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
Happy "Hegel will fuck you up" Day to all who celebrate!

‘from the chalice of this realm of spirits
foams out to Him, His infinity.’
January 29, 2026 at 5:22 AM
Reposted by Contingently i-RON-ick
The utility of imaginative feats, bound by no social norms, for the public discourse of later ages is undeniable. Had thinkers like Plato, Augustine, and Kant not aspired to sublimity, the rest of us would not possess the beautiful residues of these aspirations.
PasAA p.(xxxii)
#PublicVsPrivate
January 28, 2026 at 3:04 PM
Reposted by Contingently i-RON-ick
Philosophy should treat the quest for the unconditioned, the infinite, the transcendent and the sublime as a natural human tendency—one which Freud has helped us understand.
PasAA p.(xxxi)
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#Sublimity
January 25, 2026 at 3:01 PM
Reposted by Contingently i-RON-ick
We should see the quest for the sublime, as Freud saw the sublimation of sexual desire, as a precondition for certain striking individual achievements. But we should not see it as relevant to our public, socio-political, cultural prospects.
PasAA p.(xxxi)
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#Sublimity
January 26, 2026 at 3:02 PM
Reposted by Contingently i-RON-ick
I have been criticized for trying to put public and private in watertight compartments. I have no wish to do that.
PasAA p.(xxxii)
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#PublicVsPrivate
January 27, 2026 at 3:03 PM
Reposted by Contingently i-RON-ick
Those who have achieved contentment with the conditioned will see the pursuit of truth as the pursuit of human happiness, rather than as the fulfillment of a desire which transcends mere happiness.
PasAA p.(xxx)
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#Truth
January 23, 2026 at 3:03 PM
Reposted by Contingently i-RON-ick
To be satisfied with the conditioned, to give up the quest for the infinite, would be to rest content with beauty.
PasAA p.(xxx)
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#Sublimity
January 22, 2026 at 3:03 PM
Reposted by Contingently i-RON-ick
Pragmatism says that the conditioned is all there is: that human beings have nothing to know save their relations to each other and to other finite beings.
PasAA p.(xxx)
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#Sublimity
January 21, 2026 at 3:03 PM
Reposted by Contingently i-RON-ick
The fundamental premise of the book is that a belief can still regulate action, can still be thought worth dying for, among people who are quite aware that this belief is caused by nothing deeper than contingent historical circumstance.
CIS p.189
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#Contingency
January 18, 2026 at 3:01 PM
Reposted by Contingently i-RON-ick
The idea of a non-human authority and the quest for sublimity are both products of self-abasement.
Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism (PasAA) p.(xxx)
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#Sublimity
January 20, 2026 at 3:02 PM
Reposted by Contingently i-RON-ick
This 1943 U.S. Army film warned about fascism in America
January 19, 2026 at 3:08 PM
Reposted by Contingently i-RON-ick
Although the idea of a central and universal human component called "reason," a faculty which is the source of our moral obligations, was very useful in creating modern democratic societies, it should be dispensed with in order to help bring about a liberal utopia.
CIS p.194
#Rorty
#Morality
January 19, 2026 at 4:43 PM
Reposted by Contingently i-RON-ick
Getting somebody to deny a belief for no reason is a first step toward making her incapable of having a self because she becomes incapable of weaving a coherent web of belief and desire.
CIS p.178
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#Selfhood
January 17, 2026 at 9:54 PM
Reposted by Contingently i-RON-ick
Whenever philosophy has attempted to become an expert culture it has degenerated into scholasticism, into controversies which are of no interest to anyone outside the philosophical profession.
PCP p.125
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#Philosophy
January 15, 2026 at 3:01 PM
Reposted by Contingently i-RON-ick
Philosophy is what is left over after one has bracketed both common sense and all the various expert cultures.
PCP p.125
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#Philosophy
January 14, 2026 at 3:00 PM
Reposted by Contingently i-RON-ick
After the scales are rubbed off a butterfly's wing, you have transparency, but not beauty—formal structure without sensuous content.
CIS p152
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#Truth
January 13, 2026 at 3:01 PM
Reposted by Contingently i-RON-ick
Truths are the skeletons which remain after the capacity to arouse the senses—to cause tingles—has been rubbed off by familiarity and long usage.
CIS p.152
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#Truth
January 12, 2026 at 3:03 PM
Reposted by Contingently i-RON-ick
What we call common sense—the body of widely accepted truths—is, just as Heidegger and Nabokov thought, a collection of dead metaphors.
CIS p.152
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#Metaphor
January 11, 2026 at 3:02 PM
Reposted by Contingently i-RON-ick
If you want your books to be read rather than respectfully shrouded in tooled leather, you should try to produce tingles rather than truth.
CIS p152
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#Truth
January 10, 2026 at 3:00 PM
Reposted by Contingently i-RON-ick
If you want to be remembered by future generations, go in for poetry rather than for mathematics.
CIS p.151
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#Poetry
January 9, 2026 at 3:01 PM
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Plato himself, though generally wrong about general ideas, survives as the first white magus. He is the enchanter who spun the first strands of that web of metaphor which Derrida calls the West's "white mythology."
CIS p.151
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#Derrida
January 8, 2026 at 3:01 PM
Reposted by Contingently i-RON-ick
The second of two distinctions categorizing the purposes of books divides books the category of books working out a new final vocabulary into those books aimed at working out a new private final vocabulary and those aimed at working out a new public final vocabulary.
CIS p.143
#Rorty
#Vocabulary
January 7, 2026 at 3:01 PM
Reposted by Contingently i-RON-ick
The first of two distinctions categorizing the purposes of books is that between the range of purposes presently statable within some familiar, widely used, final vocabulary and the purpose of working out a new final vocabulary.
CIS p.142
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#Vocabulary
January 6, 2026 at 3:00 PM
Reposted by Contingently i-RON-ick
The public-private distinction I have developed suggests that we distinguish books which help us become autonomous from books which help us become less cruel.
CIS p.141
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#PublicVsPrivate
January 5, 2026 at 3:00 PM
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Only metaphysicians think that our present genres and criteria exhaust the realm of possibility. Ironists continue to expand that realm.
CIS p.135
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#Metaphysics
January 4, 2026 at 3:00 PM