A liberal is a person who can’t take his own side in a quarrel. Robert Frost

Richard Rorty stands as the most controversial figure in 20th century English-language philosophy. As William Curtis documents in Defending Rorty, Rorty’s untroubled attitude and deflationary arguments were a lightning rod among analytic philosophers, drawing hundreds of intense criticisms. In a typical exchange, John Searle accuses Rorty of confusing ontology with epistemology, to which Rorty replies “You will be pleased to know that pragmatists have neither an epistemology nor an ontology. So we can’t confuse them.” It’s precisely this kind of shrugging reply that leads many to dismiss Rorty outright, as superficial or at any rate superfluous.

But Curtis makes an airtight case that Rorty was a serious thinker—and one who offered a compelling vision of liberalism. Rorty’s wide-ranging efforts, from technical discussions of the correspondence theory of truth and the linguistic turn in analytic philosophy, to his discussions of art, are all done in service of this vision.

Curtis begins by discussing two approaches to pluralism that are trendy in liberal political theory: modus vivendi liberalism and “political liberalism.” Of the former he says:

Modus vivendi liberalism does not allow for just any type of peaceful coexistence, for this would condone a peace secured through the domination of weaker groups by stronger ones. Modus vivendi liberalism insists that there are normative rules – not backed by mere force – that bind the behavior of the parties toward one another. But the application of these rules, which determine the legitimate interactions between the pluralistic parties, is something that must be perpetually negotiated in the face of changing circumstances. In other words, the parties to the modus vivendi order must possess the qualities and ethical wherewithal to engage in civil political deliberation with each other to “respectfully” resolve disagreements over the terms of the modus vivendi. At this point, the modus vivendi, if it is to remain successfully “respectful” over time, necessitates the development of a much more ethically substantive form of liberal politics and practices. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the ethically bare bones modus vivendi liberalism is simply a minimalist theoretical abstraction that obscures the normatively thick practices and habits the parties must develop to ensure that their interaction remains peaceful and productive. Modus vivendi liberalism’s attempt to remain ethically “thin” and “low impact” does not work in practice.

Of “political liberalism” of the generally Rawlsian variety, he says:

These minimalist theories of liberalism seem to assume that the sort of critical (liberal) toleration of pluralism that they demand of citizens is a natural, transcultural default for human beings. This is what allegedly makes this ethical requirement of minimalist liberalism so widely acceptable. But this assumption is flawed; in practice, liberal toleration requires a very specific and historically rare ethical outlook. If Rawlsians, in particular, were to do the anthropology, they would likely learn that there are many more pertinent comprehensive doctrines that fail to meet political liberalism’s bar of “reasonableness” than perhaps they had imagined. One hint that Rawlsian “reasonableness” is not as broadly possessed as Rawls’s rhetoric could lead us to believe is revealed in his famous “abortion footnote.” In it, Rawls tells us that “any reasonable balance of these three values [respect for human life, ordered reproduction of political society, and the equality of women] will give a woman a duly qualified right to decide whether or not to end her pregnancy during the first semester.” As commentators are quick to point out, Rawls’s theory apparently holds a great many of his fellow citizens – all who are “pro-life” – to be unreasonable, and thus cannot accommodate their comprehensive doctrines. When push comes to shove, the ethical “thinness” that both political liberal and modus vivendi liberal theories attempt to achieve is necessarily a mirage.

Curtis wants these theorists to give up their hopeless quest for some minimal liberalism any conceivable illiberal group could get on board with, and instead fess up that liberalism in the real world is an ethically thick and demanding way of life. The “paradox of tolerance” is only a paradox if we believe tolerance should be absolute and without boundaries. If we hold tolerance to be merely relative—if we hold liberalism’s achievement in this regard to be that it has a historically very broad scope for what liberal regimes tolerate in practice—the paradox vanishes. It is precisely the hope of creating an ethically minimal liberalism that generates paradoxes of this sort.

Rorty’s vision, on Curtis’ telling, is precisely of an ethically demanding liberalism. Curtis characterizes irony, Rorty’s master virtue, as follows:

Cast in Aristotelian terms, this civic virtue is a Golden Mean between a deficiency of commitment to one’s values and beliefs (e.g., wishy-washiness, superficiality, lack of seriousness, possessing an unstable moral identity) and an excess of commitment (e.g., rigidity, close-mindedness, dogmatism, fanaticism). Possessing this virtue entails conceiving of one’s [worldview] as a product of historical contingency and thus not rooted in any ultimate reality. It supports “critical open-mindedness”: a sense of one’s own fallibility and finitude, which can nevertheless be combined with an ability to be steadfast in one’s currently best-justified judgments. It is a complex cognitive and emotional capacity that enables citizens to maintain the disposition of the fallibilist balance. This fallibilism, which must be clearly distinguished from a paralyzing or frivolous skepticism or nihilism, enables liberal citizens to be properly, though not absolutely, tolerant in their politics.

Striking this Aristotelian balance will allow one to become like Joseph Schumpeter’s “civilized man,” a character Rorty and Curtis frequently invoke who is able to “realize the relative validity of one’s convictions and yet stand for them unflinchingly.” Many accuse Rorty of having a frivolous formulation of liberalism because he doesn’t spend much time discussing institutions or policies with any rigor or detail, but Curtis rightly points out how demanding Rorty’s virtue liberalism is. Indeed, it seems on par with Victorian morality in terms of how much it asks of its practitioners.

I have little patience for the litany of complaints about my generation, but I think it is fair to say that, if the Greatest Generation leaned towards “an excess of commitment,” the Boomers raised their children in a culture that is far less demanding. So undemanding that Rorty’s critics, when they notice this aspect of his thought at all, cannot bring themselves to take it seriously. As Curtis writes:

Like others, Elshtain also suggests Rorty’s liberalism is elitist because of its valorization of the ironist intellectual; she concurs with George Will’s assessment that Rorty “seems to despise most Americans,” unironic rubes that they are. Yet we might ask who is actually being condescending toward nonintellectuals when Elsthain, challenging Rorty’s insistence that the civic virtue of irony is ideally universal in liberal society, quips, “Somehow I don’t think historicist nominalism is going to fly with Joe Six-Pack.” Rorty, like Dewey, has more faith in the intellectual capacities of the common man. Indeed, Rorty expresses his anti-elitism by agreeing with Philip Rieff that “Freud democratized genius by giving everyone a creative unconscious.” There is no reason to think that most citizens are somehow incapable of being educated to possess the civic virtue of irony. He points out that, after all, atheism used to be “the exclusive property of intellectuals,” and so, we might add, was literacy. Thus, Elsthain misses the point when she notes that most Americans are religious believers who reject historicism and nominalism. She knows that Rorty is well aware of this fact; he never suggests that achieving his fragile liberal utopia will not be an uphill battle. Nevertheless, the goal is to educate Elshtain’s Joe Six-Packs to be liberally virtuous citizens in order to improve our politics and culture.

Emphasis added by me.

In fact, fallibilism is already a crucial part of the American compass. It is considered good form and good rhetoric to acknowledge “I know I may be wrong,” and the story of scientific advancement through which old wisdoms were superseded by new ones is a component of a standard education. You can call it skin deep, or point out that it is deployed hypocritically (to point out how the other side is full of people who can’t accept they might be wrong, unlike us). But this is no argument at all; the point is that respecting fallibilism is among our guiding stars, our orienting values. That we have lived up to it less than perfectly is in part just the tragic nature of any ideal. But it also suggests that Rorty’s bold hope for us is perhaps not so impossible as it seems.

In The Bourgeois Virtues Deirdre McCloskey, another liberal virtue theorist, offers this call to action:

We need to revive a serious ethical conversation about middle-class life, the life of towns, the forum and agora. We need to get beyond the project of damning a man of business because he is neither an exalted aristocrat nor an unassuming peasant-proletarian. The conservative program of handing things over to a class of pseudoaristocrats trained at Andover and Yale or the radical program of handing things over to a proletariat-friendly party of bourgeois-born young men has not worked out very well. We need an ethical bourgeoisie.

Curtis makes a compelling case that a serious ethical (and political) conversation is precisely what Rorty was after. The conversation itself, in fact, is the thing. Again, other than expressing a preference for some form of liberal democracy, Rorty does not primarily offer specific institutional details. But he is specific about the need for a public sphere where political action is deliberated and decided, and a private sphere where people are free to pursue a wide variety of Millian “experiments in living.” How is the line between public and private decided? This is among the many matters that civilized liberals discuss and contest in the public sphere.

The question of which virtues are required to maintain a liberal order is itself a part of this never-ending conversation, in contrast to McCloskey, for whom the “classical” (Thomist) seven of prudence, temperance, justice, courage, faith, hope, and love suffice, with all conceivable others being some mixing among these. This in spite of the fact that McCloskey is no less a post-linguistic turn pragmatist in her philosophical (lack of) grounding:

The classical virtue ethicists believed they had spotted the seams in the universe, the essence of prudence or the substance of justice. In reusing their words now, in an expanding universe, we do not have such ambitions. The ethical, we believe, is local, not universal, knowledge. It is contingent and fallible, not universal and necessary.

She nevertheless insists on the seven:

In saying the seven are sensible places to begin I am not declaring them universal or permanent from here to Proxima Centauri, merely widespread and persistent from here to ancient and modern Jericho and Timbuktu. The union of three Christian and four pagan virtues is of course historically contingent. A. Th. van Deursen writes, “European culture of the seventeenth century rested on two pillars: Christianity and the classics of Graeco-Roman antiquity. They were inseparable, not because they cannot be separated, but because European history had bound them together.”

Kant and Bentham tried to separate them. The result has been, you might say, existential angst and ethical chaos. Maybe those old European theorists of the virtues were onto something.

McCloskey’s approach has an elegance and versatility that is appealing, but Rorty has this one right: virtue can only be understood and approached incompletely. Not just in the virtue-ethical sense that the content of a virtue is only “completed” when applied through practical wisdom to a specific, contingent scenario. The list itself, the words we use and the admirable traits we are attempting to articulate with those words, is necessarily incomplete. And that is fine; that is the human experience. A more tidy list is simply too confining for too little gain. More to the point, putting the list itself into play and up for grabs seems precisely like the sort of thing that Rorty’s virtue liberals need to be able to do.

Curtis rightly emphasizes that all of Rorty’s philosophically technical work is meant to be cashed out in his ethical-political project, a fact Rorty himself stressed repeatedly but remains overlooked by commentators. And it is, as stressed repeatedly above, an extremely demanding one. Rorty’s lifelong quest to promote the Golden Mean between detachment and commitment, on the one hand, along with a similar mean between national pride and clear-eyed moral accounting, on the other, was extremely admirable and too often misunderstood by uncharitable critics. Rorty was not at all the frivolous trickster figure he is still made out to be. If you want a morally serious approach to liberalism and the modern world, you could do worse than picking up Defending Rorty, or Rorty’s own Achieving Our Country.



Featured image is Dance, by Matisse