A Liberal Dose of Irony

I have decided to name my ideas blog after Richard Rorty's language in Contingency, irony, and solidarity, an excellent work of philosophical synthesis that I could not more fully agree with. Never before have I come into contact with a philosophical work with which I have more instantaneously and intuitively agreed. In a poetic way, Rorty's analysis of the contingency of the human perception of meaning, which he finds most powerfully achieved through metaphor and literature, is itself an excellent example of philosophy as a dynamic of metaphors competing in a Darwinian struggle to get themselves assimilated into our language games.

To get to the name itself though, Rorty's mission of the book is to fashion an approach to philosophy that is "content to treat the demands of self-creation and of human solidarity as equally valid, yet forever irreconcilable," embodied in the "liberal ironist." Rorty uses the European/classical definition of a liberal, in a live-and-let-live sense where "cruelty is the worst thing we do." Rorty more intriguingly defines an ironist as

"the sort of person who faces up to the contingency of his or her own most central beliefs and desires - someone sufficiently historicist and nominalist to have abandoned the idea that those central beliefs and desires refer back to something beyond the reach of time and chance."

Rorty effectively assimilates Nietzschean perspectivism and a Wittgenstein approach to language games with a Pragmatic and (less overtly) existential sense of experimentation. Rorty cautions against human obsession with Truths as existing "out there" to be found, since truths are a function of language, which is a series of symbols (or vocabularies) that have been contingently established as sufficiently useful to accomplishing single purpose, as a tool is suited to some task, which does not necessarily say anything about any intrinsic nature of reality.

More details on the liberal ironist coming soon.