Rorty QOTD
rortyquotes.bsky.social
Rorty QOTD
@rortyquotes.bsky.social
Richard McKay Rorty (October 4, 1931 – June 8, 2007): pragmatist, ironist, and panrelationalist.
Pinned
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.
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
November 22, 2025 at 3:01 PM
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
November 21, 2025 at 3:03 PM
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
November 20, 2025 at 3:03 PM
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
November 19, 2025 at 3:02 PM
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
November 18, 2025 at 3:00 PM
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
November 17, 2025 at 3:04 PM
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
November 16, 2025 at 3:00 PM
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
November 15, 2025 at 3:02 PM
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
November 14, 2025 at 3:04 PM
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
November 13, 2025 at 3:01 PM
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
October 30, 2025 at 2:05 PM
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