“There are two principal ways in which reflective human beings try, by placing their lives in a larger context, to give sense to those lives. The first is by telling the story of their contribution to a community. This community may be the actual historical one in which they live, or another actual one, distant in time or place, or a quite imaginary one, consisting perhaps of a dozen heroes and heroines selected from history or fiction or both. The second way is to describe themselves as standing in immediate relation to a nonhuman reality. This relation is immediate in the sense that it does not derive from a relation between such a reality and their tribe, or their nation, or their imagined band of comrades. I shall say that stories of the former kind exemplify the desire for solidarity, and that stories of the latter kind exemplify the desire for objectivity. Insofar as a person is seeking solidarity, she does not ask about the relation between the practices of the chosen community and something outside that community. Insofar as she seeks objectivity, she distances herself from the actual persons around her not by thinking of herself as a member of some other real or imaginary group, but rather by attaching herself to something which can be described without reference to any particular human beings.” -Rorty, Richard. Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Volume 1: Philosophical Papers (p. 21). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.
Here again, we see how Rorty’s pragmatism democratizes philosophy as compared to the classicist approach of creating a kind of hierarchy via the subject/object dichotomy in which the subject stands above the object, almost godlike, and declares judgment upon it: tells the object “what it is”. And it would only be a short jump from that to the guru complex of seeing the potential disciple as an object to the self proclaimed guru: the one that went through all the steps and climbed the ladder and found “enlightenment” that the disciple must seek in order to evolve from an object into a “subject”. And we see this accelerated under Capitalistic values. Note, for instance, the claim by scientists like Hawkings and Neal DeGrass Tyson that science will make philosophy obsolete. What else could that be but the proclamations of the benefactors of the best knowledge that money can buy? And what is really telling is how stuck they seem on the old paradigm of the lone genius like a Newton or Einstein, or even (as a caveat to the arts (a Van Gogh.
What the neo-classicists fail to see is that the new paradigm (in an almost cosmic sense of irony (is the computer programmer (most notably the hacker) –that which both Rorty and Deleuze (in their pragmatic overlap (were perfectly compatible with. Both in their materialism (their discarding of the subject/object dichotomy (were about giving us license (Rorty through unfettered discourse (Deleuze (with the help of Guatarri (through a de-centered rhizomatic model (to act as nodes in a system of exchange through which we can get beyond ourselves via a kind of social momentum, one in which we could actually make things better, one brokered through solidarity and inter-subjectivity rather than fawning over some exceptional individual.