Rhizome 3/21/16:
“I have defined “dialectic” as the attempt to play off vocabularies against one another, rather than merely to infer propositions from one another, and thus as the partial substitution of redescription for inference.” -Richard Rorty. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Kindle Locations 1129-1130). Kindle Edition.
And here we see (yet again (Rorty doing what he does best: finding different ways to describe and justify the hermeneutic approach. And this is why I find the chapter “Private Irony and Liberal Hope” one of the most exciting so far. It serves a function similar to that of Joseph Campbell early in my process in that it accelerated my enthusiasm for the process I was already engaged in. Rorty does so by describing (therefore validating (the very loose dialectic I, myself, have been engaging in for some time. What makes it revolutionary for me, however, is that I never really thought of it as a dialectic –that is even though it makes perfect sense now.
As I have always said: the only thing I am interested in is taking in a lot of information from a lot of different sources and seeing what happens in my own writing. Basically: the thrill of an input/output dynamic. And Rorty gives me his blessing by pointing out later that ironists tend to seek understanding (that is as compared to “the Truth” or some transcendental/metaphysical criterion (by simply continuing to read more and more books by different people with different final languages or playing different language games –and, BTW, inherently the most democratic approach we can take to it. In this sense, Alexander Pope was prescient:
“A little learning is a dangerous thing ;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring :
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again.”
:which seems to me the only criterion we really need honor. Still, as Rorty points out elsewhere:
“Conforming to my own precepts, I am not going to offer arguments against the vocabulary I want to replace. Instead, I am going to try to make the vocabulary I favor look attractive by showing how it may be used to describe a variety of topics.”
And I have to go with him and against my point above in recognizing that our situation has grown so complex that it will take a lot of different people doing a lot of different things using a lot of different methods to solve. And in this sense, we can see a justification for Rorty’s (as well as Deleuze’s (emphasis on discourse (or the exchanges of energy as described by Deleuze and Guatarri.
At the same time (and I think this can be confirmed by everything written above (I can’t help but feel the hermeneutic/ironist method is as haunted by confirmation bias as the metaphysical method as described by Rorty. We have to admit that there is certain amount of self flattery involved in that our revelations with a given text amounts to “that’s just what I thought!” You get to a point where you feel like what you are mainly looking for are different vocabularies (different languages (to describe what you already feel.
On the other hand, this may well be what gives the hermeneutic/ironist an advantage in their willingness to admit it as compared to the metaphysician that eventually has to gerrymander in order to make every phenomenon fit into their system.