HISTORY OF THE HUMAN SCIENCES Vol. 10 No.

4
© 1997 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi) pp. 29
29-44
[0952-6951(199711)10:4]

Rorty, literary narrative and

political philosophy
BARBARA McGUINNESS

ABSTRACT
This article seeksto examine Rorty’s contention that literary narrative,
not political philosophy, is best able to address the problems of the
West. It argues that although Rorty’s conception of the novel as a valu-
able and informative medium is credible, he does not establish it as a
valid alternative to political philosophy. Moreover Rorty retains the
sort of reasoning that is characteristic of political philosophy, despite
his assertions to the contrary.
Key words analytic philosophy, empathy, literature, narrative
devices, objectivism, redescription, subjectivity
In the last two decades a series of significant challenges to contemporary phil-
osophy and thephilosophical agenda have become increasingly prominent.
They important because they challenge the fundamental assumptions and
are
basis of the thinking behind modernity and the ’Enlightenment project’, and
they come from a variety of postmodern, communitarian and anti-foun-
dational positions, united, as Bernstein puts it, by a common ’rage against
reason’ (Bernstein, 1991: 22-3). Richard Rorty, University Professor of
Humanities at the University of Virginia, is a leading contributor to this
debate, seeking to undermine the philosophical foundations characteristically
sought by Western political thought as its justificatory basis, and question-
ing the nature and purpose of philosophy itself.
Rorty has written prolifically since the 1960s on a wide and diverse range
of issues of philosophical interest, but it was his major work Philosophy and
30

the Mirror of Nature (1980), a comprehensive analysis and critique of con-

temporary analytic philosophy, which placed him centre stage in the debate.
In this work Rorty attempts to undermine the epistemological approach to
philosophy, arguing that analytic philosophy is outdated and has failed in its
attempt to identify universal values and criteria, to find objectivity and truth,
and to ground an abstract and neutral conception of rationality. By making
unsustainable claims to universal validity and objectivity, and assuming the
possibility of a transcultural and historical morality, analytic philosophy has
misconceived the nature and purpose of philosophy itself. Rorty argues that
this needs to be reconceptualized, taking as its starting-point the pluralism,
diversity and historical particularity of the real world which leads to com-
peting accounts of truth, rationality and values, and therefore to incommen-
surability.
Rorty is not the only contemporary philosopher who is sceptical about the
analytic approach, and he has concerns in common with, for example, Alas-
dair MacIntyre,l Charles Taylor,2 Michael Walzer,3 Michael Sandel4 and
Richard Bernstein.5 All of them have in common an ’anti-foundational’
approach, but Rorty is by far the most radical, and the development of his ideas
since Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature seems to be leading to a rejection
of the value of any sort of philosophy. In Consequences of Pragmatism (1982)
Rorty espoused a ’post-philosophical’ culture and argued for a Deweyan prag-
matism as a superior alternative to analytic thinking. However, by 1989 Rorty
had departed from this sort of immanent critique of contemporary philosophy
and in Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (1989) took a more radical position.
This book focuses on the relevance of philosophy in the political sphere, and
in it Rorty advocates the abandonment of political philosophy as we know it,
positing the contingency of the self, language and community, introducing the
liberal ironist, and arguing that an abhorrence of cruelty and an inclination to
solidarity are constitutive of liberal democracy thus rendering this the most
defensible mode of life. This work was followed by various articles now col-
lected together as Philosophical Papers 1 (1991a) and Philosophical Papers 2
(1991b), which argue, among other things, that philosophy, far from being an
underpinning or overarching discipline, is just one voice among many and in
fact is merely a branch of literature, which is Rorty’s preferred medium for
successfully addressing the problems of the West.
Rorty’s long-standing and consistent hostility to analytic philosophy thus
seems in the last few years to have been transformed into a repudiation of any
sort of philosophy or theory. Even Heidegger, conceived of in Philosophy and
the Mirror of Nature as an edifying philosopher and one of Rorty’s heroes,
is now to be treated with suspicion.

Those of us who teach philosophy are especially susceptible to the per-

suasive power of Heidegger’s account of the West’s history and
 31

prospects. But this susceptibility is a professional deformation which

we should struggle to overcome. (Rorty, 1991b: 67)

The philosophical genre, in Rorty’s view, invites rationality, strives after

logical argument and searches for truth and objectivity. Political philosophy
is within this genre, and therefore does the wrong sort of things and asks the
wrong sort of questions. The literary genre, on the other hand, is different
from the philosophical. It makes no claims to objectivity or truth, but instead
asserts, engages in propaganda and appeals to feelings and emotions. The
novel, the literary medium that Rorty takes as his main example, although he
includes others such as film, is purely subjective and attempts to evoke sym-
pathy and empathy within the reader, and is Rorty’s preferred alternative for
solving the problems of the West. Rorty’s claims for the novel, and the extent
to which this form of literary narrative can be used as a valid and credible
alternative to political philosophy, will now be assessed.
In an essay on Heidegger, Kundera and Dickens (1991b), Rorty asks us to
imagine the destruction of the West by nuclear bombs. Only East Asia and
sub-Saharan Africa survive. Amidst strong anti-western feeling a purge takes
place and an attempt is made to obliterate all memories and relics of the West.
But inevitably some people (mostly academics, says Rorty) secrete as much
as they can in the way of books, art, videos, magazines, films and so on. When
500 years later these relicsare discovered, memories of the de-westernization

campaign will have faded. Scholars and artists will begin to tell stories about
these relics and about the West, and these will be numerous and diverse,
stories about politics, technology, social institutions, customs and so on.
Inevitably, however, some of these people will be philosophers, and then it is
likely that controversy will arise about what was paradigmatically western,
what was the essence of the West. Rorty suggests that philosophers would
aim to achieve
... the one true account of the West, painting the one true moral of its
career

and he goes on to say:

We think of philosophers as prone to make such attempts because we
tend to identify an area of culture as ’philosophy’ when we note an
attempt to substitute theory for narrative, a tendency towards essen-
tialism. (Rorty 1991b: 66)
This tendency according to Rorty has been notoriously unsuccessful when
applied to human situations, as the pursuit of universal and objective know-
ledge and truth has failed to achieve agreement, and he believes that narrative
of a literary kind is likely to be more fruitful. Comparing Dickens and
Heidegger, he concludes:
32

If my imaginary Asians and Africans were, for some reason, unable to

preserve the works of both men, I should much prefer that they pre-
serve Dickens. (Rorty, 1991 b: 68)

Before considering three specific points that according to Rorty are advan-
tages of literary form, it will be helpful to consider some of his general ideas
on the function of narrative itself, which differ from those of some of his con-

temporaries. Rorty of course is not the only political theorist to be suspicious

of analytic philosophy and to embrace the idea of narrative. His decision to
abandon universalism and ’settle instead for narratives’ (Rorty, 1989: xvi) is
one partly shared by Alasdair MacIntyre and Charles Taylor.

Both MacIntyre and Taylor argue that narrative is fundamental to human

existence; in Taylor’s words, it is not an optional extra. MacIntyre illustrates
this by the example of how through stories children learn about different
kinds of people, different ways of life, and different possibilities that are open
to them. This is an essential and necessary part of their development, because

Deprive children of stories and you leave them unscripted, anxious

stutterers in their actions as in their words.... [Therefore] Man is in his
actions and practice, as well as in his fictions, essentially a story-telling
animal. (MacIntyre, 1985: 216)
Without this activity humans would be unable to understand themselves,
their own societies, their moral identities, or the range of beliefs and values
open to them. To successfully identify and understand what someone is
saying or doing we need to locate the particular utterance or action within a
context, and that context will be the narrative history of the individual con-
cerned and his or her social frame. However, Maclntyre and Taylor under-
stand this in relation to a conception of the good which Rorty would find
unacceptable, and his conception of narrative seems to fall short of that of
MacIntyre and Taylor. Both of them see narrative as a fundamental and essen-
tial feature of human life, pervading all aspects of human activity.
I am presenting both conversations in particular and human action in
general as enacted narratives. Narrative is not the work of poets, drama-
tists and novelists reflecting upon events which had no narrative order
before one was imposed by the singer or writer; narrative form is
neither disguise nor decoration. (Maclntyre, 1985: 211)
This view of a sort of narrative unity of human life, allowing different
moral stories to be told and therefore offered as alternatives of how to live,
is for Rorty still too close to essentialism. Although he describes history as
’therapeutic’, the introduction of historical narratives alone will not over-
come the problem of essentialism. He cites Heidegger’s attempt to escape
essentialism by historicizing Being and Truth, but concludes that he merely
 33

escaped from eternity into historicity - and these are ’equally comic, equally
essentialist notions’ (Rorty, 1991b: 77). Quoting Kundera, Rorty says we
should throw ourselves into history, but recognize that this will have limited
benefits. The greatest truth we can learn from the Enlightenment, for example
-
and given to us by Flaubert, not a philosopher - is how stupid humans can
be. A political philosopher can do little with this, but a novelist will illustrate
this in contemporary ways and thus remind us that every age will have its
stupidity. Enlightenment philosophy reacted to the fact of human stupidity
by attempting to overcome it, replacing superstition and myth with reason
and truth. It failed, necessarily so, and the only realistic hope is
...
age in which the prevalent varieties of stupidity will cause less
an

unnecessary pain than is caused in our age by our varieties of stupidity.

(Rorty, 1991b: 76)
Rorty’s pessimism on the value of political theory and history stems from
his conviction that history is contingent. Unlike MacIntyre, who believes that
the most rational tradition will prevail, Rorty believes that historical accident
changes the direction of history in an arbitrary way. Historical chance affects
political activity and outcomes to the extent that there is no point in having
political theory; its narratives will not help in dealing with actual political
events. He argues that we

... are impressed by the sheer contingency of history ... by the fact
that a mad tyrant (and his thuggish heirs) just happened to be the upshot
of the Bolshevik revolution. When one thinks of the fate of democracy
and socialism as largely a matter of who shoots whom first, one’s sense
of the importance of the theorist in politics diminishes. (1987: 569)
We should therefore
... realise how little theoretical reflection is likely to help us with our
current problems.... Neither twentieth century Marxism, nor analyti-
cal philosophy, nor post-Nietzschean ’continental’ philosophy has
done anything to clarify this struggle.... The horrors peculiar to this
century ... the unbeatable grip of the KGB on the Russian people and
of the Soviet Army on a third of Europe - are no better describable with
the help of more recent philosophy than with the vocabulary used by
our grandfathers. (Rorty, 1991b: 25-6)

This of course is questionable. It seems naive to dissociate Marxist theory

from actual political events and changes in the Eastern bloc, even though it
can be argued that the reality did not resemble the theory very closely. But
all political doctrines have diverse forms (even liberalism, although Rorty
seems to forget this) and I would argue are not formed solely by historical
accident. People become committed to Marxism or liberalism for reasons,
34

and also become opposed to them for reasons. Taylor, in arguing that
they
ours is in fact
a very theoretical civilization, says:

We see this both in the fact that certain understandings formulated in

modern theories have become incorporated in the common under-
standings by which political society operates in the West, and also in
that, however over-simplified and vulgarised these theories may
become in attaining general currency, an important part of their pres-
tige and credibility reposes on their being believed to be correct
theories, validated as knowledge, as this is understood in a scientific age.
(Taylor, 1985: 105)
People, says Taylor, turn to theory to explain political practices, to orient
themselves in a world full of conflicting political interpretations, and to
define common understandings (1985: 106-7). It is not necessarily used as a
search for objective truth.
Rorty, however, does not accept this because of what he sees as the con-
tingency of language. Every individual has a ’final vocabulary’ which justi-
fies his or her beliefs and values. However, Rorty is an ’ironist’, that is, one
who has doubts about his own final vocabulary because he has been im-
pressed by those of others, knows that the doubts cannot be resolved within
his own and does not believe that it is more real or right than anyone else’s.
People who are ironists are those who realize ’that anything can be made to
look good or bad by being redescribed’ (Rorty, 1989: 73), which may of
course be true. However, the point is that were one to redescribe the Holo-

caust, famines in Africa caused by civil war, or the recent ethnic conflict in
the former Yugoslavia in such a way that they were somehow portrayed as
good, then to do so would surely require a distortion of the facts, of the truth
of what actually happened? Otherwise it seems that there could be no recog-
nizable sense in which these events could be good.
Political philosophers on the whole do not just redescribe truth, they look
for it, but, if the method of redescription is used, philosophical method
becomes a literary skill. Rorty attributes the beginning of this method to
Hegel, who unintentionally ’de-metaphysized’ philosophy and turned it into
a literary genre. He achieved this because the focus of his criticism of his pre-
decessors was on their language, which he considered to be obsolete. Thus
the tradition of ironist philosophy began, to be continued by Nietzsche,
Heidegger and Dewey.
Now, however, philosophy is better thought of as a part of literature.
Instead of philosophy being regarded as prior to other disciplines, as in the
western tradition, it should be understood that the best understanding will
be gained by the reconstruction of an entire historical scene, which will pri-
oritize literature, democratic politics, and a variety of other disciplines. In the
end it is literature which is prior, because it can achieve things, such as
 35

empathy with suffering, which philosophy cannot. By being aware of other

people’s vocabularies we will become aware of their suffering, which will lead
us constantly to redescribe ourselves and to come to regard philosophy as

continuous with literature as interpreting other people to us, and

...

thus enlarging and deepening our sense of community. (Rorty, 1982:

203)
Rorty outlines three ways in which literature can better address the problems
of the West than philosophy can: first, it is better able genuinely to illustrate
diversity and plurality by redescription; second, it can employ a variety of
narrative techniques which are more instructive than philosophical reason-
ing, e.g. it can use irony and ridicule to cut through the proliferation of theory
we are all bogged down in; and third and most importantly, using narrative
detail can evoke sympathy for the suffering of others and awaken in us a real-
ization of our own potential for cruelty and the desirability of solidarity.
These three points will now be considered in detail.

REDESCRIPTION

In Rorty’s view, by searching for truth philosophers concentrate on the

’appearance-reality’ distinction, whereas novelists substitute
a display of diversity of viewpoints, a plurality of descriptions of
...

the same events (Rorty, 1991b: 74)

using, for example, several descriptions of the same event as perceived by
different characters. An obvious reply is that political philosophers do this
too; they can put forward diverse viewpoints on, say, justice as perceived by
several different characters such as Hayek, Marx and Rawls. However, what
the political philosopher then does, and what the novelist does not do, is to
argue that one of the characterizations is right, or better than the others, or
true.

What the novelist finds especially comic is the attempt to privilege one
of these descriptions, to take it as an excuse for ignoring all the others.
What he finds most heroic is not the ability sternly to reject all descrip-
tions save one, but rather the ability to move back and forth between
them. (Rorty, 1991b: 74)
Whether Rorty is right about the novelist here is questionable, and will be
discussed shortly, and it is worth noting that there are of course some liter-
ary forms, such as rhetoric or polemic, which would in fact obscure or deny
plurality and diversity, not illustrate them. However, quoting Kundera,
Rorty argues that the point is not to decide whether Anna or Karenin
36

possesses the truth, but to recognize that both of them have the right to be
understood. The novel therefore is more relative, more ambiguous than
philosophical theory, it is moulded of an entirely different substance, accord-
ing to Rorty, but as the real world is lacking in single truths, the novel cor-
responds more closely to the actual world. Where this view seems to be
problematic, however, is when one attempts to translate it into the moral
world and decide what actually to do. We all know that there are many poss-
ible answers to all sorts of questions, but the problem arises when we have
to choose one and act on it. Even if we are happy to accept that we can never
find the ’truth’ or the ’right’ solution, we still have to do something, and it
cannot be the case that all solutions are as good as each other. Some actions
must be judged morally better than others. Another point which Rorty does
not seem to notice is that the novel makes clear what questions it is address-

ing. In everyday political and moral life it is not always obvious what the
questions are or which ones we should be addressing. Rorty’s discussion so
far seems to leave us in limbo with no impetus to do one thing rather than
another, a very odd position for a pragmatist to be in. Rorty appears almost
to have moved to an acceptance of the ’essential relativity’ of human values,
a relativism which he previously denied. It seems that not only does no one
have access to the truth, but no one has any more right to his or her version
of the truth than anyone else. Rorty, although identifying his approach as
hermeneutic, here seems to go beyond the ideas of, for example, Bernstein or
Gadamer,6who are central to the continuing debate on relativism and
hermeneutics.
We all just stand for ourselves, equal inhabitants of a paradise of indi-
viduals in which everybody has the right to be understood but nobody
has the right to rule. (Rorty, 1991b: 75)

NARRATIVE DEVICES

Rorty sees the narrative devices of irony, satire and ridicule as used in a
culture’s ’anti-theoretical immanent critiques’ as an instructive and efficient
way of destroying the edifices of useless theory. The novel, like Penelope,
...undoes each night the tapestry that the theologians, philosophers
and learned men have woven the day before.... The need to unweave
these tapestries can be thought of as the revenge of the vulgar upon the
priests’ indifference to the greater happiness of the greatest numbers.
(Rorty, 1991b: 73-4)
Rorty believes that Orwell did this so successfully with Animal Farm because
the theoretical debates surrounding communism and socialism had become
 37

so complex and unwieldy that it was simply impracticable to continue trying

to discuss them in this way. Orwell threw this
... into high and absurd relief by retelling the political history of his
century in terms suitable for children ... the over-extended structure
just needed a sharp kick at the right spot, the right kind of ridicule at
the right moment. That was why Animal Farm was able to turn Liberal
opinion around. It was not its relation to reality. (Rorty, 1989: 174; my
emphasis)
Again this is a problematic sort of argument. I can accept on one level that
what Rorty is saying is absolutely correct, that an incisive insight based on
satire or irony often cuts through a maze of conflicting arguments and reveals
stupidity or horror or some other human disaster. But Rorty’s last few words
seem to suggest that a similar story could be told about any sort of society,
whether true or not. That it was not the reality of the horrors of the Soviet
Union that mattered, but the latest story told about it. This surely cannot be
the case, and indeed elsewhere it certainly does not seem to be Rorty’s posi-
tion, as revealed, for example, in his remarks about the Soviet Union quoted
earlier, and his defence generally of liberal democracies. He values liberal
democracy because it embodies values which he would like to prevail in his
utopian community (which suggests that his ’final vocabulary’ is a little more
fixed than he thinks); for example, tolerance and curiosity rather than truth.
Nothing, he says, would be more real than pleasure and pain, nothing more
important than the search for happiness, and he even endorses Mill’s harm
principle:
In such a community all that is left of philosophy is the maxim of Mill’s
On Liberty... everyone can do what they want if they don’t hurt
anybody else while doing it. (Rorty, 1991b: 75)
It is also not clear to me that Rorty’s views here do justice to a novelist such
as Orwell. To concentrate on ’hyper-reality’ or the image portrayed, rather
than the political reality which inspired the story, may not have been what
Orwell intended at all. Indeed, it seems to me that the whole point of a novel
such as Animal Farm is that it did correspond to a reality that Orwell dis-
approved of. I do not see that Rorty can be right about the intentions of the
novelist: on the contrary, far from abstaining from judgements about the true,
the right and the good, novelists often have a clear moral message embodied
in their story and frequently it seems as if the whole point of the story is to
deliver that message; for example, many of Dickens’s novels. Perhaps novels
are just bad philosophy? An issue here is that Rorty of course just discusses

’good’ novels. There are also many other kinds of novel, and there are other
art forms, too, such as film; these portray violence, pornography, and so on.

Rorty does not discuss what he considers to be the boundaries of ’good’

38

literature. Anyway Rorty, from his anti-foundationalist position, should not

be able to characterize the novel or the novelist in this way, as being essen-
tially one thing rather than another. Surely different novels could have all
sorts of different aims, rather than an essence? Furthermore Rorty as an ’out-
sider’ to the literary genre is perhaps not best qualified to characterize the
nature of literary activity. Fischer (in Malachowski, 1990: 233-43) argues that
Rorty misconceives the nature of the literary task, and in so doing demeans
the study of literature itself.

SYMPATHY, EMPATHY AND HUMAN SUFFERING

This leads us to Rorty’s major claim for the novel, that it can identify and
evoke sympathy for human suffering much better than dry treatises on social
justice can. Liberal aims for individual autonomy, for example, actually mili-
tate against empathy with our compassion for others. What we need are
books that demonstrate the individual and social capacity for cruelty that
history has illustrated, books that will make us conscious of the effects of our
actions on others. Rorty identifies two useful types of novel in this respect:
first, those that expose social practices and institutions which create misery,
injustice and prejudice, as does Hugo’s Les Mis6rables; and second, books
that highlight the individual capacity for cruelty, the blindness certain kinds
of people (those seeking autonomy particularly) have towards others, as do
Nabokov’s novels. Nabokov epitomizes the novelist who writes about
cruelty from the ’inside’, from the point of view of the individual inflicting
suffering on others in the course of the pursuit of perfection and aesthetic
bliss. Orwell illustrates this from the ’outside’, or from the point of view of
the victim of cruelty.
Rorty uses Dickens’s novels to illustrate his point of view. He believes that
these novels epitomize the ideals of humanity and solidarity, and can there-
fore be used as a useful paradigm of the novel and illustrative of the West’s
increasing capacity to tolerate diversity. He argues that Dickens’s novels
...were a more powerful impetus to social reform than the collected
works of all the British social theorists of his day. (Rorty, 1989: 147)
This is because novels concentrate on different things from political theorists,
and Rorty highlights the
...
opposition between the ascetic priest’s taste for theory, simplicity,
structure, abstraction and essence, and the novelists’ for narrative,
taste
detail, diversity and accident. (Rorty, 1991b: 73)
Dickens is ’all fragments, all details’, identifying with particular instances of
suffering, pointing out particular cases of cruelty, injustice and so on. Political
 39

theorists are too concerned with high-flown overall theory to worry about
such detail, and Rorty cites Heidegger’s response to the imprisonment of
some Social Democratic colleagues, which was apparently on the lines of
’Don’t bother me with petty detail’. Dickens had no abstract conception of
human nature, and was not concerned with the transformation of society
according to some single criterion of truth or good. All he wanted, accord-
ing to Rorty, was for people to notice each other and take account of each
other’s suffering. A moral world based on the wisdom of the novel, Kundera’s
idea, would, in Rorty’s opinion
... ask itself what we can do so as to get along with each other, how we
can arrange things so as to be comfortable with each other, how insti-
tutions can be changed so that everyone’s right to be understood has a
better chance of being gratified. (Rorty, 1991b: 78)
Sympathy and empathy with others will lead to feelings of solidarity and
a rejection of the suffering of others, which will entail our intuitively reject-
ing a whole range of things, such as
...
imprisonment without trial, the use of war prisoners as slaves,
torture to extract confessions, the use of hostages ... the idea that dis-
tinctions of wealth, talent, strength, sex and race are not relevant to
public policy. (Rorty, 1989: 184)
The rejection of such things will lead to our thinking of more people as ’one
of us’ rather than as ’them’.
The view I am offering says that there is such a thing as moral progress,
and that this progress is indeed in the direction of greater human soli-
darity. [This solidarity] is thought of as the ability to see more and more
traditional differences [of tribe, religion, race, customs, and the like] as
unimportant when compared with similarities with respect to pain and
humiliation. The ability to think of people wildly different from our-
selves as included in the range of ’us’. (Rorty, 1989: 192)
Rorty argues that we should stay on the look-out for marginalized people, and
try to notice the similarities we have with them rather than the differences
between us and them, therefore increasing the likelihood of feelings of soli-
darity and lessening the likelihood of cruelty; again a utilitarian sort of argu-
ment. Novels as a medium are more likely to help us achieve this, therefore

The novel is the characteristic genre of democracy, the genre mostly

closely associated with the struggle for freedom and equality. (Rorty,
1991b: 68)
There are, however, some questionable and contradictory assumptions in
Rorty’s argument. First of all, Rorty seems to suggest that humans have both
40

the capacity to empathize with and reject suffering, and the capacity to inflict
it. This may be true, but it then is not clear why Rorty thinks that illustra-
tions of cruelty through the medium of the novel will evoke sympathy rather
than incite further cruelty, either for its own enjoyment or because self-inter-
est will make people indifferent to others and more concerned with the avoid-
ance of their own pain. Rorty himself points out that in ?984 O’Brien does

not torture Winston to try to get him to be ideologically sound, or indeed for

any end. He does it because he enjoys it - torture for torture’s sake.

The major problem though is that Rorty relies purely on a subjective, intui-
tive rejection of suffering for moral progress. Even if he is right in his
assertion that liberals are naturally inclined to reject the suffering of others (I
am by no means convinced of this, but if they are it may be better explained

not as a ’natural’ inclination but in terms of the values they hold, such as tol-
eration and liberty), he must have noticed that the world is not composed
wholly of liberals. It would be nice to think that all humans reject the suffer-
ing of others, that as Taylor says
We are all universalists now about respect for life and integrity. (Taylor,
1989: 6)
But thestarving third world cynically exploited by the West, and the failure
wholly reject regimes which oppress and torture people, might suggest
to

something different. It is not enough simply to hope that people will be

moved by human suffering, we need something to say to the people who are
not.
It also seems very much as if Rorty’s idea of moral progress is tied up with
the prevention of suffering and cruelty. This seems to be a universalist sort of
claim - good consists in preventing suffering, bad is cruelty and letting suffer-
ing happen. This is consistent with the way he endorses Mill’s harm principle,
and there is at least a minimalist foundationalism here.
Charles Taylor, while endorsing the intuitive side of morality, argues that
there is also a second aspect of morality. Those theorists (like Rorty) who
have tried to
... hive this second state off and declare it dispensable or irrelevant to
morality (Taylor, 1989: 5)
end up with a partial and incomplete understanding of moral thinking. Taylor
argues:
...
perhaps the most urgent and powerful cluster of demands that we
recognise as moral concern respect for the life, integrity, well-being,
even flourishing of others.... Virtually everyone feels these demands

and they have been and are acknowledged in all human societies ... of
course the scope of the demand notoriously varies.... But they all feel
 41

the demands laid on them by some class of persons, and for most con-
temporaries this class is co-terminous with the human race. (Taylor,
1989: 4)
Taylor thus also regards the aversion to injuring the life or integrity of others
as almost instinctual, moral intuitions which are ’deep, powerful and uni-
versal’. But, he says, such reactions are given shape and substance by the
culture we live in; for example, the idea in liberal cultures that people should
be respected because they are rational agents. In Taylor’s view cultural norms
and moral intuitions are not separate things, but part of the moral reaction
which incorporates them both. Both the gut reaction, which is purely instinc-
tual, and also cultural claims about the nature and status of human beings, are
important, and
...from this second side, a moral reaction is an assent to, an affirmation
of, given ontology of the human. (Taylor, 1989: 5)
a

Taylor is more convincing here. Rorty wants to abandon the entire idea of
rational justification of political action because he sees it as seeking ’truth’.
But he seems to remain more universalist than he thinks. If we are going to
continue the ’conversation’ then saying that certain things should or should
not occur because they cause human suffering, or that political action should
be carried out in accordance with the harm principle, which Rorty endorses,
is not very different from conventional ideas of rational justification. Of
course, it may be that there are certain regimes or individuals for whom such
appeals will carry little weight. But in such cases literature seems to have no
more resources for solving problems than does philosophy.

Rorty’s view would also be unable to make much progress in resolving con-
flicts of suffering; for example, to arbitrate in the Rushdie affair between the
suffering of Muslims following the blasphemous portrayal of their prophet, as
opposed to the suffering of Rushdie due to the threats to his life and the sub-
sequent restrictions on his liberty, both in his writing and in his life generally.
Again other concepts and other considerations would need to be elucidated
before any sort of political solution could be sought. Rorty, in considering such
factors to be irrelevant, seems to make moral progress impossible. As Taylor
says, he is unable properly to articulate the claims made by people.
The whole way in which we think, reason and question ourselves about
morality supposes that our moral reactions have these two sides: that
they are not only ’gut’ feelings but also implied acknowledgements of
claims concerning their objects. The various ontological accounts try to
articulate these claims. (Taylor, 1989: 7)

Taylor’s view at least makes it possible to continue the conversation, whereas

Rorty seems to leave us either with nothing to say or else talking past each
42

other, simply asserting our own moral intuitions and preferences and telling
our own stories.
To conclude on narrative, I have argued that Rorty’s suggestion that
reading novels is an adequate and valid alternative to the activity of political
theory does not stand up to examination. Redescribing, telling a multiplicity
of stories from a variety of views, will give us alternatives to choose from.
But this is where the novel stops, and the point for political philosophers is
that we do have to choose and therefore, even though we may not be going
to achieve the absolutely true, right or good, we need reasons to choose what
to the best of our knowledge is the best alternative in moral terms. Differing
narrative techniques such as irony and ridicule will expose and highlight rel-
evant factors but these alone will not give us adequate information for action.
And the awareness of suffering, although important, is too dependent on sub-
jective and intuitive reaction. So although Taylor’s and Maclntyre’s views on
narrative are constructive and aid understanding in political philosophy,
Rorty’s view takes us no further forward. This is hardly surprising of course
as he regards the doing of political philosophy itself as an invalid activity.
None of this, however, should be taken as criticism or repudiation of the
novel as an important feature of contemporary thinking. I believe that the
things that the novel does are important and valid as one form of political and
moral thinking and understanding. Had Rorty argued that reading novels
would aid the understanding of political theories, and make it more complete,
then I would have wholeheartedly agreed. It may be true that
...when you weigh the good and the bad the social novelists have done
against the good and the bad the social theorists have done, you find
yourself wishing that there had been more novels and fewer theories.
You wish that the leaders of successful revolutions had read fewer
books which gave general ideas and more books which gave them an
ability to imaginatively identify with those whom they were to rule.
(Rorty, 1991b: 80)
What I cannot accept is Rorty’s attempt to repudiate the usefulness of politi-
cal theory entirely. I can accept the repudiation of objectivism and universal-
ism to some degree, and accept the importance of historical context and
narrative in rendering enquiry intelligible. But unless we are to abandon our-
selves entirely to historical contingency and moral arbitrariness we still have
to use the sort of reasoning that political philosophy teaches in order to
decide what best to do, reasoning that is valid and justified by having some
commonly accepted foundations and criteria that are open to scrutiny, that
can be analysed, criticized and challenged, and that form part of an ongoing

debate. But this is not the only valid way of thinking, and I accept Rorty’s
view that understanding of the human world can be enhanced through a
variety of diverse disciplines. Of course political philosophers should read
 43

novels, as should everyone else, but they should do so in addition to, not
instead of, political philosophy.

NOTES

1 See MacIntyre, After Virtue (1985) and Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (1988).
2 See Taylor, Sources of the Self (1989) and Philosophical Papers 2 (1985).
3 See Walzer, Spheres of Justice (1983).
4 See Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (1982).
5 See Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism (1983), Philosophical Profiles
(1986) and The New Constellation (1991).
6 For a discussion of Gadamer’s hermeneutics see, for example, Warnke (1987).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bernstein, R. (1983) Beyond Objectivism and Relativism. Oxford: Blackwell.

Bernstein, R. (1986) Philosophical Profiles. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Bernstein, R. (1991) The New Constellation. Cambridge: Polity Press.
MacIntyre, A. (1985) After Virtue. London: Duckworth.
MacIntyre, A. (1988) Whose Justice? Which Rationality? London: Duckworth.
Malachowski, A., ed. (1990) Reading Rorty. Oxford: Blackwell.
Rorty, R. (1980) Philosophy and the Mirror . of Nature Oxford: Blackwell.
Rorty, R. (1982) Consequences .of Pragmatism Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press.
Rorty, R. (1983) ’Post Modernist Bourgeois Liberalism’, Journal of Philosophy 80
(October): 583-9.
Rorty, R. (1986) ’On Ethnocentrism: a Reply to Geertz’, Michigan Quarterly Review
25 (Summer): 525-34.
Rorty, R., (1987) ’Thugs and Theorists: a Reply to Bernstein’, Political Theory 15(4):
565-80.
Rorty, R. (1988) ’The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy’, in M. Peterson and K.
Vaughan (eds) The Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom: Two Hundred Years
After. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 257-82.
Rorty, R. (1989) Contingency, Irony and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press.
Rorty, R. (1991a) Objectivism, Relativism and Truth: Philosophical Papers 1
. Cam-
bridge : Cambridge University Press.
Rorty, R. (1991b) Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers 2. Cam-
bridge : Cambridge University Press.
Sandel, M. (1982) Liberalism and the Limits . of Justice Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press.
Taylor, C. (1985) Philosophical Papers 2: Philosophy and the Human Sciences. Cam-
bridge : Cambridge University Press.
Taylor, C. (1989) Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
44

Walzer, M. (1983) Spheres of Justice. Oxford: Martin Robertson.

Warnke, G. (1987) Gadamer: Hermeneutics, Tradition and Reason. Oxford: Polity
Press.

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

BARBARA McGUINNESS teaches and researches in the areas of political and

moral philosophy. Her primary interests are in contemporary political phil-
osophy and the relationship between philosophy and other disciplines, such
as literature. She is currently Deputy Director of the School of Social Sci-

ences, University of Teeside, Middlesbrough.

Address: Department of Politics, School of Social Sciences, University of

Teeside, Middlesbrough, TS1 3BA, UK.