A Guide to reading Richard Rorty's "The Last Intellectual in Europe: Orwell on Cruelty."

"The Last Intellectual in Europe: Orwell on Cruelty" is Chapter 8 of Rorty's book Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (Cambridge University Press, 1989). So to make sense of it, here are some of the key ideas that Rorty introduces in earlier chapters of the book.

Something is 'contingent' if it could have been different. We are using '1984' as a set text, but we could have used The Brothers Karamazov. I studied Philosophy and Theology, but I could have studied history. Rorty wants to persuade us that our language, also, is contingent, and that this has important implications.

Of course, everyone will agree that certain aspects of our language are contingent - we could use the word 'tog' instead of the word 'dog', for example. However, Rorty thinks that our language is contingent in a much more interesting sense. First, he introduces us to the idea of what he calls a 'final vocabulary'. Our final vocabulary is that set of words that we use to justify our beliefs and actions, and which itself cannot be, and need not be justified by anything else.

Here is a specific example of 'final vocabulary'. In a film called The Shooting Party, a group of men are shooting grouse on the estate of a local squire, played by James Mason. There is a competition to see which group can shoot more grouse, and, anxious to win the competition, one man shoots at a grouse that is very close to the ground. He misses his aim, and hits and kills one of the servants. Afterwards, he tries to justify his action: he didn't see the servant, he was acting instinctively when he fires. His host turns to him and says, "You weren't shooting like a gentleman." The man hangs his head in shame: nothing more need be said, and no appeal is possible. He has failed to act like a gentleman, and nobody can deny or ignore that all important truth.

The word 'gentleman' forms part of the 'final vocabulary' of this group. If the man said "I'm not interested in being a gentleman" they would stare at him in horror, supposing perhaps that the trauma of killing someone had unhinged his mind. They could not explain to him why someone would want to be a gentleman of course - if you need to have that explained to you, then you are already beyond hope. After reading '1984', you will appreciate why we should be so interested in the vocabulary used by a particular society, and how the availability of a certain vocabulary promotes certain thoughts, and makes others difficult or impossible to entertain.

Rorty argues that our final vocabulary is contingent. We could explain why the people in the shooting party care so much about being a gentleman, and what kind of behavior they expect from a gentleman with reference to British history, aware all the time that, if that history had turned out a little differently (if, for example, the Spanish Armada had not been destroyed by bad weather), then the concept of 'being a gentleman' might never have had the content and importance that it did. Of course, the men in the shooting party know that not everybody shares the concept of being a gentleman, and that it is only thanks to certain historical events, including the defeat of the Spanish Armada, that the concept has the importance that it does. However, they might not view this history as contingent. Of course, the Armada was defeated, they would say; the defeat of the Armada was all part of the providential plan that lead to the rise of the British Empire. If we pointed out that, had it not been for the bad weather, the Armada might have conquered England, they might reply, with Queen Elizabeth I, "God blew his winds, and they were scattered." Providence demands that, in time, the whole world learn to appreciate the special virtues of the British gentleman: the word 'gentleman' is not just part of their final vocabulary, they would say, it is part of the final vocabulary that best captures the truth about reality.

Rorty wants us to drop the idea that there is any providential force behind history, guiding us to the correct choice of final vocabulary and, indeed, to drop the idea that there is such a thing as a correct final vocabulary. This means we drop the idea that there is a God, or indeed, any other force that might take the place of God in this respect (such as historical inevitability, pure reason or the self-evident superiority of the American Way of Life). A person who recognizes the contingency of any final vocabulary is called an 'ironist', and Rorty counts himself as such a person.

The difficulty is that being an ironist might make it seem hard to have a deep commitment to any long-term political project. If I believe that my final vocabulary is correct, I can say 'We should free slaves, because this is the will of God.' If I am an ironist, I might say 'Free slaves, because liberty is a basic human right.' But what if someone challenges me saying, 'Basic human right, so what?' The ironist does not believe that it is possible to put forward an argument that will lead any intelligent person to see that we must accept and promote human rights. People may adopt a final vocabulary, or they might not, but nothing in the nature of reality makes them right or wrong to do so. Rorty describes the ironist as having a coherence theory of truth, whereas his opponent has a correspondence or realist theory of truth.

(However, I definitely would not say that Dummett's anti-realist is Rorty's ironist, or that Dummett's realist theory of truth is Rorty's correspondence theory of truth. Dummett is interested in formulating detailed theories about the nature of truth and judging which is correct, Rorty is only interested in theories about truth insofar as they are relevant to political debate,and since he concludes that theories of truth do not really affect political debates one way or the other, he does not attempt to spell out in detail what he means by 'correspondence' and 'coherence' theories.)  

Rorty's main point throughout the book is to show that ironists are capable of achieving the kind of solidarity necessary for political action. We do not need to think that we have The Truth on our side to be completely committed to ending slavery, or fighting apartheid.

Rorty reinforces this claim by pointing out that, in the battle of ideas, people minds are rarely changed by a decisive argument appealing to reason. For example, few people nowadays, even in England, aspire to be a gentleman - that aspiration probably died out in the 1960's. It would take a long time to explain why it died out, and the reasons would be just as contingent as those that gave rise to the concept in the first place, starting with the decline of the British Empire. But certainly popular culture would play a more important part than philosophy. One could point to the way The Beatles attained great popularity and prestige without ever aspiring to be a gentleman. A young man in England in the 1960's would probably aspire to being cool and hip, rather than gentlemanly, and thus a final vocabulary which once had great power would lose its force. The same person, who was once described as a gentleman, is now described as a square - and the very qualities that make him a gentleman are the qualities that make him a square. We don't need to assert, or argue, that it is true he is a square and false that he is a gentleman or vice versa - both descriptions can be true. It is just that, over time, people start to care more about the description 'He is a square' than they do about the description 'He is a gentleman', and so habits of thought and behavior are altered. Rorty is interested in the way that works of art can contribute to a shift in our final vocabulary.

1984 is an interesting novel for Rorty to discuss. It did change the vocabulary of political discussion - phrases and words from the novel have entered the language. At the same time, passages in the novel seem to present an appeal to a correspondence theory of truth as being of political importance. Rorty, as we have seen, thinks that this is a big mistake. However, he does not think that reading the novel need encourage us to make this mistake - on the contrary, he argues, although the central character in the book can be seen as advocating the connection between a realist theory of truth and politics, we as readers might come to see that this is an error.

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