[Edited: 2022–10–07 Major thanks to Paul Hunt for his comment, which triggered a significant edit to the tl;dr and the conclusion!]
This is a quick summary of Rorty’s discussion of the sublime in his Preface to Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism. It was sparked by this twitter thread:
It’s fair to criticize Rorty for the confusion his grand rhetoric can cause. It would be easier to understand any philosopher if they were completely consistent in the tenor of their descriptions of key philosophical concepts. But I imagine the resulting prose would consist of dreadfully dull, impenetrable thickets of caveats. But since philosophers’ subtle and nuanced views are realized through lopsided (but sometimes soaring) rhetoric, we have the (sometimes) enjoyable task of puzzle solving to recover their subtle and nuanced views.
With that in mind, I’ll attempt to put Rorty’s initial description of sublimity in context with caveats he made later in the same preface.
tl;dr: As usual, Rorty is distinguishing (not as clearly as he should) the traditional wholesale/private concept of “Sublimity” from Dewey’s retail/public concept of “sublimity”. Both are acceptable, but wholesale/public Sublimity is not. Also, Rorty sticks with the traditional label beauty instead of Dewey’s label “sublimity”.
Rorty’s begins the preface with an apparent shot across the bow of sublimity
The lectures in this volume attempt to envisage what philosophy would be like if our culture became secularized through and through — if the idea of obedience to a non-human authority were to disappear completely. One way of putting the contrast between an incompletely and a completely secularized culture is to say that the former retains a sense of the sublime. Complete secularization would mean general agreement on the sufficiency of the beautiful.
p.xxvii
As we will see later in the preface, Rorty ends up not advocating for complete secularization in all aspects of all lives, for completely eliminating a sense of the sublime from one and all. Given the discussion that follows in his preface, one could reasonably argue that Rorty’s grand rhetoric in this opening paragraph contradicts what he says later.
However, a charitable interpretation of this paragraph would simply criticize his ambiguous use of the phrase our culture. Does this refer to our philosophical culture, to only public or political aspects of our culture, or to every last aspect of our culture — down to our most idiosyncratic imaginings? In any case, even the most diehard Rorty apologist would probably agree that that he could have clarified from the beginning whether any sense of the sublime in any aspect of culture could be acceptable.
Rorty then spends the first several paragraphs simply describing the variety of religious and philosophical conceptions of sublimity over the centuries. He finally gets to stating his goal for the lectures to which the preface applies.
The philosophical views sketched in these lectures offer a way of thinking about the human situation which abjures both eternity and sublimity, and is finitistic through and through. The lectures try to sketch the result of putting aside the cosmological, epistemological, and moral versions of the sublime: God as immaterial first cause, Reality as utterly alien to our epistemic subjectivity, and moral purity as unreachable by our inherently sinful empirical selves. I follow Dewey in suggesting that we build our philosophical reflections around our political hopes: around the project of fashioning institutions and customs which will make human life, finite and mortal life, more beautiful.
p.xxix
This is the first mixed message on sublimity in the preface. Rorty switches between eliminating sublimity tout court and merely eliminating versions of sublimity.
Several paragraphs later, Rorty makes another distinction regarding sublimity — his central distinction between public and private;
For [Dewey and Habermas], there is nothing higher or deeper to be yearned for than a utopian democratic society — nothing more to be desired than the peace and prosperity which would make possible social justice.
For thinkers of this sort — those who are content with beauty — the proper place for sublimity is in the private consciousness of individuals. The sense of the Presence of God, like the sense of Radical Evil, may survive in the interior space of certain minds. Those minds are likely to be responsible for the production of the great works of the human imagination — for astonishing works of art, for example. But for thinkers like Dewey, Rawls, and Habermas these works are not the proper concern of philosophical reflection. Such reflection should instead be concerned with creating a society in which there will be room for many different forms of private consciousness — for both those who have, and those who lack, a sense of the sublime.
p.xxxi
So aspirations of sublimity are proper for personal artistic creation but not for philosophical reflection, which should be focused on public institutions that enable diverse private beliefs, aspirations, and practices.
Rorty goes on to compare the dangers of invoking sublimity in philosophical discussions of public, political, or culture-wide issues to the dangers of invoking God, Sin, and Truth:
From the point of view taken in these lectures, the attempt to make sublimity central to reflection on the human future is as dangerous as making God, or Sin, or Truth central to such reflection. As I see it, philosophy should treat the quest for the unconditioned, the infinite, the transcendent and the sublime as a natural human tendency — one which Freud has helped us understand. We should see it, as Freud saw the sublimation of sexual desire, as a precondition for certain striking individual achievements. But we should not see it as relevant to our public, socio-political, cultural prospects.
Rorty positions the quest for sublimity as an optional, private duty, never to be made into a required, public one:
This means that we should separate the quest for greatness and sublimity from the quest for justice and happiness. The former is optional, the latter is not. The former may be required of us by our duties to ourselves. The latter is required of us by our duties to other human beings. In religious cultures, it was believed that besides these two sets of duties, we also had duties to God. In the completely secularized culture I envisage, there will be no duties of this last sort: our only obligations will be to our fellows and to our own fantasies. So the only place for the sublime will be in the realm of the individual imagination — in the fantasy lives of certain people, those whose idiosyncrasies make them capable of feats which the rest of us find both awesome and inexplicable.
Since I initially broached this suggestion of the need to split the private from the public (in my Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity) I have been criticized for trying to put the two in watertight compartments. I have no wish to do that. The utility of imaginative feats, bound by no social norms, for the public discourse of later ages is undeniable. Had thinkers like Plato, Augustine, and Kant, and artists like Dante, El Greco, and Dostoevsky, not aspired to sublimity, the rest of us would not possess the beautiful residues of these aspirations. Our lives would be far less varied, and the forms of happiness for which we are able to strive would be much poorer. But this does not mean that we should arrange our public institutions to suit the quest for greatness or for sublimity.
p.xxxi-xxxii
Unsurprisingly, by the end of the preface, we once again realize that Rorty is treating S/sublimity as he more infamously treated concepts such a truth and representation. Although his rhetoric concerning all of these was too easily misinterpreted as being completely antithetical to them in every aspect, upon a closer and more charitable reading, he was only opposed to Wholesale, public, hypostatized, statively-capitalized Truth, Representation, and Sublimity (“the cosmological, epistemological, and moral versions of the sublime: God as immaterial first cause, Reality as utterly alien to our epistemic subjectivity, and moral purity as unreachable by our inherently sinful empirical selves”). He had no problem with private aspirations of Sublimity.
Finally, Rorty endorsed Dewey’s concept (“the sublime diversity seen through human eyes, and created by human experimentation”), which I characterize as “retail/public sublimity” as acceptable as a public aspiration. Though Rorty endorsed the concept, he did not adopt the term “sublimity”. He stuck with the more traditional term, “beauty”. In retrospect, even my title is somewhat misleading. A more accurate title would be, “Rorty’s Embrace of Dewey’s sublime”.
Given that the preface overall provides a subtle and nuanced understanding of Rorty’s views on the role and place for aspirations of S/sublimity, I think it would be uncharitable to begrudge him a single grand rhetorical flourish to open the preface, even though it is arguably somewhat misleading if taken out of context. He is not against Sublimity tout court, only wholesale/public Sublimity.
