Contingently i-RON-ick
ironick.bsky.social
Contingently i-RON-ick
@ironick.bsky.social
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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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
November 6, 2025 at 11:21 PM
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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
November 10, 2025 at 3:01 PM
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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
November 11, 2025 at 3:03 PM
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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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
November 12, 2025 at 3:03 PM
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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
November 9, 2025 at 3:02 PM
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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
November 8, 2025 at 3:02 PM
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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
November 7, 2025 at 3:04 PM
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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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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
November 4, 2025 at 3:02 PM
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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
November 3, 2025 at 3:04 PM
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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
November 2, 2025 at 3:00 PM
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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
November 1, 2025 at 2:01 PM
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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
October 31, 2025 at 2:00 PM
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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
October 27, 2025 at 2:05 PM
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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
October 29, 2025 at 2:05 PM
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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
October 28, 2025 at 2:04 PM
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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
October 26, 2025 at 2:01 PM
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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
October 12, 2025 at 2:02 PM
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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
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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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
October 16, 2025 at 2:03 PM
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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
October 24, 2025 at 2:02 PM
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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
October 21, 2025 at 2:05 PM
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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
October 22, 2025 at 2:07 PM