MC Philosophy

Rorty and the Liberal Ironist

This is the fifth and last entry on Richard Rorty's "Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity", the first is Richard Rorty: Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, the second Rorty and Language, the third Rorty and Truth, the fourth Rorty, Poet and Metaphor.

After showing the positive message that Rorty has proposed, urging self-creation as the only way to be authentic in your time and not get caught continually speaking languages put upon you by others, it is appropriate to qualify the type of "poet" that Rorty supports.  All "poets" are not created equal. 

All of these people broke out of the traditional speak of their time and recreated themselves, seizing their authentic possibilities (to give a Heideggerian term) and changing our language through their realization:

Actually its probably a think tank that did all of the above, but still, he'll get the credit

Created a language for National Socialism and the Final Solution, truly did seize his time and become a unique and self-creating figure

As previously established, recreated himself as a Christian breaking rules of Hollywood to make a deeply religious movie in dead languages

Darwin changed language and the way we think about the world almost as greatly as any person in history.  As a reward, he gets depicted with the ass of a monkey

Liberal Ironist

-As shown, there can be people who fulfill the criteria for being a "poet", but should not be commended, actually they should be demonized through future shifts in language for the changes they implemented (Hitler is now the ultimate standard-bearer for awfulness on a grand scale, so much so that you can't even compare Bush to him).

-Rorty is not shy about proclaiming the type of poet that he believes is most positive, though he is extremely reluctant to defend it in the classic analytic manner. 

-He proposes that in this state of our contingency, the most that can be hoped for is to be a Liberal Ironist.  Lets break this down in the closest thing that Rorty will come to define anything:

Liberal - "somebody who believes that cruelty is the worst thing we do."

Ironist - "someone who fulfills three conditions: (1) she has radical and continuing doubts about the final vocabulary she uses...(2) she realizes that argument phrased in her present vocabulary can neither underwrite nor dissolve these doubts; (3) insofar as she philosophizes about her situation, she does not think that her vocabulary is closer to reality than others, that it is in touch with a power not herself."

Liberal Ironists - people who understand and accept their contingency, realize that there is no truth "out there" in the world, and believe that the only solidarity that humans can find is through the understanding that suffering and humiliation are not very cool.

(Liberal Ironist)

(Liberal Ironist)

(Liberal Ironist)*

*No, I couldn't think of a single famous person who might be a liberal ironist so Hats and Glasses, Smiley, and Salty will have to do.

Cruelty and Solidarity

-The notion that there is no inherent Truth and that our lives are comprised of just contingency-filled events has been examined in earlier entries (see here), but this idea of cruelty as a bad thing is new to us. 

"The liberal ironist just wants our chances or being kind, of avoiding the humiliation of others, to be expanded by redescription.  She thinks that recognition of a common susceptibility to humiliation is the only social bond that is needed...Her sense of human solidarity is based on a sense of a common danger, not on a common possession or a shared power."

-This acknowledgment of humiliation and cruelty as a trait of human solidarity is a Freudian conception.  In this time, we have come to accept, through Freudian terms, that humiliation is a common human trait and should not be propagated through the act of cruelty.  It is important to note that there is no analytic defense for humiliation to have such an elevated status as our sole example of solidarity, for that would be playing back into the hands of analytic and metaphysical philosophers. 

(Much like our Press Secretary eluding tough questions because he won't play into the hands of our liberal media.  Instead of intelligent answers to anything, he pleases with magic tricks)

-It is only contingency that brought humiliation to the forefront and to ask "why" is an outdated metaphysical question.

"It is because liberals have come to expect philosophy to do a certain job - namely, answering questions like "Why not be cruel?" and "Why be kind?" - and they feel that any philosophy which refuses this assignment must be heartless.  But that expectation is a result of a metaphysical upbringing,  If we could get rid of the expectation, liberals would not ask ironist philosophy to do a job which it cannot do, and which it defines as unable to do."
 

Final Language

-As you may have noticed in the definition of "Ironist", Rorty mentioned "doubts about the final vocabulary." Final Vocabulary is that vocabulary that a person chooses as an end, the type of language that they feel comfortable with and consider holds truth in some way. 

Pope John Paul II probably had a final vocabulary with a lot of "God" in it

Freddie Mercury probably had a final vocabulary with a lot of "cock" in it

-Its all the same.  Its the state, defined by your beliefs in truth, that you come to accept and resist change to. 

"They are the words in which we tell, sometimes prospectively and sometimes retrospectively, the story of our lives...Those words are as far as he can go with language; beyond them there is only helpless passivity or a resort to force."

-Rorty believes that to accept a final vocabulary is to stop creating yourself, to stop using newer and newer metaphors, to give up any hope of recreation.  These people will never be Ironists, they will always be Theorists.  Instead of accepting the freedom of a contingent life, they are stuck with fallacious beliefs of greater powers ("God" or "Cock"), rooted in their final vocabulary.

Death of Philosophy

-It is through the distinction between Theorists and Ironist where Rorty proposes that philosophy is a redundant practice and literature the avenue towards future renewal. 

-The great philosophers of the 20th century, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Hegel all became too head-strong when they tried to establish a logical end, a greater reason, or a final vocabulary.

"Europe (Nietzsche), Spirit (Hegel), and Being (Heidegger) are not just accumulations of contingencies, products of chance encounters...This invention of a larger-than-self hero, in terms of whose career they define the point of their own, is what sets Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger...theorists rather than novelists: people who are looking at something large, rather than constructing something small." 

-It is in this hubris, or trying to imagine a greater Being, or a noble Europe where philosophers have run astray.  Whenever they try to create overarching concepts, they are doing nothing but over-stepping.  This is why Rorty was a philosophical rebel.  He came out of the classic analytic philosophy but has now come out and claimed that the practice is useless. 

-Instead, Rorty thinks that literature is the avenue where we can truly express contingency and create our new languages.  It is something not dogmatically tied down to old concepts and practices.  He supports people like Proust, Orwell, and Nabokov, writers who broke bounds but not with new overarching concepts, instead with liberal ironists thoughts and new vocabularies.

MC - Thus, I give you Richard Rorty, take him or leave him.   

 

Rorty, Poet and Metaphor

This is the fourth entry on Rorty's "Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity", the first is Richard Rorty: Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, the second Rorty and Language, the third Rorty and Truth.

-In the previous entries on Rorty, his view of the integral nature of language and the fallacy of Truth in the world have been detailed.  He painted a picture that looks rather bleak for the progression of human-kind.  Since there is no Truth to be found in the world and the only basis for our beliefs are contingency-filled language-games, it seems like he might just play devil's advocate to everything people hold sacred without offering a positive notion for the purpose of our lives. 

Though the devil may be behind those menacing eyes, Rorty is certainly not just a party-ruiner; he offers a positive journey for humans, one of self-creation and continual recreation. 

-After we have de-divinized the world through understanding the fallacy of Truth in the world, we can come to fully realize what it is to be a successful human being.  In this regard, Rorty follows the lead of Nietzsche and Heidegger that self-creation should be the aim of all people.  In its bare form, this entails creating yourself through breaking the bounds of the language-game you find yourself in, thus evolving language and creating a sphere for yourself that is original and progressive. 

"But in abandoning the traditional notion of truth, Nietzsche did not abandon the idea of discovering the causes or our being what we are.  He did not give up the idea that an individual might track home the blind impress all his behavings bore.  He only rejected the idea that this tracking was a process of discovery.  In his view, in achieving this sort of self-knowledge we are not coming to know a truth which was out there (or in here) all the time.  Rather, he saw self-knowledge as self-creation.  The process of coming to know oneself, confronting one's contingency, tracking one's causes home, is identical with the process of inventing a new language - that is, of thinking up some new metaphors."

-To think about this process of self-creation and renewal, we could turn to the mighty Phoenix
New ideas arise through the ashes of an old language being reborn into an original language that can explain the new evolution of thought

Or we can look to contemporary people who have re-created themselves, by seizing their contingency and making anew their life's work. 
Nietzsche, Heidegger and Rorty would call these people "Poets". 

"To fail as a poet - and thus, for Nietzsche, to fail as a human being - is to accept somebody else's description of oneself, to execute a previously prepared program, to write, at most, elegant variations on previously written poems.  So the only way to trace home the causes of one's being as one is would be to tell a story about one's causes in a new language." 

-Our friend Mr. Gibson, the Poet, chose Aramaic for the new language in his self-regeneration.   Gibson is obviously an ironic figure to put in this place considering his belief in Jesus our Lord and Savior.  Gibson doesn't believe in Contingency, and therefore won't fit wholly correctly with Rorty's Liberal Ironist (as we'll see in the next entry), but he can be considered a self-creator and therefore a "Poet".

Gibson started here,
A badass youth who ruled Hollywood through partying and his winning smile

Then he re-created himself into a person who evolved how movies can be done/used
In the ridiculously gruesome "Passion of the Christ", Gibson broke the rules of movie-making, creating a movie wholly in dead languages (even trying to not have sub-titles at first) that depicted a specific religion so openly and blatantly that it couldn't be spun Hollywood-style into a broader moral context that just had subtle undertones of religion (i.e. every Disney movie). 

-From a broader context, it could be said that Gibson recognized his place in the world, as a movie-maker/famous person extraordinaire, accepted his place, and used it as a platform to launch a new genre, or in Rorty-speak, a new language. 

-That or he's just a religious nut compelled to make us all feel uncomfortable watching his movies and trying less and less subtly to blame Jews for killing God reincarnate on earth.  I don't really care.  But I do know that from now on, at least in the immediate future, the word "Passion" won't just remind us of the latest Cinemax movie we saw, but will bring religious connotations with it.  He changed our language. 

Metaphor

-It is important to understand how Rorty proposes that Languages change, it's through the power of metaphor.  He tries to show us a "picture of intellectual and moral progress as a history of increasingly useful metaphors rather than of increasing understanding of how things really are." 

-Because there is no real definition behind the words we use to make sentences, the context in which we think of these words is ever-changing.  This is done through the use of newer and newer metaphors used to describe the world or state of affairs.  You can see this all over the place:

"War on Terror"

"Steroid Era"

"Green Revolution"

-All of these started as metaphors used by someone to describe a new phenomena they observed.  The metaphor was nothing more than a new way to describe something, maybe in jest, but was adopted to become the defining terminology for that phenomena.  This is language evolving through useful metaphors, or as Nietzsche described truth as "a mobile army of metaphors."

-Rorty treats metaphors as things which have no truth-conditional within our language-game.  They are not open to being denied or supported, but rather are just an original way to think of something, a phrase thrown out there, maybe for shits and giggles, maybe for a definite purpose.

"Uttering a sentence without a fixed place in a language game is, as positivists rightly have said, to utter something which is neither true nor false - something which is not, in Ian Hacking's terms, a "truth-value candidate."  This is because it is a sentence which one cannot confirm or disconfirm, argue for or against.  One can only savor it or spit it out.  But this is not to say that it may not, in time, become a truth-value candidate.  If it is savored rather than spat out, the sentence may be repeated, caught up, bandied about.  Then it will gradually require a habitual use, a familiar place in the language-game.  It will thereby have ceased to be a metaphor...it will have become what most sentences of our language are, a dead metaphor."

-Think about these common sentences or phrases:

"Shits and giggles"
"The grass is always greener..."
"When in Rome..."
"Go fuck yourself"
"Would you be so kind as to pass the salt shaker"

-All of these entail language that has been evolved to fit the idea we give to them.  There is no innate meaning to all of the words, that as a whole would make the sentence work in our language, rather, the meaning is determined by the acquisition of certain metaphors into our language-game that have become so commonplace as to cease being metaphors. 

-It is the Poet, the self-creator, the successful human being, who doesn't sit by and live their life according to the established language-game of the time.  Instead, they use newer and newer metaphors to further define the world, to re-create the way we think of the world.  They can affirm that they live by the Nietzschian adage, "Thus I willed it."  The Poet is the creator of themself within history, not the acceptor of the life put in front of them. 

They can say that they defined themself through continually re-creating the game, whether literature, movies, or whatever.  For Mel, it was the metaphor of connecting Jesus with "Passion" and large amounts of blood; For Heidegger, it was taking analytic philosophy into a study of "Being"; For Joyce, it was establishing "stream of consciousness" and ridiculously difficult allusions as a literature staple. 

-Did you come up with a new metaphor today? 

Next Up: Rorty and the Liberal Ironist
 

Rorty and Truth

This is the third entry on Rorty's "Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity", the first is Richard Rorty: Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, the second Rorty and Language.

Truth in Language

-Maybe the most important idea that Rorty proposes is the delegation of any type of truth (or Truth) to be merely language-based.  That is, how we think of truth, or a fact, as in "the grass is green", is only true in so far as it is a truth-conditional in language.  At this stage in our language, we have decided to assign a certain word to this general color,
"green".  So, in our language, "the grass is green" is a true statement in that it satisfies what we consider to be true within the use of our language.  That is what is meant by a "truth-conditional", it is only conditionally true within our language  (Actually, the "conditional" refers to the "If A then B" conditionality of the statement). But to say that "this color is green" is not a fact, in the Truth sense.  This is just one very specific variation of what we call a "color" that looks like what we usually assign to the word "green".  The color we see is not, in its essence, green because that is just a term humans invented to describe it. 

-This may seem like a worthless distinction.  Yes, there are many green colors (the one pictured being especially awful) but who really cares if there is no Truth in the fact that that color is "green", it basically affects my life zero, because in all aspects of my life, that color is green and to say otherwise is just semantic philosophy bullshit.  Now, if you don't mind, I'll get back to watching "Lost"

-The person who believes the above may be correct, but the idea that there is no Truth in the world, only in language conditionals actually hits very deep into most people's belief systems.

-Let's take this obvious example, "it is true that the earth revolves around the sun".  For Rorty and others of his same mold, like Donald Davidson,  there is no more Truth in this statement than in the pronouncement by Cheney

that Saddam was "a man who provided safe harbor and sanctuary to terrorists for years" and "provided safe harbor and sanctuary as well for Al Qaeda".  (He then went on to demonstrate the vice that he had put on a detainee's balls to get him to confess to this).

-Obviously, within our language-game the former statement is true and the latter bullshit, but neither is anymore True than the other in the sense of how the world really is. 

"The world does not speak.  Only we do.  The world can, once we have programmed ourselves with a language, cause us to hold beliefs.  But it cannot propose a language for us to speak." 

-Thus every "true" thing we say of the world, like "the earth revolves around the sun" is not True in the world, for the world does not have any truth conditionals, those are only things that humans have invented in their use of language to solidify beliefs. 

"But if we could ever become reconciled to the idea that most of reality is indifferent to our descriptions of it, and that the human self is created by the use of a vocabulary...then we should at last have assimilated what was true in the Romantic idea that truth is made rather than found.  What is true about this claim is just that languages are made rather than found, and that truth is a property of linguistic entities, of sentences."

"Truth is not out there".  Rorty says that the world just is, there is no Reason behind nature, there is no God running the show, there is no underlying scientific formula that will find the nature of nature. 

-Since the time of the ancients, humans have been misled into a search for Truth or Meaning.  All of this has been only a further distraction into belief structures based on something that doesn't exist and never can be found.  Any time you have thought about the "meaning" of something in your life, or in the world, or in the universe, it has been nothing more than an illusion brought upon by truth conditionals formulated by humans. 

-Rorty is adamant that this process of stripping away meaning from the world is necessary in our de-divination of the world, since as Nietzsche so rightly put it, "God is dead".  The notion of Truth or Meaning in the world is a consequence of the establishment of God or the Divine as somehow present in the world.

"To drop the idea of languages as representations, and to be thoroughly Wittgensteinian in our approach to language, would be to de-divinize the world.  Only if we do that can we fully accept the argument I offered earlier - the argument that since truth is a property of sentences, since sentences are dependent for their existence upon vocabularies, and since vocabularies are made by human beings, so are truths." 

Thus there was no chord that David played that pleased the Lord.  In fact, it was precisely David thinking he could please something that didn't exist with an earthly convention, like a lyre, that sent humans on the wrong track for millenia. 

Science

-It seems that this could all be true for colloquial words that we use and vain attempts to use words to find meaning in world, but surely with the amazing advances in the hard sciences, surely in the amazing work of Newton and Einstein there was a discovery of Truth not only in the world, but in the universe.  Wrong. 

-Rorty proposes that the hard sciences are nothing more that further descriptions we have retrospectively assigned to phenomena in another effort to find Meaning or Truth. 

"great scientists invent descriptions of the world which are useful for purposes of prediction and controlling what happens, just as poets and political thinkers invent other descriptions of it for other purposes.  But there is no sense in which any of these descriptions is an accurate representation of the way the world is in itself." 

basically equals "a man who provided safe harbor and sanctuary to terrorists for years". 

-These are both just ways to describe the world.  The difference is that one works in every and all instances, and the other, well...

"Further, we must resist the temptation to think that the redescriptions of reality offered by contemporary physical or biological sciences are somehow closer to 'the things themselves', less 'mind-dependent', than the redescriptions of history offered by contemporary culture criticism." 

-Thus the attack on Truth is hard to ignore by just watching a hot new TV series (note the use of the word "hot", further example of a language evolving).  It digs deep into the foundations of people's belief structures, and if Rorty is to be believed, then the vision most have of the world needs a heavy reevaluation. 

After all if this person can change the only thing that gives us truth in the world, then we have some SERIOUS thinking to do. 

Next Up:  Rorty, Poet and Metaphor

Rorty and Language

This is the second entry on Rorty's "Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity", the first is Richard Rorty: Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. 

Definitions: There will be no definitions, for they are nothing but contingency-filled descriptions of words.  Words have no static and stable definition, their meaning is to be determined through their usage in the respective language you speak. 

Language

-In order to fully understand Rorty's proposed revolution of thought, we must know how he believes language functions. 

-Rorty believes in the Wittgenstein /Davidson  conception of language, that is, as an inseparable part of our experience with the world. 

There is no way to look at this picture and just have an "idea" of it.  When this picture is viewed, the language "cleavage" or "unnecessarily ample and exposed breasts" necessarily accompany it.  They are inseparable, language is how we experience the world.

-To quote Davidson, "We should realize that we have abandoned not only the ordinary notion of language, but we have erased the boundary between knowing a language and knowing our way around the world generally...We must give up the idea of a clearly defined shared structure which language users master and then apply to cases...We should give up the attempt to illuminate how we communicate by appeal to conventions."

To say this body is too perfect for words is a falsity.  For there is no way for us to experience such a sight without words.  You might get sensory data that is wordless, but to make sense of it in our minds, language must be present. 

-Therefore language is no longer in the traditional mold of a "medium" or just used as "representations" of ideas.   This goes completely against Locke's conception of language as an abstracted generality of a sensory idea. 

-To recap Locke's representation view on language, using familiar analogies:

We see this animal,
and choose a word to represent that image or "idea" that the animal gives us.  We call it a "donkey".  Then we can abstract further and assign that representative word, "donkey" to other images that don't exactly fit the descriptions, but we see fit to apply to, like this

- In this method there is an actual definition of "donkey".  For Davidson/Wittgenstein/Rorty, there is no true definition of "donkey", there is only the conceived method in which the language we currently abide by uses the word in sentences.  It is thus possible for the term "donkey" to be altered in its usage over time such that its meaning is wholly different

"Dude, did you see the donkeys on that chick? Holy shit."  Thus, the term "donkey" is not inherently connected to a specific idea, it is a word, used in sentences that is malleable in its usage. 

-This is where we find that famous Wittgenstein statement that "meaning is use".  The meaning of words and sentences we relay is not inherent in the words/sentences we say, but wholly contingent on the assumed meaning.  Thus, speaking a language is the affirmation of the meanings usually applied, or as Davidson puts it, "we tend to converge on passing theories".  This is why Wittgenstein used the term "language-game" to elucidate how language affects us.  To use language is nothing more than adhering to certain rules in your culture's "language-game".

- We are stuck in "language-games" that not only determine how we use words, but also outline the ideas we can have. 

-Normally we think of language working thusly (note that I can use "thusly" in this language, because since you understand my meaning its all good):

That was much like Locke.  For Davidson/Rorty/Wittgenstein it looks more like this:

- This doesn't mean that people can't come up with original ideas, as this seems it would imply.  Instead, people must create a new language first, in order to apply their new ideas into a coherent idea. 

"The craftsman typically knows what job he needs to do before picking or inventing tools with which to do it.  By contrast, someone like Galileo, Yeats, or Hegel is typically unable to make clear exactly what it is that he wants to do before developing the language in which he succeed in doing it.  His new vocabulary makes possible, for the first time, a formulation of its own purpose." 

-Think about what that statement implies for how our minds work.  It is actually the evolution of language and not the evolution of ideas that pushes thought forward.  Because ideas are inescapable from language, and it is language that describes the world in newer and newer ways, it is the changing of language that sets the stage for changes in thought. 

That's about as heady for me as it is for this dude

-When Darwin came up with his "theory", in order to fully realize his new idea, the language of "natural selection", "survival of the fittest" and "evolution" had to be realized for him. 

  Homework - Come up with an instance where a completely new idea didn't need the invention of new language to illustrate it.

Next Up - Rorty and Truth 

Richard Rorty: Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity

Richard Rorty (10/4/31 - )

-American anti-philosopher born in New York
-Was part of the American philosophical institution before revolting against the prospects of philosophy
-Some view him as the Benedict Arnold of American Philosophy, because he's a traitor and looks rather similar (see here)
Positions Defended - Pragmatism, Power of Literary Critique, Atheism, Liberal Irony (see below)
Those Who Are Definitely Wrong - Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, Locke, Spinoza, Sartre, Blackburn, Kierkegaard, Most all other Western Philosophers and probably most Eastern ones, Scientists, Anyone searching for meaning, Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus,  and almost everyone else. 
Work to be Discussed - Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity

-As you can tell from the intenseness of his portrait above, Rorty is a revolutionary, of sorts.  Despite his apparent ferocity, he isn't a gun-wielding revolutionary, he's a revolutionary of thought. 

-Rorty has been proposing the utter uselessness and baselessness of traditional analytic philosophy.  He attacks the very foundation of trying to find Truth in the world.  This means any kind of truth, scientific, moral, philosophical, psychological, religious, anything. 

So when Galileo discovered proof that the earth revolved around the sun, he wasn't finding any truth in the world he was merely coming up with a new way of describing the world for our purposes.

When Bush says that we are in a "War on Terror", he isn't telling us a truth about the state of our world, but describing a new way for us to look at and think about the world.  And when he says "God Bless America" he's just a fucking liar, cause there is no God. 

-It is important to understand the basis for Rorty's statement that "truth is not out there".  Rorty believes that the idea of finding meaning or truth in the world is an old fallacy.  Any truth that we know, like "there is one apple", is only a truth in a linguistic sense.  That is, it is not a truth about what is actually in the world, but a truth condition fashioned by language. 

-Lets hear it from him, "To say that truth is not out there is simply to say that where there are no sentences there is no truth, that sentences are elements of human languages, and that human languages are human creations.  Truth cannot be out there - cannot exist independently of the human mind - because sentences cannot so exist, or be out there.  The world is out there, but descriptions of the world are not.  Only descriptions of the world can be true of false.  The world on its own - unaided by the describing activities of human beings - cannot." 

-Take THAT, human race. 

There is no more truth to be found in a sunrise, whether spiritual or physical, than there is moral truth to be found in a Jerry Springer episode:
Any moral/sociological explanation of this scene is as valid as a scientific explanation of light reflecting in a sunset.  They are both just new ways of us to describe the world through our contingently chosen language. 

-Here it is important to differentiate truth from description. 
We see this and say that its a "red apple, with a glossy finish of pesticides and wax that will give me cancer in the future."  All of these things are just verbal tools for describing the object, they do not get at the essence of what the object really is.  There is no ultimate interpretation of what an apple is, only newer and newer ways for us to think about and label this thing.

Liberal Irony

-What Rorty does do, besides tear down the essential beliefs that get people out of bed in the morning, is propose that we are all just products of contingencies, and should accept that fact, to become free from the binds of God/Being/Meaning. 

-The terms shall be discussed with more detail later,  but the Liberal Ironist is basically somebody who understands and accepts that their life and language is a contingency, and that the best thing they can do is to prevent themselves and others from suffering and humiliation.

-Of course, there is no Truth behind the fact that suffering and humiliation is bad, its just what contingency has brought about as important in our time. 

At one time, whipping the shit out of slaves was what contingency brought upon us.
At other times our language and contingency-filled past made man-boy love an acceptable and fruitful practice.

-Obviously these are examples used to show a type of moral outrage about Rorty's ideas, but Rorty has been shit upon enough.  If you seriously consider his ideas, as we will in the next few entries, they contain many insightful points, and reveal the inadequacy of many types of thought and never-ending strive for truth and meaning. 

-Rorty will be a central philosopher in the future, as Steve Erickson proposed to me some time ago.  Much to Rorty's delight, his work will, probably more than it has already, be used as a stepping stone for others to create new ideas based on a language he helped solidify.  Just as he would want it. 

Next Up: Rorty and Language