While Rorty begins his description of the ironic perspective by pointing to the subjectivity (contingency) of all belief systems, he moves well beyond the postmodernists by suggesting that irony is a “process of coming to see other human beings as ‘one of us’ rather than as ‘them’.” Rorty offers a utopian vision based in irony.
Rorty’s utopia would be based on human solidarity and the capacity of all people to be sensitive to the particular circumstances—and in particular the pain and suffering—of “other, unfamiliar sorts of people.” “Such increased sensitivity,” according to Rorty (1989, p. xvi), “makes it more difficult to marginalize people different from ourselves by thinking ‘They do not feel it as we would,’ or ‘There must always be suffering, so why not let them suffer.”
Rorty replaces the modern notion of enduring truth with this utopian thought in its continually evolving form (Rorty, 1989, p. xvi):
A historicist and nominalist culture of the sort I envisage would settle . . . for narratives which connect the present with the past, on the one hand, and with utopian futures, on the other. More importantly, it 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.
It is important at this point to note that Rorty’s notion of irony goes well beyond the usual presentation of irony as simply tossing around seemingly contradictory ideas or actions in a novel or movie (such as the stern father who ends up getting drunk at a company Christmas party or monsters who end up being afraid of kids).
These are silly and often quite sweet and insightful instances of what I would call Fleeting Irony. They rarely represent the form or level of Irony that Rorty has introduced and that I engage throughout this set of essays. Furthermore, this Fleeting Irony certainly does not touch the level of irony that impacts on our daily 21st Century life—a level of Irony that I am about to identify as Hard Irony.
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