Society (2022) 59:583–590

https://doi.org/10.1007/s12115-022-00769-x

BOOK REVIEW

Pragmatist Philosophy for Our Times: Reviewing Rorty’s Legacy

Richard Shusterman 1

Published online: 20 September 2022

# The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2022

Richard Rorty, Philosophy as Poetry Chris Voparil, Reconstructing Pragmatism:

Richard Rorty and the Classical Pragmatists
(University of Virginia Press, 2016), 96 pp., ISBN: 978-
0813939339 (Oxford University Press, New York, 2022), 392 pp., ISBN:
978-0197605721
Richard Rorty, On Philosophy and Philosophers,
edited by W. P. Małecki and Chris Voparil Giancarlo Marchetti (Ed.), The Ethics,
Epistemology, and Politics of Richard Rorty
(Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2020). 260 pp.,
ISBN: 978-1108488457 (Routledge, New York, 2022), 294 pp., ISBN: 978-
0367342173
Richard Rorty, Pragmatism
as Anti-Authoritarianism
I
(Harvard University Press, Mass, 2021), 256 pp., ISBN: 978-
0674248915
The pathos of death is this, that when the days of one’s
life are ended, those days that were so crowded with
business and felt so heavy in their passing, what remains
Richard Rorty, What Can We Hope For?: Essays of one in memory should usually be so slight a thing.
on Politics The phantom of an attitude, the echo of a certain mode
of thought, a few pages of print, some invention, or
(Princeton University Press, NJ, 2022), 224 pp., ISBN: 978- some victory we gained in a brief critical hour, are all
0691217529 that can survive the best of us. It is as if the whole of a
man’s significance had now shrunk into the phantom of
David Rondel (Ed), The Cambridge Companion an attitude, into a mere musical note or phrase sugges-
to Rorty tive of his singularity — happy are those whose singu-
larity gives a note so clear as to be victorious over the
(Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2021), 366 pp., inevitable pity of such a diminution and abridgement.
ISBN: 978-1108733953 (James 1962; p. 18)

So remarked the pragmatist William James in memorializ-

ing his philosophical godfather, Ralph Waldo Emerson. By
* Richard Shusterman
this Jamesian criterion, which paradoxically posits happi-
shuster1@fau.edu
ness as a posthumous affair, Richard Rorty (in some sense
1
Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, FL, USA my pragmatist godfather) should be very happy.1 Fifteen
584
years after his June 2007 death, we are witnessing some-
thing of a Rorty Renaissance celebrating his significant
singularity in much more than “a few pages of print.” In
the last 2 years, three new books of Rorty’s writing have
appeared along with comprehensive studies of his work
published by major academic presses. Two of the Rorty
volumes derive from unpublished papers, selected and
edited from his archived Nachlass at the University of
California, Irvine, while the third claims to be “Rorty’s
long-lost, last book,” presenting his “final, mature version
and vision of his path-breaking pragmatism.” (Brandom
2021; p. vii) Interest is not confined to the Anglophone
world. France’s prominent Archives de Philosophie pub-
lished the special issue “Relire Rorty” late in 2019, and
the prestigious Parisian École normale supérieure sched-
uled the international conference “Reconsidering Rorty on
Politics, Language and Aesthetics” for December 2022.
Several reasons can explain this surge of Rorty publica-
tions and interest. One stems from his prominent posthumous
presence in social media for apparently predicting the election
of someone like Donald Trump. In Achieving Our Country
(1998), Rorty imagined how white working-class Americans
would continue to lose faith both in mainstream liberal and
conservative leaders and therefore elect a populist “strong-
man” who would take the country in a dangerously undemo-
cratic and “sadistic” direction. Popularity in twitter gossip
hardly justifies the flood of attention to his philosophical
work, and Rorty would surely reject the status of clairvoyant
prophet, because he tirelessly contends that philosophy holds
no special key to knowledge and that the very philosophical
ideal of truth is a misguided and useless, albeit deeply
entrenched, traditional value. Rather than truth, Rorty insists
on moral, political, and cultural progress toward greater har-
mony and beauty as the key aim to which philosophy and
intellectual culture should be directed. A second explanation
for the burst of Rorty’s publications is that his unexpected
death from pancreatic cancer prevented him from properly
overseeing the publication of his final texts. His Page-
Barbour lectures of 2004 were not published until 2016, per-
haps because he was too busy with the publication of his last
important collection of essays, Philosophy as Cultural Politics
(2007), which includes a slightly shorter version of his third
and final Page-Barbour lecture.
The most important reason for the Rorty renaissance is
surely the quality, influence, and controversial character of
his work. A provocative thinker with clear, stylish, energeti-
cally flowing, and often colorful prose that is both appealingly
accessible and rich in erudition, Rorty writes texts that engage
0
Rorty was the person most influential in converting me from analytic phi-
losophy to pragmatism and in bringing me to the USA, when I was already a
tenured philosopher in Israel. For detailed discussion of our philosophical
connections and differences, see “Pragmatism and Cultural Politics” in
Shusterman 2012; pp. 166–196.
Society (2022) 59:583–590
a broad array of topics ranging from core philosophical topics
of epistemology, ontology, language, ethics, and political the-
ory (considered both in terms of historical treatment and con-
temporary debates) to commentary on current political issues,
including controversial matters of cultural politics. Rorty’s
voracious intellect treats far too many topics to discuss in
my essay, which, to balance the celebratory thrust of the re-
viewed publications, will ultimately focus on some issues in
his views that seem in problematic tension with his key prag-
matist aims and, more importantly, with those I believe we
should endorse in our current moment.
Rorty’s alluring blend of quality, controversy, and range
provides a fourth reason for this burst of posthumous
publication—his marketability in the commercial field of in-
tellectual goods. For academic philosophical publishing (ob-
viously concerned about declining sales), Rorty is an author of
proven broad interest that extends beyond philosophy into
literary studies and general intellectual culture. Because books
by him are sure to sell, and he is no longer alive to assert his
droit moral to control publication, his (published and unpub-
lished) works are attractive quarry for edited collections. A
slim, unremarkable lecture that Rorty gave in Turin in 2005
was puffed up with a Foreword, an Introduction, and a
Conclusion by other writers and then presented as a book by
Rorty, entitled An Ethics for Today (2011). Less dubious was
the venture of two savvy editors who republished, in a 2014
collection, some of Rorty’s uncollected early papers. Another
pair of ambitious editors usefully sifted through the Rorty
Nachlass to publish first a volume of unpublished (and some-
times undated) papers on Philosophy and Philosophers
(2020) that apparently extend from the 1960s to 2000, and
then, in 2022, a mixed volume of Rorty’s published and un-
published short journalistic texts on political issues, entitled
What Can We Hope For?
The apparent cream of this posthumous crop is
Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism (2021), meticulously
edited by Eduardo Mendietta and graced by a substantive
“Foreword” by Rorty’s favorite student Robert Brandom,
claiming it is Rorty’s “long-lost, last book” and “final” vision.
Innocent readers will need to consult the volume’s back notes
to learn that the book was never really lost but was already
published in Catalan (1998) and Spanish (2000) and that all
but one of the individual papers were previously published in
English in one form or other, after being delivered as lectures
at the University of Girona in 1996 and then given a preface in
1997. Subsequent to those lectures, Rorty published his more
accessible books on politics, Achieving our Country (1998)
and Philosophy and Social Hope (2000), as well as the last
two of his four important collections of philosophical essays
with Cambridge University Press, Truth and Politics (1998)
and Philosophy and Cultural Politics (2007). All this indicates
that rather than a set of newly composed lectures to represent
Rorty’s final vision, Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism is
Society (2022) 59:583–590
simply a collection of essays from the 1990s. One of its chap-
ters, prepared for a lecture I heard in France in 1993, was
already published in French translation in a book I co-edited
in 1998 (La modernité en questions).
The unseemliness of the advertising hype is a regrettable
blemish on what is otherwise a very finely edited collection of
essays in which Rorty’s undeniable polemical brilliance and
philosophical knowledge are in full display, even if the book
fails to do justice to the range of Rorty’s vision by concentrat-
ing on the standard philosophical problems that Rorty’s argu-
ments hope to sweep away. The book’s account of Rorty’s
pragmatism as presenting “an intellectual movement of world-
historical significance” to bring “nothing less than a second
Enlightenment” through “completion of the project of
Enlightenment” (Brandom 2021; pp. vi, xxv) seems awk-
wardly out of step with Rorty’s own admirably modest assess-
ment of these lectures: “as having shifted a few pieces around
on the philosophical chessboard [“to arrange them into slight-
ly more useful patterns”] rather than as having answered any
deep questions or produced any elevating thoughts” (Rorty
2021; p. xxxv). Such puffery is also out of tune with Rorty’s
extremely humble view of philosophy’s current significance,
portraying it as a “transitional genre” that (after superseding
religion) has been superseded by literature as the intellectual
engine of moral and political progress through literature’s
imaginative powers for inventing new vocabularies and thus
new ways of thinking that by improving our language makes
our ethical and political lives richer and better (Rorty 2006;
pp. 89–104).
Since his trailblazing Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity of
1989 (the “favorite among [his] own books” (Rorty, 2010; p.
17)), Rorty has plied a thoroughly anti-authoritarian line that
included eschewing the authority of his own philosophical
views to compel the assent of others and to claim validity
for other times or contexts, advocating the pluralist, liberal
ironist ideal “to overcome authority without claiming author-
ity” (Rorty 1989; p. 105). Repeatedly endorsing Hegel’s view
that “philosophy is its time held in thought” (Rorty 2006; p.
viii) while affirming Emersonian faith in human imagination
to create “endlessly expanding circles” (Rorty 2016; p. 20),
Rorty humbly avows (and welcomes) that any circle of
thought he sketches should be overcome by a different, more
expansive one. Believing that linguistic change through new
vocabularies is the key to moral and political progress, Rorty
critiques philosophy’s traditional attempts to ground our con-
cepts and beliefs by appeal to putative foundational truths
regarding reality beyond the web of language. Rather than
grounding our discourse and principles, “the point is to change
them so as to make them serve our purposes better” by “mak[-
ing] them more useful for democratic politics” (Rorty 2021; p.
83).
Rorty’s efforts for change focus on disabusing us of
philosophy’s traditional discourse about so-called essential
585
issues, which he regards as devoid of utility, even if they once
served past progress. This makes his philosophy principally
therapeutic or negative. One could summarize its core in three
key antithetical themes: anti-foundationalism, anti-essential-
ism, and anti-representationalism. Their challenges to tradi-
tional philosophical ideals of objectivity make Rorty look like
a relativist, but he rejects that charge by rejecting the very idea
of relativism as relying on a misguided representational view
of belief. That view explains difference in belief as deriving
from the different ways that perceptions and conceptual
schemes represent reality or “the way the world really is.”
This core notion of a foundational objective reality—“the re-
ally real” as Rorty sarcastically dubs it (Rorty 2016; p. 10)—
that is differently represented in our subjective experience,
concepts, and beliefs is an idea that Rorty’s pragmatist anti-
foundationalism vehemently rejects. We can make no prag-
matic sense of such a foundational reality because we have no
direct access to it without the linguistic tools through which
we can understand our dealings with the world and formulate
our beliefs about it. The world of our experience, in this sense,
is more made than found or given, and what makes it is human
linguistic practices as they change and develop over history.
Anti-essentialism is a clear consequence of Rorty’s anti-
foundational and anti-representational historicism. Objects in
the world are not ontologically individuated and eternally de-
fined by a set of essential properties that are necessary to the
object’s identity. Instead, linguistic practices are what deter-
mine how we individuate things and define what their essen-
tial properties are. In this sense, the things of this world are
constructed through language and can change through change
of vocabularies. What chiefly (and rightly) motivates such
linguistic change are human desires that reflect practical and
aesthetic interests rather than the purely rational search for
truth. Here, Rorty can appeal to the pragmatist, historicist
tradition of William James and John Dewey that drew on
Charles Darwin. As James defined truth as what is “good in
the way of belief” (James 2000; p. 38) and explained our sense
of rationality in terms of “aesthetic and practical interests”
(James 1983; p.817), so Dewey explained how knowledge
and concepts (including those of philosophy) developed
through changing historical circumstances, particularly
through the need to adjust beliefs to new social challenges.
Such historicism, Rorty argues, is fully compatible with a
form of naturalism that recognizes brute physical causality
and the fact that human language makers and their webs of
rational belief are products of the evolving natural world rath-
er than supernatural gifts of a divine spiritual force.
Although Rorty dodges the charge of relativism, his anti-
essentialist, anti-foundational, anti-representational histori-
cism entails a form of ethnocentrism, one he cheerfully em-
braces (Rorty 2021; pp. 59, 76). Humans always experience
and understand things through a particular culture that gives
them not only the language that structures their thought but
586
also the social circumstances and values that shape their hori-
zons and desires, their sense of what is possible and worth-
while. As there is no foundational reality that could justify our
view of things as the true one, so there is no foundational
rationality to invoke for convincing others that our beliefs
are more rational. There is no neutral space to step out of rival
cultural beliefs so that pure reason could adjudicate between
rival views and values. Arguments that our secular liberal
beliefs are more rational than those of the religious fundamen-
talist will always have some implicit circularity because they
will inevitably appeal to concepts, beliefs, and values that
somehow presume the superiority of secular rationality over
the inscrutable, unfathomable reason of God.
For Rorty, however, such circularity does not mean that we are
rationally condemned to believe that all cultures are equally good
and that we therefore cannot argue for what we believe is an ideal
culture. Rorty’s texts unflaggingly maintain the superiority of sec-
ular liberal democracy over all other forms of societal and political
order. During Reagan’s political reign that witnessed the fall of
Soviet communism, Rorty defined his position as “postmodernist
bourgeois liberalism”: postmodernist in doubting grand
metanarratives of coming closer to ultimate truth; bourgeois in
recognizing that, historically, capitalism helped shape cherished
notions of rights and freedoms while providing the economic
wealth that fostered Western culture; and liberal in its commitment
to personal freedom and tolerance (Rorty 1991; pp. 197–210).
Though still convinced that no superior substitute for liberal cap-
italist society would emerge, Rorty later preferred to describe his
political ideal in different terms: the democratic “culture Whitman
and Dewey hoped to build” as the distinctive promise America
pledged to embody (Rorty 2021; p. 124). It is the ideal of an
inclusive liberal democracy devoted to promoting personal free-
dom and social harmony, buttressed by economic security, toler-
ance, and kindness or love for all its citizens.
Although critical of certain American realities, Rorty re-
mained a patriotic believer in America’s ideals and distinctive
exemplary role in advancing democracy. While critical of
Christian belief in the supernatural and original sin, his dem-
ocratic social ideal (built on Dewey’s) endorsed “the Christian
doctrine that love is the only law” (Rorty 2021; p. 44). As
good democracy advocates the “substitution of love for pow-
er,” so justice, for Rorty, is “larger loyalty” that extends our
concern for fairness and equity to social groups beyond those
close and dear to us. Its verdicts, like other moral judgments,
are best justified not through rational argument but by “appeal
to sentiment” (Rorty 2021; p. 75). Hence, Rorty sees “moral
progress as a progress of sentiments,” “of increasing
sensitivity” to others, rather than progress toward higher ratio-
nality (Rorty 2021; pp. 131, 135). He therefore regards litera-
ture (particularly the novel) as superior to philosophy in pro-
moting ethical improvement because of its special powers to
stimulate feelings of sympathy for others who are different
and remote from ourselves.
Society (2022) 59:583–590
If literature outstrips philosophy as the engine of moral
progress toward “a utopian, inclusivist, human community,”
then culture should be “no longer dominated by the ideal of
objective cognition but by that of aesthetic enhancement”
through the individual’s “idiosyncratic self-creation” in her
personal life (Rorty 2021; p. 47; 2010; pp.19–20). Rorty then
adds, “if we were not the sort of beings who are capable of
self-creation, we would not be worth caring about” (Rorty
2010; p. 20). Philosophy’s service to the public sphere of
politics should be devoted to promoting the possibilities of
such aesthetic fulfillment, to “build our philosophical reflec-
tions around our political hopes: around the project of fash-
ioning institutions and customs which will make human life,
finite and mortal life, more beautiful” and “see the pursuit of
truth as the pursuit of human happiness” (Rorty 2021; pp.
xxix–xxx). The yearning “for something more than happi-
ness” and beauty—what Rorty calls “the quest for the infinite”
and “the sublime” (which he identifies with philosophy’s tra-
ditional quest for “the really real” and the absolute ideal)—he
sees as too dangerous for the public sphere and so must be
confined to “the realm of individual imagination” (Rorty
2021; pp. xxxi–xxxii).
Recognizing that his own metaphilosophical commitments
will not allow him to argue for his beliefs by saying that they
are closer to foundational truth, Rorty concedes that any argu-
ment claiming his views to be more rational than those of an
illiberal theocrat will ultimately rely on reasons that presup-
pose his claim rather than providing neutral evidence equally
acceptable by his opponents. If rational argument is compel-
ling only when the arguers share common ground as to what
counts as proper evidence and right reasoning, then
philosophy’s perennial questions will perennially defy resolu-
tion since their rival positions are based on conflicting intui-
tions about evidence and different preferences of vocabular-
ies. Rorty insists, however, that argument’s impotence to re-
solve fundamental disagreement does not mean there is no
way to convince others of the superiority of one’s views. His
alternative to argument is narrative. Where reasoning finds
insufficient common ground to resolve matters, persuasive
storytelling can induce assent. Rather than reason, aesthetic
appeal will crown the winner. Philosophies are not so much
disproved as displaced by new philosophical views, vocabu-
laries, and problems that seem more attractive, more interest-
ing and relevant to the particular tastes, hopes, and needs of
their time.
Though eminently capable of razor-sharp argumentation
(displayed when challenging specific points of analytic inter-
locutors), Rorty maintains his preferred mode of persuasion is
narrative rather than argument, acknowledging Hegel as the
imaginative genius who created narrative philosophy by es-
tablishing its power. In Philosophy as Poetry, Rorty contrasts
analytic philosophy (wholly committed to logical coherence)
with “narrative philosophy” in which “imaginativeness that
Society (2022) 59:583–590
gives new uses to old words” and thus redescribes philosophy
and its history in new ways. Narrative philosophy maintains
coherence while offering more creatively attractive forms of
coherence, compelling storytelling that connects philoso-
phers, their ideas, and the scientific, social, and cultural con-
texts that shaped those ideas in interesting new ways (Rorty
2016; p. 48). Just 2 months before dying, Rorty confirmed this
“taste for ambitious, swooshy, Geistesgeschichte,” and most
of his later essays are in this “big swooshy narrative” style
(Rorty 2010; pp. 6, 17). He describes its ideal form as “a
supernarrative – a story that holds the history of science to-
gether with that of politics, history of poetry together with that
of theology, the sequence of canonical philosophical texts
together with that of canonical works of architecture,” a nar-
rative of imaginative redescription, which though “too big an
assignment for a single thinker” is the proper task of intellec-
tual culture as a whole (Rorty 2016; pp. 59–60). Philosophy’s
contribution should be supplying its own broad redescriptive
narratives instead of focusing on narrow, scholastic analytic
issues by continuing to admire itself as the ultimate seeker and
arbiter of foundational truth, rationality, and justice.
According to Rorty, what makes such sweeping
redescriptive narratives convincing is their imaginative in-
terest and aesthetic appeal; this helps keep the philosophical
conversation from stagnating in scholastic sterility by re-
freshing it with new perspectives and vocabularies.
Already in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Rorty iden-
tified his philosophical approach as “a turn against theory
and toward narrative,” one that conquers through attraction
not argument. “Conforming to my own precepts, I am not
going to offer arguments against the vocabulary I want to
replace. Instead, I am going to try to make the vocabulary I
favor look attractive,” while making “objections [to it] look
bad, thereby changing the subject” (Rorty 1989; pp. 9, 44).
Aesthetic factors are central in Rorty’s thought, not only as
criteria of vocabulary choice and narrative persuasion, but
also in his private ideal of aesthetic self-creation and even in
his political ideal of democracy as promoting “a world of
beautiful Gestelle” of social harmony (Rorty 2021; p. xxxi).
The failure of recent philosophical commentaries to ade-
quately address the crucial aesthetic and poetic dimension
of Rorty’s thought is regrettable. However, Kloppenberg
and Westbrook (in the most useful essays of The
Cambridge Companion) point to its importance and the dif-
ficulties that aesthetic experience (with its important non-
linguistic dimensions) poses to Rorty’s textualism. Such
difficulties make Rorty seem uncomfortable with the aes-
thetic, despite his frequent invocation of aesthetic terms,
criteria, and ideals. In polemics with me, he attacked the
aesthetic field “as another of Kant’s bad ideas” (Rorty
2001; p. 156).
587
Even discarding the concept of aesthetics, we still can ask
what makes Rorty’s redescriptive narratives attractive? Why
do they continue to fascinate readers? One could describe his
compelling narrative style through the military metaphor of
shock and awe. Rorty displays the awesome breadth of his
knowledge of philosophical history (covering ancient and
modern, analytic and continental Western thought) along with
masterful skills of rigorous argument, subtle distinctions, and
imaginative facility in making surprising and ingenious con-
nections. Equally awesome is his rhetorical genius to present
such breadth and power in clear, flowing, unpretentious prose
that carries the narrative so swiftly and effortlessly forward
that the captivated reader would rather relish riding the narra-
tive wave than stop to question it, even when the shocks on
that wave threaten balance and credibility.
Some of these shocks come from Rorty’s method of
connecting seemingly very divergent thinkers and views
(Dewey and Heidegger, Peirce and Wittgenstein), demonstrat-
ing the sort of witty discordia concors that made Donne’s
metaphysical poetry scandalously appealing. Other shocks
come from outlandish claims, delivered as insouciant asides.
“It seems safe to say that if Peirce had never lived, that would
have made no great difference to the history of philosophy.
For Frege would have made the linguistic turn single-
handedly” (Rorty 2021; p. 7). This staggering dismissal of
the acknowledged founder of pragmatism by its unstinting
contemporary advocate shows Rorty’s recognition that prov-
ocation through radical claims is among the simplest yet most
effective methods for getting attention and inciting interest—
one way to keep philosophical conversation going in hopes of
prompting it toward more promising directions. He knows it is
far more difficult to invent ambitiously original philosophical
ideas than to connect or debunk them with critical narratives
of their rise and fall, and pragmatic assessments of their con-
temporary use or uselessness. Rorty’s honest modesty is truly
impressive in stating “The function of unoriginal syncretists
like myself is to construct narratives which, by fusing hori-
zons, link together the products of original minds” to serve the
purpose of showing which of those philosophical “products of
the imagination of the past have become shopworn and be-
draggled, and need to be replaced” (Rorty 2010; p. 4).
II
Having described Rorty’s philosophy through his posthumous
publications, I now consider some troubling limitations that
their views pose to his pragmatist goals of reviving philosophy
by changing its agenda. Rather than redirecting that agenda to
important new issues in cultural politics which impact our
hopes to realize a better world of harmony, beauty, and
588
happiness, the major thrust of these posthumous texts by (and
about) Rorty is to plunge us back into the traditional philo-
sophical issues that his narratives seek to sweep away but
instead continue to resurrect as essential to their narrative
meaning. Rather than offering new visions of improved har-
mony, beauty, and happiness and new ways to achieve this
(by building positive freedom of capabilities), Rorty merely
offers the vague and familiar gospel of humanist love and
Mill’s negative liberty of noninterference. Exhorting philoso-
phy as cultural politics “to suggest further novelties…to mod-
ify people’s sense of who they are, what matters to them, what
is most important,” Rorty embraces Dewey’s definition of
philosophy as “social hope reduced to a program of action”
(Rorty 2006; p. ix). But he falls short in delivering any mean-
ingful new ones.
The exciting appeal of Rorty’s texts in the 1980s converted
me from an Oxford-trained analytic philosopher to an advo-
cate of the Deweyan-Jamesian pragmatism he championed.
My enthusiasm diminished with his lack of positive proposals
for creating a new cultural agenda and a lack of substance for
the aesthetic and eudaimonic values he advocates. Perhaps
Rorty’s insistently deflationary stance, his unrelenting rejec-
tion of yearning for any sort of sublimity, greatness, depth, or
elevation beyond the “darkling two-dimensional plane” of
linguistic practices (Rorty 2021; p. 105), is meant to curb
passionate enthusiasm, which, admittedly, is often misguided.
But passion is needed to motivate the kind of activism needed
for significant political and cultural reform. Deflationary iro-
nist words of flatness are not an adequate spur to action, and
Rorty’s textualism eschews the notion of affect along with the
concept of experience that was crucial to the pragmatism of
James and Dewey.
More troubling than these issues and deeply discordant
with the needs of contemporary cultural politics is Rorty’s
extreme anthropocentrism, an apparent corollary of his restric-
tion of the relevant universe to the universe of human dis-
course. In arguing “that we should separate the quest for great-
ness and sublimity from the quest for justice and happiness,”
Rorty claims “our only obligations will be to our fellows and
to our own fantasies,” because “The idea of a non-human
authority and the quest for sublimity are both products of
self-abasement” (Rorty 2021; pp. xxx,xxxii). As pragmatist
“neo-Darwinians,” he claims “our attitude toward the non-
human…is one of Baconian mastery rather than one of re-
spect” (Rorty 2021; p. 191). This radically narrow anthropo-
centrism is clearly no help in addressing a most crucial issue
for contemporary cultural politics: the urgent need to save our
planet from catastrophic climate change by transforming not
only our vocabularies but also our attitudes and lifestyles.
Respecting the nonhuman natural world and the powers
and limits it exerts on us is not a policy of self-abasement
Society (2022) 59:583–590
but a pragmatic Darwinian adjustment for survival and
flourishing. Philosophy may have started from this recogni-
tion of human limits before the unfathomable, overwhelming
powers of nature and the Olympian gods. Its founding injunc-
tion to “Know thyself” was inscribed on Apollo’s Delphic
temple to remind humankind of our mortality and vulnerabil-
ity, that we should know our humble place in the vast universe
to avoid the catastrophes of hubris. Socrates and Plato crea-
tively reinterpreted the maxim as advocating the need to know
one’s soul so as to recognize and cultivate its spiritual, divine
dimension. That powerful redescription set philosophy on the
quest for the eternal, the infinite, and the sublime that Rorty
denounces.
He claims his “pragmatism is a philosophy of finitude,”
exhorting us “to give up the quest for the infinite [and]…rest
content with beauty” by abjuring “pursuit of criteria which
transcend the social practices of a time and place [which] is
an attempt to evade this finitude” (Rorty 2021; p.xxx; 2016;
p.57). “So is the attempt to philosophize at a wholesale level”
(such as saying “something general about…the various things
that different sorts of men and women have found valuable”
so as to suggest “a wholesale ideal”) which only serves “to
puff ourselves up, to give us the sense that we are associated
with something that does not share our finitude” (Rorty 2016;
pp. 57–58). Rorty describes his philosophy as “finitistic
through and through” (Rorty 2021; p. xxxi), even to the par-
adoxical point of challenging its own belief in human finitude,
considering it as merely a choice of vocabulary. “It is not as if
human finitude is the ultimate truth of the matter, as if human
beings are intrinsically finite. On our view, human beings are
what they make themselves and one of the things they have
wanted to make themselves is a divinity” (Rorty 2021; p. 95).
Does mere wanting make it so? Finitude in these posthumous
Rortian texts refers essentially to the limits of any discursive
regime, the fact that any vocabulary or world view is finite
because human imagination can always create a new one that
will outflank and displace it. In Rorty’s Emersonian terms,
any inclusive circle our thought can draw will eventually be
superseded by “new and larger circles” (Rorty 2016; p. 10).
He does not discuss the finitude of death and the loss of pow-
ers (physical or mental) through injury, old age, and disease.
Can we secular pragmatists effectively talk our way out of
these physical and mental limits, of the degenerative decline
of aging and death?
Rorty’s posthumous books speak little of death, nor of pain
and suffering. But pain constituted a central theme of
Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, his transdisciplinary mas-
terpiece that fruitfully engaged literary as well as philosophi-
cal, psychological, and political culture, with its discussions of
Proust, Nabokov, and Orwell alongside those of Marx and
Mill, Kant and Hegel, Plato and Nietzsche, and Davidson
Society (2022) 59:583–590
and Heidegger. There Rorty defines human solidarity as “not
discovered by reflection” on a putative shared essence but
instead “created by increasing sensitivity to… the pain and
humiliation of other, unfamiliar sorts of people” (Rorty
1989; p. xv). Acknowledging the nonhuman world’s “brute
power” to inflict “naked pain” that can “inarticulately crush
us” (Rorty 1989; p. 40), Rorty also recognizes the nonlinguis-
tic nature of such pain, distinguishing it from the suffering of
humiliation through the destruction of the cherished language
games essential to one’s sense of selfhood. Rorty here repeat-
edly recognizes here that “pain is nonlinguistic” and that “the
ability to feel pain” (rather than reasoning ability) is the only
thing “we share with all other humans”; that “what unites [a
person] with the rest of the species is not a common language
but just susceptibility to pain, and in particular to that special
form of pain which the brutes do not share with the humans –
humiliation” (Rorty 1989; pp. 92, 94). Because it is nonlin-
guistic, pain is something we have no ability to erase through
linguistic “transformation, only the ability to recognize” it
along with contingency of existence (Rorty 1989; p. 40).
Why does pain’s role disappear in the later writings? A
likely answer is the intensification of Rorty’s textualism, a
doubling down on his “psychological nominalism” that ad-
mits nothing but language, condemning consciousness, sen-
tience, and experience as invalid concepts for philosophy, and
insisting that “all awareness is a linguistic affair” (Rorty 2021;
pp. 162, 174). If pain is nonlinguistic, but we are obviously
aware of pain (certainly our own if not also that of others),
then not all awareness is linguistic. Pain must therefore be
marginalized from Rortian theory for the sake of preserving
panlinguistic purity.2 Such purity means rejecting all nonlin-
guistic feelings from philosophical relevance by arguing that
acknowledging them entails the epistemological “myth of the
given” (i.e., that prelinguistic experience gives us direct access
to truth about the world). But feelings have relevance beyond
the epistemological questions on which Rorty remains fo-
cused (though seeking to sweep them away). Feelings have
a crucial role in visions of the good life. Rejecting feelings
means excluding not only pain but also pleasures. That exclu-
sion is why Rorty’s talk of aesthetic fulfillment and happiness
seems drably vague and abstract, and why he denies a philo-
sophical role to embodiment, the seat of affect that James and
Dewey recognized and cultivated. More puzzling is that Rorty
fails to recognize that in rejecting the philosophical relevance
of feeling he is undermining his own advocacy of moral
2 tion provides a program of action to give more body to
Another reason for excluding pain from philosophy may be its stubborn
resistance to remedy through language. In Rorty’s beautifully evocative essay
on facing his imminent death from inoperable pancreatic cancer, he writes of
having “found comfort” in poetry rather than other forms of literature, includ-
ing philosophy (Rorty 2007; 130). There is no mention of pain, though it must
surely have been part of his final ordeal in life. Perhaps dismissing it in theory
helped to diminish it in felt experience.
589
progress as “a progress of sentiments,” his aim of enlarging
moral “agreement by persuasion…[through] feeling” using
forms of “rhetorical manipulation” that appeal to the senti-
ments rather than strict arguments based on reason (Rorty
2021; pp. 131, 156).
The centrality of affect in moral attitudes and action should
lead to recognizing the value of somaesthetic cultivation for
ethical and political improvement: suggesting a new program
of action for cultural politics. As all sentiments are fundamen-
tally bodily, so are feelings of prejudice (racism, sexism, ho-
mophobia, ethnic hatred, etc.), which often arise from somatic
feelings of discomfort aroused by the bodies of culturally dif-
ferent people. The fact that they look, smell, talk, or walk
differently than we do makes us feel differently toward them
and less likely to treat them as deserving the same treatment as
us. These negative feelings often work beneath the level of full
consciousness and linguistic awareness, which is another rea-
son why their resulting prejudice resists rational arguments for
tolerance. By cultivating disciplined somatic consciousness,
we can improve awareness of such feelings so as to control or
transform them to conquer our prejudices (Shusterman, 2008;
pp. 127–132).
Feelings can be effectively manipulated through somatic as
well as linguistic means. We can bring strangers (and even
enemies) to feel more comfortable with each other by having
them share the pleasures of eating and drinking together. As
James famously argued, we can also transform our own
moods and feelings by taking on the postures and bodily be-
haviors of those affects we wish to feel (James 1983; pp.
1077–1078). To imagine empathetically what it feels like to
be oppressed or despised (or even simply insulted or offended)
is an act of somatic consciousness that can be done more
powerfully when we have a more developed somatic imagi-
nation, when our soma (the sentient, purposive body that
Dewey sometimes called body-mind) is more sensitive and
perceptive. There is thus a deep connection between cultivat-
ing somatic sensibility and creating the broader sympathy with
others that Rorty advocates as the means to moral progress but
identifies too narrowly with literature and language. Our sym-
pathy is narrowed when we focus only on words. This privi-
leges the intellectuals who wield verbal power, while ignoring
(and thus belittling) the feelings of the inarticulate, often dis-
cernible through somatic gesture but worthy of consideration
in any case.
In broadening and deepening the palate of our pleasures by
enhancing our perceptual sensibilities, somaesthetic cultiva-
Rorty’s admirable ideal of a democratic utopia of harmony
and happiness. The aim would be not merely an inclusive
consensual society, but also a con-sensual one where harmony
is built on the progressive bonds of shared pleasures (in unity
and difference) rather than a mere tolerance of otherness.
590
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Publisher’s Note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdic-
tional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Reviewer: Richard Shusterman is the Dorothy F. Schmidt Eminent Scholar
in the Humanities and Professor of Philosophy at Florida Atlantic University.
His most recent books are Ars Erotica: Sex and Somaesthetics in the
Classical Arts of Love (2021) and Philosophy and the Art of Writing (2022).