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Rorty QOTD @rortyquotes.bsky.social · 16h

The vocabulary I propose, one which revolves around notions of metaphor and self-creation rather than around notions of truth, rationality, and moral obligation, is better suited to the preservation and progress of democratic societies.
CIS p.44
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#Metaphor

In this chapter I shall claim that the institutions and culture of liberal society would be better served by a vocabulary of moral and political reflection which avoids the distinctions I have listed than by a vocabulary which preserves them. I shall try to show that the vocabulary of Enlightenment rationalism, although it was essential to the beginnings of liberal democracy, has become an impediment to the preservation and progress of democratic societies. I shall claim that the vocabulary I adumbrated in the first two chapters, one which revolves around notions of metaphor and self-creation rather than around notions of truth, rationality, and moral obligation, is better suited for this purpose.

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Rorty QOTD @rortyquotes.bsky.social · 1d

Every human life is the working out of a sophisticated idiosyncratic fantasy, and no such working out gets completed before death interrupts. It cannot get completed because there is nothing to complete, there is only a web of relations to be rewoven.
CIS p.42
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#StrongPoet

To sum up, I suggest that the best way to understand the pathos of finitude which Larkin invokes is to interpret it not as the failure to achieve what philosophy hoped to achieve—something nonidiosyncratic, atemporal, and universal—but as the realization that at a certain point one has to trust to the good will of those who will live other lives and write other poems. Nabokov built his best book, Pale Fire, around the phrase "Man's life as commentary to abstruse unfinished poem." That phrase serves both as a summary of Freud's claim that every human life is the working out of a sophisticated idiosyncratic fantasy, and as a reminder that no such working out gets completed before death interrupts. It cannot get completed because there is nothing to complete, there is only a web of relations to be rewoven, a web which time lengthens every day.

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Rorty QOTD @rortyquotes.bsky.social · 2d

There can be no fully Nietzschean lives, lives which are pure action rather than reaction—no lives which are not largely parasitical on an un-redescribed past and dependent on the charity of as yet unborn generations.
CIS p.42
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#StrongPoet

Shifting from the written poem to the life-as-poem, one may say that there can be no fully Nietzschean lives, lives which are pure action rather than reaction—no lives which are not largely parasitical on an un-redescribed past and dependent on the charity of as yet unborn generations. There is no stronger claim even the strongest poet can make than the one Keats made—that he "would be among the English poets," construing "among them" in a Bloomian way as "in the midst of them," future poets living out of Keat's pockets as he lived out of those of his precursors. Analogously, there is no stronger claim which even the superman can make than that his differences from the past, inevitably minor and marginal as they are, will nevertheless be carried over into the future—that his metaphoric redescriptions of small parts of the past will be among the future's stock of literal truths.

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Rorty QOTD @rortyquotes.bsky.social · 4d

Freud let us see sexual perversion, extreme cruelty & manic delusion as the private poem of the pervert, the sadist, or the lunatic. He lets us see what moral philosophy describes as extreme, inhuman, and unnatural, as continuous with our own activity.
CIS p.38
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#PublicVsPrivate

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Rorty QOTD @rortyquotes.bsky.social · 5d

Poetic, artistic, philosophical, scientific, or political progress results from the accidental coincidence of a private obsession with a public need.
'Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity' p.37
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#PublicVsPrivate

To sum up, poetic, artistic, philosophical, scientific, or political progress results from the accidental coincidence of a private obsession with a public need. Strong poetry, commonsense morality, revolutionary morality, normal science, revolutionary science, and the sort of fantasy which is intelligible to only one person, are all, from a Freudian point of view, different ways of dealing with blind impresses—or, more precisely, ways of dealing with different blind impresses: impresses which may be unique to an individual or common to the members of some historically conditioned community. None of these strategies is privileged over others in the sense of expressing human nature better. No such strategy is more or less human than any other, any more than the pen is more truly a tool than the butcher's knife, or the hybridized orchid less a flower than the wild rose.

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Rorty QOTD @rortyquotes.bsky.social · 6d

Freud suggests that we condemn ourselves for failure to break free of that past rather than for failure to live up to universal standards.
'Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity' p.33
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#SelfCreation

Freud suggests that we need to return to the particular—to see particular present situations and options as similar to or different from particular past actions or events. He thinks that only if we catch hold of some crucial idiosyncratic contingencies in our past shall we be able to make something worthwhile out of ourselves, to create present selves whom we can respect. He taught us to interpret what we are doing, or thinking of doing, in terms of, for example, our past reaction to particular authority-figures, or in terms of constellations of behavior which were forced upon us in infancy. He suggested that we praise ourselves by weaving idiosyncratic narratives—case histories, as it were—of our success in self-creation, our ability to break free from an idiosyncratic past. He suggests that we condemn ourselves for failure to break free of that past rather than for failure to live up to universal standards.

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Rorty QOTD @rortyquotes.bsky.social · 7d

Every human life is a poem—every such life as an attempt to clothe itself in its own metaphors.
'Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity' p.35
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#Metaphor

But there is a difference between Nietzsche and Freud which my description of Freud's view of the moral man as decent but dull does not capture. Freud shows us that if we look inside the bien-pensant conformist, if we get him on the couch, we will find that he was only dull on the surface. For Freud, nobody is dull through and through, for there is no such thing as a dull unconscious. What makes Freud more useful and more plausible than Nietzsche is that he does not relegate the vast majority of humanity to the status of dying animals. For Freud's account of unconscious fantasy shows us how to see every human life as a poem—or, more exactly, every human life not so racked by pain as to be unable to learn a language nor so immersed in toil as to have no leisure in which to generate a self-description. He sees every such life as an attempt to clothe itself in its own metaphors. As Philip Rieff puts it, "Freud democratized genius by giving everyone a creative unconscious."

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Rorty QOTD @rortyquotes.bsky.social · 8d

After reading Freud we shall see neither Bloom's strong poet nor Kant's dutiful fulfiller of universal obligations as paradigmatic. For Freud himself eschewed the very idea of a paradigm human being.
'Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity' p.35
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#Antiessentialism

But Freud gives us a way of looking at human beings which helps us evade the choice. After reading Freud we shall see neither Bloom's strong poet nor Kant's dutiful fulfiller of universal obligations as paradigmatic. For Freud himself eschewed the very idea of a paradigm human being. He does not see humanity as a natural kind with an intrinsic nature, an intrinsic set of powers to be developed or left undeveloped. By breaking with both Kant's residual Platonism and Nietzsche's inverted Platonism, he lets us see both Nietzsche's superman and Kant's common moral consciousness as exemplifying two out of many forms of adaptation, two out of many strategies for coping with the contingencies of one's upbringing, of coming to terms with a blind impress. There is much to be said for both. Each has advantages and disadvantages. Decent people are often rather dull. Great wits are sure to madness near allied.

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Contingently i-RON-ick @ironick.bsky.social · 9d

Alternatively, a doctored photo can be considered an "imperfect" record of a record. It's analogous to monks imperfectly copying texts. The new text/record is an unintentionally "doctored" copy of the original.

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Rorty QOTD @rortyquotes.bsky.social · 9d

My mother used to tell me, with great pride, that when I was seven I had had the honor of serving little sandwiches to the guests at a Halloween party attended both by John Dewey and by Carlo Tresca, the Italian anarchist leader.
'Achieving Our Country' p.61
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#Holidays

Another such circle was made up of the so-called New York Intellectuals. As a teenager, I believed every anti-Stalinist word that Sidney Hook and Lionel Trilling published in Partisan Review—partly, perhaps, because I had been bounced on their knees as a baby. My mother used to tell me, with great pride, that when I was seven I had had the honor of serving little sandwiches to the guests at a Halloween party attended both by John Dewey and by Carlo Tresca, the Italian anarchist leader who was assassinated a few years later. That same party, I have since discovered, was attended not only by the Hooks and the Trillings, but by Whittaker Chambers. Chambers had just broken with the Communist Party and was desperately afraid of being liquidated by Stalin's hit men. Another guest was Suzanne La Follette, to whom Dewey had entrusted the files of the Commission of Inquiry into the Moscow Trials. These files disappeared when her apartment was burgled, presumably by the Soviet agents.

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Contingently i-RON-ick @ironick.bsky.social · 9d

Couldn't a doctored photo be understood as a mixed record? The undoctored part is an older record of a scene captured by a camera. The doctored part is a newer record of the computations that manipulated certain pixels of the older record.

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Rorty QOTD @rortyquotes.bsky.social · 13d

The course of history is a long, swelling, increasingly polyphonic poem leading up to nothing save itself. Upon extinction, "human nature's total message" will not be a set of propositions, but of vocabularies—the more, and the more various, the better.
'Rorty & Pragmatism' p.33
#Rorty
#Vocabulary

I think of the course of human history as a long, swelling, increasingly polyphonic poem—a poem that leads up to nothing save itself. When the species is extinct, "human nature's total message" will not be a set of propositions, but a set of vocabularies—the more, and the more various, the better. Nobody will get this message, I suspect, since I still find no reason to agree with James and Hartshorne that "the best things are the more eternal things." But I do not see why eternity, or the silence of the infinite spaces, should matter.

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Rorty QOTD @rortyquotes.bsky.social · 11d

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.
CIS p.28
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#SelfCreation

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Rorty QOTD @rortyquotes.bsky.social · 12d

Anyone who spends his life trying to formulate a novel answer to the question of what is possible and important fears the extinction of that answer.
'Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity' p.23
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#Contingency

"Death" and "nothingness" are equally resounding, equally empty terms. To say one fears either is as clumsy as Epicurus's attempt to say why one should not fear them. Epicurus said, "When I am, death is not, and when death is, I am not"; thus exchanging one vacuity for another. For the word "I" is as hollow as the word "death." To unpack such words, one has to fill in the details about the I in question, specify precisely what it is that will not be, make one's fear concrete.
Larkin's poem suggests a way of unpacking what Larkin feared. What he fears will be extinguished is his idiosyncratic lading-list, his individual sense of what was possible and important. That is what made his I different from all the other I's. To lose that difference is, I take it, what any poet—any maker, anyone who hopes to create something new—fears. Anyone who spends his life trying to formulate a novel answer to the question of what is possible and important fears the extinction of that answer.

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Rorty QOTD @rortyquotes.bsky.social · 14d

We should try to get to the point where we no longer worship anything, where we treat nothing as a quasi divinity, where we treat everything—our language, our conscience, our community—as a product of time and chance.
CIS p.22
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#Contingency

The line of thought common to Blumenberg, Nietzsche, Freud, and Davidson suggests that we try to get to the point where we no longer worship anything, where we treat nothing as a quasi divinity, where we treat everything—our language, our conscience, our community—as a product of time and chance. To reach this point would be, in Freud's words, to "treat chance as worthy of determining our fate." In the next chapter I claim that Freud, Nietzsche, and Bloom do for our conscience what Wittgenstein and Davidson do for our language, namely, exhibit its sheer contingency.

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Rorty QOTD @rortyquotes.bsky.social · 28d

Let us hope for a culture that would regard the realization of utopias, and the envisaging of still further utopias, as an endless process—an endless, proliferating realization of Freedom, rather than a convergence toward an already existing Truth.
'Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity' p.xvi

A historicist and nominalist culture of the sort I envisage would settle instead for narratives which connect the present with the past, on the one hand, and with utopian futures, on the other. More important, it would regard the realization of utopias, and the envisaging of still further utopias, as an endless process—an endless, proliferating realization of Freedom, rather than a convergence toward an already existing Truth.

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Rorty QOTD @rortyquotes.bsky.social · 15d

The very idea that the world or the self has an intrinsic nature— one which the physicist or the poet may have glimpsed—is a remnant of the idea that the world is a divine creation.
'Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity' p.21
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#Antiessentialism

These historians have made the point I mentioned earlier: The very idea that the world or the self has an intrinsic nature—one which the physicist or the poet may have glimpsed—is a remnant of the idea that the world is a divine creation, the work of someone who had something in mind, who Himself spoke some language in which He described His own project. Only if we have some such picture in mind, some picture of the universe as either itself a person or as created by a person, can we make sense of the idea that the world has an "intrinsic nature."

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The Onion @theonion.com · 16d

Breaking News: Woman Crying On Train Platform

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Rorty QOTD @rortyquotes.bsky.social · 24d

Think of the history of language, and thus of culture, as Darwin taught us to think of the history of a coral reef. Old metaphors are constantly dying off into literalness, and then serving as a platform and foil for new metaphors.
CIS p.16
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#Metaphor

A nonteleological view of intellectual history, including the history of science, does for the theory of culture what the Mendelian, mechanistic, account of natural selection did for evolutionary theory. Mendel let us see mind as something which just happened rather than as something which was the point of the whole process. Davidson lets us think of the history of language, and thus of culture, as Darwin taught us to think of the history of a coral reef. Old metaphors are constantly dying off into literalness, and then serving as a platform and foil for new metaphors. This analogy lets us think of "our language"—that is, of the science and culture of twentieth-century Europe—as something that took shape as a result of a great number of sheer contingencies. Our language and our culture are as much a contingency, as much a result of thousands of small mutations finding niches (and millions of others finding no niches), as are the orchids and the anthropoids.

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Rorty QOTD @rortyquotes.bsky.social · 16d

The world does not provide us with any criterion of choice between alternative metaphors; we can only compare languages or metaphors with one another, not with something beyond language called "fact."
'Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity' p.20
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#Metaphor

I shall try to develop this last point in Chapters 2 and 3 in terms of Harold Bloom's notion of the "strong poet." But I shall end this first chapter by going back to the claim, which has been central to what I have been saying, that the world does not provide us with any criterion of choice between alternative metaphors, that we can only compare languages or metaphors with one another, not with something beyond language called "fact."

The only way to argue for claim is to do what philosophers like Goodman, Putnam, and Davidson have done: exhibit the sterility of attempts to give a sense to phrases like "the way the world is" or "fitting the facts." Such efforts can be supplemented by the work of philosophers of science such as Kuhn and Hesse. These philosophers explain why there is no way to explain the fact that a Galilean vocabulary enables us to make better predictions than an Aristotelian vocabulary by the claim that the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics.

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Rorty QOTD @rortyquotes.bsky.social · 19d

The Nietzschean substitution of self-creation for discovery substitutes a picture of the hungry generations treading each other down for a picture of humanity approaching closer and closer to the light.
'Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity' p.20
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#SelfCreation

But in a Nietzschean view, one which drops the reality-appearance distinction, to change how we talk is to change what, for our own purposes, we are. To say, with Nietzsche, that God is dead, is to say that we serve no higher purposes. The Nietzschean substitution of self-creation for discovery substitutes a picture of the hungry generations treading each other down for a picture of humanity approaching closer and closer to the light. A culture in which Nietzschean metaphors were literalized would be one which took for granted that philosophical problems are as temporary as poetic problems, that there are no problems which bind the generations together into a single natural kind called "humanity." A sense of human history as the history of successive metaphors would let us see the poet, in the generic sense of the maker of new words, the shaper of new languages, as the vanguard of the species.

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Rorty QOTD @rortyquotes.bsky.social · 18d

A culture in which Nietzschean metaphors were literalized would be one which took for granted that philosophical problems are as temporary as poetic problems, that there are no problems which bind the generations together into a single natural kind called "humanity."
CIS p.20
#Antiessentialism

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Rorty QOTD @rortyquotes.bsky.social · 17d

A sense of human history as the history of successive metaphors would let us see the poet, in the generic sense of the maker of new words, the shaper of new languages, as the vanguard of the species.
'Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity' p.20
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#HumanEvolution

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Rorty QOTD @rortyquotes.bsky.social · 22d

Nietzschean history of culture, and Davidsonian philosophy of language, see language as we now see evolution, as new forms of life constantly killing off old forms—not to accomplish a higher purpose but blindly.
'Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity' p.19
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#Boundlessness

Positivist history of culture thus sees language as gradually shaping itself around the contours of the physical world. Romantic history of culture sees language as gradually bringing Spirit to self-consciousness. Nietzschean history of culture, and Davidsonian philosophy of language, see language as we now see evolution, as new forms of life constantly killing off old forms—not to accomplish a higher purpose but blindly. Whereas the positivist sees Galileo as making a discovery—finally coming up with the words which were needed to fit the world properly, words Aristotle missed—the Davidsonian sees him as having hit upon a tool which happened to work better for certain purposes than any previous tool. Once we found out what could be done with a Galilean vocabulary, nobody was much interested in doing the things which used to be done (and which Thomists thought should still be done) with an Aristotelian vocabulary.

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Rorty QOTD @rortyquotes.bsky.social · 20d

To say, with Nietzsche, that God is dead, is to say that we serve no higher purposes.
'Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity' p.20
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#Antiauthoritarianism

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