Triple contingency: are language, selfhood, and liberal community contingent all the way down?

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

The position in brief

The contingency of language: vocabularies are made not found, products of time and chance rather than fits to the world's pre-existing joints. The contingency of selfhood: what we are is a web of contingent commitments and remembered events, not an essential core to be discovered or developed. The Larkin-Freud- Nietzsche line teaches us how to see selves as woven rather than essential, contrapuntal rather than unified.

The contingency of a liberal community: no philosophical foundation grounds liberal democratic institutions, and no philosophical foundation is needed; what supports those institutions is the contingent historical experience of their working better than the alternatives, made vivid by the literary and historical record of cruelty and its overcoming.

The triple contingency is not nihilistic. It is liberating — recognizing that one's convictions could have been otherwise does not make them arbitrary, only un-skyhooked.12

Sources

  1. Just as there is nothing which validates a person's or a culture's final vocabulary, there is nothing implicit in that vocabulary which dictates how to reweave it when it is put under strain. All we can do is work with the final vocabulary we have, while keeping our ears open for hints about how it might be expanded or revised.
    Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, pp. 213–214
  2. So my strategy will be to try to make the vocabulary in which these objections are phrased look bad, thereby changing the subject, rather than granting the objector his choice of weapons and terrain by meeting his criticisms head-on.
    Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, pp. 60–61

Where the argument is made

  • Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989) Chapters 1-3 — the contingency of language, the contingency of selfhood, the contingency of a liberal community
  • Consequences of Pragmatism (1982) 'Nineteenth-Century Idealism and Twentieth-Century Textualism'
  • 'Solidarity or Objectivity?' in Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth (PP Vol 1, 1991)
  • 'Postmodernist Bourgeois Liberalism' (in ORT)

How the argument was received

The position taken in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989) is the one that drew the sharpest criticism from across the philosophical and political spectrum, and the one Rorty defended most vigorously. MacIntyre's charge in Dependent Rational Animals (1999) — that irony violates the virtues of truthfulness- in-accountability — was treated as an important objection; Blackburn's Ruling Passions (1998) developed the ironists- become-unstable charge with a Holocaust counterexample. The religious-traditionalist objection that contingency cannot generate normative force is recurring. The Marxist Left charge that triple contingency is bourgeois quietism. The communitarian Left (Taylor, MacIntyre) charge that the contingent self lacks resources for solidarity. Rorty's reply to each is in Rorty and His Critics (2000) and in scattered essays through Truth and Progress and Philosophy as Cultural Politics.