A poeticized culture would be one which would not insist we find the real wall behind the painted ones, the real touchstones of truth as opposed to touchstones which are merely cultural artifacts. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity p.53 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Poetry

An ideally liberal polity would be one whose culture hero is Bloom's "strong poet" rather than the warrior, the priest, the sage, or the truth-seeking, "logical," "objective" scientist. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity p.53 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Liberalism

We need to substitute the hope that chances for fulfillment of idiosyncratic fantasies will be equalized for the hope that everyone will replace "passion" or fantasy with "reason." Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity p.53 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Liberalism

We need a redescription of liberalism as the hope that culture as a whole can be "poeticized" rather than as the Enlightenment hope that it can be "rationalized" or "scientized." Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity p.53 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Liberalism

It is central to the idea of a liberal society that, in respect to words as opposed to deeds, persuasion as opposed to force, anything goes… A liberal society is one which is content to call "true" whatever the upshot of such encounters turns out to be. CIS p.51 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Liberalism

The liberal societies of our century have produced more and more people who are able to recognize the contingency of the vocabulary in which they state their highest hopes—the contingency of their own consciences—and yet have remained faithful to those consciences. CIS p.46 #Rorty #Contingency

The vocabulary I propose, one which revolves around notions of metaphor and self-creation rather than around notions of truth, rationality, and moral obligation, is better suited to the preservation and progress of democratic societies. CIS p.44 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Metaphor

Every human life is the working out of a sophisticated idiosyncratic fantasy, and no such working out gets completed before death interrupts. It cannot get completed because there is nothing to complete, there is only a web of relations to be rewoven. CIS p.42 #Pragmatism #Rorty #StrongPoet

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. CIS p.42 #Pragmatism #Rorty #StrongPoet

Just as even the strongest poet is parasitic on her precursors, just as even she can give birth only to a small part of herself, so she is dependent on the kindness of all those strangers out there in the future. CIS p.41 #Pragmatism #Rorty #StrongPoet

Freud let us see sexual perversion, extreme cruelty & manic delusion as the private poem of the pervert, the sadist, or the lunatic. He lets us see what moral philosophy describes as extreme, inhuman, and unnatural, as continuous with our own activity. CIS p.38 #Pragmatism #Rorty #PublicVsPrivate

Poetic, artistic, philosophical, scientific, or political progress results from the accidental coincidence of a private obsession with a public need. 'Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity' p.37 #Pragmatism #Rorty #PublicVsPrivate

Freud suggests that we condemn ourselves for failure to break free of that past rather than for failure to live up to universal standards. 'Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity' p.33 #Pragmatism #Rorty #SelfCreation

Every human life is a poem—every such life as an attempt to clothe itself in its own metaphors. 'Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity' p.35 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Metaphor

After reading Freud we shall see neither Bloom's strong poet nor Kant's dutiful fulfiller of universal obligations as paradigmatic. For Freud himself eschewed the very idea of a paradigm human being. 'Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity' p.35 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Antiessentialism

My mother used to tell me, with great pride, that when I was seven I had had the honor of serving little sandwiches to the guests at a Halloween party attended both by John Dewey and by Carlo Tresca, the Italian anarchist leader. 'Achieving Our Country' p.61 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Holidays

Freud makes it possible for us to see science and poetry, genius and psychosis—and, most importantly, morality and prudence—not as products of distinct faculties but as alternative modes of adaptation. 'Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity' p.33 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Adaptation

To fail as a poet—and thus, for Nietzsche, to fail as a human being—is to accept somebody else's description of oneself, to execute a previously prepared program, to write, at most, elegant variations on previously written poems. CIS p.28 #Pragmatism #Rorty #SelfCreation

Anyone who spends his life trying to formulate a novel answer to the question of what is possible and important fears the extinction of that answer. 'Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity' p.23 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Contingency

The course of history is a long, swelling, increasingly polyphonic poem leading up to nothing save itself. Upon extinction, "human nature's total message" will not be a set of propositions, but of vocabularies—the more, and the more various, the better. 'Rorty & Pragmatism' p.33 #Rorty #Vocabulary

We should try to get to the point where we no longer worship anything, where we treat nothing as a quasi divinity, where we treat everything—our language, our conscience, our community—as a product of time and chance. CIS p.22 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Contingency

The very idea that the world or the self has an intrinsic nature— one which the physicist or the poet may have glimpsed—is a remnant of the idea that the world is a divine creation. 'Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity' p.21 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Antiessentialism

The world does not provide us with any criterion of choice between alternative metaphors; we can only compare lan­guages or metaphors with one another, not with something beyond lan­guage called "fact." 'Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity' p.20 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Metaphor

A sense of human history as the history of successive metaphors would let us see the poet, in the generic sense of the maker of new words, the shaper of new languages, as the vanguard of the species. 'Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity' p.20 #Pragmatism #Rorty #HumanEvolution

A culture in which Nietzschean metaphors were literalized would be one which took for granted that philosophical problems are as temporary as poetic problems, that there are no problems which bind the generations together into a single natural kind called "humanity." CIS p.20 #Antiessentialism

The Nietzschean substitution of self-creation for discovery substitutes a picture of the hungry generations treading each other down for a picture of humanity approaching closer and closer to the light. 'Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity' p.20 #Pragmatism #Rorty #SelfCreation

To say, with Nietzsche, that God is dead, is to say that we serve no higher purposes. 'Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity' p.20 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Antiauthoritarianism

In a Nietzschean view, one which drops the reality-appearance distinction, to change how we talk is to change what, for our own purposes, we are. 'Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity' p.20 #Pragmatism #Rorty #RealityVsAppearance

Nietzschean history of culture, and Davidsonian philosophy of language, see language as we now see evolution, as new forms of life constantly killing off old forms—not to accomplish a higher purpose but blindly. 'Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity' p.19 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Boundlessness

Our language and our culture are as much a contingency, as much a result of thousands of small mutations finding niches (and millions of others finding no niches), as are the orchids and the anthropoids. 'Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity' p.16 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Contingency

Think of the history of language, and thus of culture, as Darwin taught us to think of the history of a coral reef. Old metaphors are constantly dying off into literalness, and then serving as a platform and foil for new metaphors. CIS p.16 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Metaphor

Revolutionary achievements in the arts, in the sciences, and in moral and political thought typically occur when somebody realizes that two or more of our vocabularies are interfering with each other, and proceeds to invent a new vocabulary to replace both. CIS p.12 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Vocabulary

I am not going to offer arguments against the vocabulary I want to replace. Instead, I am going to try to make the vocabulary I favor look attractive by showing how it may be used to describe a variety of topics. 'Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity' p.9 #Pragmatism #Rorty #PhilosophyAsProposal

To say that we should drop the idea of truth as out there waiting to be discovered is not to say that we have discovered that, out there, there is no truth. 'Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity' p.8 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Truth

Let us hope for a culture that would regard the realization of utopias, and the envisaging of still further uto­pias, as an endless process—an endless, proliferating realization of Free­dom, rather than a convergence toward an already existing Truth. 'Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity' p.xvi

There is no answer to the question "Why not be cruel?"—no noncircular theoretical backup for the belief that cruelty is horrible. 'Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity' p.xv #Pragmatism #Rorty #Cruelty

How would things look if we drop the demand for a theory which unifies the public and private, and are content to treat the demands of self-creation and of human solidarity as equally valid, yet forever incommensurable? 'Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity' p.xv #Pragmatism #Rorty #PublicVsPrivate

Liberals are the people who think that cruelty is the worst thing we do. 'Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity' p.xv #Pragmatism #Rorty #Politics

Edifying philosophy falls into self-deception whenever it tries to do more than send the conversation off in new directions. 'Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature' p.378 #Rorty #Pragmatism #Conversation

Honesty has nothing to do with any controversy between Realists and non-Realists, both of whom pay it equal honor. 'Response to James Conant ' in 'Rorty and His Critics' p.347 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Truth

A talent for speaking differently, rather than for arguing well, is the chief instrument of cultural change. 'Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity' p.7 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Vocabulary

The history of philosophy is the history of Gestalt-switches, not of the painstaking carrying-out of research programs. 'Truth and Progress' p.11 #Rorty #Pragmatism #GestaltSwitch

Anything can be made to look good or bad, important or unimportant, useful or useless, by being redescribed. 'Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity' p.7 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Redescription

Happy 94th Birthday to Richard McKay Rorty! #Rorty #Pragmatism #Philosophy #Birthday

On the eve of Richard McKay Rorty's 94th birthday*, announcing @rortyquotes: dedicated to tweeting a fresh #Rorty banger each and every day of the year—starting tomorrow! * And the day, 79 years ago, that Rorty went off to the University of Chicago's Hutchins College.