Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-8ctnn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T03:47:40.310Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Postmodern Self and The Politics of Liberal Education*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 January 2009

Steven Kautz
Steven Kautz
Affiliation:
Political Science, Emory University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

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 no neutral, 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.

Type
Research Article
Information
Social Philosophy and Policy , Volume 13 , Issue 1 , Winter 1996 , pp. 164 - 189
Copyright
Copyright © Social Philosophy and Policy Foundation 1996

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Rorty, Richard, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. xv, 53, 197.CrossRefGoogle Scholar In Liberalism and Community (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995) – from which this paragraph and the next are taken – I discuss Rorty's liberalism.

2 Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, p. 44; and Rorty, Richard, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 178Google Scholar (quoting Charles Taylor).

3 Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, p. 198; and Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, p. 47 and context.

4 That is, I do not directly challenge Rorty's metaphysical or epistemological irrealism here; the question of whether Rorty's deeper philosophical views are true or not is almost entirely distinct from the question of whether embracing those views will yield illiberal and otherwise destructive psychological and political consequences. This essay addresses only the latter issue. Thus, I do not address the question of whether the absence of foundations necessarily or for philosophical reasons places us in a moral free-fall; rather, I argue that the natural and ordinary psychological consequence of this new liberalism without foundations is such moral confusion.

5 As Rorty admits, he does not quite “argue” that this is so:

“argument” is not the right word. For on my account of intellectual progress as the literalization of selected metaphors, rebutting objections to one's redescriptions of some things will be largely a matter of redescribing other things, trying to outflank the objections by enlarging the scope of one's favorite metaphors. So my strategy will be to try to make the vocabulary in which these objections are phrased look bad, thereby changing the subject, rather than granting the objector his choice of weapons and terrain by meeting his criticisms head-on. (Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, p. 44)

6 Plato, , Republic, trans. Allan, Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1968), 375a–376c.Google Scholar In this respect, the Republic offers a model of a liberal education, an education toward both citizenship (virtue) and philosophy (reason).

7 In “Education without Dogma: Truth, Freedom, and Our Universities,” Dissent, vol. 36, no. 2 (Spring 1989), Rorty distinguishes, as I do here, between conservative and radical understandings of liberal education, but he is a critic of both understandings. (His some-what bloodless name for the conservative aspect of liberal education is “socialization.”) But his account of the two dimensions of liberal education differs from my account in significant ways, some of which are noted below.

8 Rorty, “Education without Dogma,” p. 198.

9 Ibid.

10 Plato, Republic, 359c, 362a.

11 Strauss, Leo, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), p. 3.Google Scholar

12 Walzer, Michael, Interpretation and Social Criticism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987).Google Scholar

13 See Frederick Douglass, “The Constitution of the United States: Is It Pro-Slavery or Anti-Slavery?” (March 26, 1860), “Oration in Memory of Abraham Lincoln” (April 14, 1876), and “The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro” (July 5, 1852), in The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, ed. Foner, Philip S. (New York: International Publishers, 1955).Google Scholar

14 Rorty, “Education without Dogma,” pp. 198–99.

15 Ibid., p. 200.

16 I also discuss this question in my essay “Privacy and Community,” in The Legacy of Rousseau, ed. Nathan, Tarcov and Clifford, Orwin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).Google Scholar

17 Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, pp. xiii, 177, 185.

18 Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, pp. 197–99; Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, pp. 59–60.

19 Rorty, Richard, Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), pp. 165–66Google Scholar; Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, pp. 3, 52.

20 Perhaps I should acknowledge that there are differences between the sort of conservatism that has made its peace with liberalism, which has been at issue here, and the more classical conservatism that preceded liberalism or now opposes it. Whatever these may be, they do not reach the issue here, since even the oldest conservatism affirms that “one's own” community is a “good” community, thereby opening the door to Socratic rationalism. For a notable example of the Socratic strategy in dealing with conservatism that this moral posture invites, see the Polemarchus section in the Republic (331e–336a). But Rorty and the postmodernists slam this door shut.

21 Plato, Republic, 334d.

22 Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, p. 166.

23 Rorty, “Education without Dogma,” p. 204; and Rorty, Richard, “That Old-Time Philosophy,” New Republic, April 4, 1988, p. 28.Google Scholar

24 Rorty, “Education without Dogma,” pp. 200–201; Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, pp. 52, 84–85, 48.

25 Rorty, “Education without Dogma,” p. 201; Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, p. 84. On the ordinary vices of democracy, see Hamilton, Alexander, Madison, James, and Jay, John, The Federalist Papers, ed. Clinton, Rossiter (New York: New American Library, 1961), “Federalist No. 10,” pp. 81–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and “Federalist No. 63,” pp. 384–87.

26 Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, pp. 23–27.

27 Ibid., pp. 26–32.

28 Ibid., p. 31.

29 Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, p. 191; Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, p. 208.

30 Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, pp. 28–29, 33.

31 Ibid., pp. 35–38.

32 Rorty, “Education without Dogma,” pp. 203–4.

33 I should add that Rorty does affirm a connection between the two dimensions of his account of liberal education: in the best cases, “enactments of freedoms” can connect student and teacher

in a relationship that has little to do with socialization but much to do with self-creation. … Unless some such relationships are formed, the students will never realize what democratic institutions are good for: namely, making possible the invention of new forms of human freedom, taking liberties never taken before. (Rorty, “Education without Dogma,” p. 204)

34 See Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, chs. 2 and 4.

35 ibid., pp. 85, 87.

36 Melzer, Arthur M., “Tolerance 101,” New Republic, July 1, 1991, p. 11.Google Scholar

37 Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, pp. 87, 192.

38 Hamilton, Madison, and Jay, The Federalist Papers, “Federalist No. 10,” p. 84.

39 Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, p. 77. For Stephen Douglas, Lincoln's great opponent during the 1850s, see The Lincoln-Douglas Debates, ed. Johannsen, Robert W. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), esp. pp. 22–36.Google Scholar See also Scott v. Sanford, 60 U.S. (19 How.) 393, 407 (1857).

40 Mansfield, Harvey C. Jr, “Democracy and the Great Books,” New Republic, April 4, 1988, p. 35Google Scholar; cf. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, p. xv.

41 Let me add two further remarks here. Regarding conservatism: the postmodern embrace of contingency deprives conservatism of its traditional nobility or dignity, because it lacks a sense of honor – the conviction that we today are given the task of living up to an honorable way of life established by our “founders”; that our tradition embodies something, some grand way of life, that may be lost in time; and that such a loss would be a great tragedy rather than a contingent accident not especially to be lamented. Regarding liberal reformism: the postmodern embrace of contingency takes the wind out of its sails, in two ways. First, it deprives the reformer of a coherent idea of progress and reduces reform to the honorable but limited task of encouraging peoples to live up to existing ideals. Thus, Rorty has often been criticized from the social democratic (and also from the more extreme) left for undermining efforts to sustain more-radical criticism of prevailing principles and practices. In the text, I present a conservative account of democratic self-satisfaction, but the argument can just as easily be made from the left, and has been. It must be admitted that Rorty's own remarks regarding liberal democracy are sometimes wonderfully smug, as in the passage on the North Atlantic democracies cited at the beginning of this essay, and as here:

Indeed, my hunch is that Western social and political thought may have had the last conceptual revolution it needs. J. S. Mill's suggestion that governments devote themselves to optimizing the balance between leaving people's private lives alone and preventing suffering seems to me pretty much the last word. (Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, p. 63)

Second, and on the other hand, there is a hidden pessimism in Rorty's account of the history of social and political “progress” (whatever that might be) that diminishes liberal reformism. What is the point of such political undertakings if “what our future rulers will be like will not be determined by any large necessary truths about human nature and its relation to truth and justice, but by a lot of small contingent facts” (ibid., p. 188)? In any case, Rorty sometimes speaks in a way that diminishes what he calls “social hope,” as in the chapter on Orwell in ibid. (cf. p. 94). But this is a long story.

42 Ibid., p. 177.

43 Ibid.

44 Plato, Republic, 334e–335a.

45 Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, p. 166; Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, p. 33.

46 Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, pp. 161, 165–66, first emphasis added.

47 Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, p. 197.

48 Barber, Benjamin R., The Conquest of Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), p. 179.Google Scholar

49 Bloom, Allan, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), pp. 141–240Google Scholar; Ackerman, Bruce, Social Justice in the Liberal State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), p. 368.Google Scholar

50 Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, p. 73.

51 See, for example, Elshtain, Jean Bethke, “Don't Be Cruel: Reflections on Rortyian Liberalism,” in The Politics of Irony, ed. Conway, Daniel W. and Seery, John Evan (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992)Google Scholar, together with Rorty's “Robustness: A Reply to Jean Bethke Elshtain,” in ibid.; and Bernstein, Richard J., “One Step Forward, Two Steps Backward: Richard Rorty on Liberal Democracy and Philosophy,” Political Theory, vol. 15, no. 4 (November 1987)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, together with Rorty's “Thugs and Theorists: A Reply to Bernstein,” in ibid.

52 Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, p. 45.

53 Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, p. 87; Richard Rorty, “The Philosophy of the Oddball” (review of Stanley Cavell, In Quest of the Ordinary), New Republic, June 19, 1989, p. 41. On the dull but decent folks, see Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, p. 35.

54 Dworkin, Ronald, A Matter of Principle (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), pp. 181–213, 335–72.Google Scholar See note 57 below.

55 Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, p. 38; see the discussion near the end of Section III above. See also Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, pp. 203–10.

56 Taylor, Charles, Multiculturalism and “The Politics of Recognition” (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 25.Google Scholar Consider Taylor's account of the “politics of recognition”: on one hand, “[o]ur moral salvation comes from recovering authentic moral contact with ourselves” (ibid., p. 29); on the other hand, “[d]ue recognition is not just a courtesy we owe people. It is a vital human need” (ibid., p. 26). See, generally, ibid., pp. 25–44.

57 Kautz, Steven, “Liberalism and the Idea of Toleration,” American Journal of Political Science, vol. 37, no. 2 (May 1993).CrossRefGoogle Scholar In that essay, I also put forward a case for toleration that suits the proud individualism of classical liberalism (though I might be inclined to draw the line this side of lunacy and sadism). What is at issue here is not whether toleration is a liberal good, but whether the postmodern liberal mode of thinking about toleration is reasonable.

58 Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, p. 29; and see ibid., pp. 89–92; cf. pp. 141–68. See also the passages cited in note 56.