Daniel Green, whose literary blog The Reading Experience I discovered recently, has an interesting piece on Richard Rorty in the current issue of online magazine Prose Toad.
Green is interested in Rorty's distinction between "private irony" and "social hope", and between books whose function is primarily edifying -they "help us become autonomous"- and books whose function is primarily ethical - they "help us become less cruel". This distinction interests Green because it seems to make the case for "elevating 'mere' literature to a status just as respectable as that traditionally occupied by philosophy or the other learned disciplines". I take Green to be agreeing with Rorty that this is a case worth making. As I understand him, the aim of his essay is to measure the costs incurred in the way Rorty makes that case.
Rorty's view, perhaps most straightforwardly expounded in his essay 'Trotsky and the Wild Orchids' (collected in Philosophy and Social Hope), is that we ought to abjure the temptation to try to fuse our private, aesthetic pleasures with our moral and political aspirations for mankind. There is no "single vision", pace Yeats, capable of reconciling private irony and social hope.
Green thinks the problems start when Rorty tries to say what's valuable about the "idiosyncratic fantasies" we nourish in our encounters with works of literature (and also, it should be said, with certain books normally classified as "philosophy" - by authors like Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein and Derrida). His suspicion is that however hard Rorty tries, he can't make a case for literature, the aesthetic or whatever, that isn't finally an ethical one. Despite himself, Rorty commits what Green regards as the besetting sin of academic literary theory and finds a "socially utilitarian role for literature", making the "actual experience of literature as literature -as something other than expository discourse- so irrelevant, so unnecessary to whatever uses one can profitably make of the text at hand as to render it effectively an illusion."
The general point about academic literary studies is well-taken. The particular point about Rorty being made here is based on his essay about Nabokov in Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, a copy of which I don't have to hand. In any case, I'm more interested in how Green goes about vindicating the aesthetic. He appeals to one of Rorty's heroes, Dewey:
Nabokov is ... a writer whose work discloses its deeper aesthetic purposes to the reader who understands that the aesthetic can be apprehended and appreciated only as an experience, that as John Dewey described it in Art as Experience, the free and unconditional experience of the aesthetic is the purest and most profound kind of experience one can have. In Dewey's analysis, art provides us with the fullest sense of what human experience is like.... In this conception of the aesthetic, [its ultimate value] is not the perception beauty per se.... Instead, it is inherent in the act of perceiving itself, which in tandem with the artist's own creative efforts produces a kind of collective expression of the possibilities of the human imagination.
Now this looks to me very much like an ethical vision of the aesthetic. Not, to be sure, an ethical or moral vision of the kind Green attributes to Rorty (and I'm not concerned, in this post, with the propriety of that attribution). Literature and the aesthetic, I take Green to be saying, are valuable precisely because they offer us a picture of the human. I think this is different from the argument Green attributes to Rorty because implied here is the idea that literature alone offers us a vision of these human possibilities - or, at the very least, that literature offers us a distinctive vision of them. You find something similar in the essays of Iris Murdoch, for example. This is from 'Against Dryness' (in Existentialists and Mystics):
Tolstoy who said that art was an expression of the religious perception of the age was nearer the truth than Kant who saw it as the imagination in a frolic with the understanding. The connection between art and the moral life has languished because we are losing our sense of form and structure in the moral world itself.... We need more concepts than our philosophies have furnished us with.... We need to return from the self-centred concept of sincerity to the other-centred concept of truth.... It is here that literature is so important, especially since it has taken over some of the tasks formerly performed by philosophy. Through literature we can re-discover a sense of the density of our lives.... In morals and politics we have stripped ourselves of concepts. Literature ... can give us a new vocabulary of experience, and a truer picture of freedom.
