bernstein, “Richard Rorty's Deep Humanism,” 25.

108 Topper, “Richard Rorty, Liberalism and the Politics of Redescription,” 956, 962. Cf. Rorty, CIS, xv, 68.

109 Wolin, “Democracy in the Discourse of Postmodernism,” 14.

110 Rorty, CIS, 33.

111 Joy Connolly, The State of Speech: Rhetoric and Political Thought in Ancient Rome (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 139.

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