[...] the vocabulary in which I make intelligible and justify or fail to justify my actions, beliefs, and life within a network of relationships of giving and receiving is never merely mine. It is always ours [...]. Ironic detachment involves a withdrawal from our common language and our shared judgments and thereby from the social relationships which presuppose the use of that language in those judgments. [In irony,] I am to find a vantage point quite outside those relationships and commitments that have made me what I now am. But what might this be?
On this Rorty might well comment: that which he praised is an ironic attitude towards one's own final vocabulary, but not an ironic attitude towards those commitments, those solidarities, which are the basis for the trust that others may repose in us. And Rorty's trenchant and admirable expression of his own social democratic commitments and solidarities does not seem to be in the least ironic. So over what then do we disagree? Presumably over whether it is or is not in the end possible to separate one's attitude towards the vocabulary through which one's commitments and solidarities are articulated from one's attitude towards those commitments and solidarities. Attempts to answer this question have a long history. [...] -- Alasdair MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals (152-3)
I mention this because something illustrative of MacIntyre's idea of postmodernity and something else illustrative of Rorty's have both hit the news at the same time, or at least hit this weird little world of mine in which both these things count as striking and useful bits of nourishment.
In the first case, certain evangelical Protestants are turning to monasticism, of a very new but also very old kind, a creative and forward-looking improvisation. In MacIntyre's words -- words written in 1981 at the close of After Virtue --
What they set themselves to achieve [...] -- often not recognizing fully what they were doing -- was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness. [...] We are not waiting for a Godot, but for another -- doubtless very different -- St. Benedict.
In the second case, Rorty's favorite author Nabokov has this David-Lynch sounding last unfinished novel kicking about in a steel Swiss shoebox called The Original of Laura. And Nabokov's son has received spectral permission to sell it (as opposed to indulging in that theatrical Nabokovian habit of burning the damn thing). The link here to the monasticism business -- aside from the eerie possibilities issuing from a contemplation of a man whose most profound social connection involved shutting himself in a room and pounding out his bent genius into a form that more than once almost went straight into the bin -- involves what hints can be gleaned from this firsthand-ish report on Laura as to the issues Nabokov grappled with therein concerning the relationship between the destruction of the individual self and the construction of the social self. Which in many respects is the last modern, and first postmodern, question.
Having types this out in alone in a room, I must now leave it to you to finish making all the profound little connections.
Bush sat there for seven minutes, seemingly unshook by the information he was given about the attack on 9/11...
"I must now leave it to you to finish making all the profound little connections."
What, does Jesus help with authentic, communal, harmonious living?
Posted by: Bahram Farzady | February 10, 2009 at 02:49 AM