EUGENE GOODHEART
The Postmodern Liberalism
of Richard
Rorty
Richard Rorty's distinction is that he has given liberalism a postmodern
expression. There are other contemporary liberal philosophers, most no–
tably John Rawls, but they do not qualify as postmodern in the
ideological sense. Rorty's influence has been considerable in our intel–
lectual life generally and in the literary academy in particular. In
reformulating long-standing philosophical problems, he has created the
impression of having solved them. It is a real question, however, whether
he has not simply avoided or repressed them.
One of the distinguishing characteristics of postmodernism is its ob–
session with the perspectival limits of knowledge and judgment.
Perspectivists like Rorty tell us that objectivity is an illusion, that words
like "transcendence," "metaphysics," "rationalism," and "universalism"
refer to an unattainable reality and only create anxiety in us. These words
have their provenance in the apparently antithetical discourses of religion
and the Enlightenment. In the political sphere they are susceptible to ap–
propriation by ideologies supportive of tyranny. For perspectivists, the
words that truly describe our condition are "contingent," "mortal,"
"finite": modest words that not only express what we are but that also
imply a respect for those who are different from us. And yet the vocabu–
lary of universalism remains a powerful temptation even for liberals
because of its association with the Enlightenment. How is the temptation
and the anxiety connected with it to be overcome? Rorty's advice is that
we change our vocabulary. We need to purge our language of unneces–
sary anxiety-inducing distinctions like the one between "rational" and
"irrational" or between "subjectivism" and "objectivism" or even be–
tween "truth" and "falsity." In the wake of the verbal fallout, we will
have the non-objectivist (not the subjectivist), the non-rationalist (not the
irrationalist). With the evaporation of traditional distinctions, the insolu–
ble problems of epistemology will simply vanish. Rorty's work is in the
spirit of Wittengstein's strenuous effort to refocus thinking away from
metaphysics - without Wittgenstein's strenuousness. Liberalism will at last
have a language appropriate to its pluralistic ideal and its respect for the
private individual.
