Abstract
This chapter articulates Rorty’s main contribution to the nihilism debate. After a summary of this debate, it examines why Rorty anoints egotism as a modern problem. My critical reconstruction of Rorty’s work shows that his redemptive antidote to egotism is self-enlargement, a process that involves cultivating the values of self-creation and solidarity. I then reveal the connection between egotism and nihilism: that prior to becoming nihilists, human beings begin as egotists. By addressing the egotism that precedes modern nihilism via self-enlargement, Rorty’s pragmatism articulates a novel way of being existentially redeemed from nihilism—a perspective that the overcoming accounts of Taylor, Dreyfus, and Kelly have failed to consider.
Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded creatures glide under water, unapparent for the most part, and treacherously hidden beneath the loveliest tints of azure. Consider also the devilish brilliance and beauty of many of its most remorseless tribes, as the dainty embellished shape of many species of sharks. Consider, once more, the universal cannibalism of the sea; all whose creatures prey upon each other, carrying on eternal war since the world began.
Consider all this; and then turn to the green, gentle, and most docile earth; consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself? For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half-known life. God keep thee! Push not off from that isle, thou canst never return!
Herman Melville, Moby Dick; or The Whale (1851; 1972, 380–381).
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Notes
- 1.
See Janack (2010). Rorty’s famous rejoinder is that Fraser misreads his work, since he defines the private as something like Whitehead’s definition of religion, that is, “what you do with your solitude,” which differs from the interaction that occurs in the kitchen or the bedroom (Nystrom and Puckett 2002, 62). Rorty has also addressed the charge of him discounting the idea that “the personal is the political”: “But I do not think that anything I wrote can be cited in support of the view that men have the right to beat their wives in the privacy of their homes, without state interference. I was not trying to define limits of state power, but rather say what, in the long run, states are good for” (2010b, 20).
- 2.
While Rorty endorses its catchy phraseology, Wilde’s essay does not reflect his politics of democratic socialism. The liberal utopia is not about elitist flourishing: “certain passages in Wilde will not bear repeating, as when he speaks of ‘the poets, the philosophers, the men of science, the men of culture—in a word, the real men, the men who have realized themselves, and in whom all humanity gains a partial realization’” (Wilde 1966, 1080 [cf. Rorty 2010b, 488]).
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Llanera, T. (2020). Averting Nihilism. In: Richard Rorty: Outgrowing Modern Nihilism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45058-8_4
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