Well, my boyfriend Richard Rorty and I are at odds again. I’m kind of glad… there’s a piquancy in the blend of “dear man, you are brilliant!” and “dear man, you are out of your fluffy mind!” that I would have been sad to lose.

So here’s where we stand. One of Rorty’s biggest shticks is his rejection of foundationalism: the idea that beliefs and statements are, or should be, justified on the basis of fundamental, self-evident beliefs. Like a good ironist (and this is so much of why I love him), he doesn’t try to argue that foundationalism is wrong on any absolute grounds — just that it’s useless and often harmful. His vision of a utopian liberal society is one where everybody recognizes that their beliefs and language systems are contingent, and doesn’t let that stop them from proclaiming those beliefs, fighting for those language systems, in the public square.

Here you go, quote:

A liberal society is one whose ideals can be fulfilled by persuasion rather than force, by reform rather than revolution, by the free and open encounters of present linguistic and other practices with suggestions for new practices. But this is to say that an ideal liberal society is one which has no purpose except freedom, no goal except a willingness to see how such encounters go and to abide by the outcome.
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To sum up, the citizens of my liberal utopia would be people who had a sense of the contingency of their language of moral deliberation, and thus of their consciences, and thus of their community. They would be liberal ironists… people who combined commitment with a sense of the contingency of their own commitment.

All well and good. His vision holds together — there’s no self-contradiction, no inherent flaws. But I cannot imagine it actually happening. I cannot imagine a society where people were so content to let go of any kind of foundationalism, and simply let “truth” create and re-create itself through public dialogue and the imaginations of strong poets. Maybe I’m wrong, but apparently I believe that the need for foundational beliefs of some kind is deeply engrained in human nature. Not for all humans, maybe, but for enough of us to make such a society practically impossible.

And then again, maybe all. In the last half of the “Contingency of Community” chapter (which is where the quote comes from), I may have spotted a pinprick of a hole, just the remotest trace of a foundation in even darling Rorty’s thought. Let’s see if you agree with me.

Here’s a telling sentence:

This Oakeshott-Sellars way of looking at morality as a set of practices, our practices, makes vivid the difference between the conception of morality as the voice of a divinized portion of our soul, and as the voice of a contingent human artifact, a community which has grown up subject to the vicissitudes of time and chance, one more of Nature’s “experiments.”

It’s the very last phrase that I’m looking at. Of course he doesn’t mean it literally, doesn’t really argue that “Nature” is an agent conducting experiments through biological and cultural evolution. It’s a metaphor; but as someone who takes metaphors very seriously, he must expect to be held accountable for its use. He doesn’t argue it, but he does see things that way.

Here’s another one, italics mine:

In my view, however, the purported opposition between reason and its other (e.g., the passions, Nietzsche’s will to power, Heidegger’s Being) is one we can abandon when we abandon the notion that “reason” names a healing, reconciling, unifying power — the source of human solidarity. If there is no such source, if the idea of human solidarity is simply the fortunate happenstance creation of modern times, then we no longer need a notion of “communicative reason” to substitute for that of “subject-centered reason.”

Richard Rorty is firmly behind the idea of human solidarity. He’s passionate about it. He is correspondingly passionate about decreasing cruelty. I can’t find a place where he says it explicitly, but one could make a strong case that he believes it’s the most important social goal.

So. What I see here, facilitating Rorty’s anti-foundationalism, is a profound trust: trust that human solidarity is stronger than any forces that might destroy it. Because without that trust, you have to choose between your commitment to solidarity and your commitment to the “free and open encounters” between ideas. It seems to me that there’s an unspoken assumption in these pages that the latter will always strengthen the former, that the marketplace-competition of ideas will ultimately move society toward kindness and tolerance.

If that assumption isn’t present, then I would expect to see Rorty address it, to say something like: “My own commitment is to human solidarity, and even though I recognize the contingency of that, and that a future society might develop other priorities, I will fight (with words, of course, the only weapon permitted in the liberal society) for human solidarity with my last breath.” But I don’t see him saying that. Maybe I’ll encounter it somewhere, but I haven’t so far. And if he doesn’t say that, then he’s carrying the assumption that human solidarity is stronger and will win in the marketplace of ideas. And that — to me — seems just a little bit like a foundation, no?

And this is a bit of a leap, and might just be me projecting, but that telltale use of “Nature” in the quote above… well, any time someone personifies “nature” or “the universe” I call foul play, because if you attribute any kind of personhood to those concepts, you’re talking about a god. I don’t care if you don’t want to use that word because of its cultural baggage, but that IS what you’re talking about, my friends. And to see it pop up in Rorty’s work suggests to me that on some remote, barely-conscious level, he believes that God is on his side: that is to say, that Nature’s continuing experiments will result in the development of the kind, tolerant, liberal society he hopes for.

I’m not claiming that he thinks he believes this, still less that he thinks other people should believe it. I’m saying that this belief dwells somewhere within him, and that that is what allows him to contemplate his own ideas without agony.

Because this is the problem with anti-foundationalism: most of us care about something other than the prevalence of anti-foundationalism. Most of us have other goals for society, for ourselves, goals that we desperately desire should be realized. If we accept an anti-foundationalist position, then we must acknowledge that we are completely on our own in fighting for these goals. If enough other people happen to share them, they will probably prevail, but there’s no guarantee that that will be the case. If you truly believe this, and are truly committed to your goals, there must be a certain agony with which you contemplate the world: you want to win, you will do everything in your power to win, but you know that you may lose.

Some people have the emotional fortitude to live in this agony, and this is beautiful to me, and I salute them. I don’t see it in Rorty, though. He is very peaceful, very optimistic. I think that Rorty, like myself, has a little, niggling, irrational belief that it’s all going to be okay (and by “okay” I mean, “the way I want it, with love, kindness, and freedom prevailing”). I wonder if he knew it when he was alive. I wonder what (if anything) he knows now.