Because he had arranged an insightful foundation on how an American framework of society can be fashioned by operational theories in which people can live by and prosper together, Richard Rorty has been dubbed as “America’s greatest living philosopher” (Degregori, 1999). In one of his landmark books entitled Achieving Our Country, he developed his views about the self, the difference between public and private life, social solidarity, democratic culture, and leftist politics. One would never fail to see his interest in these topics as merely working out the consequences of his anti-foundationalist epistemology for other areas of philosophy. In this book, Rorty focused on just one aspect of the cultural and intellectual transformation of the American society as he figures the story of the disintegration of “the old alliance between the intellectuals and the unions” that resulted in the entry of “leftists in the academy” in the “cultural politics to supplant real politics”.
At the start of this book, Rorty encapsulated different themes to concretize his views in terms of the promises and failures of American culture. At the beginning of his book, Rorty immediately observed that:
National pride is to countries what self-respect is to individuals: a necessary condition for self-improvement. Too much national pride can produce bellicosity and imperialism, just as excessive self-respect can produce arrogance. But just as too little self-respect makes it difficult for a person to display moral courage, so insufficient national pride makes the energetic and effective debate about national policy unlikely. Emotional involvement with one’s country–feelings of intense shame or of glowing pride aroused by various parts of its history and by different present-day national policies necessary if political deliberation is to be imaginative and productive. Such thinking will probably not occur unless pride outweighs shame.
As we are all aware, there are many things in America’s past that are often taken for granted, especially when the government is delineating policies that presently have a downside in the formation of an equitable society. Aside from that, there are also many features of American social institutions and many aspects of American self-understanding that are causing undeserved shame for the American citizens. In Rorty’s explanation, he definitely took the side of fellow American philosopher John Dewey as he sees hopefulness in conjuring America’s possibilities in the future as he considered Dewey’s proposition that “democracy is the only form of moral and social faith which does not rest upon the idea that experience must be subjected at some point or other to some form of external control: to some ‘authority’ alleged to exist outside the processes of experience”. Another proof of his positive expectations about American society is exemplified after he mentioned Walt Whitman’s claim that “the United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem”. Rorty viewed that the poetical nature of the United States should follow in its commitment to a process of self-creation without being too keen about its purposeful nature.
In order to claim a “paradigmatic democracy,” Rorty recommended that the United States as a country should “pride itself as one in which governments and social institutions exist only for the purpose of making a new sort of individual possible, one who will take nothing as authoritative save free consensus between as diverse a variety of citizens as can possibly be produced”. This means that we, as citizens of the United States, should forge a strong moral identity that is determined by no authority outside of ourselves, just as getting on in the natural or social world requires forgoing the authority of epistemology. We can make our country get rid of some shame we committed in the past if only we resolve our commitment to the promises and opportunities to improve our national character and our history made available to us. In the future, we can achieve this higher moral identity for ourselves. Nonetheless, it is how we can achieve greatness for our country, where our future is made possible on the basis of options opened up by its past. For Rorty, our future country is classless and casteless and contains as much personal liberty for each person as is consistent with the similar liberty of all the others.
Moreover, we would not fail to miss that Rorty’s propositions had been largely drawn out from Friedrich Nietzche’s previous ideas. It was Nietzsche who first tried to get his readers to see that our own identity as humans, our deepest self-understanding, had been entirely shaped by accidental historical and cultural factors that we generally think have no binding significance for us. In his other book, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Rorty evidently offered a key to reconciling Nietzsche’s overtly illiberal thought with the guiding ideals of liberalism lies in restricting his moral perfectionism to the private sphere. This reconciliation is possible, Rorty explained, because Nietzsche’s cranky attacks on liberalism are not linked to his enduring philosophical insights:
Nietzsche often speaks as though he had a social mission as if he had views relevant to public action-distinctly antiliberal views. But, as also in the case of Heidegger, this antiliberalism seems adventitious and idiosyncratic-for the kind of self-creation of which Nietzsche and Heidegger are models seems to have nothing, in particular, to do with questions of social policy (Rorty 1989, p. 99).
Accepting the ideas of Nietzsche, Rorty dwelled on all attempts to rediscover a common human nature or a substantial center to the self, and have thereby undermined any notion that there is something about the human being that is either realized through self-discovery or waiting to be developed through establishing the right sorts of social institutions. It is quite obvious that the pragmatist strand in Rorty’s thoughts had come from Nietzsche as they both paved the way to attach solidarity by taking into consideration our history. In their view, our heightened sense of contingency should lead us to recognize the truth, which our community and we have not necessarily discovered. Rorty revealed that the result of our recognition of the past mistakes in history would bring in greater freedom while increasing solidarity with those like us. There is no essence to the self that constrains possibilities for self-elaboration, and there is no common human nature that necessarily binds us to our fellows when we ground our community’s values.
Rorty qualified that when we start recognizing the role of the past, this will open us to a way of living that sloughs off the shackles of older traditions and make possible a freer, more flexible form of life. Although Rorty thinks like the progressive leftist reformers of the twentieth century, he attempted to do so not by not theorizing too much but through concrete attempts to reform democratic institutions in order to reduce suffering and increase possibilities of developing the American society. As Rorty acclaimed the leftist reformers, he bolstered his assumptions with his own upbringing in a household steeped in leftists and progressive politics. Part of what arouses such outrage among philosophers is Rorty’s willingness to throw out the entire philosophical tradition that defines the work of most mainstream philosophy today. Although critics of Rorty flail his “insouciance” as he radiated contempt for his country, Rorty’s propositions should not be taken lightly as he delivered a biting theoretical endeavor aimed at providing well-grounded and conclusive answers to a set of basic questions handed down by American tradition. As Rorty employed a number of rhetorical strategies to undercut previous notions, he succeeded in making a case for his transformed understanding of how we should think of ourselves. At times, he tries to re-explain his opponent’s position to make it seem either trivially true or outright false. At other times, he opposes a position by arguing for an extreme counterposition, a tactic that seems to suggest that all positions on the topic are somewhat arbitrary.
Ultimately, Rorty assumed that “nobody knows what it would be like to try to be objective when attempting to decide what one’s country really is, what its history really means, any more than when answering the question of who one really is oneself, what one’s individual past really adds up to” (p. 11). While he argues that a “free consensus between as diverse a variety of citizens as can possibly be produced” precludes class and caste divisions, Rorty denies the need to ground this understanding of our possibilities. He suggested justifiable parameters for progressive evolution to give us some control over the directions of our inspirations and reasons to insist on staying critically open ourselves. Indeed, Rorty has set a milestone in refocusing the guidelines of what aspects of modern society should be focused on, and that made him stood out from the rest as he produced value-laden reformist theories that would be applicable to unveil the vision of the future American society.
Works Cited
- Degregori, Thomas R. Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America. Journal of Economic Issues, 33.1(1999): 201-203.
- Rorty, Richard. Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998.
- Rorty, Richard. Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989.