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intentioned proscription against cruelty is vacuous, because it is accompa–
nied by another proscription against pursuing the so-called metaphysical
questions about justice and right action that would enable us to determine
what constitutes cruelty. Given his restrictions, it is understandable why
his liberalism would have nothing to offer the public realm. What is
harder to understand is why he would want to impose such restrictions.
Rorty's anti-universalism is disabling because it is doctrinaire and
therefore not adequately responsive to the realities of political and moral
life. For instance, he contrasts himself with "the traditional, Platonic or
Kantian philosopher," for whom "the possibility of grounding the Euro–
pean form of life - of showing it to be more than European, more than a
contingent human project - seems the central task of philosophy. He
wants to show that sinning against Socrates is sinning against our nature,
not just against our community. So he sees the pragmatist as an irrational–
ist." The distinction between community and nature serves the
philosophical
argument that Rorty is making, but it is not
pragmatically
nec–
essary. What if someone (it doesn't have to be a philosopher) interposed
himself and said that to sin against Socrates is a sin against many, if not all
communities? Would Rorty then resist the view that there may be a
community that cuts across communities, because it smacks of universal–
ism? Rorty complains about the irrelevance of philosophy to the
problems of the world (he identifies the philosophical enterprise with the
universalism of metaphysical discourse) and offers as an alternative the
concrete knowledge and even wisdom of novelists and journalists. They
have the advantage of observing the actual lives of people and the work–
ings of society. Yet it is striking how often Rorty's arguments are
animated by philosophical rather than pragmatic considerations.
According to Rorty, each community provides the ideals necessary
for condemning and acting against cruelty. But such a view avoids the
hard cases like internecine conflict between communities (the situation in
the former Yugoslavia, for instance) or war between nations. In such
conflicts, whose ideals should be followed? Is it always the case that a
communal ideal will serve the cause against cruelty? Communities or so–
cieties based on the code of honor encourage rather than prevent cruelty.
Rorty feels that he can afford to invoke the communal against the
UTU–
versalist ideal, because his Eurocentric community contains those
universalist ideals that speak out against cruelty:
... it is part of the tradition of our community that the human
stranger from whom all dignity has been stripped is to be taken in, to
be reclothed with dignity. This Jewish and Christian element in our
