Aesthetic-Ethic Thought Study On Richard Rorty

Richard Rorty,a philosopher of contemporary American neo-pragmatism.Rorty’s neo-pragmatism thought absorbed the theoretical resources of Wittgenstein,Heidegger,and Dewey,and shifted from the realm of analytic philosophy to focus on the question of how to live,which is an ethical issue and a expression of the ethical turn of aesthetics.For Rorty,the ethics of the Platonic/Kantian tradition attempts to find a universal essence of people over the time and fortuity.Rorty dissolves the traditional philosophical "a choose with capital T" on the basic ideas of contingency of language.Through a criticism of the fallacies in the traditional ethics,Rorty reveals contingency of self,advocates aesthetic ethics thought.Further,Rorty proposes a strategy of Poeticized Culture,in which literature replaces the philosophy and religion as the principal vehicles of moral progress,and the imagination becomes the only power of redemption.Rorty applies the aesthetic qualities of poeticized culture to life and proposes an aesthetic ethical lifestyle.In the private field,Rorty promotes "ironic novelists" and "strong poets",emphasizing the aesthetic life of self-generation;In the public field,using the "avoiding cruelty" approach,Rorty proposes a collaborative ethic in order to avoid the dangerous tendencies of personal aesthetic life.In this way,the ideal personality in Rorty’s aesthetic ethical thought is the liberal ironist,and that private perfection and public solidarity can be compatible in Rorty’s poeticized culture.Rorty’s thought on aesthetic ethics has important significance.First,it transcends the thought of Western modernity’s distinction between aesthetics and ethics,making the aesthetic and the ethical connected in the postmodern.Second,Rorty offers a new vision of how people live,that is,to shape life like a work of art.Finally,in the world of literature,Rorty enables us to recognize more possibilities in life.Although Rorty’s thought of aesthetic ethics is regarded as an aesthetic utopian imagination due to the absence of theory,it is far more fascinating for us than a repetitive rationality.