The philosopher as a child of his own time

Rorty on irony and creativity

Javier Toro

in: Pragmatism and creativity, European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy 5 (1), 2013.

Abstract

In this essay I propose a criticism of Richard Rorty’s dualism between the public and the private. According to Rorty’s ironic utopia, the intellectual should not try to fuse public and private drives, since both spring from different sources and are qualitatively incompatible. Thus, Rorty’s utopia consists in a radical irreconcilability between private intellectuals who create their own language and the general public for which such language has little to no impact. In this essay, however, I argue that Rorty’s ironic proposal is not consistent since: 1) Rorty himself acknowledges that the vocabulary and imagination of private intellectuals, such as Socrates and Galileo, eventually – if it is appealing enough – becomes the canon; and 2) because Rorty’s conception of philosophy, which he shares with the classical pragmatists, does not allow the idea of a philosophical problem as not making a difference in practice, which is the case with the problems with which is concerned the creative philosopher of Rorty’s utopia. As opposed to such detached idea of philosophical creativity, I argue that, as the classical pragmatists claimed, all philosophical thought, in order to account as a practical difference, is relational, and not, as Rorty claimed, romantically solipsistic.

Cited authors

Rorty Richard

Socrates