Abstract

RICHARD RORTY’S IDEAL CHARACTER, THE “IRONIST,” is simultaneously committed to two different projects. The first is the repudiation of metaphysics, implying the abandonment of all philosophical or theological efforts “to achieve universality by the transcendence of contingency.” This first project is not so remarkable anymore, the twentieth century having seen any number of attempts to bring metaphysics to a close. But the second project has been gathering speed only in the last few decades. It is described as the attempt to make something “never... dreamed of before,” which is also the attempt to get free from “inherited contingencies.” Given that many of life’s contingencies are originally inherited, getting free of them is a far-reaching business, bringing a whole Nietzschean lifestyle in its train. Sometimes Rorty talks as if the two projects were simply two sides of the one project. He says for example that a person becomes an ironist “when one’s aim becomes an expanding repertoire of alternative descriptions rather than The One Right Description,” as if renouncing the latter meant embracing the former. However, surely a person can repudiate metaphysics, and yet live peacefully with his or her current contingencies? If I regard my everyday vocabulary as a useful way of talking which my society has developed as a way of coping, why should I automatically want to change it, or move beyond it?