Interpreting Ourselves and Caring for Others: Levinas and Rorty

What is the relation between how we shape our own identities and how we care for the well-being of others? This question hovers in the background of Richard Rorty’s Contingency, irony, and solidarity. Rorty formulates an answer here to criticism that he badly neglected the issue of social responsibility in his early work. He now does pay attention to the problem of living together with others, but, following liberal social philosophy, he draws a sharp distinction between the task of shaping one’s own life and obligations to others. They are opposite values which can exist alongside each other in life, but cannot be reduced to each other in a theory. Metaphysics once tried to do this: to bring together private and public life by showing that self-discovery and public utility could be united. The vocabulary of metaphysics attempts to bring these two spheres together. Ironic theory—after the end of metaphysics—pursues the same aim, though its method is narrative rather than systemic. Rorty regards both attempts as hopeless and draws a sharp line between private and public, for which he is again taken to task.