We all have a lens by which we see the world. That lens is ours and others cannot see through it—yet the lens is shaped by the world and belongs to the world; like our beliefs and rhetoric and experience, this lens belongs to us and yet it is not us.
This lens is our mind.
The mind ends up being ourselves to a great extent, because it is how we—and no one else—navigates space in real time. And yet the mind is not finally who we are; it is not the soul.
Importantly, we can forget that we have a soul and live as if this lens is, in fact, our soul.
Our experience is not us. But good and bad experiences have gone into shaping our lens. When does an experience change who we are? It never does. It simply shapes the lens. The lens can fool us into thinking “this is who I am,” ironically enough, at the very moment it is distracting us from the truth of who we are. The experience and the person whom the experience impacts are not the same. As long as we keep this simple fact in mind, no cunning or tragedy finally harms us. “Death, where is thy sting?”
Yet the mind will convince us that it is all, if we are not watchful.
The mind has its demands.
The lens is a powerful tool, since it simultaneously takes from the world and knows the world—it is a self-regulating machine which doesn’t need us. Due to its profound ability at circularity (receive, process, act, receive again) the mind has nothing to do with our soul, that eternal part of us which the lens ultimately serves—when it is not too busy immersed in the contingencies of time and space.
I have entitled this essay “the radical mind,” and the above prefatory remarks were necessary, since the radical mind can be defined by the very tendency of mind I mentioned above: not only does the radical mind have no use for the soul; it resents the soul and wishes to torture the soul into submission as part of the processing and functioning loop which aims to make us who we are purely in terms of the mind.
The radical mind seeks to make the mind all.
The sharp intellect of the radical mind knows of the soul but does not believe in it—the soul for the radical mind does exist, but it exists as part of its mind.
The simple, religious, semi-educated, “good soul” is no match in a debate with the radical mind, since the soul—our eternal part—has nothing to do with intellectual argument. Good souls, if they buy the flattery of wishing to be “smarter,” convert to the radical mind. This is the only way conversion occurs, but it’s very common, especially in educational institutions. This is why universities are radical.
Richard Rorty, a dead white male influenced by John Dewey (d. 2007, educated at U. Chicago), an influential modern theorist, when he was a University Professor of Humanities at the University of Virginia—in 1989, published Contingency, irony, and solidarity (Cambridge University Press), a work which illuminates the kindly side of the radical mind in a late-20th century snapshot of Modernism’s march to institutional hegemony.
In 2022, the radical mind, commonly met with in institutional life, is not nearly as friendly as it was in 1989—when it still believed in free speech. The radical mind is not cool anymore.
Comparison is the only way to intellectually understand anything—this is why studying a 1989 work by Richard Rorty might give us hope in how to figure out the unraveling of the radical mind which seems to be happening today.
Comparison is the only way to reason, according to Richard Rorty, a boon in our favor. The radical mind does not believe “intrinsic” truths exist. Never mind religion and God; Rorty wants to ditch metaphysics. What matters to the radical mind is “contingency, irony, and solidarity” (and so the title of his book.)
The Modernist Revolution took several practical steps to get to where it is today.
First, it transformed art—which then transformed education, which finally transformed journalism.
Shapeless art became acceptable in America, pragmatic education grew from that, and then journalism, too found that level.
But does “shapeless art” denote the most profound thing ever? Or something really bad?
Who knows? This uncertainty is precisely what the radical mind feeds on. This ambiguity is what Rorty, still hippie-like, celebrated.
Other pursuits, gas, oil, the fossil fuel industry, farming, banking, trading, diplomacy, government policy, politics, sports, all these other things—do they care what I am now discussing? The transformation of the poem itself, the poem as it exists in the classroom, all affecting the journalist outside the classroom—does this really matter? Can what a humanities professor at Virginia says about “irony” in 1989 matter at all?
Richard Rorty anticipates all of this.
Think of the pot-smoking professor played by Donald Sutherland in the movie Animal House (1975).
Richard Rorty is not far off at all.
Rorty’s big word is irony—which is how a professor who wants to be taken seriously says: hey, nothing really matters.
If you were a student and he was your professor, it would make you kind of rejoice—if you were a class clown, if you were ‘too smart for school.’
Rorty: “Most nonintellectuals are still committed either to some form of religious faith or to some form of Enlightenment rationalism.”
These nonintellectuals always feel they “must” answer this question which Rorty poses: “When may one favor members of one’s family, or one’s community, over other, randomly chosen, human beings?” Rorty, as the philosopher of contingency, believes we can never answer this question.
Chapter 4, “Private Irony and Liberal Hope,” comes closest to fleshing out the apolitical Rorty.
“The ironist, by contrast, is a nominalist and a historicist. She thinks nothing has an intrinsic nature, a real essence. So she thinks that the occurrence of a term like “just” or “scientific” or “rational” in the final vocabulary of the day is no reason to think that Socratic inquiry into the essence of justice or science or rationality will take one much beyond the language games of one’s time.”
The radical mind takes “language games” very, very seriously. And what is important is the latest language game. Socratic language games are not interesting—(and therefore Socrates is not interesting) because to the “ironist” who is an “historicist,” old slang no longer has meaning.
It doesn’t matter that free Socractic inquiry makes Rorty and the ironist possible. The ironist, aware of the contingent present, re-makes the contingent past. Socrates is junked by the strong poet who has replaced the priest and is about to replace the philosopher. (While the outside world doesn’t quite understand.)
Here’s what Rorty writes next from the perspective of his “ironist”—and think of its implications in the current climate of hyper-sensitive and highly triggering speech:
“The ironist spends her time worrying about the possibility that she has been initiated into the wrong tribe, taught to play the wrong language game. She worries that the process of socialization which turned her into a human being by giving her a language may have given her the wrong language, and so turned her into the wrong kind of human being. But she cannot give a criterion for wrongness.”
This is striking.
And Rorty doesn’t realize he’s playing with fire. For he continues this way:
So, the more she is driven to articulate her situation in philosophical terms, the more she reminds herself of her rootlessness by constantly using terms like “Weltanschauung,” “perspective,” “dialectic,” “conceptual framework,” “historical epoch,” “language game,” “rediscription,” “vocabulary,” and “irony.”
Yes—“philosophical terms.”
But what about political ones? Rorty, in his ivory tower, doesn’t think of that.
The “ironist” will not remain philosophical, will they? And doesn’t this become a problem? After all, Rorty is simultaneously getting rid of both religion and metaphysics. But he thinks there’s no danger.
How innocent Socrates exploring the “essence” of something is, compared to “language” turning you into “the wrong kind of human being.”
“Language” is the property of poetry—and so why wouldn’t an otherwise dull humanities professor (who voted for Jimmy Carter in 1980), toiling under Ronald Reagan throughout the 1980s, exult in this? Religion, practical work, science, Socrates? These don’t compare to the anxiety, danger and thrill of “She worries that the process of socialization which turned her into a human being by giving her a language may have given her the wrong language, and so turned her into the wrong kind of human being.”
Rorty uses the death of the “metaphysician” as the springboard for his “ironist.”
“The metaphysician assumes that our tradition can raise no problems which it cannot solve—that the vocabulary which the ironist fears may be merely “Greek” or “Western” or “bourgeois” is an instrument which will enable us to get at something universal. The metaphysican agrees with the Platonic Theory of Recollection, in the form in which this theory was restated by Kierkegaard, namely, that we have the truth within us, that we have built-in criteria which enable us to recognize the right final vocabulary when we hear it.”
Today the radical mind does not “fear” something “may be merely Greek or Western or bourgeois. The “merely” has been removed. The West itself is feared. There’s a language game for you.
“Whereas the metaphysician sees the modern Europeans are particularly good at discovering how things really are, the ironist sees them as particularly rapid in changing their self-image, in re-creating themselves.”
This is true. Cynical recreating has actually run amok. And it’s not just something the metaphysicians are doing.
“A more up-to-date word for what I have been calling “dialectic” would be “literary criticism.” In Hegel’s time it was still possible to think of plays, poems, and novels as making vivid something already known, of literature as ancillary to cognition, beauty to truth. The older Hegel thought of “philosophy” as a discipline which, because cognitive in a way that art was not, took precedence over art. Indeed, he thought that this discipline, now that it had attained maturity in the form of his own Absolute Idealism, could and would make art as obsolete as it made religion. But, ironically and dialectically enough, what Hegel actually did, by founding an ironist tradition within philosophy, was help de-cognitivize, de-metaphysize philosophy. He helped turn it into a literary genre.”
I quote the Hegel passage to demonstrate the way Rorty uses metaphysics to enhance his argument even while he is busily destroying metaphysics. Burning the ground on which you stand—the ultimate ironist position. But again, we can see why this mode of discourse is attractive to a humanities professor. Philosophy becomes literature! Or, as he puts it, in slightly more combative terms in the spirit of Harold Bloom:
“Influential critics, the sort of critics who propose new canons—people like Arnold, Pater, Leavis, Eliot, Edmund Wilson, Lionel Trilling, Frank Kermode, Harold Bloom—are not in the business of explaining the real meaning of books, nor of evaluating something called their “literary merit.” Rather, they spend their time placing books in the context of other books, figures in the context of other figures. This placing is done in the same way as we place a new friend or enemy in the context of old friends and enemies.”
“Literary criticism does for ironists what the search for universal moral principles is supposed to do for metaphysicans.”
Rorty recognizes that:
“Literary criticism has been stretched further and further in the course of our century…to theology, philosophy, reformist political programs, and revolutionary manifestos.”
And:
“Once the range of literary criticism is stretched that far there is, of course, less and less point in calling it literary criticism….the rise of literary criticism to preeminence within the high culture of the democracies…has paralleled the rise in proportion of ironists to metaphysicians among intellectuals. This has widened the gap between the intellectuals and the public. For metaphysics is woven into the public rhetoric of modern liberal societies.”
Rorty knows there’s a problem with burning the ground you are standing on. But he’s not really concerned because as an “ironist”—who knows the two main strands of the Radical Mind, Nietzsche (self-creation) and Marx (solidarity) will never meet (as Rorty says in his Introduction)—he thrives in that split between private and public (which old religion and metaphysics vainly sought to bring together):
“Ironist theorists like Hegel, Nietzsche, Derrida, and Foucault seems to me invaluable in our attempt to form a private self-image, but pretty much useless when it comes to politics.”
Rorty is finally happy to be bourgeois when it comes to politics—and leave the radical and scary notions to bounce around in the classroom:
“We ironists who are also liberals think that such freedoms require no consensus on any topic more basic than their own desirability. From our angle, all that matters for liberal politics is the widely shared conviction that, as I said in Chapter 3, we shall call the “true” and the “good” whatever is the outcome of free discussion…”
“The social glue holding together the ideal liberal society described in the previous chapter consists in little more than a consensus that the point of social organization is to let everybody have a chance at self-creation to the best of his or her abilities, and that that goal requires, besides peace and wealth, the standard “bourgeois freedoms.” This conviction would not be based on a view about universally shared human ends, human rights, the nature of rationality, the Good for Man, nor anything else.”
Rorty’s goal is rather rarefied, then. Let “bourgeois freedoms” continue to structure society and remain the “social glue,” while intellectuals privately re-make themselves in non-traditional ways. Everything is good. A wealthy society with hippie pot-smoking professors and bloviating, right-wing Harold Bloom professors.
Rorty begins chapter one by saying:
“About two hundred years ago, the idea that truth was made rather than found began to take hold of the imagination of Europe. The French revolution had shown that the whole vocabulary of social relations, and the whole spectrum of social institutions, could be replaced almost overnight.”
The French revolution, in many ways, was a radical horror show of murder.
But to an “ironist” professor in front of a blackboard, the French revolution can seem rather quaint.
Today, both conservatives and liberals fear democracy is under attack, that “bourgeois freedoms” are on the way out, that America has lost its way, that even guillotines are being prepared.
Rorty presents the French revolution as a kind of abstract good. Were he alive today, would he not note the irony that he presents radical irony as an abstract good—but apart from politics?
Maybe it’s OK when the “ironist” intellectual has no public views. But what if society is run by people who have no public views? Rorty doesn’t let himself wonder about this.
Is this the problem? The radical mind is razor-sharp in the classroom—but naive in the real world?
Should classroom instruction look over its shoulder, occasionally, at the real world?
Should professors wonder what will happen when their ideas escape the lab?
Should poets write poems that people actually like to read?
Rorty begins chapter 2 by quoting the end of a Philip Larkin poem:
And once you have walked the length of your mind, what
You command is as clear as a lading-list.
Anything else must not, for you, be thought
To exist.
And what’s the profit? Only that, in time
We half-identify the blind impress
All our behavings bear, may trace it home.
But to confess,
On that green evening when our death begins,
Just what it was, is hardly satisfying,
Since it applied only to one man once,
And that man dying.
Rorty quotes a lot of Harold Bloom and William James in analyzing this poem, claiming that what distresses Larkin is the fear that he won’t be happy—even as one of Bloom’s “strong poets,” In this context, Rorty writes, “Only poets, Nietzsche suspected, can truly appreciate contingency. The rest of us are doomed to remain philosophers, to insist that there is really only one true lading-list, one true description of the human situation, one universal context of our lives.”
According to Rorty: “The strong poet’s fear of death as the fear of incompletion is a function of the fact that no project of redescribing the world and the past, no project of self-creation through imposition of one’s own idiosyncratic metaphoric, can avoid being marginal and parasitic.”
Larkin must accept the fact that no one’s life will be complete when they die—that everything is contingent. Rorty credits Bloom as “de-divinizing the poem,” just as Nietzsche did the same for “truth,”and Freud, for “conscience.” Larkin must depend on the “good will” of future readers.
Larkin’s poem—is Rorty aware of this?—is made more remarkable precisely because the poem (an excerpt, no less) has no use for Rorty’s learned and philosophical rhetoric—as interesting as it is on its own.
Rorty’s discourse, however, needs Larkin’s poem. (I don’t know about “strong poets,” but this might be a litmus test for a “strong poem.”)
Is Larkin afraid that, even while he demonstrates he is a strong poet in his poem, he still fails?
Or is he just afraid of dying?