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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LindyBill who wrote (37980)	8/15/2002 7:47:27 PM
From: JohnM	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Bill, A couple of things. Or three. First, that Rorty page you reference has only a quote or two from Rorty, then it's someone else's ideas of what Rorty said. In my view, not well done. And certainly not the core point I'm trying to make. Frankly, I think you would find him very interesting. Not a political soulmate but one of those folk that reading helps you think through your own thoughts. I've said my favorite of his is the Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity book. It's sort of at a midway point in terms of accessible. He has several volumes that are quite dense. The most accessible work of his is a little book with the awkward title of Achieving Our Country. Here's the Amazon url. amazon.com If I've already passed that along, please forgive me. As for the quote you grabbed from that page, here is a direct quote from the book which was on that web page. "In my utopia, human solidarity would be seen not as a fact to be recognized by clearing away "prejudice" or burrowing down to previously hidden depths but, rather, as a goal to be achieved. Is it to be achieved not by inquiry but by imagination, the imaginative ability to see strange people as fellow sufferers. Solidarity is not discovered by reflection but created. It is created by increasing our sensitivity to the particular details of the pain and humiliation of other, unfamiliar sorts of people" --Richard Rorty, "Contingency, Irony and Solidarity" Back to another point, liberals as pessimists and conservatives as optimists. I notice FL had a comment and it, of course, reminded me of the old canard about the difference between the two. Liberals were optimists, believed "human nature" was malleable and thus social institutions could be improved and enhance the improvements in humans; conservatives were pessimists, believed in original sin, even a secular variant, thought of social institutions, much as Freud did, as controlling or regulating our baser selves. I've got a feeling the pessimist-optomist distinction is not getting to get us very far. Just a little finger exercise on the keyboard.