EUGENE GOODHEART
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I will return to the matter of Rorty's complacency and its political
implications, but I want first to address "redescription," the method that
he advocates for relieving our epistemological anxieties. What is not ob–
vious is its coerciveness, its readiness to dictate the terms ofliberal culture.
It
shows in its intolerance of metaphysical or religious views considered to
be inimical to liberal culture. As Rorty explains it:
. .. in its ideal form, the culture of liberalism would be one which
was enlightened, secular, through and through. It would be one in
which no trace of divinity remained, either in the form of a divinized
world or a divinized self. Such a culture would have no room for the
notion that there are nonhuman forces to which human beings should
be responsible. It would drop, or drastically reinterpret, not only the
idea of holiness but those of "devotion to truth" and "offulfillment of
the deepest needs of the spirit."
Rorty, it would seem, is fulfilling the uncompleted anti-religious
projects of the Enlightenment: uncompleted, because it sublimated the
god terms of Christianity in its own world view.
It
divinized world and
self. We find this view in Carl Becker's
The Heavenly City of Eighteenth–
Century Philosophers,
in which he argues that the philosophers had secu–
larized Christian religion. By redescribing the Enlightenment, Rorty
effectively rids it of all religious associations. Having given up the idea of
justification by rational argument, he does not feel obliged to justifY his
ideal liberal society. He is the lawgiver, who provides it with its authori–
tative definition. The heroes of Rorty's society are, surprisingly, the
strong poet and the utopian revolutionary. (One wonders how he can
reconcile his exalting of the strong poet with his project of de–
divinization. What does he make of strong poets who divinize the world?
And what would a liberal literary criticism with anti-religious motives
make of
The Divine Comedy
and
Paradise Lost?
Such criticism would de–
mystifY rather than celebrate the strong poet.)
The denial of God is an inalienable right in a liberal society, and it is
understandable that a liberal would try to resist god terms since they are
associated with the absolute. But what a liberal society cannot permit is
the suppression by whatever means of religious expression. The effect of
Rorty's redescription is suppression. By ridding the language of god terms
it denies those who have a religious appetite a vehicle for expression.
Rorty anticipates the objection that redescription may be experienced
as a coercive act. "Most people do not want to be redescribed. They want
to be taken on their own terms - taken seriously just as they are and just
