What is liberal irony?

Richard Rorty, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

Richard Rorty answers

The liberal ironist holds two things simultaneously that most people assume cannot be held together: a thoroughgoing recognition that her final vocabulary — the words she uses to justify her actions and her life — is contingent, and a firm commitment to avoiding cruelty and humiliation in her public dealings with others. The trick is that these two things do not need to be reconciled by finding a philosophical foundation for the second in the first.

What unites the ironist with other human beings is not a common language, a common rationality, or a shared essence, but simply a shared susceptibility to pain — and in particular to humiliation, that special sort of suffering that distinguishes humans from brutes.¹ The morally relevant definition of a person, on this view, is just "something that can be humiliated," and the sense of solidarity that follows from this is based on a common danger rather than a common possession.²

That is a much thinner basis for solidarity than the liberal metaphysician wants, but it is the only basis the ironist thinks is actually available once you have stopped believing in ahistorical essences. The liberal metaphysician wants more. He wants a final vocabulary that is not split down the middle by a public-private distinction — one where the inner and outer man are as one, where what makes solidarity possible is also what makes self-definition possible.³

He wants an argument that answers not just "What humiliates?" but "Why should I avoid humiliating?" — something that bolsters the wish to be kind by pointing to a common human essence beyond our shared ability to suffer.⁴ The ironist declines to provide this. She thinks the only redescriptions that serve liberal purposes are those which expand our chances of noticing and avoiding humiliation, not those which provide a metaphysical warrant for caring about it in the first place.⁵

The private/public split is the practical tool that makes this position livable. For private purposes, the ironist may redescribe herself and others in any terms she likes, pursuing self-creation without apology. But the part of her final vocabulary that bears on her public actions — on how she treats others — requires imaginative acquaintance with alternative final vocabularies, so that she can understand the actual and possible humiliation of people whose words and self-descriptions differ entirely from hers.⁶

Skill at imaginative identification does the work that the liberal metaphysician would assign to rationality, or the love of God, or the love of truth.⁷ The vocabulary of self-creation is necessarily esoteric; the vocabulary of justice is necessarily exoteric, susceptible of wide sharing and argumentative exchange.⁸ The ironist does not pretend otherwise, and does not feel the need to.

A liberal is someone who thinks cruelty is the worst thing we do — that is a commitment to a historically and culturally local practice, and it does not require a noncircular theoretical justification to be held firmly.⁹ What the ironist adds to the liberal's cruelty-aversion is simply the recognition that her commitment to it is a function of her community, not of her detection of an ahistorical moral truth.

Sources

1. what unites her with the rest of the species is not a common language but just susceptibility to pain and in particular to that special sort of pain which the brutes do not share with the humans — humiliation.

   Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, p. 108

2. the ironist takes the morally relevant definition of a person, a moral subject, to be 'something that can be humiliated.' Her sense of human solidarity is based on a sense of a common danger, not on a common possession or a shared

   Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, pp. 107–108

3. The liberal metaphysician, by contrast, wants a final vocabulary with an internal and organic structure, one which is not split down the middle by a public-private distinction... He prays, with Socrates, that the inner and the outer man will be as one — that irony will no longer be necessary.

   Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, p. 108

4. The liberal metaphysician wants our wish to be kind to be bolstered by an argument, one which entails a self-redescription which will highlight a common human essence, an essence which is something more than our shared ability to suffer humiliation.

   Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, pp. 107–108

5. the ironist thinks that the only redescriptions which serve liberal purposes are those which answer the question 'What humiliates?' whereas the metaphysician also wants to answer the question 'Why should I avoid humiliating?'

   Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, pp. 107–108

6. the liberal ironist needs as much imaginative acquaintance with alternative final vocabularies as possible, not just for her own edification, but in order to understand the actual and possible humiliation of the people who use these alternative final vocabularies.

   Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, pp. 107–108

7. For the liberal ironist, skill at imaginative identification does the work which the liberal metaphysician would like to have done by a specifically moral motivation — rationality, or the love of God, or the love of truth.

   Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, pp. 108–109

8. The vocabulary of self-creation is necessarily esoteric: difficult to share and unsuited to argument. The vocabulary of justice is necessarily exoteric: susceptible of being widely shared and able to serve as a medium for argumentative exchange.

   Rorty and His Critics, p. 299

9. A liberal is someone who thinks cruelty is the worst thing we can do... Someone who is committed to the vocabulary of liberalism thinks that there is no noncircular theoretical justification for his belief that cruelty is a horrible thing.

   Rorty and His Critics, p. 299