Rorty calls Hegel, Niezsche and Heidegger “theorists”
because he finds the word philosopher (lover of wisdom) inappropriate because
they don’t believe wisdom exists in a Platonic sense. Rather, they are surveyors of the history of
Western metaphysics.
In the “Plato-Kant” canon, the underlying Truth, which is
more real than the illusion of multiplicities and available to us via a higher
path of thought, is what is sought after.
This pathway of truth seeks to evade the tricks of time and motion that
limit the senses to reveal unshakeable laws of reality and of ethics. This kind of thinking is not outdated as it
is the bed rock of many seemingly counterintuitive theories we learn in modern
physics class rooms where it is well known that time and space do not actually
exist.
Rorty implies that ironists see these metaphysicians as
having a “vertical view downwards” but prefer a horizontal view backwards.
The ironist looks at past attempts to find an ahistorical
truth which search for final vocabularies whereby in the process, the need to
theorize is highlighted and revealed.
Revealing a truth, a power greater than us, and a scientific
principle is not the point for the ironist; rather, it is revealing their
autonomy in active truth-finding and principle-making where the power
lies.
Proust and Nietzsche are called paradigm
metaphysicians. Proust says we discover
ourselves through the process of creating art.
There isn’t the sense of a pre-existing profound reality to be
found. There is a process of self-reflection
in creating art and in the process, reality is created. Rorty quotes Nehamas in explaining this
“ambiguous” relationship between discovery and creation.
For Nietzsche, the statement; “who one actually is” means
“whom one turned oneself into in the course of creating the
taste by which one ended up judging oneself.”
This way of looking at the world isn’t attributing truth to
what is to be found in the world but looks at the world as filled with
historically influenced and ambiguous meaning.
We discover who we are by redefining what we are born into, thereby
aware of the sources of one’s belief as the possibility for non-belief, or
rather, recreation. There is a
counteracting tension between what a person is searching for and what the
person is. The searching becomes the
source of study for the ironist.
Sartre, an existentialist philosopher, might call this a
“futile passion” but Rorty would say he would be implying a goal oriented
approach to Proust or Nietzsche that they do not have. They are not searching for recreation. To them, it is simply a feature of being.
Proust is an ideal ironist because he describes and re-describes
people he knows, in the process, making it impossible to pin down a defining
essence of a person. Contingency is highlighted
in his work. A point that comes through
in his writing is that to a certain extent, we create people in describing them
just as they create us in their view of us.
Nietzsche takes a different approach in search of a more
impactful point by picking as the source of his historical inquiry the whole of
Europe and Christianity. This makes
Nietzsche a theorist and not a novelist like Proust since he is tracing the
conversation throughout history of the presuppositions of philosophy. What Nietzsche suggests is that the will to
power is the common denominator in all of these cases, but in saying this,
Nietzsche is stepping outside of Rorty’s definition of ironist.
Rorty writes; “Plato must give way to Saint Paul, and
Christianity to Enlightenment. A Kant
must be followed by a Hegel, and a Hegel by a Marx.”
Heidegger writes Being and Time. He doesn’t want to resign himself to being a
mere footnote to Plato so he takes the classic relationship passed down from
the ancient Greeks and far East to the Neo-Platonists: All is One(outside of
Time)- Reality- Eternity
Real(appearances)- Time. Rather
than having the real/time be just the world of appearances- Heidegger seeks to
“invert” Plato as Rorty writes; “so as to make the (Real) consist in that with
which Plato has identified with Appearance.”
In Heidegger’s approach- we are thrown into a world that has
meaning and historicity but each sign we encounter only presents us with
options on how to act. How we act is
uniquely our own but discover ourselves through our encounter with history and
society. Dasein is Heidegger’s word for
man’s existence which stands for being-in-the world. Man cannot be isolated from the world, and the
world cannot be isolated from man in Heidegger’s account. The attempts to achieve enlightenment,
whether in the Platonic, Buddhist, or Christian, or scientific tradition is
untrue to reality according to Heidegger.
One of the problems Heidegger encounters is a difficulty in
choosing a language and terminology for discussing the metaphysical onto
theological tradition while still being “authentic.” This is partly the reason for his coinage of
so many Heideggarian worlds that keep him bolted to describing man as actively
participation in this world.
Heidegger isolated poetry as an authentic human activity
because it is a use of language that is not “a means to an end” and also one
that captures the human spirit.
Especially in ancient text when it tries to explain existence. Rorty however says that he was incorrect in
thinking there was a “universal poem” which combined the “best features of
philosophy and poetry.” Heidegger’s the
Essence of Poetry seeks to make the point that poetry is the “most innocent and
the most dangerous of all goods.”
Heidegger and Nietzsche become involved in politics that
make them increasingly controversial due to their explicit and/or implicit
attachments to the Nazi Party. This has
been separated from the seriousness of the contributions of their thought. Marx tried to fuse philosophy with social theory
completely and Rorty discourages this as he pushes for a public and a private
realm of philosophy that should be kept separately. It is Rorty’s objective to show us how
valuable the role of literature is in conveying a political/ethical philosophy as
it is in Proust.
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