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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.

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

Introduction

Richard Rorty is not only one of the most influential American philosophers of recent decades, but also “arguably the most controversial” among them.Footnote 1 Among his ideas, the separation he postulates between the private and the public realms is certainly one of the most controversial. This separation is the result of a reflection started at the very beginning of his career and which continued for the rest of his life. As he explains in the autobiographical “Trotsky and the Wild Orchids,” he started studying philosophy with the hope of finding “some intellectual or aesthetic framework” to (using an expression he took from Yeats) “hold reality and justice in a single vision,” where by “reality” we are to understand the “private, weird, snobbish, incommunicable interests” that give one's own self-image a sense of uniqueness and autonomy and by “justice” the sense of responsibility to fight for a better world. In the same essay he also explains that it is in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (henceforth CIS)—the book in which this question took central stage—that he came to the conclusion that “there is no need to weave one's personal equivalent of Trotsky and one's personal equivalent of my wild orchids together.”Footnote 2 How relevant this split is for Rorty's thought can be immediately grasped by reflecting on the fact that it concerns the two main motives animating it: the defense of a poeticized, ironic culture of individual self-creativity, on the one hand, and of a liberal and progressive democratic society, on the other. But the conclusion he reached—that these two commitments should be held separate—is quite puzzling. As Richard Bernstein has written, it is often difficult to avoid thinking that, despite all his professed progressivism, ultimately Rorty's political theory does not seem to offer much more than an “apologia for the status quo.”Footnote 3 This sort of disappointment is not uncommon among Rorty's readers, and it is a disappointment many of them associate with the split between the private and the public realms. Actually, over the years, Rorty came to regret the rigidity with which he drew this split in CIS and to recognize that the relation between these two realms is more complex.Footnote 4 Indeed, as we will see, this rigidity contradicts important aspects of his own general vision. Nevertheless it is quite telling that, despite later qualifications and partial concessions, Rorty has never provided an alternative view on this topic as fully elaborated as the one we find in CIS.

Thus, the position Rorty takes in CIS has become, since the book's publication, one of the main targets of his critics. Thomas McCarthy, for instance, has accused Rorty of promoting a “de-theorization of politics” and “de-politicization of philosophy.”Footnote 5 For McCarthy, when Rorty defended the idea that philosophy is only a literary genre, he was relegating it to the private realm, making it completely useless from a political point of view. The problem, seen from a critical-Habermasian perspective, was that if together with philosophy's pretension to truth we also dispense with the idealizing moment implicit in this claim, we run the risk of losing any foothold from which we can question the accepted beliefs and practices of a society.Footnote 6 Nancy Fraser has also attacked Rorty's split between private and public realms, underlining how it reveals an incapacity to find a productive compromise between the Romantic impulse to self-creation and the pragmatic defense of solidarity and thus to clarify how radical redescription can be politically relevant. Such incapacity, according to Fraser, can be seen in the fact that Rorty often seems to reduce all “abnormal” discourses to an overly “aestheticized, narcissized, and bourgeoisified” kind of discourse with no political utility and to depict the public space as an “overly communitarian and solidary” one where no radical change is possible. The case of feminism for her is a clear example of why the private is political and why radical, creative redescriptions are crucial for transforming not only one's own life but also that of the community.Footnote 7 Defenders of agonist democracy such as William Connolly and Chantal Mouffe have pointed out that in Rorty's division between the private and the public all the disrupting and creative power of contestation—in particular, the capacity of irony to uncover the arbitrariness of state power—is relegated to the former realm, with the consequence that in his account we find no real resources for promoting political change.Footnote 8 More recently, a sympathetic scholar of Rorty, Christopher Voparil, has questioned his public/private split for similar reasons, arguing that his “conceptions of politics and public life neither enlist nor require the individual highest energies or most fully developed selves.”Footnote 9 For Voparil, in making self-creation essentially a private matter, Rorty has betrayed one of the most important legacies of pragmatism: the idea that democracy cannot live on abstract principles alone, but should be embodied in a concrete form of life, an ethos, and that the vitality of democracy depends on the capacity of its citizens to reform themselves.Footnote 10

As suggested above, in Rorty the relationship between the “existential” and the “political” is crucial: “self-creation and human solidarity” are his two main commitments—as he says, both “equally valid” and “yet forever incommensurable.”Footnote 11 The highest aspiration of associated life should consist for him precisely in “optimizing the balance between leaving people's private lives alone,” so that they can maximize their possibility of self-creation, and “preventing suffering” by way of enlarging solidarity. Indeed, Rorty thinks that this is the core of political liberalism and the reason for its superiority as a political system.Footnote 12 For him the separation between the goals of self-creation and of fostering human solidarity, the existential and the political, is justified by the fact that between them not only are there no systematic synergies, but there can even be dangerous interferences. Similarly to Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Foucault, Rorty believes that common sense and social conformity always exercise a negative pressure against individual projects of self-creation. But against these thinkers he also argues that the purpose of transforming these projects into political ones is intrinsically authoritarian, because it threatens pluralism. This does not mean, however, that Rorty does not recognize that some kind of positive transaction between the private and the public is not only possible, but also necessary. Political progress, on his account, cannot happen without imaginative individuals who create new and more attractive vocabularies. But he believes that this transaction, and therefore the same progress, ultimately depend on nothing more than “the accidental coincidence of a private obsession with a public need.”Footnote 13 This is the great paradox of his political theory, which has been denounced over and over again by his critics: he identifies in individual creativity a crucial factor for promoting progress, yet he is at the same time unable to offer a more positive account of how to reconcile such creative power with the necessities of society. It is because of this deficiency that, at the end of the day, Rorty's “liberal hope” appears somehow hollow, nothing more than a mere hope.

Rorty's critics are right to argue that the difference between his irreverent and radical critique of philosophy and his somehow uninspiring and conformist political theory depends to an important extent on his incapacity to find a better compromise between the public and the private. At the same time we have to acknowledge that Rorty's position on this question is more complex and that it is possible to find in his writings resources to draw a less dichotomous and more positive view of the relation between these two realms. For instance, in the important essay “Feminism and Pragmatism,” in which Rorty explains the propagation of feminist discourses to the rest of society, we have the impression that, as Nancy Fraser puts it, “the oppositions between the public and the private, the community and the individual, the political and the aesthetic are exploded.”Footnote 14 Some recent interpretations of Rorty have confirmed this more benevolent kind of reading. Tracy Llanera, for instance, has shown how in Rorty's later writings self-creation and solidarity can be seen as complementary, even if distinct, dimensions of a single endeavor to create a larger self.Footnote 15 William Curtis has also tried to recompose Rorty's dichotomy between the private and the public, differentiating his concept of irony into two versions: one, understood as an openness to question one's own values, which should be embraced by all citizens, and a second and more radical version, which is the prerogative of the “strong poets” and whose relevance is mainly private. The political version of irony constitutes for Curtis one of the founding virtues of liberalism, which he defines, with the support of Rorty, as an ethically thick ideology, a form of life that combines the existential and the political.Footnote 16

Like Curtis, many of Rorty's interpreters have focused on his idea of irony. The political relevance of irony dwells essentially in its capacity to question the certainty of our own self-image and thus to foster an “ethos of ‘presumptive generosity’” and openness towards the other.Footnote 17 Irony, however, functions mainly in a negative manner: through a rhetoric of contestation that critically remarks upon the contingent and arbitrary character of hegemonic identities. But in Rorty's philosophy we find not only an apology for irony in line with his postmodern and romantic inclination, but also a defense of a politics of consensus more in line with his liberalism and pragmatism. Such politics is animated by relational faculties such as imagination, empathy, and hermeneutic and rhetorical skills, which allow for the interconnecting of different vocabularies and discourses. This relational dimension is central to Rorty's understanding of rationality, normativity, and also of self-creation.Footnote 18 Combined with his strong emphasis on the power of language, it is a feature that reveals an unexpected proximity of his thought and the ideal of completeness in Renaissance humanism: the ideal that promotes the harmonious development of all the potentialities of the human being. Rorty's humanism, indeed, is something that has not passed unnoticed. But “humanism” is a term renowned for its generality and the analyses of Rorty's humanism so far have remained on a very general level.Footnote 19 This paper instead will explore Rorty's humanism from the specific perspective of a central tradition of humanism: that started by Cicero's and Quintilian's ideal of eloquence, then recovered by the Renaissance Humanists, and which eventually reached its culmination with the “last humanist of the modern world,”Footnote 20 Giambattista Vico. This cultural tradition shares with Rorty the premise of considering the human world as an essentially linguistic artifact and hence the conclusion that individual and collective progress depends principally on linguistic skills—eloquence, or, in Rortyan terminology, the art of redescription—and the hermeneutic capacity to navigate through this linguistic medium. However, differently from Rorty, this tradition sees self-creation and public commitment as two interdependent and complementary tasks. So comparing them will allow us to confront Rorty on his own terms and show why a rigid separation between self-creation and political commitment is untenable according to his own vision—and, in particular, his own humanism.

Rorty's Humanism: The Priority of Language and Politics over Truth and Philosophy

In the preface to the volume in the Library of Living Philosophers series dedicated to Rorty, Randy Auxier writes: “Rorty is a humanist in the sense that one might apply the term to Cicero, Seneca, and Epictetus, the eloquent humanist; or to Pico della Mirandola and Montaigne, the wise humanist; or to Emerson and Dewey, the prudent humanist.”Footnote 21 Eloquence, wisdom, and prudence, Auxier reminds us, are the cardinal virtues of rhetoric. According to him, in Rorty we find all of these virtues, but it is prudence in which he excelled. In what follows we will explore Rorty's humanism, taking into consideration all the dimensions mentioned by Auxier. One of the conclusions we will reach, however, is that it is precisely the virtue of prudence that Rorty's humanism fails to fully endorse.

Probably the most general sense in which Rorty can be considered a humanist has been highlighted by Richard Bernstein. In summing up Rorty's legacy, Bernstein has referred to a “deep and persistent humanism… characteristic of his life and thinking,” clarifying that he considers Rorty a humanist because he “challenged any and all attempts to argue that there are any constraints upon us—except those that come from our fellow human beings.”Footnote 22 The plea to shift the focus from the search for truth to the enhancement of solidarity, indeed, certainly represents Rorty's main theme and the basic reason for the unreserved identification he came to develop with the tradition of pragmatism. As he puts it: “in the end, the pragmatists tell us, what matters is our loyalty to other human beings clinging together against the dark, not our hope of getting things right.”Footnote 23

Such prioritization of the sphere of human affairs is unquestionably also one of the defining features of humanism. It is the meaning that, for instance, Hannah Arendt attributed to Cicero when she defined him a “true humanist” since he believed that “neither the verities of the scientist nor the truth of the philosopher nor the beauty of the artist can be absolutes” and therefore that ultimately “the question of freedom… [is] the decisive one.”Footnote 24 Actually Arendt may be exaggerating a little, because Cicero's stoicism made him believe in the existence of a natural law conceived by divine reason, which should serve as a model for human institutions and morals. In this sense, Rorty could be more properly approximated to the antifoundationalism ante litteram of Protagoras, according to whom human beings are the measure of all things. But the crucial fact here is that for Cicero too, as well as his followers, there was a shift of perspective towards the realm of human affairs and specifically of politics, where freedom rather than truth is what really matters. And precisely as happened for the Sophists, for Cicero too, because in this sphere things occur mainly through language, rhetoric takes central stage.

In Rorty we find a similar connection between antifoundationalism, attention toward the power of language, and the shift from philosophy to politics. First came antifoundationalism and the idea of the power of redescription. In “Trotsky and the Wild Orchids” he recounts how, as a young philosopher, he reached a point when the more philosophy he read, the clearer it became in his mind that finding absolute standpoints—the “fabled place ‘beyond hypotheses,’” which can assure that a justification of a philosophic position is, ultimately, noncircular—was impossible.Footnote 25 The next step consisted in debunking the idea of philosophy as a founding discipline and redescribing it as one of the activities we have to defend our positions, not because closer to truth, but rather because their new vocabularies offer better ways to look at things. The category of truth then came to lose all its aura, being downgraded to a simple “compliment we pay to entities or beliefs that have won their spurs, paid their way, proved themselves useful, and therefore been incorporated into accepted social practices.”Footnote 26

In Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (PMN), Rorty's humanism took the form of this attack on the primacy of epistemology, on which philosophy has traditionally based its claim of authority over the rest of culture. Philosophy as epistemology, he proposed, should be substituted by an alternative way of philosophizing he described as “therapeutic” and “edifying” and whose main purpose would be the substitution of outworn vocabularies with new ones and the creation of connections among different vocabularies.Footnote 27 Philosophy should become something like a “conversational” art that helps to “keep the conversation going.”Footnote 28 And if philosophy were to evolve into a conversational art, then it is clear that it should develop hermeneutical skills. Indeed in PMN Rorty found in Gadamer an important ally. “Hermeneutics,” he wrote, “is the name philosophy should take… once we decide to focus more on how things are said rather than on the possession of truths”; and Bildung, that is, self-transformation through education in order to find “a new and more interested way of expressing ourselves, and thus of coping with the world,” the goal of thinking.Footnote 29 If “edifying” and “therapeutic” philosophies have the task of challenging, through a continuous engagement with “abnormal discourses,” the closure and hypostatization of “normal” ones (those a particular community in a specific moment considers the standards of rational argumentation),Footnote 30 hermeneutics for Gadamer is the art that, starting from the assumption about the universality of the experience of misunderstanding, strives to find a “fusion of horizons.”Footnote 31 They move from similar premises and promote similar political goals.

In his subsequent works Rorty would abandon the strictly metaphilosophical focus of PMN and start to spell out the political implications of his positions.Footnote 32 CIS in particular is a key text in this regard. It is in this work that he offers the most comprehensive profile of his “liberal utopia”: a society whose democratic-liberal institutions and values are understood as the outcome of historical contingencies and defended not by appealing to ultimate philosophical justifications, but rather pragmatically for their capacity to promote solidarity and protect from suffering. Such a society would be a progressive one; one, however, where change is not considered a matter of truth—a category that became almost completely useless—but rather of new vocabularies able to expand solidarity and freedom.Footnote 33 Politics as described in CIS becomes something that depends entirely on the capacity to create and persuade; where persuasion is obtained through aesthetically and practically attractive new discourses, more than through philosophical argumentation. Creating new stories, capable of stimulating our imagination to strengthen solidarity, inspiring our hope for the future and showing new solutions to old problems—this is how Rorty thinks we can promote political change. Politics, in brief, becomes rhetoric, or as he says, literature;Footnote 34 and the capacity to redescribe, the main vehicle of progress.

In ancient rhetoric the technique of redescription (paradiastole) was considered a central aspect of this art, since through it the orator could present reality in different ways, according to what the circumstances require, highlighting one moral aspect rather than another, emphasizing one emotion rather than another.Footnote 35 For such an activity, both the tradition of rhetoric and Rorty individuate in tropes, and above all in metaphors, a particularly important instrument. Quintilian, for one, refers to metaphor (translatio) as “the most beautiful of the tropes”; tropes that are particularly useful for redescription since they permit translating the meaning of a term from its original context to a new one and thus to accomplish “the supremely difficult task of providing a name for everything.”Footnote 36 For Rorty, metaphors are “growing-points of language”: voices from outside the logical space of a particular vocabulary, which enlarge the realm of its possibilities and reweave its beliefs.Footnote 37 They are for him such a primary tool for change that he comes to define “intellectual and moral progress” as “a history of increasingly useful metaphors.”Footnote 38 Recalling the legacy of Romanticism, according to which “anything could be made to look good or bad by being redescribed,” Rorty concludes that “a talent for speaking differently, rather than for arguing well… is the chief instrument of cultural change.”Footnote 39

But in Rorty's works we do not find any real engagement with the tradition of rhetoric. When he talks about what for him is a key advancement in Western culture—“the idea that truth was made rather than found”Footnote 40 —it is to the Romantic tradition, the French Revolution and German Idealism, that he makes reference; not to the tradition of rhetoric or, for instance, to Vico's motto verum et factum convertuntur, which proclaims the convertibility between the true and the created, and his thesis about the poetic origin of civilization. In this respect, it is noteworthy that, after the publication of PMN, Rorty's interest in Gadamer's hermeneutic vanished altogether. As Gadamer came more and more to understand, rhetoric and hermeneutics are complementary arts, one focused on communication and the other on comprehension; and both have an essentially social dimension.Footnote 41 Their neglect, as Danish and Wain suggest, seems to indicate that Rorty came to understand the potential of redescription more in line with the existentialist Romantic-Nietzschean tradition, as a way of making difference and uniqueness proliferate, than in the rhetorical-humanistic sense of using it to create social and political cohesion.Footnote 42

Nevertheless, the assonances between Rorty's vision of a postphilosophical, literary culture and that of the rhetorical-humanistic tradition are strong, being rooted in a common rejection of truth as the proper standard for human affairs and the consideration of the human world as a linguistic artifact.Footnote 43 It is because of this shift from truth to language that, in humanism, rhetoric assumes a central place, as the binding force that keeps all the areas of knowledge together. And something similar occurs in Rorty, in his endorsement of what he describes as an epochal transformation, from the Enlightenment to Romanticism: the “transition from a philosophical to a literary culture.”Footnote 44 It is the passage from a philosophical-scientific idea of knowledge, as a realm divided into specialized fields, all them regulated by philosophy, to a more fluid conception, where philosophy loses its leading position and literature comes to assume the same key function of rhetoric in humanism, as disciplinary frontiers become porous and everything is treated as “text” and considered as “permanent possibilit[y]… for redescription, reinterpretation, manipulation.”Footnote 45 The main character of such a culture, accordingly, is no longer the philosopher, but rather novelists, poets, journalists, filmmakers, or more generally “literary critics.”Footnote 46 All these figures can be included in the portrait of what Rorty calls the “humanistic intellectual.”Footnote 47 The “humanistic intellectuals” are people who “read a lot more books in the hope of becoming a different sort of person” and “in order to enlarge their sense of what is possible and important—either for themselves as individuals or for their society.”Footnote 48 They have a political and moral ascendancy, not thanks to a “special access to moral truth,” but rather because they have “exceptionally large range of acquaintance,” they “have been around” and “have read more books” and thus are “in a better position not to get trapped in a [single] vocabulary” and to understand the needs of those who use different vocabularies from their own.Footnote 49 Their specialty consists in finding analogies between different vocabularies, in “placing books in the context of other books, figures in the context of other figures,” and putting them in dialogue. This is how they make their contribution to society, helping in the task of “reweaving its fabric of beliefs.”Footnote 50

As in traditional philosophy, then, so too in Rorty wisdom plays an essential political and moral role. But his idea of wisdom, or more generally of culture, is of a different sort: one that cannot be understood according to the traditional philosophical metaphor of “depth”—a reason that penetrates beyond the realm of appearance towards real essences—but rather according to the much more humanistic and rhetorical metaphor of “width” or “enlargement.”Footnote 51 It is this metaphor that best reveals the humanistic-rhetorical sensibility of Rorty's thought. Expanding the frontiers of our culture, and therefore our political and moral horizons, becomes for him a matter of creating connections between different discourses: something like “sewing together a very large, elaborate, polychrome quilt.”Footnote 52 This is why in his view reason is displaced by imagination as “the cutting edge of cultural evolution.”Footnote 53 It is through imagination indeed that “our minds gradually [grow] larger and stronger and more interesting by the addition of new options—new candidates for belief and desire.”Footnote 54

The metaphor of “width” used by Rorty for describing his idea of culture echoes the encyclopedic ideal of Cicero, Quintilian, the Humanists, and Vico. Vico, in particular, is emblematic in this respect. He describes his New Science as a work that embraces “all the wisdom, human and divine.”Footnote 55 It is a work that, as he says in the second edition of 1730, has to be read with an “associative mind,” because in such a mind “there is no thing that cannot be associated with innumerable others of other sorts.”Footnote 56 Differently from Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopédie, composed with a dissociative and analytic logic, the New Science embodies a more associative and inclusive encyclopedic ideal.Footnote 57 It is a work that collects an enormous number of facts, subjects, and ideas, whose common nature is discovered through ingenuity and fantasyFootnote 58 and which are made to cohere into a unique story through the art of narration. In extolling such an imaginative work, Vico was following the teachings of the rhetorical-humanistic tradition, which considered imagination a central faculty for inventio (one of the five basic canons of rhetoric) and its associated ars topica: the creative art of finding the “places,” or arguments, from which to start a discourse.Footnote 59 But imagination is also important for rhetoric in a much more immediate political sense, since it is through an imaginative thinking and feeling from the other's point of view that the orator can empathize with the audience and improve her chances of persuading it.Footnote 60 In similar terms, for Rorty imagination is crucial in the process of persuasion, through which we can extend the reach of solidarity. Indeed the possibility of extending our solidarity depends for him not so much on convincing people of the rationality of some moral truths, but rather on a “sentimental education”: a process guided by the capacity of the imagination to establish connections, through which we come to “see strange people as fellow sufferers.”Footnote 61 It is also in this more direct political sense that for Rorty imagination is the key political faculty: in that it educates our feelings, putting us in the place of others through a work of redescription, and hence expanding “the reference of the terms ‘our kind of people’ and ‘people like us.’”Footnote 62

We can see then why the Rortyan “humanistic intellectual” is so much in harmony with the humanistic ideal of the Renaissance man of learning and action and its predecessor, the Ciceronian “perfect orator.” These are ideals that promote the idea that a “wide” rather than a specialist education is important not only for personal improvement but also for engaging with one's own fellow citizens, since it contributes to the development of a capacity to create connections among persons, disciplines, and discourses, and thus to enhance the kind of judgment necessary to deal with the variety of situations that human interaction creates.Footnote 63 A cultivated person, according to this humanistic perspective, is someone who, as Arendt puts it, “knows how to choose his company among men, among things, among thoughts, in the present as well as in the past.”Footnote 64

Rorty's Antihumanism and the Unpersuasiveness of the Public/Private Division

Having unraveled the sense of Rorty's affinity with the rhetorical-humanistic tradition, I can now move on to their main point of difference. The premise from which we should move to deal with this topic is the fact that according to both, becoming proficient in the sort of literary wisdom and the art of redescription we have just explored also means undergoing a fundamental change in one's own self-understanding. One of the implications is that we cannot deal with Rorty's idea of redescription, considering linguistic mastery as a mere instrument through which one can change things by way of redescribing it. Rorty does have a pragmatic understanding of language, according to which what counts is the result, but for him how we understand ourselves depends to a larger extent on how we describe ourselves.Footnote 65 This is why it is more meaningful to compare Rorty with the substantive conception of rhetoric of Cicero, Quintilian, and their followers—according to whom eloquence produces not only an external change but also a modification of the ethos of the speaker—rather than with the merely instrumental one of the Sophists, as Danish does.Footnote 66

A central feature of the rhetorical-humanistic tradition is the idea that personal cultivation and involvement in political life are interdependent endeavors, which find their combination in eloquence. In contrast to the Platonic perspective, this tradition defends the necessity of combining the vita contemplativa with the vita activa, arguing that the latter without the former would be a mere struggle for power and the former without the latter a hollow and sterile endeavor. And what for this tradition can guarantee the union between these private and public endeavors is precisely the art of rhetoric—on the one hand, because eloquence is the medium through which theoretical wisdom can be transmitted to the people and transformed into political action, and on the other, because practicing eloquence means practicing politics and therefore the guarantee of a continuous connection with the concrete problems of the community. The best illustration of such a combination is given in Cicero's and Quintilian's figure of the perfectus orator, which represents an ideal both for the individual and the citizen; an ideal in which outstanding political and ethical virtues are combined with vast knowledge and find their concrete manifestation in eloquence. Eloquence becomes here the highest manifestation of a practical reason, which can be reached only through a transformation of one's own ethos; so that, as Quintilian says, greatness of the spirit is indeed the most important attribute of an orator.Footnote 67

Despite his humanistic sensibility, however, Rorty sees the relationship between self-creation and public commitment in different terms. His most important work, CIS, “tries to show how things look if we drop the demand for a theory which unifies the public and private, and are content to treat the demands of self-creation and of human solidarity as equally valid, yet forever incommensurable.”Footnote 68 It is in this book that he defends in the most elaborate way the idea of the split between them. And, even if over the years Rorty gradually came to soften this position, it is undeniable that the belief about the necessity to create some kind of separation is, as Keith Topper has suggested, a central element of his postmetaphysical liberalism: it is the “way out” he offers from “what he sees as a prototypical case of deadlock in contemporary social and political theory, namely the stalemate regarding the relation between the private and the public.”Footnote 69 The question of how to maintain a proper separation between these two domains is a central question for liberalism. And the separation proposed by Rorty is his solution to respect at the same time his liberal credo of avoiding cruelty and his Romantic-Nietzschean penchant for self-creation.Footnote 70

Rorty introduces the split between the private and the public in CIS by establishing a division between two types of intellectuals: on one hand, ironist, aestheticist, and irrationalist figures such as Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, and Proust; on the other, liberals and public intellectuals such as Mill, Dewey, Habermas, and Orwell. In the first group “the desire for self-creation, for private autonomy dominates,” and with it a strong skepticism for socialization, which they consider intrinsically “antithetical to something deep within” them. They are archetypes of “what private perfection… can be like,” because masters in creating new vocabularies to redescribe themselves. In the second group what stands out is the “desire for a more just and free human community” and the capacity to produce vocabularies of justice and solidarity.Footnote 71 Because of this, the latter group severely reproaches the pursuit of private perfection by the ironists because, mocking universality and consent, they cannot reconcile it with the pursuit of justice. These two different existential orientations are for Rorty not merely different, but incommensurable. Both can be described as linguistic undertakings, but they diverge insofar as they engender different vocabularies: “the vocabulary of self-creation is necessarily private, unshared, unsuited to argument. The vocabulary of justice is necessarily public and shared, a medium for argumentative exchange.”Footnote 72 The liberal intellectual strives to create discourses that strengthen the beliefs that keep together a community, while the master ironist strives to “create the taste by which he will be judged.”Footnote 73

What is important to underline is that the separation between these two spheres of action is for Rorty a practical solution and, as he says, a negative point.Footnote 74 It is the consequence of recognizing a philosophical impossibility, once we accept antifoundationalism and historicism. Indeed, if the vocabularies we speak are the products of historic contingencies and if we human beings are only contingent “centerless webs of beliefs and desires,”Footnote 75 then reconciling self-creation and public commitment under a single general account is impossible, since it would require a metaphysical idea of human nature and an ahistorical vocabulary that are not available.Footnote 76 Politically, keeping these endeavors separate is the only possible solution for Rorty that allows one to pursue both, even if separately. On the other hand, the purpose of unifying them cannot but lead to antidemocratic solutions, as was the case for Hitler's and Mao's totalitarian fantasies about the creation of the new man.Footnote 77

The great inconvenience with such a solution, however, is that it does not provide any conceivable ways, beyond mere chance, in which to employ the creative resources of self-creation for political ends. As we have seen, even if for Rorty the contribution of great individualities is crucial to change society for the better,Footnote 78 the possibility that this could happen is a question of mere chance, or as he says, something that cannot be anticipated since it lies “somewhere down the line.”Footnote 79 This sort of fatalism starkly contrasts with the picture we get from the rhetorical-humanistic tradition, which finds in the figure of the orator and her art the main agent for political change—that able to give birth and maintain a communityFootnote 80 — being a substantial part of such a power the product of the process of self-cultivation. In the Rortyan narrative, instead, creativity is associated almost exclusively with private self-creation, so that it becomes difficult to understand on which resources we can count to promote what he calls an “Emersonian self-creation on a communal scale.”Footnote 81 This difficulty in Rorty's theory can be traced back to the rather elitist and fractured picture of society he sometimes seems to endorse. In CIS, for instance, Rorty reifies society into a stark dichotomy between an elite of brilliant ironists devoted to the creative, but exclusively private, project of self-cultivation and a mass of “commonsensical” citizens, from whom no real political change can be expected.Footnote 82 Even if Rorty describes the separation between the private and the public as a critical response to what he defines as the “Platonic attempt” to unify them, such a division closely echoes that established by Plato between the few and the many.Footnote 83 In the citizens who populate Rorty's liberal society we find no trace of political grandeur. They are, in his words, “bland, calculating, petty, and unheroic” individuals whose daily and too mundane private affairs drain all their energies. “The prevalence of such people,” he recognizes, “may be a reasonable price to pay for political freedom.”Footnote 84 The only figures sketched with heroic traits are those (radical) ironists—intellectuals, artists, and the like—who have the courage and creativity to continuously reinvent themselves.Footnote 85

If we accept Curtis's distinction between a radical and a more moderate sense of irony, we see that only the former possess the creative energies necessary to promote change. Indeed if the more moderate version of irony generates an attitude of open-mindness, it is only the more extreme one that impels one to produce new vocabularies, installing radical and continuous doubts about one's own “final vocabulary” and thus the desire to seek autonomy.Footnote 86 But this more radical version of irony, similarly to Plato's philosophy, has for Rorty a very problematic relation to politics: it stands in perfect opposition to common sense, which he calls “the watchword of those who unselfconsciously describe everything important in terms of the final vocabulary” and who “tak[e] for granted that statements formulated in that final vocabulary suffice to describe and judge the beliefs, actions, and lives of those who employ alternative final vocabularies.”Footnote 87 The radical ironists can challenge the self-image of society, but they cannot provide the rhetoric of hope and empowerment that is necessary to foster solidarity. Indeed, in contrast to the metaphysicians who promise to emancipate their subjects by providing them discourses that uncover and set free their real nature, the ironists cannot make such promises simply because they do not believe that such a nature exists.Footnote 88 Above all, the incapacity of the radical ironists “to take themselves seriously because always aware… of the contingency and fragility of their final vocabularies, and thus of their selves” is difficult to combine with the need of stability and order a community necessarily has.Footnote 89 For Rorty, radical irony engenders a discourse of disruption that posits a permanent risk to the necessary cohesion of society; a discourse, on the other hand, whose positive political contribution is often hampered by a too complex and sophisticated style. Political language for him has to be normally commonsensical, simpleminded, since its aim is to strengthen the common “truths” and sense of solidarity that keep together the community, not emphasizing individual idiosyncrasies, as the ironic language does. It has to be much more like Orwell's 1984 or Animal Farm, than like Proust's À la recherche.

However, as we know, for Rorty, without the acumen of radically ironic redescriptions society cannot gain a critical distance from its own self-image and accept the substitution of its old, solidified vocabularies. What is interesting here is that, confirming once again an unexpected proximity with Plato, for Rorty this crucial public role can be exercised only in disguise, by covering these redescriptions under the mask of a commonsensical and responsible rhetoric to avoid giving the impression of putting the stability and order of society too much at risk.Footnote 90 Rorty invites radical ironists to recognize that their redescriptions could cause harm, since “threatening one's final vocabulary, and thus one's ability to make sense of oneself in one's own terms… suggests that oneself and one's world are futile, obsolete, powerless.”Footnote 91 This is why, more than “commonsensical” citizens, this ironist needs “as much imaginative acquaintance with alternative final vocabularies as possible, not just for her own edification, but in order to understand the actual and possible humiliation of the people who use these alternative final vocabularies.”Footnote 92 That is, radical irony can perform its political function only with the help of imagination, which allows us to see “the similarities between ourselves and people very unlike us”Footnote 93 and therefore to be more empathetic toward people who do not share the same ironic attitude. As we have seen before, indeed, it is precisely because of their exceptionally broad range of acquaintance and familiarity with different vocabularies that the literary critics are taken as moral advisers.Footnote 94 In brief, then, for Rorty irony can play a political role only if used with tact, and accompanied by that imaginative empathy and hermeneutic ability typical of the humanistic intellectual. Its rhetoric of disruption needs to be complemented and tamed by a rhetoric of consensus, necessary to persuade the members of one's own community about the advantages of changing their self-image and, at the same time, the potential new members to join the practices and values of that community.Footnote 95

Now, putting together all these virtues—irony, imagination, the capacity to redescribe, a hermeneutic sensibility—we obtain the outline of what phronesis would be like according to Rorty. Indeed this is how he described his view of philosophy in PMN: as the form of practical reason necessary for having a conversation, which results from a process of “edification” made up of acculturation and practice.Footnote 96 It is thanks to this process of edification through the encounter with a great variety of vocabularies that the “literary critics” and “humanistic intellectuals” can develop the communicative and relational capacities necessary to act politically. This form of phronesis is crucial because it helps us to be ironic, even radically ironic, in public without causing arbitrary harm: it is what develops what Rorty characterizes as the “taste” necessary to mediate between abnormal and normal discourses, as it allows us to see “normal discourse in terms of its own motives” rather than “only from within our own abnormal discourse” and to make us understand when “someone's refusal to adopt our norms… is morally outrageous and when it is something which we must… respect.”Footnote 97

The kind of “taste” Rorty talks about can be associated with one of the most important principles in rhetoric: decorum, a principle that combines ethical and aesthetic considerations to determine the more appropriate discourse according to the circumstances.Footnote 98 The relevance of decorum is particularly evident in Cicero's conception, where it assumes the fundamental role of instructing the orator about how to find the proper combination of philosophical and more principled considerations, on the one hand, and political-practical exigencies on the other.Footnote 99 Translated into Rorty's jargon, this is the principle that instructs us how to employ irony, and particularly its more radical version, for public purposes. The Ciceronian orator, who makes of the combination between self-cultivation and public commitment his main attribute, is a character particularly skilled in such mediation. Cicero describes him as being at the same time able to communicate with the people, through commonsensical vocabularies, and to look beyond common opinion through philosophical insight.Footnote 100 For this reason the orator always remains in an ambiguous position: at center of the public stage, but always with an eye to what is beyond. He is aware that self-cultivation and politics have different and often conflicting exigencies.Footnote 101 So when he speaks in public, he is always careful to disguise his more unconventional views—those inspired by his philosophical training—under the cover of a traditional language (the technique of dissimulatio), precisely as Rorty prescribes.

In Cicero's De oratore, those who lack eloquence and decorum are called “tactless” (ineptus); an attribute which is said to be particularly common among the cultivated Greek people.Footnote 102 The same kind of tactlessness seems to abound also in Rorty's radical ironists, who do not know how to adapt their disruptive discourses of self-creation to the exigencies of political life. Since their specialty consists in creating “the taste by which [they] will be judged,” they have problems in accommodating their discourse to communal norms, as decorum prescribes.Footnote 103 They are exceptionally eloquent in redescribing themselves, but normally quite ineloquent (or inepti) when it comes to politics. They are Romantic geniuses, not Ciceronian orators. Even if they are formed by the culture to which they belong—since their redescriptions cannot but start from the textual resources provided by such cultureFootnote 104 —they are somehow strangers in their own community. They understand themselves through abnormal discourses and do not usually have the capacity to bring their descriptions into dialogue with the normal discourses of society. The possibility that such a fluency could develop at the same time as a kind of practical reason is indeed reduced by Rorty to a question of mere chance, about which there is not much to be said.

This sort of fatalism about the relation between society and some of its most inventive minds not only contrasts with Rorty's progressive view (because moral and political progress for him cannot happen without the creativity of those minds), but also with the fact that he has always admonished those who, in devoting themselves too eagerly to the creative project of self-creation, run the risk of falling away from the rest of society.Footnote 105 At the same time this fatalism seems to disregard the fact that, as Llanera has argued, enlarging one's own sense of identity through a continuous engagement with different vocabularies and imaginative literature is crucial not only for the political goal of expanding solidarity but also for the existential one of self-creation. Both the creation of bridges between different groups and the search of one's own personal autonomy indeed require one to combat what Rorty calls “egotism”: an excessive self-satisfaction and self-confidence that render us incapable of changing and taking other points of view into consideration.Footnote 106

At the Roots of Rorty's Public/Private Division

I want to conclude by suggesting a possible explanation of why Rorty ended up in such a cul-de-sac and thus also a way to overcome it. As we have seen, Rorty refuses to combine the private and the public in a general account, for instance in a conception of phronesis, because this would inevitably imply defending one particular Truth about human nature. Such a defense is for him not only theoretically impossible, once we adopt an antifoundationalist vocabulary, but also politically problematic, since our institutions have the obligation to guarantee pluralism. But is Rorty's conclusion the only one possible? Well, only if we think that the only possible way to combine the public and the private is to provide a comprehensive theory that solves the problem once and for all, rather than through thoroughly contingent, practically oriented, and fuzzy solutions, which can be applied and tested and then continuously reinvented. In this respect, some of Rorty's most acute critics have noticed the paradoxical fact that eventually he remained trapped in a too philosophical antiphilosophical posture, which prevented him from developing a more constructive political theory—one devoted less to the task of deconstructing the primacy of philosophy over politics and more to the task of drawing the consequences of such ideas. People such as Ferrara, Elshtain, Habermas, Bernstein, and Laclau have all in some way suggested that Rorty's thinking is constructed on a series of exclusive dichotomies, in which the position he takes results from a dialectical negation of the opposite view that precludes developing the argument in new directions.Footnote 107

But if the main goal of Rorty's project consists in replacing dialectical argumentation with poetical redescription, then there is nothing to prevent him from creating an account, certainly provisional, multifaceted, or even vague, of how to attempt to establish positive interactions between private self-creation and public commitment without falling into metaphysical presuppositions. Rorty is certainly right in underlining that these two endeavors are animated by different impulses, call for different attitudes, and express themselves in different vocabularies, and in warning that the attempt to combine them could be a threat to pluralism. But at the same time, his account reveals why it is politically and morally very problematic to keep them separate. On the one hand, the radical irony that abounds in the champions of self-creation is an indispensable political tool for questioning hegemonic vocabularies. On the other, this irony can be employed in the public sphere without causing unnecessary harm only with the help of political and relational skills, such as an imaginative capacity to create connections and an ability to persuade. Society needs the radical ironist; and the radical ironist needs political reason in order to be a good citizen.

Keith Topper has underlined that the separation between the private and the public is for Rorty more of a “practical compromise” than a theoretical solution to the problem that could emerge from an attempt to keep them together. By insisting on the impossibility of creating a theoretical framework to combine these two endeavors, he says, Rorty hoped to persuade us to focus on finding practical solutions to accommodate them.Footnote 108 Nevertheless, I think the inflexibility with which Rorty has often defended such idea and his incapacity to explore other alternatives can be explained also by the fact that his reflection on this topic has developed mainly at a theoretical level, through a dialectical inversion of a position he wanted to confute (that self-creation and political commitment are commensurable and can be combined within a general account). In this respect, as Wolin suggests, the idea of the incommensurability between self-creation and political commitment became part of Rorty's “ultimate vocabulary”;Footnote 109 a vocabulary that, according to his ironist credo, he should have attempted to overcome. Indeed, the existence of a tension between these two goals is not something like an ultimate truth, but rather a contingent and concrete fact—certainly, one particularly significant in our modern individualist societies—with political consequences. Rorty himself gave different formulations of their relationship, revealing not only their tension, but also, as we have seen, their interconnection and mutual dependency. Nevertheless, in his work the vocabulary of tension gradually became too literalized, preventing him from developing a new one. This would perhaps have allowed him to formulate a less conformist and uninspiring political theory.

This article has not provided any substantive proposal about how to develop such positive interaction between self-creation and public commitment, beyond reminding us of the way in which the rhetorical-humanistic tradition did so and noting how Rorty came close to this idea but eventually took a different position. Here the point could be made that to revitalize a notion of phronesis in our epoch is an anachronism. In particular, the notion of phronesis—understood as the capacity to link the particular with the universal and specifically with the ultimate aim of living well—seems unfit for Rorty's vocabulary. He regarded the distinction between moral deliberation and prudential calculation as obsolete, because for him Freud's critique of the unified subject has revealed our moral development to be “far more finely textured, far more custom-tailored to our individual case, than the moral vocabulary which the philosophical tradition offered us.”Footnote 110 Nevertheless, it is important to underline that the idea of phronesis we derive from the rhetorical-humanistic tradition is one that pivots around relational, rather more substantive, qualities. As Joy Connolly has recently pointed out, Cicero's figure of the perfect orator is an ideal that “reinvents the process of conceptualizing the good life in terms of communication.”Footnote 111 Connolly offers a compelling interpretation of such an ideal, in line with postmodern and feminist theories of subjectivity, which stresses its intersubjective dimension, bringing to the fore all its contingency and fragility. As we have seen, Rorty endorses a similar kind of communicative phronesis as an essential instrument both for moral and political progress; a phronesis behind which we find a conception of the self “as relational ‘through and through.’”Footnote 112 It is a wider and more imaginative description of this relational self and its interactions with society—one that reveals the positive interactions between self-creation and political commitment—that we would have expected from Rorty.

Footnotes

1 Guignon, Charles and Hiley, David, “Introduction: Richard Rorty and Contemporary Philosophy,” in Richard Rorty, ed. Guignon, Charles and Hiley, David (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 1.

2 Rorty, Richard, “Trotsky and the Wild Orchids,” in Philosophy and Social Hope (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1999), 7–8, 13.

3 Bernstein, Richard J., The New Constellation: The Ethical-Political Horizons of Modernity/Postmodernity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 233.

4 See, e.g., Rorty, Richard, “Response to Daniel Conway,” in Richard Rorty: Critical Dialogues, ed. Festenstein, Matthew and Thompson, Simon (Cambridge: Polity, 2001), 91; Rorty, , Take Care of Freedom and Truth Will Take Care of Itself: Interviews with Richard Rorty, ed. Mendieta, Eduardo (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), 50; Rorty, Richard, Nystrom, Derek, and Puckett, Kent, Against Bosses, Against Oligarchies: A Conversation with Richard Rorty (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm, 2002), 61–64 ; Rorty, , “Reply to J. B. Schneewind,” in The Philosophy of Richard Rorty, ed. Auxier, Randall E. and Hahn, Lewis E. (Chicago: Open Court, 2010), 506; Rorty, “Reply to Raymond D. Boisvert,” in Philosophy of Richard Rorty.

5 McCarthy, Thomas, “Private Irony and Public Decency: Richard Rorty's New Pragmatism,” Critical Inquiry 16 (1990): 366–67.

6 Footnote Ibid., 370. A similar argument can be found in Ferrara, Alessandro, “The Unbearable Seriousness of Irony,” Philosophy & Social Criticism 16 (1990): 81–107 .

7 Fraser, Nancy, “Solidarity or Singularity? Richard Rorty between Romanticism and Technocracy,” Praxis International 8 (1988): 266. For Rorty's response, see Richard Rorty, “Intellectual Autobiography,” in Philosophy of Richard Rorty, 20; Rorty, Nystrom, and Puckett, Against Bosses, Against Oligarchies, 61–62.

8 Ball, Terence et al. ., “Review Symposium on Richard Rorty,” History of the Human Sciences 3 (1990): 101– 22; Mouffe, Chantal, “Deconstruction, Pragmatism and the Politics of Democracy,” in Deconstruction and Pragmatism, ed. Critchley, Simon and Mouffe, Chantal (London: Routledge, 1996), 1–12 .

9 Voparil, Christopher, Richard Rorty: Politics and Vision (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006), 134.

10 Footnote Ibid., 135–43.

11 Rorty, CIS, xv.

12 Footnote Ibid. 63.

13 Footnote Ibid. 37; see also 17.

14 Fraser, Nancy, “From Irony to Prophecy to Politics: A Response to Richard Rorty,” Michigan Quarterly Review 30 (1991): 262; Rorty, Richard, “Feminism and Pragmatism,” in Philosophical Papers, vol. 3, Truth and Progress (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Fraser, however, considered that the positive step Rorty takes in this essay to reconcile his public/private split is still insufficient, since for her his account of the subversive practices of feminist groups is still tainted by a conception of “abnormal discourses” too poeticized, apolitical, and elitist.

15 Llanera, Tracy, “Rethinking Nihilism: Rorty vs. Taylor, Dreyfus and Kelly,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 42, no. 9 (2016): 937–50.

16 Curtis, William M., Defending Rorty: Pragmatism and Liberal Virtue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 96–98 .

17 See, for instance, White, Stephen K., The Ethos of a Late-Modern Citizen (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 128–31.

18 Voparil, Christopher, “Taking Other Human Beings Seriously: Rorty's Ethics of Choice and Responsibility,” Contemporary Pragmatism 11 (2014): 83–102 .

19 Bernstein, Richard J., “Richard Rorty's Deep Humanism,” New Literary History 39, no. 1 (2008): 13–27 ; Auxier, Randall E., preface to The Philosophy of Richard Rorty, ed. Auxier, and Hahn, ; Skowronski, Krzysztof, Values, Valuations, and Axiological Norms in Richard Rorty's Neopragmatism (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015), chap. 3.

20 Giuseppe Toffanin, cited in Rebollo, Maria José, Dios, héroes y hombres: G. Vico, teórico de la educación (Seville: GIHUS–CIV, 2000), 134.

21 Auxier, preface to Philosophy of Richard Rorty, xix.

22 Bernstein, “Richard Rorty's Deep Humanism,” 13, 19.

23 Rorty, Richard, “Pragmatism, Relativism, and Irrationalism,” in Consequences of Pragmatism: Essays, 1972–1980 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 166.

24 Arendt, Hannah, “The Crisis in Culture,” in Between Past and Future (New York: Viking, 1961), 224–25.

25 Rorty, “Trotsky and the Wild Orchids,” 10.

26 Rorty, Richard, “Cultural Politics and the Question of the Existence of God,” in Philosophical Papers, vol. 4, Philosophy as Cultural Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 6–7 .

27 Rorty, Richard, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 12, 360.

28 Footnote Ibid., 372, 378.

29 Footnote Ibid., 359. The penultimate chapter of PMN is entitled “From Epistemology to Hermeneutics,” where the expression “hermeneutics” is taken from Gadamer.

30 Footnote Ibid., 320–21, 360, 377.

31 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, Truth and Method, trans. Weinsheimer, Joel and Marshall, Donald G., rev. ed. (London: Continuum, 1993), 179.

32 Cf. PMN, 7; CIS, xvi.

33 E.g., Rorty, Richard, “Universality and Truth,” in Rorty and His Critics, ed. Brandom, Robert (Cambridge: Blackwell, 2000), 7.

34 Rorty, CIS, 94.

35 On the role of paradiastole in ancient rhetoric see Skinner, Quentin, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), chap. 5.

36 Quintilian, , Institutio oratoria, trans. Butler, H. E. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1920–22), 8.6.4–5, p. 303. Cf. Cicero, Orator, in Brutus and Orator, trans. Hubbell, H. M. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1952), 134. Cicero, however, specified that the success of a metaphor depends on giving the impression of not invading an alien place, but occupying one to which it belongs (Brutus, in Brutus and Orator, 274).

37 Rorty, Richard, “Philosophy as Science, as Metaphor, and as Politics,” in Philosophical Papers, vol. 2, Essays on Heidegger and Others (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 12–13 . Cf. CIS, 44.

38 Rorty, CIS, 9.

39 Footnote Ibid., 7, 73.

40 Footnote Ibid., 3.

41 Gadamer has once defined hermeneutics as the “inversion” of rhetoric (Truth and Method, 188). On Gadamer's views about rhetoric and the humanistic tradition see also ibid., 17ff.; Gadamer, Hans-Georg and Dottori, Riccardo, A Century of Philosophy (New York: Continuum, 2004), 50–65 .

42 Danish, Robert, “The Absence of Rhetorical Theory in Richard Rorty's Linguistic Pragmatism,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 46 (2013): 156–81; Wain, Kenneth, “Strong Poets and Utopia: Rorty's Liberalism, Dewey and Democracy,” Political Studies 41 (1993): 394–407 .

43 It is precisely in these terms that some of the most distinguished scholars of the rhetorical-humanistic tradition have explained the general sense of this movement: Garin, Eugenio, L'Umanesimo italiano: Filosofia e vita civile nel Rinascimento (Bari: Laterza, 1965); Grassi, Ernesto, La filosofia dell'Umanesimo: Un problema epocale (Napoli: Tempi Moderni, 1988); Grassi, Ernesto, Vico e l'Umanesimo (Milano: Guerini, 1988); Fumaroli, Marc, L’Âge de l'éloquence: Rhétorique et “res literaria” de la Renaissance au seuil de l'époque classique (Paris: Albin Michel, 1994).

44 Rorty, Richard, “Philosophy as a Transitional Genre,” in The Rorty Reader, ed. Voparil, Christopher J. and Bernstein, Richard J. (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 477.

45 Richard Rorty, “Nineteenth-Century Idealism and Twentieth-Century Textualism,” in The Rorty Reader, 132.

46 E.g., CIS, 81; Rorty, “Nineteenth-Century Idealism and Twentieth-Century Textualism,” 139–41, 149.

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

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

54 Rorty, Richard, introduction to Philosophical Papers, vol. 1, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 14.

55 Vico, Giambattista, “Autobiografia,” in Opere, ed. Nicolini, Fausto (Milano: Riccardo Ricciardi, 1953), 39.

56 Vico cited in Battistini, Alessandro, “On the Encyclopaedic Structure of the New Science,” New Vico Studies 12 (1994): 28.

57 Footnote Ibid., 39.

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

59 Giambattista Vico, “Scienza Nuova,” in Opere, para. 497–98; Vico, “Autobiografia,” 17–18.

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

61 Rorty, CIS, xvi; cf. 93.

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. 2; Seigel, Jerrold, Rhetoric and Philosophy in Renaissance Humanism: The Union of Eloquence and Wisdom, Petrarch to Valla (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968).

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

69 Topper, Keith, “Richard Rorty, Liberalism and the Politics of Redescription,” American Political Science Review 89, no. 4 (1995): 955.

70 Cf. Curtis, Defending Rorty, 101.

71 Rorty, CIS, xiii–xiv.

72 Footnote 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).

79 Rorty, Take Care of Freedom, 50.

80 E.g. Isocrates, , Antidosis, in Isocrates in Three Volumes, trans. Norlin, G. (London: Heinemann, 1962), 2:253–55; Cicero, De inventione, in De inventione, De optimo genere oratorum, Topica, trans. Hubbell, H. M. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1949), 1.2–3; Cicero, De oratore 1.8, 30–34, 2.124–25, 187, etc.; Quintilian, Institutio oratoria 1.pr.9–10, etc.

81 Richard Rorty, “Truth without Correspondence to Reality,” in Philosophy and Social Hope, 34.

82 Rorty, CIS, 87.

83 Footnote 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 ; and Fraser, “Solidarity or Singularity?”

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

87 Rorty, CIS, 73–74.

88 Footnote Ibid., 90.

89 Footnote Ibid., 73–74.

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 . 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 Footnote 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): 94; Leff, Michael, “Cicero's Pro Murena and the Strong Case for Rhetoric,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 1 (1998): 61–88 ; Michel, Alain, Les rapports de la rhétorique et de la philosophie dans l'oeuvre de Cicéron, 2nd ed. (Louvain: Peeters, 2003), 130–33, 310–18.

100 E.g., Cicero, De oratore 1.12, 16–18, 20–21, 48–70, 160–203, 2.6, 3.54, 72.

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), 322; 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.

112 Mahon, Áine, The Ironist and the Romantic: Reading Richard Rorty and Stanley Cavell (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 133.

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