Hat tip to Alina over at Totalitarianism Today for pointing to this summary of James Conant's argument against philosopher, Richard Rorty's (mis)appropriation of Orwell.
For those who care, Rorty has long given the libertarianish and conservatively inclined the shudders in his attempts to deprive liberalism (in the old-fashioned sense) of any sort of philosophical foundation. Such attempts sometimes lead him to appropriate other writers in idiosyncratic ways (which is a statement Rorty would take to be complement). In particular, Rorty has offered a rather unique reading of Orwell's 1984 (see here for more commentary), a novel traditionally interpreted as a warning against the degrading totality of totalitarianism, particularly its propensity to consume all of the private sphere, to regulate even once-free individual activities. Orwell, it is widely believed, was pointing to the propensity of totalitarian governments for destroying all that is private and individual, to the point of re-writing history and even denying what ones senses know to be true, even elementary truths like 2+2=4.
Rorty, on the other hand, reads Orwell as arguing against totalitarian societies on the grounds that they subjugate a liberals attempts to remake himself in ways that are more open, that are less cruel (Rorty's hallmark virtue). For Rorty, it's the claim to possess objective truths, over and above particular descriptions, that lead to the 'philosophical urge', an urge that once turned political, becomes tyrannical.
Winston's admittance that 2+2=5 if Big Brother claims it to be so should not, according to Rorty, be read as a defense of the notion of 'objective truth', or as a diatribe against relativism but as an admission that Big Brother's total control is an intrusion into an individual's own attempt to carve out his path at salvation (his own virtues, his highest good, etc...). In the same way, Rorty argues that Winston's final breakdown as the rat is eating through the cage - a breakdown in which he betrays Julia - is ostensibly a depiction of cruelty, but primarily an act of self-betrayal. The interrogator's actions force Winston to shred his own self-description, a description he could create only within the confines of the private sphere. For Winston - the quintessential liberal, a man for whom cruelty was the worst offense - his betrayal of Julia was a complete breakdown in the language (web of belief, etc...) which he used to describe himself.
Rorty's argument (clumsily truncated here) is that one need not read the topical Orwell as shilling for notions of 'philosophical foundations' or 'objective truth'. Orwell's importance (as contrasted with Nabakov in the same book) was his political contribution to liberalism, or to the idea that the more intrusive the form of government, the more likely it is to ravage the individual's private acts of self-creation, the more likely it is to force individuals to betray the things they hold most dear - even the basic beliefs that make sense of the world. Rorty argues that, read in this way, 1984 need not be read as one more argument that the foundation of liberalism is rooted in the nature of the world. It is as much an invective against cruelty as it is against totalitarian forms of government.
Orwell - as others have shown - would have disagreed with Rorty's attempt to lump him in with those post-modern skeptics who have argued for a liberalism without foundations (a la Habermas and Rawls). But that's a minor nuisance to Rorty. The fun of his poetic project - as he sees it - is not to use writers in the 'correct way', but to find wildly unorthodox ways of appropriating their works, of utilizing what one needs to complete one's projects. What the author intended has always been of little concern to Rorty; he is happy to use what he finds to cobble out his own contribution to what he regards as the enlightenment/liberalism project.
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