Breanna Campbell
Prompt 3: Contigency, Irony, Solidarity Chapter 8
1. blinkered
2. inveighed
3. truisms
4. axiom
5. redescriptions
6. unwieldy
7. recurrent disconfirmation
8. despotic
9. reconstitute
10. “Thought Police”
11. Fillip
12. Reductions
13. Analogue
14. Intransigent
15. Extrapolations
16. Parry
17. Incredulous
18. Interlocutors
19. Maieutic
20. doublethink
Chapter 8 talks about our next author we are going to read, George Orwell. Rorty begins by saying that Orwell’s books will be read as long as the view on the twentieth century remains the same. Orwell wrote about human equality through utopian society. Rorty states that the first two thirds of 1984 are redescriptive and the last third is prospective. “He did this in the last third of 1984 – the part which is about O’Brien. There he sketched an alternative scenario, one which led in the wrong direction. He convinced us that there was a perfectly good chance that the same developments which had made human equality technically possible might make endless slavery possible.” (Rorty 175)
Rorty discusses Orwell’s cruelty as the torture of making someone believe something that is not true. He uses this example from 1984 where O’Brien tries to convince Winston that two and two equals five in order to completely break him apart. Rorty says this example was symbolic for making people believe a truth and then breaking that truth. He thinks that people are not individuals because they only follow what society says.
Ten Key Points:
1. “Someday this description of our century may come to seem blinkered or shortsighted. If it does, Orwell will be seen as having inveighed against and evil he did not entirely understand.” (Rorty 170)
2. “After Winston and Julia go to O’Brien’s apartment, 1984 becomes a book about O’Brien, not about twentieth-century totalitarian states. This part of the book centers on the citations from The Theory and Practise of Oligarchical Collectivism (co-authored by O’Brien) and on O’Brien’s explanation of why Winston must be tortured rather than simply shot.” (Rorty 171)
3. “Emphasizing these passages has led many commentators to conclude that Orwell teaches us to set our faces against all those sneaky intellectuals who try to tell us that truth is not ‘out there,’ that what counts as a possible truth is a function of the vocabulary you use, and what counts as a truth is a function of the rest of your beliefs. Orwell has, in short, been read as a realist philosopher, a defender of common sense against its cultured, ironist despisers.” (Rorty 172)
4. “It is a matter of insisting that the kind of thing Orwell and Nabokov both did- sensitizing and audience to cases of cruelty and humiliation which they had not noticed- is not usefully thought of as a matter of stripping away appearance and revealing reality. It is better thought of as a redescription of what may happen or has been happening- to be compared, not with reality, but with alternative descriptions of the same events.”
5. “Orwell’s mind was neither transparent nor simple. It was not obvious how to describe the post-World War II political situation, and it is still not.” (Rorty 174)
6. “O’Brien reminds us that human beings who have been socialized – socialized in any language, any culture – do share a capacity which other animals lack. The can all be given a special kind of pain: They can all be humiliated by the forcible tearing down of the particular structures of language and belief in which they were socialized.”
7. “O’Brien wants to cause Winston as much pain as possible, and for this purpose what matters is that Winston be forced to realize that he has become incoherent, realize that he is no longer able to use a language or be a self. Although we can say, ‘I believed something false,’ nobody can say to himself, ‘I am, right now, believing something false.’ So nobody can be humiliated at the moment of believing a falsehood, or by the mere fact of having done so.”
8. Rorty says we should identify Orwell with Winston nad O’Brien with George Bernard Shaw.
9. “On my reading, Orwell’s denial that there is such a thing as the autonomous individual is part of a larger denial that there is something outside of time or more basic than chance which can be counted on to block, or eventually reverse, such accidental sequences. So I read the passage from Winston’s diary about the need to insist that two and two equals four not as Orwell’s view about how to keep the O’Brien’s at bay but, rather, as a description of how to keep ourselves going when things get tight.”
10. “I take Orwell to be telling us that whether our future rulers are more like O’Brien or more like J. S. Mill does nto depend- as Burnham, Williams, and metaphysicians generally suggest it does – on deep facts about human nature. For, as O’Brien and Humber Humbert show intellectual gifts – intelligence, judgment, curiosity, imagination, a taste for beauty – are as malleable as the sexual instinct. They are as capable of as many diverse employments as the human hand.”
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