Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity - Part III: Cruelty and Solidarity

Part III: Cruelty and Solidarity

7) The barber of Kasbeam: Nabokov on cruelty

For Rorty, Nabokov represents private cruelty in his literature, giving readers a model that they can employ as a warning.

Rorty also discusses Nabokov's obsessive promulgation of the idea that literature be viewed aesthetically; that the reader should absolutely never look for a larger meaning when reading his books. Rorty suggests that Nabokov promotes this type of literary critique because, if it were adopted, the critic would not be able to recontextualize Nabokov in the way that Nabokov has recontextualized earlier authors. In this way, Nabokov can invent his own final vocabulary, thus freeing himself from the vocabularies of his predecessors, while not allowing others to recontextualize and therefore alter the final vocabulary he has created.

8) The last intellectual in Europe: Orwell on cruelty

George Orwell, especially in Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm, represents public, or institutional cruelty. Rorty argues that Orwell deprived the liberal community of their hopes for liberal utopia without providing them with an alternative. For Rorty, Orwell represents a liberal who is not an ironist, while Heidegger represents an ironist who is not a liberal.

9) Solidarity

In this chapter, Rorty argues that because humans tend to view morals as "we-statements" (e.g., "We Christians do not commit murder"), they find it easier to be cruel to those who they can define as "them". He therefore urges that we continue to expand our definition of "we" to include more and more subsets of the human population until no one can be considered less-than-human.