Richard Rorty: Life, Pragmatism, and Conversational Philosophy
lareviewofbooks.org
lareviewofbooks.org
As for the claim that democracy is based on the idea there is no objective truth, and instead we create it through conversation, that is certainly not what the American founding fathers thought.
He supports the Western views of democracy, the rights of individualism, etc and points to the success of the western world as having to do with the result of these ideas being whiled embraced. Yet, you're right, his views are also very Nietzschean. So he can't say that the success of these ideas is because of something "innate" or "universally metaphysical" behind them. They simply were tools that were used to yield certain historical results.
It's been a while since I've read any Rorty, but I'm nearly certain that when he is talking about this he uses some language about "fate" vs "luck". Where we like to think that it was the fate of these western values to produce great societies, when really it could be, from an epistemic viewpoint, just luck.
Rorty's Nietzschean pseudo-anti-foundationalism holds there is nothing definite out there and so we are free to make our descriptions as we wish. Many people like this idea because of the common claim that different cultures think of reality entirely differently, but that is not true. In fact there are enormous commonalities, and this is because there are real, independent realities that we all have to deal with to survive, like the necessity to eat, and what counts as food.
As for liberal democracy, I see it as based on a more authentic practical anti-foundationalism that was developed before academic philosophy got there. So for instance, if you can't capture all of reality with a single set of precise concepts, then you need to have lots of different people working on understanding it and contributing to making decisions, which is why you need free speech and various other characteristics of liberal democracy. Which is what Dewey, a much more sincere anti-foundationalist, said.
>It's been a while since I've read any Rorty, but I'm nearly certain that when he is talking about this he uses some language about "fate" vs "luck". Where we like to think that it was the fate of these western values to produce great societies, when really it could be, from an epistemic viewpoint, just luck.
Yes, that is an important point.
His tone actually comes off as the latter to me. His work is intelligent but ultimately that of a weak pushover. I'm glad nobody is discussing this old-fashioned neoliberal. He was smart, but did not do what this writer seems to think he did.
What positions indicate that he's a pushover? A weird charge in philosophy.
What does he have to do with neoliberalism, favorite scareword of the year?
Rorty was not a neoliberal in any honest sense of the word. He was a liberal and a progressive, to be sure, but was decidedly not a neoliberal.
If you're confused about what "neoliberal" means, think "the intersection of things that Clinton and Reagan had in common", not "the things right-wing US commentators call liberal". Most true neoliberals in Congress are on the red team, for example.
Literally the only place I can find Rorty himself described as a neoliberal is in some Marxist critique of something or other. And those authors doesn't even make it through their criticism of Rorty without a blatant grammatical error, leading me to believe they don't take their characterization very seriously.