From the pan-relationalist point of view, great intellectual achievements (Hegel’s system) are not categorically different from small technical achievements (getting the pieces to fit together neatly in a piece of cabinetry). PasAA p.xxxiv #Pragmatism #Rorty #Panrelationalism

We pan-relationalists move things about, rearrange them so as to highlight their relations to other things, in the hope of finding ever more useful, and therefore ever more beautiful, patterns. PasAA p.xxxiv #Pragmatism #Rorty #Panrelationalism

If we are pan-relationalists we shall see everything on, so to speak, a single horizontal plane. We shall not search for the sublime either high above, or deep beneath, this plane. PasAA p.xxxiv #Pragmatism #Rorty #Panrelationalism

There is no such thing as the correct description of anything: there are only the descriptions which, by relating it to other things, put it in contexts which serve our current, varied, needs. PasAA p.xxxiv #Pragmatism #Rorty #Panrelationalism

There is no such thing as “the correct context” in which to read a text, place a person, or explain an event. Rather, there are as many such contexts as there are human purposes. PasAA p.xxxiv #Pragmatism #Rorty #Panrelationalism

A thing has as many identities as there are relational contexts into which it can be put. PasAA p.xxxiv #Pragmatism #Rorty #Panrelationalism

A lot of the best recent philosophy can be summed up as an attempt to get rid of the substance-accident and essence-accident distinctions by claiming that nothing can have a self-identity, a nature, apart from its relations to other things. PasAA p.xxxiii #Pragmatism #Rorty #Panrelationalism

We should be as suspicious of attempts to ground political proposals on large theories of the Nature of Modernity as we are of attempts to ground them on the Will of God. PasAA p.xxxiii #Pragmatism #Rorty #PublicVsPrivate

Moral & political principles should be viewed as abbreviations for narratives of successful use of tools, summaries of the results of successful experiments, rather than as insights into the nature of anything large (Society, History, or Humanity). PasAA p.xxxiii #Pragmatism #Rorty #PublicVsPrivate

In the spirit of Dewey, we should see public institutions as tools to be justified by their success in getting certain finite jobs done, rather than as instantiations of eternal truths. PasAA p.xxxii #Pragmatism #Rorty #PublicVsPrivate

Our lives would be far less varied, and the forms of happiness for which we are able to strive would be much poorer without quests for greatness or sublimity. But this does not mean that we should arrange our public institutions to suit such quests. PasAA p.xxxii #Pragmatism #Rorty #PublicVsPrivate

The utility of imaginative feats, bound by no social norms, for the public discourse of later ages is undeniable. Had thinkers like Plato, Augustine, and Kant not aspired to sublimity, the rest of us would not possess the beautiful residues of these aspirations. PasAA p.(xxxii) #PublicVsPrivate

I have been criticized for trying to put public and private in watertight compartments. I have no wish to do that. PasAA p.(xxxii) #Pragmatism #Rorty #PublicVsPrivate

We should see the quest for the sublime, as Freud saw the sublimation of sexual desire, as a precondition for certain striking individual achievements. But we should not see it as relevant to our public, socio-political, cultural prospects. PasAA p.(xxxi) #Pragmatism #Rorty #Sublimity

Philosophy should treat the quest for the unconditioned, the infinite, the transcendent and the sublime as a natural human tendency—one which Freud has helped us understand. PasAA p.(xxxi) #Pragmatism #Rorty #Sublimity

The attempt to make sublimity central to reflection on the human future is as dangerous as making God, or Sin, or Truth central to such reflection. PasAA p.(xxxi) #Pragmatism #Rorty #Sublimity

Those who have achieved contentment with the conditioned will see the pursuit of truth as the pursuit of human happiness, rather than as the fulfillment of a desire which transcends mere happiness. PasAA p.(xxx) #Pragmatism #Rorty #Truth

To be satisfied with the conditioned, to give up the quest for the infinite, would be to rest content with beauty. PasAA p.(xxx) #Pragmatism #Rorty #Sublimity

Pragmatism says that the conditioned is all there is: that human beings have nothing to know save their relations to each other and to other finite beings. PasAA p.(xxx) #Pragmatism #Rorty #Sublimity

The idea of a non-human authority and the quest for sublimity are both products of self-abasement. Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism (PasAA) p.(xxx) #Pragmatism #Rorty #Sublimity

Although the idea of a central and universal human component called "reason," a faculty which is the source of our moral obligations, was very useful in creating modern democratic societies, it should be dispensed with in order to help bring about a liberal utopia. CIS p.194 #Rorty #Morality

The fundamental premise of the book is that a belief can still regulate action, can still be thought worth dying for, among people who are quite aware that this belief is caused by nothing deeper than contingent historical circumstance. CIS p.189 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Contingency

Getting somebody to deny a belief for no reason is a first step toward making her incapable of having a self because she becomes incapable of weaving a coherent web of belief and desire. CIS p.178 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Selfhood

The idea that either literary criticism or philosophy should become an expert culture is a result of unfortunate attempts to squeeze these areas of culture into a university system tailored to the needs of lawyers, physicians, and natural scientists. PCP p.125 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Philosophy

Whenever philosophy has attempted to become an expert culture it has degenerated into scholasticism, into controversies which are of no interest to anyone outside the philosophical profession. PCP p.125 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Philosophy

Philosophy is what is left over after one has bracketed both common sense and all the various expert cultures. PCP p.125 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Philosophy

After the scales are rubbed off a butterfly's wing, you have transparency, but not beauty—formal structure without sensuous content. CIS p152 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Truth

Truths are the skeletons which remain after the capacity to arouse the senses—to cause tingles—has been rubbed off by familiarity and long usage. CIS p.152 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Truth

What we call common sense—the body of widely accepted truths—is, just as Heidegger and Nabokov thought, a collection of dead metaphors. CIS p.152 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Metaphor

If you want your books to be read rather than respectfully shrouded in tooled leather, you should try to produce tingles rather than truth. CIS p152 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Truth

If you want to be remembered by future generations, go in for poetry rather than for mathematics. CIS p.151 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Poetry

Plato himself, though generally wrong about general ideas, survives as the first white magus. He is the enchanter who spun the first strands of that web of metaphor which Derrida calls the West's "white mythology." CIS p.151 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Derrida

The second of two distinctions categorizing the purposes of books divides books the category of books working out a new final vocabulary into those books aimed at working out a new private final vocabulary and those aimed at working out a new public final vocabulary. CIS p.143 #Rorty #Vocabulary

The first of two distinctions categorizing the purposes of books is that between the range of purposes presently statable within some familiar, widely used, final vocabulary and the purpose of working out a new final vocabulary. CIS p.142 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Vocabulary

The public-private distinction I have developed suggests that we distinguish books which help us become autonomous from books which help us become less cruel. CIS p.141 #Pragmatism #Rorty #PublicVsPrivate

Only metaphysicians think that our present genres and criteria exhaust the realm of possibility. Ironists continue to expand that realm. CIS p.135 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Metaphysics

The more original a book or a kind of writing is, the more unprecedented, the less likely we are to have criteria in hand, and the less point there is in trying to assign it to a genre. CIS p.135 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Metaphysics

Why does it sound so shockingly different when Derrida does it, if it is just dialectical inversion all over again? Because he makes use of "accidental" material features of words, whereas Hegel stuck to the rule that you cannot put any weight on words' sounds & shapes. CIS p.134 #Rorty #Hegel

Deconstruction is not a novel procedure made possible by a recent philosophical discovery. Recontextualization in general, and inverting hierarchies in particular, has been going on for a long time. CIS p.134 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Redescription

Derrida's importance lies in his having had the courage to give up the attempt to unite the private and the public. He privatizes the sublime, having learned from the fate of his predecessors that the public can never be more than beautiful. CIS p.125 #Pragmatism #Rorty #PublicVsPrivate

lronists should reconcile themselves to a private-public split within their final vocabularies, to the fact that resolution of doubts about one's final vocabulary has nothing in particular to do with attempts to save other people from pain and humiliation. CIS p.120 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Irony

Marxism seemed to show how to synthesize self-creation and social responsibility, pagan heroism and Christian love. On my account of ironist culture, such opposites can be combined in a life but not synthesized in a theory. CIS p.120 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Ironism

Heidegger was quite right in saying that poetry shows what language can be when it is not a means to an end, but quite wrong in thinking that there could be a universal poem…something which lay beyond both metaphysics and ironism. CIS p.119 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Poetry

"What does Heidegger mean by the word 'Dasein'?" People who are unable to stand the thought that they are not their own creations. These are the people who immediately see the point of Blake's exclamation, "I must Create a System, or be enslav'd by another Man's." CIS p.109 #Rorty #Authenticity

Books which are about ideas, even when written by historicists like Hegel and Nietzsche, look like descriptions of eternal relations between eternal objects, rather than genealogical accounts of the filiation of final vocabularies. CIS p.107 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Contingency

So the lesson I draw from Proust's example is that novels are a safer medium than theory for expressing one's recognition of the relativity and contingency of authority figures. CIS p.107 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Contingency

To try for the sublime is to try not just to create the taste by which one judges oneself, but to make it impossible for anybody else to judge one by any other taste. CIS p.106 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Sublime

Although the thoroughgoing ironist can use the notion of a "better description," he has no criterion for the application of this term and so cannot use the notion of "the right description." CIS p.99 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Redescription

The last thing the ironist theorist wants or needs is a theory of ironism. CIS p.97 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Irony

Ironist theory is a ladder which is to be thrown away as soon as one has figured out what it was that drove one's predecessors to theorize. CIS p.97 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Irony