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as they talk. The [liberal] ironist tells them that the language they seek is
up for grabs by her and her kind. There is something potentially very
cruel about that claim." Rorty defends himself against the charge that his
conception of redescription is coercive by insisting that its aim is not the
transformation of others but the moral autonomy of the redescriber:
It is only when a Romantic intellectual begins to want his private self
to serve as a model for other human beings that his politics tends to
become anti-liberal. When he begins to think that other human be–
ings have a moral duty to achieve the same inner autonomy as he
himself has achieved, then he begins to think about political and social
changes which will help them do so. Then he may begin to think that
he has a moral duty to bring about these changes, whether his fellow
citizens want them or not.
Rorty provides the example of Proust:
All [Proust] wanted was to get out from under finite powers by mak–
ing their finitude evident. He did not want to befriend power, nor to
be in a position to empower others, but simply to free himself from
the description of himself offered by the people he had met. He
wanted not to be merely the person that these other people thought
they knew him to be, not to be frozen in the frame of a photograph
shot from another person's perspective.
One hardly needs to particularize this characterization of redescrip–
tion in the name of Proust. It represents an effort of all thoughtful,
independent-minded writers (and not only writers) to extricate them–
selves from alien understandings of their lives and to express in their own
language their self-understandings. The desire, according to Rorty, is not
to communicate and persuade others of the truth of one's self-description
for other lives (not "to be in a position to empower others"), but to
achieve the satisfaction of extricating oneself from the authority of others.
This is an account of Proust's achievement that denies him the power and
ambition of the strong poet to influence his readers' conceptions of
themselves. But it does reveal Rorty's bias for a liberal "community" of
persons content with their own private existence, largely indifferent to
the public realm. It shows him as sensitive to the dangers, potential and
actual, in the intellectual's will to power. Elsewhere he gives the example
of 1984 in which the inner party intellectual O'Brien compels Winston
Smith to redescribe himself in O'Brien's own terms.
