Metaphor And Irony: Richard Rorty’s Theory Of Liberal Utopia

Rorty’s liberal utopia or liberal ironist utopia is conceived with the intention tobalance the relationship between public justice and private perfection. Its genesis is outof the respective predicaments caused by the fundamentalism complex of the traditionalphilosophy and the fundamentalist foundation of analytical philosophy. Irony is the coreelement of Rorty’s liberal utopia while metaphor is the tool of irony.Rorty’s irony inherits the original implications from Socratic irony and irony inliterary or daily context. His ironists are the radical anti-fundamentalists andanti-essentialists and the most typical ironist is a thorough non-metaphysician. All in all,an ironist is a postmodern deconstructionist, who deconstructs any fundamental, central,essential, binary or ultimate stuff of traditional philosophy, and even philosophy itself.Meanwhile, he pursues an incessant process of autonomy and self-creation, getting outfrom under the fetter and constraint of reality, material, any absolute stuff or the givenrole to gain the liberated, unrestrained passion. In the course of such continually radicaldoubting and deconstructing, he secures fresh self-recognition and new identity throughdialogues. The tool that an ironist uses to go in for such never-ending self-creation ismetaphor, or, metaphorical redescription.Rorty’s view of metaphor, on the one hand, drops the traditional idea of languageas a medium, thus getting rid of the view that there exists a common human nature toserve as the foundation of morality. On the other, it enables Rorty to include all thebooks by all theorists as literary texts, to provide examples for new possibilities ofself-creating redescription and to put all the texts into historical context for metaphoricaland ironic rereading and redescription. Thus the culture is reconstructed towardliterature-oriented structure. Such a view, on the one hand, promotes the merging ofculture, and on the other, changes the structure of culture, making it impossible fortheology, science, philosophy or literature to dominate as capitalized authority over all the other disciplines. Rorty’s metaphor is the world-making redescription. It is literarynarratives which are descriptive rather than philosophical arguments which aretheoretical that makes much greater contribution to the moral edification for the utopiancitizens. Therefore, Rorty’s praxis is an expression of poetics.Like his irony, Rorty’s metaphor also emphasizes on contingency and is a rebellionagainst the traditional philosophy’s pursuit for certainty, thus being alsoanti-fundamentalism and anti-metaphysics. Both metaphor and irony are culturalconstituents to promote tolerance and reduce cruelty and they both symbolize theawakening of subjectivity. Metaphorical redescription is a powerful tool for Rorty’sironists to engage in self-creations while irony pluralizes and diversifies metaphors.Rorty’s liberal ironist utopia is more of a new construction of cultural structurethan a political theory, the utopian nature of which is its substitution for traditionalphilosophy. It is a middle way between postmodernism and liberalism. Thejuxtaposition of liberalism and ironism not only generates a literature-oriented culture,but also creates a new perspective of and a new approach to literary reading to make itpossible to reveal the coexistence of both ironism and liberalism in literary works. It, onthe one hand, discloses the acute insight to the contingency of human existence, and onthe other, demonstrates human cruelty, so that man’s consciousness of self-recognitionand self-creation could be awakened and at the same time, the sense of tolerance,sympathy and empathy that are necessary to human solidarity could be expanded.The foothold of Rorty’s liberal ironist utopia lies in the public/private division,which is not a traditional binary-opposition style of division, or the family/society kindof physical area division, not to mention the self-splitting division. It is the division ofdifferent purposes of metaphorical world-making. Public metaphors enhance humansolidarity and private metaphors promote self-creation. The identity of ironists beingliberals and ironists all at once implants a sense of danger and fear of bringinghumiliation to those they redescribe, so they care about human solidarity and avoid any potential undermining of it. In the meanwhile, they privatize their irony so much so thatit won’t cause cruelty in the public to weaken solidarity. Public justice and privateperfection harmoniously coexist, each getting its due. Rorty brings forth a new hope andpossibility of human life while deconstructing fundamentalism and metaphysics. Thismakes him one of the outstanding constructive postmodern thinkers.