Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity centres on the figure of the poet. By poet, Rorty means “any maker, anyone who hopes to create something new,” a definition which encompasses not only those who write verse but applies equally to many historians, literary critics, scientists, and philosophers (Rorty 1989: 23).[1] It is, I think, because Rorty’s interest is in poetry in this extended sense that he sometimes speaks not of poets but of ironists, and accordingly in this short essay I will treat those terms as interchangeable.[2] In it I show that the account of the poet sketched in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity can be seen to describe Rorty himself, and his relation to the pragmatist tradition.

Rorty’s vision of the poet can be brought into focus with reference to one dimension of his break with the presumptions of modern philosophy. In Rorty’s interpretation, Descartes invented the modern conception of the mind by describing it in epistemic terms. Descartes modelled thinking on vision, conceiving of the mind as an “inner eye” which inspects its mental states (its beliefs and its desires). In a contrasting view which began to emerge in the late eighteenth century, the mind is described not as having beliefs and desires but rather as being comprised of them. In contemporary philosophy, Rorty takes this thought to be best expressed by Daniel Dennett in his description of the self as “a centre of narrative gravity”: “Dennett asks me to think of my self as gradually coming into existence as I gradually accumulate beliefs and desires containing the words ‘I’ and ‘Richard Rorty’ and as these beliefs and desires begin to hang together in a coherent and plausible story. No narrative, no self” (Rorty 1993: 22).

Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity suggests that such narratives can fruitfully be seen in terms of poetry. Rorty’s view of poetry draws on Harold Bloom’s work, in particular his account of what it is that leads a person to write a poem. According to Bloom, “every poet begins (however ‘unconsciously’) by rebelling more strongly against the fear of death than all other men and women do” (cited in Rorty 1989: 24). Rorty takes up this thought in a discussion of his favourite verse poet Philip Larkin’s anxieties about what he called his “fear of extinction”.[3] As Rorty reads it, Larkin’s poem “Continuing to Live” expresses his fear that what will extinguished at death is his particular sense of what is significant; what Rorty, employing Larkin’s term “lading-list”, describes as “his idiosyncratic lading-list, his individual sense of what was possible and important” (Rorty 1989: 23). Generalising the point, the poet fears that one’s “lading-list” is merely an imitation of that of earlier poets, so that “[o]ne will not have impressed one's mark on the language but, rather, will have spent one's life shoving about already coined pieces. So one will not really have had an I at all.” Against this, the poet seeks to articulate what is distinctive about herself, making concrete what will become extinct at death: “one would know exactly what it is that will die, and thus know what one has succeeded in becoming” (Rorty 1989: 24).

Rorty takes Larkin’s fear to be a reminder of what Plato described as the ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy. Since Plato’s Socrates, most philosophers have regarded themselves as seeking the truth, viewed as a matter of accurately representing the supposedly permanent ahistorical framework in which all human life is lived. Accordingly, philosophers have often been dismissive of poets, whose interest lies not with the universal and timeless but the local and contingent. In Rorty’s interpretation, Nietzsche was the first philosopher to give up entirely the Platonic aim of representing the world as it is in itself, the world independent of the descriptions particular men and women give of it. Nietzsche 

hoped that once we realized that Plato’s “true world” was just a fable, we would seek consolation, at the moment of death, not in having transcended the animal condition but in being that peculiar sort of dying animal who, by describing himself in his own terms, had created himself. More exactly, he would have created the only part of himself that mattered by constructing his own mind. To create one's mind is to create one’s own language, rather than to let the length of one’s mind be set by the language other human beings have left behind (Rorty 1989: 27).

Rorty resists, though, what he calls Nietzsche’s attempt to divinise the poet, his view of the poet as the creator of something entirely new. Poets cannot free themselves completely from the vocabulary which they inherited, but must rather work within and through it: “there can be no fully Nietzschean lives, lives which are pure action rather than reaction—no lives which are not largely parasitical on an un-redescribed past and dependent on the charity of as yet unborn generations” (Rorty 1989: 42).

These thoughts can be explored further by turning to Bloom, who distinguishes poets in terms of what he thinks of as their strength. Those he calls weak poets hope to evade the influence of their precursors but, in so doing, are said merely to succumb to and extend it. In contrast, strong poets wrestle with that influence. Poetic struggle—or in Bloom’s preferred word, agon—is as he describes it not a friendly or happy affair. But Bloom himself delights in it, writing of:

the triumph of having so stationed the precursor, in one’s own work, that particular passages in his work seem not to be presages of one’s own advent, but rather to be indebted to one’s own achievement, and even (necessarily) to be lessened by one’s greater splendor. The mighty dead return, but they return in our colors, and speaking in our voices, at least in part, at least in moments, moments that testify to our persistence, and not to their own (Bloom 1997: 141, emphasis in original).

In her triumph, the strong poet achieves immortality, when (in Larkin’s terms) her idiosyncratic lading-list continues to live after her death.

On this view poetic tradition is the result of a poet’s agon with her precursors, with the tradition reinvented with what Bloom calls each strong misreading. This account of poetry provides an illuminating way of viewing Rorty’s influential understanding of pragmatism. For that understanding is the result of, in Bloom’s sense, a strong misreading of his precursors. In Rorty’s telling Peirce, usually regarded as the founder of pragmatism, is quickly dismissed: “His contribution to pragmatism was merely to have given it a name, and to have stimulated James” (Rorty 1982: 161).[4] In their turn, James and Dewey are criticised for attempting to retain something philosophically interesting in the idea of experience, and regarded, at their best, to be precursors of the linguistic turn. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature is often taken to have led to a revival of pragmatism, but the argument in that book is developed principally not with reference to the classical pragmatists but to analytic philosophers, most importantly Quine and Sellars. These philosophers give up on the very idea that language might represent the world, though both are read by Rorty as having failed to break completely with modern epistemology. Rorty agrees with Davidson’s view that Quine remained committed to a form of the “myth of the given” in thinking that a naturalistic successor to empiricism could be found in the idea that we constitute the world through the stimulation of our sense organs; Sellars is read as continuing to invoke distinctions, such as the necessary and contingent, which Quine had overcome. They are thus both said to trace one part of the way beyond epistemic foundationalism. Rorty combines their insights with Davidson’s rejection of what he calls the “third dogma of empiricism,” arriving at a position he initially called epistemological behaviourism and subsequently described as pragmatism.

Rorty’s understanding of pragmatism takes over Nietzsche’s narrative of “how the ‘true world’ finally became a fable” and is defined as the “doctrine that there are no constraints on inquiry save conversational ones—no wholesale constraints derived from the nature of the objects, or of the mind, or of language, but only those retail constraints provided by the remarks of our fellow-inquirers.” In Rorty’s version of Nietzsche, humanity is seen as coming to set aside non-human authorities—be it the will of God or the intrinsic nature of reality—and replaced with the idea that the only source of authority is that of human beings in the social practices in which we participate. “In the end, the pragmatist tells us, what matters is our loyalty to other human beings clinging together in the dark, not our hope of getting things right” (Rorty 1982: 165, 166).

We have seen that Rorty is dismissive of Peirce. Peirce himself was annoyed by what he regarded as literary misreadings of his position. He remarks that:

at present, the word [pragmatism] begins to be met with occasionally in the literary journals, where it gets abused in the merciless way that words have to expect when they fall into literary clutches. Sometimes the manners of the British have effloresced in scolding at the word as ill-chosen—ill-chosen, that is, to express some meaning that it was rather designed to exclude. So then, the writer, finding his bantling “pragmatism” so promoted, feels that it is time to kiss his child good-by and relinquish it to its higher destiny; while to serve the precise purpose of expressing the original definition, he begs to announce the birth of the word “pragmaticism,” which is ugly enough to be safe from kidnappers (Peirce 1998a: 334-5).

Peirce’s point about the British is well taken (see also Haack 1995). Regarding Rorty, a large literature has grown up which takes aim at, and hopes to correct, his readings of Peirce, James, and Dewey. One of Rorty’s most forthright critics is Susan Haack, who objects that what she calls Rorty’s “literary dilettantism” leads to misreadings of pragmatism in general, and of Peirce in particular. In one paper Haack stages a literal literary agon, “a philosophical boxing match” between Peirce and Rorty, which juxtaposes passages from their work on topics such as truth, metaphysics, and pragmatism (Haack 1998a). Haack takes this to show that “Peirce gets his revenge on a self-styled neo-pragmatist” (Haack 1998b: 2) but, employing her vocabulary while resisting her conclusion, as I read it Peirce doesn’t lay a glove on Rorty.

Philosophers who identify with Peirce’s version of pragmatism have usually declined to take up his word “pragmaticism,” seeking instead to rescue pragmatism by setting out their own accounts. The most important of these is Cheryl Misak, a part of whose work can be read in terms of an agon with Rorty’s version. In Truth, Politics, Morality, Misak writes of Rorty that “[i]n some quarters he has been so successful that the first task for any other kind of pragmatist is to wrest the label from him” (Misak 2000: 12). In a subsequent collection of essays, Misak coins the term “new pragmatism,” which she uses to contrast with Rorty’s “neo-pragmatism” (Misak 2007). And in The American Pragmatists, Misak sets out what she takes to be the central fault line in contemporary pragmatism with Rorty firmly in mind: “it is a debate between those who assert (or whose view entails) that there is no truth and objectivity to be had anywhere and those who take pragmatism to promise an account of truth that preserves our aspiration to getting things right” (Misak 2013: 3).[5]

I have argued elsewhere that Misak draws the line between contemporary pragmatists too firmly and suggested also that her re-description of Peirce’s theory of truth as infeasibility brings her position closer to Rorty’s “neo-pragmatism” than she recognises (Bacon 2014).[6] On the reading offered here though, whether or not I am right about this is beside the point. We do not ask whether a poem is right, but rather ask (or ought to ask) whether it is weak or strong. In the preface to The American Pragmatists, Misak writes that: “my project straddles the history of ideas and philosophy. One of my aims is to tell what I think is a gripping story in the history of philosophy—a story about how pragmatism came into being, evolved, and branched out. But an equally important aim is to show what is good in pragmatism; where philosophical missteps were taken; and how pragmatists can best go forward” (Misak 2013: xi). Partly through its agon with Rorty’s account, The American Pragmatists offers a strong reading of the pragmatism tradition, one measure of which is its success in achieving the aims Misak sets herself.

Rorty as I have indicated derives his account of the strong poet from Bloom. In turn, Bloom has written appreciatively of what he takes from Rorty’s understanding of pragmatism.  

American pragmatism, as Rorty advises, always asks of a text: what is it good for, what can I do with it, what can it do for me, what can I make it mean? I confess that I like these questions, and they are what I think strong reading is all about, because strong reading doesn’t ever ask: Am I getting this poem right? Strong reading knows that what it does to the poem is right, because it knows what Emerson, its American inventor, taught it, which is that the true ship is the shipbuilder. If you don’t believe in your reading, then don’t bother anyone else with it, but if you do, then don’t care also whether anyone else agrees with it or not. If it is strong enough, then they will come round to it anyway, and you should just shrug when they tell you finally that it is a right reading (Bloom 1982: 19-20, emphasis in original).

A right reading, Bloom insists, is a strong one rather than one that finally gets a text right.[7] Rorty’s strong poet knows that her reading, if it continues to live after her death, will come to be misread; as he writes, “We shall never find descriptions so perfect that imaginative redescription will become pointless” (Rorty 2007: 109).[8]

Essays however cannot continue forever, and in this one I end not with Rorty but by circling back towards the beginning, to Peirce. Not to the Peirce whose idiosyncratic lading-list includes the ugly redescription “pragmaticism”, but the Peirce who announces strongly that: “I hear you say: ‘All that is not fact; it is poetry.’ Nonsense! Bad poetry is false, I grant; but nothing is truer than true poetry” (Peirce 1998b: 193, emphasis in original). Dead right.

* My thanks go to Elin Danielsen Huckerby for very helpful comments.

[1] In this sense, poets include those who in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature Rorty calls revolutionary philosophers. He also distinguishes between systematic and edifying revolutionaries, strongly favouring the latter. “Edifying philosophers want to keep space open for the sense of wonder which poets can sometimes cause—wonder that there is something new under the sun, something which is not an accurate representation of what was already there, something which (at least for the moment) cannot be explained and can barely be described” (Rorty 1979: 370, emphasis in original).

[2] Rorty discusses the poet in the first part of Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, and part two examines the figure of the ironist. Rorty’s account of irony has attracted considerably more critical attention, largely I think because he placed it in the book’s title. I take the ironist of part two to be the same figure as the strong poet in part one, and that the difference in terminology reflects the contingency of the book having been based on two series of lectures.

[3] David Rigsbee notes that Larkin was Rorty’s favourite verse poet in Rigsbee 2008.

[4] In a comment that can usefully be applied to Rorty’s view of Peirce, Bloom writes: “To unname the precursor while earning one’s own name is the quest of strong or severe poets” (Bloom 2011: 10).

[5] Another mark which (using Bloom’s words) testifies to Rorty’s persistence is that Misak concludes her chapter on his work in The American Pragmatists with a sentence that recalls her comment from thirteen years earlier: “The first challenge (and opportunity) faced by this kind of pragmatist [the new pragmatist] is to wrest the label ‘pragmatism’ from Rorty” (Misak 2013: 237).

[6] In The American Pragmatists Misak distinguishes what she calls “Rorty’s revolutionary pragmatism,” of which she is critical, from his “less revolutionary pragmatism,” with which she expresses some sympathy. I doubt there is a difference to be made out here, and think Brandom correct when he remarks that “it is important to remember that some of Rorty’s views are more outrageous than others—but none are less” (Brandom 2011: 111).

[7] Rorty takes everyone to have what he calls a “final vocabulary”: “It is ‘final’ in the sense that if doubt is cast on the worth of these words, their user has no noncircular argumentative recourse” (Rorty 1989: 73). Finality marks the current frontier of one’s vocabulary, not that it might not be transcended in the future. This is a point which Emerson captures, writing that: “Permanence is but a word of degrees” (Emerson 1903: 302). Rorty seldom mentions Emerson by name, but I hope to say something idiosyncratic about the relation between them at some point.

[8] To quote Emerson again: “If John was perfect, why are you and I alive?” (Emerson 1904: 240). My essay has attempted a redescription by making no reference to the “firm distinction” Rorty draws between the public and the private (Rorty 1989: 83).

References

Bacon, Michael (2014), “On Cheryl Misak’s Modest Pragmatism,” Contemporary Pragmatism (11.2), 95-105.

Bloom, Harold (1982), Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

________ (1997), The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2nd edition).

________ (2011), The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life (New Haven: Yale University Press).

Brandom, Robert B. (2011), Perspectives on Pragmatism: Classical, Recent, and Contemporary (London: Harvard University Press).

Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1903 [1841]), “Circles,” in Edward Emerson (ed.), The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essays. 1st series [Vol. 2] (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company), 301-322.

________ (1904 [1844]), “Nominalist and Realist,” in Edward Emerson (ed.), The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essays. 2nd series [Vol. 3] (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company), 225-248.

Haack, Susan (1995), ‘Vulgar Pragmatism: An Unedifying Prospect’, in Herman J. Saatkemp Jr. (ed.) Rorty and Pragmatism: The Philosopher Responds to His Critics (London: Vanderbilt University Press), 126-147.

________ (1998a), “’We Pragmatists…’ Peirce and Rorty in Conversation,” in Haack, Manifesto of a Passionate Moderate: Unfashionable Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 31-47.

________ (1998b), “Introduction,” in Haack, Manifesto of a Passionate Moderate, 1-5.

Misak, Cheryl (2000), Truth, Politics, Morality: Pragmatism and Deliberation (London: Routledge).

________ (2007), “Introduction,” in Misak (ed.) New Pragmatists (Oxford: Clarendon Press).

 ________ (2013), The American Pragmatists (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

Peirce, C. S., (1998a), “What Pragmatism Is,” in Nathan Houser, and Christian Kloesel (eds.), The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings Volume 2 (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press), 331-345.

________ (1998b), “The Seven Systems of Metaphysics,” in Houser and Kloesel, (eds.), The Essential Peirce, 179-195.

Rigsbee, David (2008), “Rorty from a Poet's View,” New Literary History (39.1), 141-143.

Rorty, Richard (1979), Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: University of Princeton Press).

________ (1982), “Pragmatism, Relativism, and Irrationalism,” in Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism: Essays 1972-1980 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), 160-175.

________ (1989), Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

________ (1993), “Centers of Moral Gravity Commentary on Donald Spence's ‘The Hermeneutic Turn,’” Psychoanalytic Dialogues (3:1), 21-28. 

________ (2007), “Pragmatism and Romanticism,” in Rorty, Philosophy as Cultural Politics: Philosophical Papers Volume 4 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 105-119.