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Nowhere is this tension between Western jingoism and skepticism more evident than in the work of the North-American, neo-pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty. In a famous essay entitled “Human Rights, Rationality, and Sentimentality,” Rorty brought some of the same Heideggerian concerns that can be found in Malik’s and Havel’s writings forward into the Post-Cold War era. Importantly, though, he did so without committing to any of the larger and more questionable aspects of the Heideggerian “existential revolution.”72 If both Malik and Havel took
from Heidegger an over-dependence on the need for existential decisionism and/or revolution, Rorty, by contrast, offered a Heideggerianism that remained more muted and mundane, but one that still reflected the transition from the ideological conflict of the Cold War to that of the current moment of globalization.
In his much discussed 1993 Oxford Amnesty Lecture, Rorty suggested that rather than seeking a rational, transcendental foundation for human rights, activists should instead appeal to the sentiments. In this suggestion, which marks a turn away from the unflinching, rationalist universalism of previous human rights discourse, we can hear reverberations of Havel’s talk of empathy and sympathy, as well as Malik’s longing for friendship and understanding. More importantly, though, we can also hear echoes of Heidegger’s notorious description of reason “as the most stiff-necked adversary of thought.” 73
71 UNESCO, Human Rights: Comments and Interpretations (New York: Columbia
UP, 1949). Available at
http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0015/001550/ 155042eb.pdf
72 The essay “Human Rights, Rationality, and Sentimentality”, was first presented
as one of the 1993 Oxford Amnesty Lectures, and has been collected in Richard Rorty, Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, Volume 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998), 167-185
73 Martin Heidegger, “Nietzsche’s Word, ‘God is Dead’,” in The Question
Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York:
Chapter Two 86
Although contemporary commentators often overlook it, the influence of Heidegger’s thought on Rorty was profound—so profound, in fact, that at one point in his career Rorty even planned to write a book on Heidegger.74 As Rorty looked more and more to continental thought for insight and inspiration throughout the 1980s and 1990s, he came to share Heidegger’s overarching critique of Western philosophy. Like his predecessor, Rorty thought that excessively rationalist attempts—from Descartes forward—to transform Western philosophy into an ahistorical science were misguided and in some instances even dangerous. But Rorty’s proposals for rescuing philosophy from this predicament differed rather drastically from Heidegger’s. Insofar as both Rorty and Heidegger insisted on amputating large portions of the philosophical canon, effectively jettisoning all of its residual metaphysical or scientific content, they were both philosophical radicals. But whereas Heidegger put his philosophical radicalism into the practice of a disastrous political radicalism, Rorty instead channeled it into a humble, ameliorative progressivism, one that appealed not to destined epochs in the history of Being as with Heidegger , nor to existential revolutions as with Malik and Havel , nor even to universal laws of reason as with somebody like Jürgen Habermas, perhaps but simply to—as he put it in his lecture on human rights—“sentimental education.”75
Rorty envisioned a less exalted place for post-rationalist philosophy than did Heidegger. “Because I do not think that philosophy is ever going to be put on the secure path of a science,” he admitted in a late essay, “nor that it is a good idea to try to put it there, I am content to see philosophy professors as practicing cultural politics.”76 This is not to suggest that, for
Rorty, all politics could be reduced to cultural politics. In fact, he was a rather vocal critic of the professoriate’s tendency to mistake cultural
74 I discuss Rorty’s relation to Heidegger in my Heidegger in America (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2011). For a critique of Rorty’s antifoundationalist understanding of human rights see Matthias Kettner, “Rortys Restbegrundung der Menschenrechte. Eine Kritik”, in Hinter den Spiegeln: Beiträge zur Philosophie
Richard Rortys mit Erwiderungen von Richard Rorty, ed. Thomas Schäfer, Udo
Tietz, and Rüdiger Zill (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2001), 201-228, as well as Rorty’s own response in the same volume, 229-234.
75 Rorty, “Human Rights, Rationality, and Sentimentality,” 176.
76 Richard Rorty, “Analytic and conversational philosophy,” in Philosophy as
Cultural Politics: Philosophical Papers, Volume 4 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
Provincializing Human Rights? 87
activism for political activism.77 Nevertheless, Rorty maintained that the
political sphere rested upon shared cultural assumptions, and he believed that post-scientific philosophers were particularly well suited for the task of challenging and perhaps even re-imagining these assumptions. Rather than replace the concrete, everyday activities of human rights activists, jurists, or politicians, what proponents of the kind of “sentimental education” Rorty envisaged were to enact what José-Manuel Barreto has called “a long-term strategy” for the promotion and defense of human rights.78 In helping to establish a human rights culture based on sympathy
for the plight of the suffering as well as revulsion toward all instances of cruelty, such “sentimental education” could foster the cause of human rights, whether human rights were enshrined in local traditions, positivist law, transcendental philosophy, physical science—or not. There need not be any waiting, in other words, for the philosophy of human rights to be worked out as if it were some kind of scholastic puzzle. Human rights activism can begin at any moment, provided that our pining for philosophical foundations is left at the door.
While many philosophers have resisted the relegation of their profession to just another voice in the chorus of cultural debate, Rorty maintained that this new calling offered philosophers the opportunity to contribute more positively to the cause of human rights than they had previously. Rather than pushing the human rights conversation towards the shoals of such abstract and intractable notions as universalism, relativism, natural law or human nature, philosophy could simply imagine desirable political utopias, aspirational communities of hope and solidarity. Like novelists and poets, philosophers could inspire and edify, they could impassion and transform. Liberated from its timeless pursuit of transcendental truth and reconceived as a tool of persuasion, philosophy could be used to sway people to the cause of human rights. It no longer had to resort to specious and unconvincing talk of unchanging essences, which might prove contingent and malleable, or historical destinies, which might never come true.
77 Rorty’s attacks on what he called the “American cultural Left” are most pointed
in his Achieving Our Country (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998).
78 See José-Manuel Barreto, “Rorty and Human Rights: Contingency, Emotions
and how to Defend Human Rights Telling Stories,” Utrecht Law Review 7 (2011), 93-112, which makes a much fuller case for this interpretation of Rorty, but also of wider human rights discourse itself. Available online at http://www.utrecht lawreview.org/index.php/ulr/article/viewFile/164/163
Chapter Two 88
For Rorty, the discourse of human rights was not an expression of the fundamental truth of human existence, as both Malik and Havel, working from Heidegger, would have it. To the contrary, the discourse of human rights was nothing more than a language of sentimental education that could be used to inculcate a sense of “sympathy” for the weak and the oppressed—to get people “to imagine themselves in the shoes of the despised and the oppressed.”79 More important than working for an
“increased moral knowledge” was the dissemination of “sad and sentimental stories” that would sway people to the cause of human rights.80 Just as the
later Heidegger turned to the poets for intimations of the “truth of Being,” Rorty enlisted the help of novelists to make a better world.81 In doing so,
he abandoned the nostalgia for timeless wisdom that still animated the work of Malik and Havel. Whereas Malik and Havel both held onto Heidegger as somebody who provides insight into the universal human condition, Rorty saw him merely as somebody who calls attention to the limits of rationalism. Rorty’s sympathetic solidarity was a chosen affiliation, based not on any common, essential humanity or even a common theory of humanity , but on a shared sentimental rejection of acts of inhumanity. His “solidarity of the shaken” jettisoned any and all overarching claims about the existence of “man” or the fate of the West. For him, human rights represented a form of social hope more than it did any preordained outcome of human evolution. There was no essential connection between human rights and the Western tradition, only a contingent one. As a result, the West could not lay claim to human rights discourse.
In an essay from the early nineties that invoked the example of Václav Havel, Rorty lamented that his fellow intellectuals had “grown accustomed to thinking in world-historical, eschatological terms.”82 What Rorty liked
most about Havel was that he did not try to translate the messy and unexpected events of the Velvet Revolution into a tidy, predetermined schematic. Communism’s collapse in Czechoslovakia was the result of contingent human actions that were rooted in specific human emotions. It
79 Rorty, “Human Rights, Rationality, and Sentimentality,” 179-80. 80 Ibid., 172.
81 On the later Heidegger, see Joseph J. Kockelmans, On the Truth of Being:
Reflections on Heidegger’s Later Philosophy (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1985).
82 Richard Rorty, “The End of Leninism, Havel, and Social Hope,” in Truth and
Progress: Philosophical Papers, Volume 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Provincializing Human Rights? 89
was not the outcome of a necessary course of world-historical events. The lesson Rorty drew from Havel was that intellectuals should busy themselves less with the pursuit of ever-elusive transcendental truths and more with the task of influencing human emotion via the production of what he called, after Havel, “a poetry of social hope.”83
The fundamental question, for Rorty, was the question of solidarity. Throughout the 1980s he continually stressed its importance, even going so far as to argue that our notions of science and objectivity derived from solidarity and not the other way around as was commonly believed by his more analytically inclined colleagues.84 In his 1989 book Contingency,
Irony and Solidarity he was even more forthright: whatever enhanced
solidarity, whether it was written by philosophers, poets or novelists, was what truly mattered.85 Some twenty years later, though, in our current era
of globalization, solidarity seems more elusive than ever.86
Rorty worried that human rights—like other progressive movements— would shipwreck on doctrinal rocks. He thought that recasting the human rights discussion along the lines of global solidarity might provide safer passage insofar as it would avoid the siren calls of universalism, rationalism and essentialism. But how are we to achieve solidarity in the face of neoliberal globalization, the menace Rorty spent his final years confronting?87 Widening our field of vision might be a start. If a
connection can be made between the sort of internalist critiques of Western rationalism that we find in Malik, Havel and Rorty, on the one hand, and more recent postcolonial writings from the margins of the West, on the other, perhaps we might be able to hold open, if only temporarily, a fertile space for an alternative conception of human rights, one that fosters empathetic solidarity over and above impersonal, bureaucratic rationalism.
83 Ibid., 243.
84 See, for instance, “Solidarity or Objectivity?” and “Science as Solidarity” in
Richard Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers, Volume 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
85 Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1989).
86 For Rorty’s optimistic views regarding the prospects of solidarity in the face of
globalization, see his “Globalization, the Politics of Identity and Social Hope,” in Richard Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope (New York: Penguin, 1999), 229-239.
87 See, for example, Richard Rorty, Take Care of Freedom and Truth Will Take
Care of Itself: Interviews with Richard Rorty, ed. Eduardo Mendieta (Stanford:
Chapter Two 90
Following Havel’s lead, we might conclude that globalization is indeed the result of the exporting of Western models to the rest of the world. But rather than simply rejecting this historical legacy, however, the task is to reexamine the ways in which it has interacted with local contexts. Only then might we begin to see the outlines of a potential solidarity from below, or rather, from the margins.