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Rorty QOTD
@rortyquotes.bsky.social
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Richard McKay Rorty (October 4, 1931 – June 8, 2007): pragmatist, ironist, and panrelationalist.
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Rorty QOTD @rortyquotes.bsky.social · Oct 3
On the eve of Richard McKay Rorty's 94th birthday*, announcing @rortyquotes: dedicated to tweeting a fresh #Rorty banger each and every day of the year—starting tomorrow!

* And the day, 79 years ago, that Rorty went off to the University of Chicago's Hutchins College.
rortyquotes.bsky.social
To see one's language, one's conscience, one's morality, and one's highest hopes as contingent products, as literalizations of what once were accidentally produced metaphors, is to adopt a self-identity which suits one for citizenship in such an ideally liberal state.
CIS p.61
#Rorty
#Hope
To see one's language, one's conscience, one's morality, and one's highest hopes as contingent products, as literalizations of what once were accidentally produced metaphors, is to adopt a self-identity which suits one for citizenship in such an ideally liberal state. That is why the ideal citizen of such an ideal state would be someone who thinks of the founders and the preservers of her society as such poets, rather than as people who had discovered or who clearly envisioned the truth about the world or about humanity. ... She will be commonsensically Bloomian enough to take for granted that it is the revolutionary artist and the revolutionary scientist, not the academic artist or the normal scientist, who most clearly exemplifies the virtues which she hopes her society will itself embody.
November 22, 2025 at 3:01 PM
rortyquotes.bsky.social
A liberal society is one whose hero is the strong poet & the revolutionary [P & R] because it recognizes that it is what it is, has the morality it has, not because it approximates the will of God or the nature of man but because certain [Ps & Rs] of the past spoke as they did.
CIS p.61
#Liberalism
A liberal society is one whose ideals can be fulfilled by persuasion rather than force, by reform rather than revolution, by the free and open encounters of present linguistic and other practices with suggestions for new practices. But this is to say that an ideal liberal society is one which has no purpose except freedom, no goal except a willingness to see how such encounters go and to abide by the outcome. It has no purpose except to make life easier for poets and revolutionaries while seeing to it that they make life harder for others only by words, and not deeds. It is a society whose hero is the strong poet and the revolutionary because it recognizes that it is what it is, has the morality it has, speaks the language it does, not because it approximates the will of God or the nature of man but because certain poets and revolutionaries of the past spoke as they did. To see one's language, one's conscience, one's morality, and one's highest hopes as contingent products...
November 21, 2025 at 3:03 PM
rortyquotes.bsky.social
An ideal liberal society is one which has no purpose except freedom, no goal except a willingness to see how free and open encounters of present linguistic practices with suggestions for new practices go and to abide by the outcome.
CIS p.60
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#Liberalism
A liberal society is one whose ideals can be fulfilled by persuasion rather than force, by reform rather than revolution, by the free and open encounters of present linguistic and other practices with suggestions for new practices. But this is to say that an ideal liberal society is one which has no purpose except freedom, no goal except a willingness to see how such encounters go and to abide by the outcome. It has no purpose except to make life easier for poets and revolutionaries while seeing to it that they make life harder for others only by words, and not deeds. It is a society whose hero is the strong poet and the revolutionary because it recognizes that it is what it is, has the morality it has, speaks the language it does, not because it approximates the will of God or the nature of man but because certain poets and revolutionaries of the past spoke as they did. To see one's language, one's conscience, one's morality, and one's highest hopes as contingent products...
November 20, 2025 at 3:03 PM
rortyquotes.bsky.social
A liberal society is one whose ideals can be fulfilled by persuasion rather than force, by reform rather than revolution, by the free and open encounters of present linguistic and other practices with suggestions for new practices.
CIS p.59
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#Liberalism
A liberal society is one whose ideals can be fulfilled by persuasion rather than force, by reform rather than revolution, by the free and open encounters of present linguistic and other practices with suggestions for new practices. But this is to say that an ideal liberal society is one which has no purpose except freedom, no goal except a willingness to see how such encounters go and to abide by the outcome. It has no purpose except to make life easier for poets and revolutionaries while seeing to it that they make life harder for others only by words, and not deeds. It is a society whose hero is the strong poet and the revolutionary because it recognizes that it is what it is, has the morality it has, speaks the language it does, not because it approximates the will of God or the nature of man but because certain poets and revolutionaries of the past spoke as they did. To see one's language, one's conscience, one's morality, and one's highest hopes as contingent products...
November 19, 2025 at 3:02 PM
rortyquotes.bsky.social
We cannot see Christianity or Newtonianism or the Romantic movement or political liberalism as a tool while we are still in the course of figuring out how to use it. For there are as yet no clearly formulatable ends to which it is a means.
CIS p.55
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#Vocabulary
I can perhaps make this abjuration of philosophical neutrality in the interest of political liberalism more palatable by referring yet again to the Wittgensteinian analogy between vocabularies and tools. I said in the first chapter that the problem with this comparison is that the person who designs a new tool can usually explain what it will be useful for - why she wants it - in advance; by contrast, the creation of a new form of cultural life, a new vocabulary, will have its utility explained only retrospectively. We cannot see Christianity or Newtonianism or the Romantic movement or political liberalism as a tool while we are still in the course of figuring out how to use it. For there are as yet no clearly formulatable ends to which it is a means. But once we figure out how to use the vocabularies of these movements, we can tell a story of progress, showing how the literalization of certain metaphors served the purpose of making possible all the good things that have recently...
November 18, 2025 at 3:00 PM
rortyquotes.bsky.social
We should see allegiance to social institutions as no more matters for justification by reference to familiar, commonly accepted premises—but also as no more arbitrary—than choices of friends or heroes.
Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity p.54
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#Relativism
To sum up, the moral I want to draw from my discussion of the claim that Berlin's position is "relativistic" is that this charge should not be answered, but rather evaded. We should learn to brush aside questions like "How do you know that freedom is the chief goal of social organization?" in the same way as we brush aside questions like "How do you know that Jones is worthy of your friendship?" or "How do you know that Yeats is an important poet, Hegel an important philosopher, and Galileo an important scientist?" We should see allegiance to social institutions as no more matters for justification by reference to familiar, commonly accepted premises—but also as no more arbitrary—than choices of friends or heroes. Such choices are not made by reference to criteria. They cannot be preceded by presuppositionless critical reflection, conducted in no particular language and outside of any particular historical context.
November 17, 2025 at 3:04 PM
rortyquotes.bsky.social
A poeticized culture would be a culture which, precisely by appreciating that all touchstones are merely cultural artifacts, would take as its goal the creation of ever more various and multicolored artifacts.
Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity p.53
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#Poetry
From the point of view I have been commending, any attempt to drive one's opponent up against a wall in this way fails when the wall against which he is driven comes to be seen as one more vocabulary, one more way of describing things. The wall then turns out to be a painted backdrop, one more work of man, one more bit of cultural stage-setting. A poeticized culture would be one which would not insist we find the real wall behind the painted ones, the real touchstones of truth as opposed to touchstones which are merely cultural artifacts. It would be a culture which, precisely by appreciating that all touchstones are such artifacts, would take as its goal the creation of ever more various and multicolored artifacts.
November 16, 2025 at 3:00 PM
rortyquotes.bsky.social
A poeticized culture would be one which would not insist we find the real wall behind the painted ones, the real touchstones of truth as opposed to touchstones which are merely cultural artifacts.
Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity p.53
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#Poetry
From the point of view I have been commending, any attempt to drive one's opponent up against a wall in this way fails when the wall against which he is driven comes to be seen as one more vocabulary, one more way of describing things. The wall then turns out to be a painted backdrop, one more work of man, one more bit of cultural stage-setting. A poeticized culture would be one which would not insist we find the real wall behind the painted ones, the real touchstones of truth as opposed to touchstones which are merely cultural artifacts. It would be a culture which, precisely by appreciating that all touchstones are such artifacts, would take as its goal the creation of ever more various and multicolored artifacts.
November 15, 2025 at 3:02 PM
rortyquotes.bsky.social
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.
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 14, 2025 at 3:04 PM
rortyquotes.bsky.social
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."
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 13, 2025 at 3:01 PM
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
rortyquotes.bsky.social
Freud makes it possible for us to see science and poetry, genius and psychosis—and, most importantly, morality and prudence—not as products of distinct faculties but as alternative modes of adaptation.
'Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity' p.33
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#Adaptation
One can sum up this point by saying that Freud makes moral deliberation iust as finely grained, just as detailed and as multiform as prudential calculation has always been. He thereby helps break down the distinction between moral guilt and practical inadvisability, thereby blurring the prudence-morality distinction. By contrast, Plato's and Kant's moral philosophies center around this distinction—as does "moral philosophy" in the sense in which it is typically understood by contemporary analytic philosophers. Kant splits us into two parts, one called "reason," which is identical in us all, and another (empirical sensation and desire), which is a matter of blind, contingent, idiosyncratic impressions. In contrast, Freud treats rationality as a mechanism which adjusts contingencies to other contingencies. But his mechanization of reason is not just more abstract philosophical reductionism, not just more "inverted Platonism."
October 30, 2025 at 2:05 PM
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