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ironick.bsky.social
Contingently i-RON-ick
@ironick.bsky.social
160 followers 390 following 120 posts
I am an Ironist: http://wikiwand.com/en/Ironism
I am a Rorty stan.
I am an Entropy stan.
Blog: ironick.medium.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ironick
Mastodon: http://mastodon.online/@ironick17
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rortyquotes.bsky.social
Just as even the strongest poet is parasitic on her precursors, just as even she can give birth only to a small part of herself, so she is dependent on the kindness of all those strangers out there in the future.
CIS p.41
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#StrongPoet
In this passage Bloom de-divinizes the poem, and thereby the poet, in the same way in which Nietzsche de-divinized truth and in which Freud de-divinized conscience. He does for romanticism what Freud did for moralism. The strategy is the same in all these cases: It is to substitute a tissue of contingent relations, a web which stretches backward and forward through past and future time, for a formed, unified, present, self-contained substance, something capable of being seen steadily and whole. Bloom reminds us that just as even the strongest poet is parasitic on her precursors, just as even she can give birth only to a small part of herself, so she is dependent on the kindness of all those strangers out there in the future.
November 6, 2025 at 11:21 PM
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rortyquotes.bsky.social
The liberal societies of our century have produced more and more people who are able to recognize the contingency of the vocabulary in which they state their highest hopes—the contingency of their own consciences—and yet have remained faithful to those consciences.
CIS p.46
#Rorty
#Contingency
Berlin ended his essay by quoting Joseph Schumpeter, who said, "To realise the relative validity of one's convictions and yet stand for them unflinchingly, is what distinguishes a civilized man from a barbarian." Berlin comments, "To demand more than this is perhaps a deep and incurable metaphysical need; but to allow it to determine one's practice is a symptom of an equally deep, and more dangerous, moral and political immaturity." In the jargon I have been developing, Schumpeter's claim that this is the mark of the civilized person translates into the claim that the liberal societies of our century have produced more and more people who are able to recognize the contingency of the vocabulary in which they state their highest hopes—the contingency of their own consciences—and yet have remained faithful to those consciences. Figures like Nietzsche, William James, Freud, Proust, and Wittgenstein illustrate what I have called "freedom as the recognition of contingency."
November 10, 2025 at 3:01 PM
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rortyquotes.bsky.social
It is central to the idea of a liberal society that, in respect to words as opposed to deeds, persuasion as opposed to force, anything goes… A liberal society is one which is content to call "true" whatever the upshot of such encounters turns out to be.
CIS p.51
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#Liberalism
We would only have a real and practical standoff...if certain topics and certain language games were taboo—if there were general agreement within a society that certain questions were always in point, that certain questions were prior to certain others, that there was a fixed order of discussion, and that flanking movements were not permitted. That would be just the sort of society which liberals are trying to avoid—one in which "logic" ruled and "rhetoric" was outlawed. It is central to the idea of a liberal society that, in respect to words as opposed to deeds, persuasion as opposed to force, anything goes. This openmindedness should not be fostered because, as scripture teaches, Truth is great and will prevail, nor because, as Milton suggests, Truth will always win in a free and open encounter. It should be fostered for its own sake. A liberal society is one which is content to call "true" whatever the upshot of such encounters turns out to be.
November 11, 2025 at 3:03 PM
ironick.bsky.social
Gall’s Law of Problem Conservation:
Problems cannot be created or destroyed; only reframed and reranked.

An essay on this law: ironick.medium.com/galls-law-of...
#Philosophy
#Pragmatism
#Buddhism
#Rorty
#Dewey
Gall’s Law of Problem Conservation
Problems cannot be created or destroyed; only reframed and reranked
ironick.medium.com
November 12, 2025 at 7:38 PM
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rortyquotes.bsky.social
We need a redescription of liberalism as the hope that culture as a whole can be "poeticized" rather than as the Enlightenment hope that it can be "rationalized" or "scientized."
Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity p.53
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#Liberalism
This appreciation is summed up in the vague, misleading, but pregnant and inspiring thought that truth is made rather than found. I also said that literature and politics are the spheres to which contemporary intellectuals look when they worry about ends rather than about means. I can now add the corollary that these are the areas to which we should look for the charter of a liberal society. We need a redescription of liberalism as the hope that culture as a whole can be "poeticized" rather than as the Enlightenment hope that it can be "rationalized" or "scientized." That is, we need to substitute the hope that chances for fulfillment of idiosyncratic fantasies will be equalized for the hope that everyone will replace "passion" or fantasy with "reason." In my view, an ideally liberal polity would be one whose culture hero is Bloom's "strong poet" rather than the warrior, the priest, the sage, or the truth-seeking, "logical," "objective" scientist.
November 12, 2025 at 3:03 PM
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rortyquotes.bsky.social
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.
November 9, 2025 at 3:02 PM
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rortyquotes.bsky.social
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.
November 8, 2025 at 3:02 PM
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rortyquotes.bsky.social
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.
November 7, 2025 at 3:04 PM
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rortyquotes.bsky.social
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
November 5, 2025 at 3:01 PM
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rortyquotes.bsky.social
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.
November 4, 2025 at 3:02 PM
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rortyquotes.bsky.social
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.
November 3, 2025 at 3:04 PM
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rortyquotes.bsky.social
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."
November 2, 2025 at 3:00 PM
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rortyquotes.bsky.social
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.
November 1, 2025 at 2:01 PM
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rortyquotes.bsky.social
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.
October 31, 2025 at 2:00 PM
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rortyquotes.bsky.social
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.
October 27, 2025 at 2:05 PM
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rortyquotes.bsky.social
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
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. This may sound paradoxical, because we think of causes as discovered rather than invented. We think of telling a causal story as a paradigm of the literal use of language. Metaphor, linguistic novelty, seems out of place when one turns from simply relishing such novelty to explaining why these novelties, and not others, occurred. But remember the claim made in Chapter I that even in the natural sciences we occasionally get genuinely new causal stories, the sort of stories produced by what Kuhn calls "revolutionary science." Even in the sciences, metaphoric redescriptions are the mark of genius and of revolutionary leaps forward.
October 29, 2025 at 2:05 PM
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rortyquotes.bsky.social
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.
October 28, 2025 at 2:04 PM
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rortyquotes.bsky.social
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.
October 26, 2025 at 2:01 PM
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rortyquotes.bsky.social
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.
October 12, 2025 at 2:02 PM
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rortyquotes.bsky.social
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."
October 25, 2025 at 2:02 PM
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Breaking News: Woman Crying On Train Platform
October 24, 2025 at 5:01 PM
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rortyquotes.bsky.social
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.
October 16, 2025 at 2:03 PM
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rortyquotes.bsky.social
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.
October 24, 2025 at 2:02 PM
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rortyquotes.bsky.social
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.
October 21, 2025 at 2:05 PM
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rortyquotes.bsky.social
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
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.
October 22, 2025 at 2:07 PM