(Over 60 diverse thinkers on how to get more from books)
Rorty was an American Neo-pragmatic philosopher.
We should read broadly and diversely across various genres, including fiction, philosophy, social theory, ethnography, and journalism, he suggested, to engage with different traditions and avoid being confined by a single “final vocabulary” (Rorty 1989, xvi). Rorty’s concept of a vocabulary, or paradigm, refers to the terms we employ to explain the behaviour of, and narrate, ourselves and others. It “stands for a loose description of a social practice, with all of its conceptual norms. In that social practice, words mean what they mean because people use them in certain institutionalized ways and not in others” (Santelli 2020). Books are our primary instruments for encountering and internalising new vocabularies.
Self-creation involves the “reweaving and redescription of personal identities” (McClean 2014, 137). Books facilitate this by offering new descriptions and new vocabularies that allow individuals to invent their own language and metaphors (Rorty 1989, 27). This enables a person to re-describe themselves and their past, thereby creating a new self: every human life is a poem, an “attempt to clothe itself in its own metaphors” (pp. 35–6). Reading provides the raw material and inspiration for this ongoing “hierophanic project of self-creation, of soul-making” (McClean 2014, 62).
Cultural change depends on “a talent for speaking differently, rather than for arguing well”, so by exposing us to new ways of speaking and describing the world, reading encourages this process in a manner akin to how “old metaphors are constantly dying off into literalness, and then serving as a platform and foil for new metaphors” (Rorty 1989, 7, 16). Through engagement with diverse texts, we can “expand the reference of the terms ‘our kind of people’ and ‘people like us’” (McClean 2014, 9 (quoted in)).
Moral progress is achieved not through abstract arguments about universal human nature, but through “sentimental education” that expands our empathy (ibid. (quoted in)). Literature, by providing “detailed description of what unfamiliar people are like and…redescription of what we ourselves are like”, helps to “sensitize one to the pain of those who do not speak our language” (Rorty 1989, xvi; McClean 2014, 147 (quoted in)). This process involves adopting new “moral vocabularies” that allow us to see “more and more traditional differences… as unimportant when compared with similarities with respect to pain and humiliation” (Rorty 1989, 192).
Books can help us become “more sensitive to the ways that we have been cruel to others on the way to our own personal goals in life, our own personal redescriptions” (McClean 2014, 147–8). Books of this sort can be divided roughly into those “which help us see the effects of social practices and institutions on others”, and “those which help us see the effects of our private idiosyncrasies on others” (Rorty 1989, 141).
The first type is “typified by books about, for example, slavery, poverty, and prejudice”: they “help us see how social practices which we have taken for granted have made us cruel” (ibid.). They include “The Condition of the Working Class in England and the reports of muckraking journalists and government commissions, but also novels like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Les Miserables, Sister Carrie, The Well of Loneliness, and Black Boy” (ibid.). The second type concerns “the ways in which particular sorts of people are cruel to other particular sorts of people” (ibid.):
the most useful books of this sort are works of fiction which exhibit the blindness of a certain kind of person to the pain of another kind of person. By identification with Mr. Causaubon in Middlemarch or with Mrs. Jellyby in Bleak House, for example, we may come to notice what we ourselves have been doing. In particular, such books show how our attempts at autonomy, our private obsessions with the achievement of a certain sort of perfection, may make us oblivious to the pain and humiliation we are causing. They are the books which dramatize the conflict between duties to self and duties to others.
Aside from Eliot and Dickens, he suggested that works of Olive Schreiner, Richard Wright, Choderlos de Laclos, Henry James, and Nabokov serve this function (p. xvi). A specific example is taken from Nabokov’s Lolita, where Rorty discusses the following passage in which the protagonist, Humbert, gets a haircut (p. 162 (quoted in)):
In Kasbeam a very old barber gave me a very mediocre haircut: he babbled of a baseball-playing son of his, and, at every explodent, spat into my neck, and every now and then wiped his glasses on my sheet-wrap, or interrupted his tremulous scissor work to produce faded newspaper clippings, and so inattentive was I that it came as a shock to realize as he pointed to an easelled photograph among the ancient gray lotions, that the moustached young ball player had been dead for the last thirty years.
For Rorty, this passage “epitomizes Humbert’s lack of curiosity—his inattentiveness to anything irrelevant to his own obsession—and his consequent inability to attain a state of being in which ‘art,’ as Nabokov has defined it, is the norm” (p. 163). Nabokov deliberately includes such details, and then, in his Afterword, points out that readers often miss them (ibid.). The impact is that the reader, upon realising their own inattentiveness to the barber’s suffering (the loss of his son), becomes “suddenly revealed to himself as, if not hypocritical, at least cruelly incurious” (ibid.). The message is (p. 164):
to notice what people are saying. For it might turn out, it very often does turn out, that people are trying to tell you that they are suffering.
In interpreting books from different cultures Rorty advocated a “frank ethnocentrism”: a recognition that “we cannot leap outside our Western social democratic skins when we encounter another culture, and we should not try” (McClean 2014, 140–1 (quoted in)). This acknowledgment of our cultural embeddedness should be coupled with an active effort to “[fuzz] up the differences between ‘us’ and ‘them’ so as to put aside any notion of permanent mutual incomprehension or incommensurability” (p. 141 (quoted in)). The aim is that we realistically acknowledge the human condition: we always operate from a particular historical and cultural perspective, and can never achieve a neutral, “God’s-eye” view (p. 97). Therefore, reading does not demand the abandonment of our cultural identity to the text but rather the cultivation of a “rooted cosmopolitanism” that uses our own cultural framework as a starting point for empathetic engagement (p. 92). We blur “us” with “them” by expanding our sympathies and recognizing shared vulnerabilities (like pain and humiliation), despite differing “final vocabularies”. This approach fosters tolerance by helping us recognise the contingency of all cultural forms, including our own.
Rorty considers books tools for human purposes—“all we ever do with anything is use it” (p. 58 (quoted in)). This instrumental view is part of his anti-idolatry stance, which aims to “put into their proper places the cultural tools before which we too commonly fall to our knees” (p. 59). By treating books as tools rather than sacred objects or sources of absolute truth, Rorty encourages a pragmatic engagement with them, fostering intellectual humility and distrust of “intellectual snobbery” (p. 61 (quoted in)). We can approach texts with specific goals, extracting what is useful for our own projects rather than seeking a singular, universal message. For instance, a reader might engage with a philosophical text not to discover its “true” meaning, but to find a new vocabulary that helps them articulate their own problems or aspirations. We should be active agents in our reading, transforming texts into resources for our own intellectual and practical endeavours.
Texts comment on other texts; they don’t represent or mirror the world. The goal of texts about physics and philosophy, for example, is not to accurately represent reality, but to offer new interpretations or engage in a kind of writing that comments on previous writings. Physicists are people “looking for new interpretations of the Book of Nature” (Rorty 1982, 90). Texts are autonomous, so their meaning is generated within an intertextual network, rather than being derived from an external referent. Thus, authorial intent is rejected as the ultimate authority for meaning. Rorty endorses a reader who “asks neither the author nor the text about their intentions but simply beats the text into a shape which will serve his own purpose” (p. 151). This is achieved by “imposing a vocabulary…on the text which may have nothing to do with any vocabulary used in the text or by its author, and seeing what happens” (ibid.). An author’s own vocabulary of self-description is not necessarily the best for understanding them (ibid.).
Our focus shifts, then, from what the author “undertook to signify” to the text’s role in an ongoing, evolving conversation (ibid.). The “retail constraints provided by the remarks of our fellow-inquirers” become the primary guides for interpretation (p. 165). Meaning is negotiated and refined through communal discussion and the exchange of perspectives, rather than being individually discovered. Readers are encouraged to engage in dialogue, offer their interpretations, and consider the objections and alternative readings of others, understanding that the “truth” is what “can survive all objections” within a given conversational context (ibid.).
We should approach texts, then, as creative re-interpretations or redescriptions of existing vocabularies, rather than as discoveries of preexisting truths or essences. Meaning is made, not discovered. The pursuit of a singular, definitive meaning in texts, or a universal method for uncovering it, is misguided. There cannot be a “last Word” or a final commentary, as writing always leads to more writing (p. 109).