A New Cruelty — On the Longing for Certainty

Part of the idea of a democratic society is that social change comes by reform rather than revolution and this in effect means that the people who have the power actually letting go of some of it. – Richard Rorty

Out on the market squares the voices are clamoring. They lament the swaying of the stone temples we call democracy. But while our gaze clings to the crumbling facades of power, we overlook the quiet fading of tenderness in the corners of our everyday lives. We cling to a scaffolding of institutions and forget in doing so that political freedom is not a foundation on which we stand, but rather follows an improbable story that we must keep telling ourselves in ever different guises.

Behind the visible trembling of our institutions, a quieter yet far deeper freezing is taking place. It is as though an old contract with humanity has been terminated—a withdrawal from the shared care for this fragile world. Where once stood the promise of striving to alleviate the pain of the other, there grows today a strange urge toward a new hardness (Kohlenberger, 2024; von Redecker, 2026).

The language that once bound us has turned to stone. It knows only the absolute: sharp edges of “facts” and “enemies”, a vocabulary cast as though from ore, leaving no room for what lies between. Attention is directed either toward distraction—the flight from a society one no longer wishes or is able to care about—or toward the destruction of what seems no longer to function. In part patience has run out, and in part curiosity is suffocating in restlessness.

In the narratives of our day, truth has gone astray; a bizarre theater of the obvious reigns, in which the lie is no longer concealed but triumphs as a naked gesture of violence. It is the violence of the unenlightened, in the sense that their centers were never permitted to develop desires. They were not nurtured and could not learn to draw symbolically from their accumulated rage and traumas. What had previously remained hidden behind etiquette and the effort to maintain decorum now shows itself unveiled: speech is no longer used to be understood, but to humiliate other people.

This spirit manifests vividly in the image of a solitary wanderer in the eternal ice. The penguin in Werner Herzog’s (Herzog, 2007) narrative becomes a propaganda figure who, for no reason, turns away from the sheltering colony to waddle stubbornly toward distant mountains. It is a thoroughly extraordinary march against the penguin’s own environment, against the instinct for survival, and against every community of interdependent beings.

There, in the desolation of the peaks, the wanderer hopes to open up a new realm of winners. He wants to be certain of his cause. Doubt—his own as much as that of his companions—is what gnaws at him. From the perspective of his colony, which is setting out toward the ocean, it is a mission without tomorrow, driven by a dark longing for the end—a final act of retribution against a disappointing world that one can no longer imagine made better. And in this departure, the cruelty directed against curiosity and doubt becomes the pleasure of satisfaction in being right, at least with the prophecy of downfall. In our ears Herzog’s voice resonates:

But why? – Werner Herzog

And we applaud the courage of the wanderer and try to re-interpret the nihilistic impuls as a call to save Europe (Gundlach, 2026). But this wanderer does not follow life; he follows a myth of freedom that leads him irresistibly into the white void. He is dead. He won against his environment—against a careless nature:

With five thousand kilometer ahead of him, he’s heading towards certain death. – Werner Herzog

In the shadow zones of our digital world, a brotherhood of grievance has formed, a loose network of voices that find their identity only in the echo of hatred. They need a face they can despise, and because sensitization has taken something from them, solidarity itself has become the enemy. The call for a return to the “true mask” of man is more than mere nostalgia; it is the desperate longing for an old, heavy armor that admits no cracks and thus no vulnerability. It is an anarchic armor that no longer requires solidarity at all, because it is its own ecosystem—self-sufficient, independent, and closed in on itself. At the same time, behind the facade lies deep suffering, because man has lost something that once made his world simple and secure.

He could no longer reconfigure his identity through the new vocabulary. He was humiliated and sought another language, so that everything that had seemed particularly important to him might once again become true and good. What he found is the language of dominance. It is as though history were violently recoiling. Where the world had begun to grow quieter and more sensitive to the pain of the “other,” a part of it responds with a new, steely coldness.

Yet beyond the loud grievance of the streets, in the soundless, glass-walled cathedrals of light and silicon, a far quieter, almost clinical cruelty is ripening. It is a faith that bundles itself in seven cold stars into a single radiance—an alliance of those who regard “the human being” as a transitional sketch to be technologically overcome (Gebru & Torres, 2024). In this light, the longing for the stars no longer appears as a departure but as a flight; an expansion into the void, driven by the dream of an eternity that no longer needs a body.

From the heights of their galactic calculations, these architects of the future look down on the here and now as upon an ant colony in the dust. The suffering of the present—the exhaustion of the earth, the silencing of diversity—shrinks in their eyes to a negligible rounding error. It is an ethics that sacrifices today to tomorrow, a morality of arithmetic, a rule of code instead of law (Rosengrün, 2022) in which a burning planet weighs less than the mathematical promise of a posthuman world of gods. We should be well aware of these old dreams of greatness that require “a downfall of decadence”.

In this worldview, an old dark spirit returns, cloaked in the garb of logic: the conviction that life has a price measured by its utility for the great progress, which could be gauged by its approximation to the absolute. Once again it is assumed that everything can be calculated, but in place of Kantian principles stand calculating machines and the theories of probability and expected values. Once again we await a god—this time a god made of numbers—a superintelligence that, like an infallible oracle, could end the chaos of our interpersonal stories—as though society could communicate with anything other than itself. It is Plato’s ancient, stony dream—the hope that pure, incorruptible truth might finally triumph over the tender but imperfect narratives of compassion; that we might remember what has always been out there and within us. The True and the Good coincide.

Plato thought that morality and politics should be based on principles in the same why that Euclidean geometry is based on axioms. He thought that philosophical inquiry was a matter of nailing down firm immutable principles which could then guide action. […And] as Plato said, it is if we had known the truth in a pervious existence and simple need to be reminded of it, have it brought back to consciousness. – (Rorty, 1990)

But in this purity there is no longer room for breathing, for trembling, for the passion, love and affection for a world that is precious precisely because it can keep reinventing itself. There will be no gods only the loss of institutions that once balanced and distributed power.

It seems to me the Platonic notion of absolute truth is a thoroughly misleading slogan and a culturally dangerous shibilith. – (Rorty, 1990)

This frosty belief is nourished not least by a bottomless exhaustion—a cynicism that crystallizes like a dark sediment out of the fear of the end. It is the rebellion against the last remaining justice: death, that relentless equality to which we all succumb. In the impatience to outwit this fate, hope turns into bitterness. Some have everything but can only continue to create themselves by getting rid of themselves. Others have nothing and can only react to disruptions. They have no time for self-description. What is a calculable risk for few becomes a danger for everyone else.

A quiet, gray poison forms, which has long since crossed the threshold of our homes. It nestles into the corners of our living rooms, a mood like a silent echo of those chroniclers of hopelessness who whisper to us that the world has become a closed circle. In the age of disruptions (Stiegler, 2019)—which feels more and more like an age of destructions—the chords that present us with a horizon of notes fall silent. Structures dissolve, so that we have difficulty imagining different futures. We feel it in the burden of everyday life: the sense that what exists can no longer be healed, that the system is frozen at its foundations and can only be broken.

As different as these three figures may appear—the ranter on the market square, the calculator in the server room, the exhausted person on the sofa—they share a common root: the inability to live with the contingency of life. All three want certainty. One fights for it through enemies, another calculates it through machines, the third finds it in the renunciation of all hope.

In this darkness we look at ourselves and see only deficiencies. The human being no longer appears to us as a continually changing riddle of openness, but as a flawed, inadequate disruptive factor to be optimized away. While the calculating machine promises eternal perfection, the human being becomes a creature of dust and error, one that can readily be dispensed with. We lose faith in the laborious, small gesture of improvement and instead begin once more to dream of perfection, as though we could knowingly move toward the summit. It is the exhaustion of the contingent and thus the wish that something might finally be certain.

Doubt as Home — Contingency, Irony, Solidarity

Amid this recurring coldness, this icy wind of abstraction, a voice is needed that leads the resistance against dehumanization not as a loud protest, not as instruction or a return to the rational, but as a healing gesture of humility: it wrests the human condition from the cold, sterile distances of the heavens and beds it back in the warm, imperfect dust of the earth.

Richard Rorty is such a voice—a voice that prefers doubt to certainty. As a philosopher of irony (in the sense that we should not take our existing vocabularies too seriously), of contingency (in the sense that there are no ahistorical truths and history follows no necessary path), and of solidarity (in the sense that he prefers it to truth) (Rorty, 1989), he wanted—naively put—to strip philosophy of its imperialist position as the foundational discipline—and to propose, of all things, the literary critic as a model for the public intellectual, which fairly earned him the reputation of relativist and charlatan.

By an intellectual I mean someone who has doubts about the value of the language she is been using to make moral or political judgements and who reads books in an effort to deal with these doubts. To be an intellectual is to have a restless mind—never to be sure that once judgement of other people’s characters or of alternative social institutions are more than inherited prejudices. – (Rorty, 1990)

Meanwhile, he himself wrote quite systematically (as in (Rorty, 1979)) but was more interested in interpreting and reconfiguring philosophical texts than in erecting a new grand system of his own. His writing style as well as his philosophical position are American in their simplicity, whereas his admiration squints toward Europe. He likely embodies much of what disturbs philosophers when they write about the “decline of culture,” for as someone who wants to take neither Kant nor Nietzsche too literally, he refuses answers to cold questions such as: “What ought I to do?”—in the sense of a universal duty. The warm question, however, “What can we do for one another?”, he does answer, but without metaphysical backing: Reduce cruelty, expand your circle of solidarity—not because reason commands it, but because we have learned what it means to be humiliated.

His irritating position on “the Truth” and “the really real” is a melting of Pragmatism and Romaticism which can be. summed up by the following quote:

On the account of human abilities I am suggesting, the use of persuasion rather than force is an innovation comparable to the beaver’s dam. Like the beavers’ collaboration in getting the dam built, it is a social practice. It was initiated by the noval suggestion that we might use noises rather than physical compulsion to get other humans to cooperate with us. That suggestion gave rise to language. Rationality, thought, and cognition all began when language did.1 Language gets off the ground not by people giving names to things they were already thinking about but by proto-humans using noises in innovative ways, just as the proto-beavers got the practice of building dams off the ground by using sticks and mud in innovative ways. Language was, over the millenia, enlarged and rendered more flexibel not by adding the names of abstract objects to those of concrete objects but by using marks and noises in ways unconnected with environmental exigencies. The distinction between the concrete and the abstract can be replaced with that between words used in making perceptual reports and those unsuitable for such use. […W]e need to think of reason not as a truth-tracking faculty but as a social practice—the practice of enforcing social norms on the use of words rather than blows as a way of getting things done. We need to think of imagination not as the faculty that produces visual or auditory images but as a combination of novelty and luck. To be imaginative, as opposed to being merely fantastical, is to do something new and to be lucky enough to have that novelty be adopted by one’s fellow humans, incorporated into their social practices. […] People whose novelties we cannot appropriate and utilize we call foolish, or perhaps insane. Those whose ideas strike us as useful we hail as geniuses. – (Rorty, 2016)

What Rorty offers me is an admirable description of the liberal and democratic society that unerringly exposes anti-liberal opposites. He gives me an answer to the question “What do liberals want and what can they hope for?” with which I can agree. And although—or precisely because—he takes leave of first principles and speaks soberly about texts from Wittgenstein to Proust, he can inspire enthusiasm for a liberalism by understanding it as the art of solidarity.

Let us begin with a note on why educational institutions in particular are so decisive for the art of solidarity:

In democratic societies like ours, colleges and universities have a peculiar two-faced role. They get their money by promising to furnish money-making skills to their students and by promising to perform research which will enable society as a whole to get more goods and services more cheaply. The face they present to rich donors, state legislators, and the general public is essentially a commercial one. They suggest that they have certain products which the society as a whole needs and they ask for support on that basis. They usually don’t suggest that their function is to disturb the students, make them have doubts about the way they were brought up, force them to ask unanswerable questions. But as you know quite well, that is the function which many faculty members, especially the people who teach in the humanities and social science departments, think that colleges and universities should serve. Such people see the promise of marketable skills as simply the lure which brings students within their reach. Once the student is in their classes, these people assign books which will—they hope—upset her enough to make her want to start for looking for other such books so as to get upset in still more complicated ways. They are not satified unless the students who leave their courses are dissatified with the society in which they live and unless they have at least some doubts about the moral codes in which they were brought up. […T]he point of encouraging dissatisfaction becomes clear when times are bad and particularly when societies and governments become repressive. Then the colleges and universities come into their own. They begin to function either as sources of social change or as sanctuaries for resistance. […] I can sum up the two roles of colleges and universities by saying that whereas the society as a whole wants to produce people with skills, the university faculties also want to produce intellectuals. – (Rorty, 1990)

Rorty’s thinking begins where the coldness described above has its deepest origin: in the belief that there is (or was) a final truth toward which we are moving (or from which we have depatured). He distrusts this belief—not out of cynicism, but out of a deep care for what we lose when we chase after it. For Rorty, truth is a property of sentences, and sentences are made by people. “The world” cannot make these sentences true, but we can make them useful for ourselves and useful for us. In the age of “fake news” this may sound irritating, for is it not “the Truth” whose loss we lament?

In place of principles that we might yet discover, Rorty stakes everything on new, persuasive vocabularies that are to be invented. For if one wants to say something new, one must create a new language (Maturana, 1991). Freedom and solidarity arise where we find words, metaphors, and descriptions that allow us to see ourselves, others, and the world differently. The power of language lies not in mirroring reality, but in reconfiguring it.

Kant provided some good reasons to prevent cruelty, and Nietzsche shattered their claim to universality—he shattered the idea that there is any entity, whether God or Reason, that could decide outside a historical-evolutionary context: “Who I am”, “What I should do”, “What I can know” and “What I may hope for.” Kant undertook the attempt to formulate principles that should hold for everyone, thereby creating the basis for solidarity, human rights, and democracy. But his Reason could not order the surplus of meaning that arose from the newly won freedom: too many opinions, too many perspectives, too much criticism and deconstruction. Kant overlooked the obvious: that he himself as observer must remain blind to his own observing. Once again the paradox erupted and an attitude settled in that at best tolerates uncertainty without despairing. We are free but also overwhelmed—that is perhaps the dilemma of liberal democracy: we do not know what to do and must decide nonetheless.

Authors such as Nietzsche and Heidegger offer vocabularies for self-creation, for individual meaning-making beyond metaphysical certainties and beyond reason. Nietzsche is perhaps the epitome of the ironic theorist who unmasks every supposed truth as a contingent product of a historical narrative—except, of course, his own.

Nietzsche teaches us that no description of the world is necessary—that we could always tell other stories to understand ourselves and our community differently. Kant, on the other hand, reminds us that such new creations have limits where they overlook the suffering of others.

Rationality is a matter of making allowed moves within a language game. Imagination creates the games reason proceeds to play. Then […] it keeps modifying those games so that playing them is more interesting and profitable. Reason cannot get outside the latest circle that imagination has drawon. It is in this sense, and only this sense, that imagionation holds the primacy – (Rorty, 2016)

Rorty recognizes in this tension the productive condition of a liberal modernity: without Nietzsche, no renewal; without Kant, no consideration. We need Nietzsche so that life remains interesting, and Kant so that it remains bearable.

Rational discussion is not an appeal to eternal standards, but simply an attempt to make our beliefs and desires as coherent with one another as possible while constantly adding new beliefs and desires to the old. – (Rorty, 1990)

Rorty emphatically reminds us that most people do not want to be redescribed, and that an imposed redescription is usually cruel. People generally want to be taken as they speak.

There is something potentially very cruel about the claim that [the language people speak is, for the ironist, a matter of chance]. For the most effective way of causing people enduring pain is to humiliate them by making the things that seemed most important to them look futile, obsolete, and powerless. - (Rorty, 1989)

I think this is one of the most remarkable statements, one that emphasizes the dark side of the ironic attitude. The ironist knows that every vocabulary—every language in which people give meaning to their lives—is contingent, and therefore replaceable, not final, but neither useless nor arbitrary. An ironist—such as Nietzsche—can at any moment show that the concepts by which someone lives are merely historical accidents. But that is precisely what can be a form of cruelty. For if I convincingly demonstrate to someone that everything he believes in, lives for, and that constitutes his identity is only a “matter of chance,” I have not simply offered him a better argument. I have pulled the ground out from under his feet.

Rorty urges caution when it comes to proposing other vocabularies. Solidarity itself can cause smaller and smaller circles. In the public sphere, in dealings with others, irony is potentially cruel—and yet it is new vocabularies that enable moral progress, while at the same time the replacement of vocabularies can be the worst form of cruelty.

All we can do is to compare new customs and institutions with old customs and institutions in the experimental and tentative way in which we compare new friends, new jobs, or new environments with old ones. The only test of truth is that it is the view that wins in a free and open encounter. But the result of that test can only be accepted until somebody comes up with some new proposal, a new scientific theory, a new artistic style, a new political institution. Then discussion will have to be undertaken all over again. There will never be a time when Socratic questioning becomes unnecessary. […] Kant said, following Plato, that the source of moral obligation must be a distinct faculty—reason rather than emotion—because reason is part of human nature whereas emotions are just contingent features of particular individuals. Even someone like myself, who wants to discard the notion of intrinsic human dignity and unconditional moral obligation has to admit that these Kantian uses have been extremely useful. The ethics of sensitivity which I have associated with the figure of the literary critic, may seem to endanger all the gains made in recent times with the help of these Platonic and Kantian notions. [… However] we may find a way to do it without the ladder we climbed. […] An ethics of sensitivity assumes that morality is not a matter of recognizing unconditional obligations built into every human being simply by virtue of being human, but rather of community obligations—obligations one feels as a member of a group. […S]uch obligations determine one’s identity as a member of a community. It is one thing to treat someone weaker less advantaged than oneself decently because one happens to feel kindly toward him—perhaps because of some unconscious accidental association with one of his features or trades. It’s another thing to recognize this person as a fellow citizen, one of us, the sort of person to whom we are obliged to behave decently. […] It is a matter of coming to see more and more different sorts of people as us. Seeing an individual who lives quite a different life form as our own as, nontheless, one of us. – (Rorty, 1990)

Rorty advocates for a liberalism for which there is nothing worse than humiliating others, for humiliation is the deepest form of cruelty (Rorty, 1989). It is the destruction of the self-image and of the language in which a person gives meaning to their life. The problem with Rorty, one that has perhaps caught up with us today, is that for him there are no final grounds with which he could defend his liberal position.

Substituting this sort of practical question for theoretical questions about first principles means admitting that there is no way to answer such critics of democracy such as Plato, Nietzsche, or Hitler. There is no neutral ahistorical ground one could stand on when members of a democratic community try to argue with people who ask whether their society may not be headed in exactly the wrong direction. First principles are rationalizations of existing habits and institutions […] which is no reason to distrust them automatically. The Homeric heroes, the Nazi concentration camp guards, the pre-civil war slave owners all had principles. But their principles did not save them from cruelty to people whom they did not think of as us. What counts for moral progress is not firmness in abiding by established habits or institutions or principle, but rather the willingness to ask who’s getting hurt by the existence of these institutions or by the application of these principles. – (Rorty, 1990)

The conviction that cruelty is the worst thing comes from a particular historical and cultural development, from the European Enlightenment, from democratic revolutions, from the gradual expansion of the circle of those to whom we extend compassion. It is contingent, that is, neither necessary nor impossible. But that does not make it any less valuable or binding for Rorty. One can passionately commit to something without claiming: the universe stands behind it.

Why, then, should we not humiliate others? Because through experience, through stories, through listening, we have learned what it feels like to be humiliated. Because we have built a culture that cultivates this sensitivity. And because the attempt to provide a deeper justification for this leads us astray: it suggests that someone not convinced by the argument could be rationally refuted. But the liberal ironist cannot accomplish this. The sadist, to whom the suffering of others is indifferent, lacks not an argument according to Rorty—he lacks a certain capacity for empathy that cannot be logically derived, but can only be cultivated.

The development of civilization on this view is not the triumph of reason over passion but the triumph of tolerance over distrust. Therefore, democratic society is not founded on a sense of obligations, but on a sense of sympathy. […] The increasing egalitarianism of the democracies is not a matter of recognizing that illiterate laborers, blacks, women, and gays are as rational beings as middle-class straight white males, but rather of those males themselves—the people who have a monopoly on power—coming to realize that these people have the same hopes and fears and the same susceptibility to pain and humiliation as they do. – (Rorty, 1990)

Heidegger diagnosed in his Spiegel interview (Heidegger, 1976) the powerlessness of all theory and politics before the forgetfulness of Being in modernity. Such a diagnosis Rorty would have rejected in its metaphysical depth. And yet both, on very different paths, share the skepticism toward philosophy as savior: Heidegger, because only a god could help; Rorty, because there are no ultimate justifications. But Roty avoids the sort of despair Heidegger seemed to hold. Christianity, Kant’s reason, and the crisis of the absolute had their time. They told new stories to bring meaning back into descriptions. The liberal and democratic society, however, cannot be universally grounded—it can only be narrated (Rorty, 1999). It lives as long as we find new words for “the good,” “the just,” and “the common.” It would, however, be dangerous to transfigure it as “the genuinely true,” “the superior,” or “the absolutely just.” Its salvation lies not in truth but in conversation; in the shared resolution:

We don’t do that. We respect one another. We don’t kill other people. We support each other. We always doubt our own sensitivity.

Rorty knew that the loss of absolute truth would be unsettling for the individual, and in that context proposes distinguishing between the private and public spheres. In private, the ironist knows that her convictions are contingent (accidental, historically conditioned). She knows that her values are not God-given. She has doubts, and that is all right. She can pursue her striving for self-realization. Thus Rorty relocates the impulse toward self-creation—which he takes seriously and regards it as important, and which he sees embodied in Nietzsche, Proust, Heidegger, and Derrida—into the private realm.

But for Proust and Nietzsche, there is nothing more powerful or important than self-redescription. They are not trying to overcome time and chance but to use them. – (Rorty, 1989)

His liberal ironists no longer concern themselves with universals, essences, or absolutes that might metaphysically ground why one should not humiliate others. They enjoy the writings of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, and many other ironic theorists for their own private redescription without searching for a conclusive public vocabulary.

Rorty saw in Nabokov a central tension of his own philosophy: the conflict between private aesthetic self-creation and public solidarity. For Rorty, Nabokov embodied the type of the liberal ironist who strives for autonomy and artistic ecstasy, but in doing so runs the risk of becoming cruel. Thus, for example, Nabokov’s Humbert is highly educated, sensitive, and writes beautifully. But precisely this search for aesthetic ecstasy makes him blind to the suffering of others. He does not see Lolita as a suffering child but as an aesthetic object of his fantasy. Nabokov thereby shows that neither intelligence, artistic sensibility, nor linguistic brilliance automatically makes us morally good people. One can be an artistic genius and still act cruelly, and although Nabokov never saw himself as a teacher, he helps his reader to notice cruelty in detail. We therefore need authors like Nabokov for our private lives (to invent ourselves, to be autonomous, to take pleasure in language). But, Rorty argues, we must not carry this attitude into the public sphere, because a society based solely on aesthetic pleasure would be cruel.

In Rorty’s ironic culture it is no longer a matter of finding the right words or a common reality behind appearances that will connect people. He gives up the dream of finding the True, the Good, and the Beautiful for everyone. That is why we should stop asking:

Does my belief correspond to true reality?

More important is the question:

Does this belief help us live together better, more freely, and less cruelly?

In his utopia, solidarity is not regarded as a fact that must be recognized by removing prejudices or uncovering previously hidden depths. Any uncovering becomes impossible once we abandon the search for a common essence or nature, for the effort toward universal justification is then in vain. Solidarity must therefore be constructed. Thus Rorty’s liberals make solidarity their goal. This goal is achieved not through reason or any logical proofs, but through imagination and empathy—through the imaginative capacity to see unfamiliar people as fellow sufferers.

The philosopher is driven by what Dewey called the quest for certainty and the literary critic by curiosity and sympathy. The latter is curious about forms of life different from her own and sympathetic to people who leads such lives. The former looks for unity and thinks of philosophical inquiry as converging to a single body of truths. The latter looks for diversity. She is more concerned having missed something, having been condescending and cruel towards someone of a different sort than about certainty. – (Rorty, 1990)

Solidarity is not discovered through reflection; it is created. It is created by increasing our sensitivity—through literature, novels, films, theatre, music, (computer) games, and reportage—to the particular subtleties of the pain and humiliation of others, people unknown to us.

[The literary critic], on my view, [is] our modern substitude for the Platonic moral philosopher. […] The traditional notion of a separation between moral judgments and aesthetic judgements is, I would claim, a relic of the idea that there is a deep common human nature which sets moral goals and standards. [… In our times] it is almost impossible to believe that all human beings, male or female, slave or free, illiterate or cultured, ancient or modern, European or Chinese, have always carried around the same vision of goodness and justice deep within themselves. Everything […] suggests the plasticity of human beings. – (Rorty, 1990)

Such heightened sensitivity makes it harder to marginalize people who are different from us by assuming that they do not feel the way we do, or that there will always be suffering, so why should one not let them suffer? It is a process of emotional expansion of the “we”—a change in perception, not in epistemological cognition in the form of an increase in knowledge. This process of seeing other people as “one of us” rather than “the others” consists in describing in detail what unknown people are like, and in redescribing who we ourselves are and how we recognize one another (Rorty, 2016).

Cruelty and humiliation are abolished by creating realities through dense descriptions that sensitize the reader to the pain of those who do not speak our language. This task had been expected of proofs for a common human “nature,” but whether grounded in metaphysics or natural science, it can capture the indeterminacy and paradox of the human being in no final description. As Nietzsche already pointed out,

[i]t is only through the forgetting of that primitive metaphor-world, only through the hardening and stiffening of an original mass of images, flowing liquid and hot out of the primal power of human fantasy, only through the invincible belief that this sun, this window, this table is a truth in itself—in short, only through the fact that man forgets himself as a subject, and indeed as an artistically creative subject—does he live with any repose, security, and consistency: if he could get out of the prison walls of this belief, even for an instant, his ‘self-consciousness’ would be immediately destroyed. – (Nietzsche, 1873)

and Rorty follows him in this insight:

We should understand concepts like ‘gravitation’ or ‘human rights’ not as entities whose essence remains mysteriously hidden, but as sounds and marks whose use has made possible more significant and better social practices. Intellectual and moral progress is not an approximation toward a prior goal, but the surpassing of the past. What we call ‘improved knowledge’ should not be interpreted as better access to the real, but as an enhanced ability to do things. […] Freedom begins when we can discuss which words better describe a situation. Knowledge and freedom develop simultaneously. – (Rorty, 2016)

There will be no final, conclusive vocabulary. Whenever one makes a distinction in one’s experience or life, one makes this distinction in the domain in which it appears through language.

Systems theorists such as Maturana regard cognitive statements (on the path of “objectivity”) as an invitation to participate in and operate within a certain domain of distinctions, and as such they can be rejected or accepted. “Be objective” is, from the perspective of metaphysical realism, a demand to accept my position—to deny oneself to some degree.

Correspondingly, Rorty assumes that we mark sentences as “true” because we thereby express our assent to the actions associated with them (Rorty, 2016). Analogously, an explanation functions as a “peacemaker” in human relationships (Maturana, 1991). In the moment we accept an explanation, questioning ceases. I therefore see a genuine compatibility between these two schools of thought.

The contrasting view [of getting at a certain answer to questions like “What is really good?”, “What is really just”. “What is really real?”, “What is really true?”, “What is really human?”], which I share with people like William James, Dewey, [and] Satre is that the point of Socrates’ life was not to discover a permanent absolute truth but rather just to keep people thinking, to keep them inventing, to open up their imaginations to alternatives to present convictions. – (Rorty, 1990)

Once liberal society has become distrustful of its “inner core,” it can no longer appeal to that core. What society has learned about itself it will not easily be able to forget. In other words: Nietzsche’s cut cannot be papered over even when the author has been exposed as a moral reprobate. Open society will not be saved by a universal truth; not by reason and not by a metaphysical foundation. Rorty thus reminds us that there is no final authority that could assure us that freedom, equality, or compassion are true and good. Their validity is not the result of discovery but of narration.

To progress morally is a matter of individual and social self-creation rather than self-discovery. – (Rorty, 1990)

Precisely for this reason, Rorty burdens literature with perhaps the most important task: to foster the imagination for ways of living, so that in the future we will not say that we lead a more truthful or more sublime life than our ancestors, but that we have developed better ways “of being human” that our descendants may perhaps adopt.

If one asks which books helped along such processes such of self-creation in the last few hundred years I think a good case can be made for saying that most of them were novels. Whereas our ancestors relied on scripture or on theological or philosophical treatisis for their notion of what it was to be a human being and what was the point of human life, more recently, we have been relying on books like The Brothers Karamazov, The Magic Mountain, Remembrance of Things Past, and Catcher in the Roy. Novels about young people growing up and creating themselves. If one asks which books have done most to make American society freer and more just, again, a lot of them are novels. Books like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Black Boy and Invisible Man did more than any philosophical or sociel scientific treatises to let the whites see what they were doing to the blacks. Books like The Well of Loneliness and The City and the Pillar did more than psychological treatises to let the straits see what they had been doing to the gays. Books like Middle March and The Color Purple did more to make men realize what they were doing to women than any socioeconomic data or any feminist theorizing. – (Rorty, 1990)

In his admiration for the ironic theorists, Rorty simultaneously warns us against their absorbing tendencies to want more than self-creation. For all his love of life and self-redescription, Nietzsche was hardly concerned with preventing cruelty; rather, he was concerned with enabling the few—among whom he counted himself—to invent and describe Europe as something great. In this sense, Rorty is right to suggest that Nietzsche’s vocabulary can unfold its power in the private domain of our lives, but produces little that is fruitful in the discourse of the open society. When the work of art that we ourselves are—the one that is neither simply created nor discovered but pre-exists within us and can yet only be found in the process of creation—destroys the possibility of another work of art coming into being, that is, stifles the self-creation of others, then a deep cruelty arises. Autonomy and self-efficacy are ideals that liberals also revere, but in the darkness lurks the connection between art and torture. The work of art is not “the good”—even if it is beautiful, it can be cruel.

Over time we have expanded our moral imagination and included more beings in our circle of care, not on account of unchanging principles, not because of God or some inner truth we would have discovered, but because of the vitality of our imagining; not because of transcendental or transcendent truth, but because of lived and imagined experiences that have been narrated and inscribed into our cultural memory. We have invented a less cruel world.

This at times naively appearing hope—this project of continuation—gains contour where genuine encounters take place in the lifeworld. On account of my physical impairment, I possess the paradoxical privilege of evoking in others a suspicion of humiliation: the mere appearance of my body leads others to assume that cruelty must inevitably have been done to me. Even when these projections rest on stereotyped prejudices, they reveal the human capacity for empathy. The suspicion is plausible, and not entirely wrong.

Two fundamentally different ways of meeting this suspicion crystallize: The first is something like a Christian glorification of suffering. Here the fateful is elevated to an essence; the sufferer is styled as a martyr whose mode of being is thereby definitively inscribed. In this logic, suffering lies “in her nature”—a convenient ontology that releases us from the question of how a shared life would have to be arranged to reduce this suffering. It is precisely that form of pity that Nietzsche mocked in Schopenhauer’s writings: a pity that fixes the other in her weakness rather than allowing her to invent herself.

The second, solidary path, on the other hand, must always preserve contingency. Solidarity here means conceiving of the other as a space of possibilities and remaining conscious of the limits of one’s own descriptions. It begins not with a judgment, but with the radically open question: “How can I help to reduce the cruelty that befalls you?” This attitude acknowledges that there are no universally valid answers. While in the public sphere we must fight for the conditions of a dignified life, the space of private self-creation must remain open—as that place where every person may draft their own image, beyond the gaze of others and their pitying diagnoses.

Yet we sometimes find it hard to hold a contingent evolutionary history responsible for our “place.” Instead we often need a culprit who protects us from the recognition that the human being

hangs on the back of a tiger in dreams. – (Nietzsche, 1873)

Malice is never long in coming. It surfaces when the other manages to no longer see their own vulnerability in the counterpart, cannot imagine how it might be like to be “the other”, or to believe they can no longer afford to be sensible, given social, material, bodily or psychological compulsion.

Some cruelty becomes visible, acquires a language, and other cruelty remains hidden, and when it cannot “heal” or express itself at all and thereby reflect on itself, it will have to prove itself—that is, it will (re-)produce the conditions for its own continued existence. Without doubt about one’s own sensitivity to the pain and humiliation of others, curiosity about possible alternatives remains rude and calculating.

For Rorty, solidarity becomes the capacity to “see more and more” rather than seeing an “inner core.” It is the capacity to count as “us” people (and other living beings) who are worlds apart from us. It is grounded not, as in Kant, on universal Reason, nor, as in Christianity, on God, but on the striving to prevent and alleviate cruelty and pain.

But even when we use neither Kantian nor Christian language, we may still have the feeling that it is dubious to be more concerned about the living conditions of a fellow citizen of New York than about someone living equally hopelessly and miserably in the slums of Manila or Dakar. […] On the other hand, it is not incompatible with my position [(which accepts no essences)] to insist that we must try to include in our understanding of “we” also people whom we have so far counted among the “they.” This claim, characteristic of liberals who fear their own cruelty more than anything else, rests solely on the […] historical contingencies—namely, the development of the moral and political vocabularies typical of the secularized democratic societies of the Western world. – (Rorty, 1989)

Placing this “liberal axiom” above the sublime cannot be defended in any neutral, non-circular way. But the same holds for Heidegger’s claim that the idea of “the greatest happiness for the greatest number” is also just a piece of metaphysics, a piece of forgetfulness of Being.

Rorty cannot claim that avoiding cruelty is universally good. He cannot even claim that his assertion that there is no absolute truth is itself absolutely true. It is the classic self-contradiction objection—whoever says “there is no absolute truth” seems thereby to claim the very thing they reject. Rorty was of course aware of this. His move consists in not playing the game at all. Rorty does not claim: “It is objectively true that there is no objective truth.” That would be self-contradictory. Instead he says something like: The concept of “objective truth” is no longer a useful tool. We should stop using it—not because we have proved that there is no objective truth, but because a vocabulary without this concept gets us further. Rorty does not position himself on a higher level and delivers a verdict about truth from there. He recommends a different vocabulary. He says: Try it once without the concept of “absolute truth” and see whether you manage better. That is not a thesis about the world, but a suggestion about how we ought to speak.

When someone in the seventeenth century stopped thinking in the categories of scholasticism and adopted instead the language of the new natural science, they did not prove that scholasticism was wrong. They simply tried out a different vocabulary and found it more fruitful. According to Rorty, the same applies to the concept of truth: he does not want to refute the existence of truth, but to suggest that without this concept we can conduct more interesting conversations. Rorty accepts that his own position is just as contingent as any other. He claims for it only that it is more useful—more useful for the project of reducing cruelty and expanding solidarity.

Critics such as Hilary Putnam or Thomas Nagel have responded that Rorty cannot really save himself here: if he says his vocabulary is “more useful,” that again contains a truth claim—namely that it really is more useful. Rorty would reply: “useful” too is not an objective criterion but an evaluation from a particular perspective. The game can thus be continued indefinitely, and that is precisely Rorty’s point—there is no place at which one finally arrives. The philosophy that searches for such an endpoint pursues, according to Rorty, a goal that does not exist. Whether one finds that convincing ultimately depends on whether one is willing to abandon the desire for ultimate justification. Rorty demands that of his readers and he knew that many would not comply.

So, what would Rorty propose to us today? Certainly no grand promises or revolutions, but decidedly radical changes that in his time still sounded pragmatic. Authors such as Han (Han, 2021) describe the achievement society as a place of friendly violence in which self-creation degenerates into self-optimization and the human being becomes mere standing-reserve—a concept that Han borrows from Heidegger’s critique of technology (cf. (Heidegger, 1954)). Here Rorty would react with skepticism, and not only toward the diagnoses, but above all toward the vocabulary. He fundamentally distrusted Heidegger’s metaphysics of forgetfulness of Being: it runs the risk of condemning modernity as a whole rather than naming and addressing concrete grievances. For Rorty this is a philosophical luxury that a left that actually wants to change something cannot afford. This does not mean that Rorty would simply dismiss Han’s observations. The empirical description that people suffer from exhaustion, that the pressure of self-optimization destroys social solidarity, that depoliticization is a danger—these he would share. But his answer would be pragmatic and reformist, not cultural-critical: shorten working hours, guarantee social security, create spaces for purposeless exchange, so that people once again have the leisure to redescribe themselves rather than optimizing themselves for the market. These are bread-and-butter questions of politics, and it is precisely there, not in the deep diagnosis of the occidental history of Being, that Rorty would begin.

And since for Rorty progress is the capacity to allow one’s own final vocabulary to be expanded by that of the other, through literature and encounters (sentimental education), algorithms that isolate us in echo chambers destroy precisely this capacity for empathy. He would probably reject digital surveillance as a new form of cruelty that prevents solidarity.

Futhermore, his hope for an ever-growing solidarity presupposes that the material conditions still permit this expansion at all. That is why he would agree with Han’s observation that “depoliticization” is a danger, but he would call for speaking once again about “bread-and-butter issues” rather than philosophically condemning the whole of modernity. Here, however, Rorty’s approach runs up against a limit that he himself did not see: his concept of solidarity remains anthropocentric—he asks who can suffer pain and humiliation and draws the circle of the moral exactly there. The earth does not speak, so it does not feature in his account. Yet Rorty seemed open to move beyond human solidarity.

Imagination, in the sense in which I am using the term, is not a distinctively human capacity. It is […] the ability to come up with socially useful novelties. This is an abilitiy Newton shared with certain eager and ingenious beavers. But giving and asking for reason is distinctively human, and in coextensive with rationality. The more an organism can get what it wants by persuasion rather than force, the more rational it is. – (Rorty, 2016)

Yet if we take Rorty’s own logic seriously—namely that the circle of solidarity must be drawn ever wider—then the question inevitably arises of whether this circle may stop at the human being. A solidarity that applies only among speakers fails to hear the silence of those who have no language. Perhaps that is the blind spot that costs us the most dearly today.

Our ancestors 500 years ago simply could not have grasped what now seems to us common sense that differences of religion, race, and social status are morally irrelevant. These ancestors weren’t blind to something we now see because there wasn’t yet anything for them to see. What we see had to be created in the interim. The human race has been busy creating itself over the last 500 years, creating moral obligations for itself which were once mere fantasies in the minds of a few people of unusually vivid imagination and unusually broad sympathy. I want to suggest that someday if this notion of humanity’s self-creation comes to replace the traditional philosophical notion of humanity’s self-understanding, the colleges and universities might be able to stop using even for commercial purposes the Platonic rhetoric of a quest for eternal truth. They might openly proclaim that their principle function is to keep society from ever being satified with itself, to keep individual students from being satified with themselves as they were when they arrived. If this happens deomcratic society might lose their habitual distrust of intellectuals. This would happen because […] whole societies would get intellectualized—not in the sense of being turned into a nation of philosophers, but in the sense of being turned into a nation of literary critics, that is, people curious about alternative forms of life and constantly sensitive to the possibility that they may be being as unconsciously cruel as their ancestors were. Such societies would still think of the education of the young as a matter of instilling traditional values. But the principle traditional values they have in mind would be simply the value of questioning traditions. – (Rorty, 1990)

Cultivating Sensitivity

The urge toward new hardness, toward strong men, clear images of the enemy, and national self-assertion, is not a sign of strength. It is a sign that the circle of solidarity is shrinking. Rorty would not have been surprised. He already warned in Achieving Our Country (Rorty, 1998) that a left that retreats into cultural and academic distinction and stops speaking about material inequality prepares the ground for precisely those resentments that today call for hardness. The disappointed then find their voice not among those who advocate solidarity, but among those who name enemies.

What liberals can learn from Rorty is first of all an attitude of humility: those who stand up for liberal democracy should stop transfiguring it as the genuinely superior, the historically necessary, or the rationally only possible, for this rhetoric acts on those who do not share it as humiliation. Rorty proposed defending liberalism not as truth but as habit—as a way of living together that we have laboriously acquired and that is worth continuing to narrate.

The resistance to new hardness cannot be primarily argumentative. One does not refute resentments through better arguments; one changes them through better stories—that is, through narratives that give a face to people regarded as foreign, that show what it feels like to be excluded, persecuted, humiliated. That is not a weakness of the liberal project but its actual strength: not persuasion through logic, but expansion of the imagination.

Third, and this is perhaps Rorty’s most uncomfortable lesson: liberals must stop overlooking their own cruelty. New hardness thrives where people feel that their vocabulary—their way of describing their life, giving dignity to their work, and meaning to their community—is being ridiculed by those who advocate openness and tolerance. A solidarity that applies only among the educated is no solidarity. It is a new form of humiliation, and Rorty would have insisted that liberals look for this first in themselves before pointing a finger at others.

In short: Rorty would not call on us to save democracy by philosophically refuting its enemies. He would call on us to narrate it—again and again, in new words, for people who do not yet recognize themselves in it.

But that requires time. Not the time of rapid consumption, but the slow time of reading. It requires that patience which allows one to immerse oneself in an unfamiliar form of life, to understand it from within, before evaluating it. Rorty knew that solidarity does not arise in seconds. It grows in the hours spent with Raskolnikov, Dorothea Brooke, or the Invisible Man—with people one will never meet and whom one nonetheless begins to know.

As a new communication medium participating in communication for the first time (cf. (Esposito, 2022)), (Generative) AI transforms precisely this process, and in a way that would have troubled Rorty. Not because the technology is evil, but because it accelerates, compresses, and smooths encounters with the unfamiliar. What a novel laboriously builds over two hundred pages—for example, trust in an unfamiliar voice, the capacity to endure contradictions, the slow understanding of another world—an AI can summarize in a few paragraphs. But whether the expansion of the imagination that Rorty had in mind still arises in the process is questionable. Summaries do not sensitize; they inform. And the difference between the two is, for Rorty, the difference between knowledge and solidarity.

This is not a condemnation of technology, but a reminder of what is at stake. Rorty would not call on us to put away the smartphone forever or to ban AI. He would call on us to ask ourselves: When did we last read a book that truly disturbed us, and whose story was it? When were we last willing to be truly disturbed by an unfamiliar life?

When I look at my little nieces, I hope that—despite the impending catastrophes as a combination of a war against our political as well as environmental ecosystemr—they will live in a culture that has managed to sensitize itself to cruelties I cannot yet see. I hope they live in a culture that has once again made it its goal to be intellectual in the Rortyan sense: a culture that revitalizes the old ideal of “poets and thinkers”—not by hunting for a final, objective truth, but by using the poet’s imagination to reshape our world into something more humane. I hope they will be merciful toward me, understanding that it was still impossible for me to see so much more, because my language was still bound by the limits of my time. I hope the circle of their imagination, in which rationality plays its game, will be larger and not smaller; that they are courageous enough to constantly redescribe themselves and their community, until the “we” of their solidarity reaches far beyond what I am capable of imagining today.

References

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  1. Today, there is substantial evidence that prelinguistic infants display sophisticated reasoning, numerical intuition, and causal understanding well before acquiring language. Great apes, corvids, dolphins, elephants demonstrate planning, tool use, and social cognition without anything resembling human language. The key move is to distinguish between basic cognition (perception, spatial navigation, pattern recognition, which animals and infants clearly have) and discursive, propositional, reason-giving thought, i.e., the kind philosophers actually argue about. Rorty could concede the former while maintaining that the latter is constitutively linguistic and social. Not: “You can’t think without language” but “The kind of thinking that involves justifying beliefs, weighing reasons, making normative claims, that is through and through a linguistic practice.” ↩