liberal irony

is the character of the ideal liberal subject who is caught in a necessary paradox. She is a public defender of her values and at the same time knowing full well that her values are contingent and thus questionable.

Richard Rorty's discussion of liberal irony is interesting on this point. Rorty's ideal liberal is not a dispassionate philosopher in search of the holy grail of Truth, Goodness, and Justice, but a poet privately plagued by self-doubt about her deepest moral convictions, about what appears to her as a set of commonsense intuitions. In his words, 'the process of socialization which turned her into a human being by giving her language may have given her the wrong language, and so turned her into the wrong kind of human being' (Rorty 1989, p. 75). Her doubt is bom from the knowledge that all truths are the contingent values of linguistic functions... that no one 'vocabulary' is closer to reality than another... and that the values one cleaves to most dearly may well be harmful to others. Nevertheless, although Rorty's ideal liberal subject privately suffers her anxieties and doubts, she publicly passionately defends her values until the organic philosophers, poets, ethnographers, and literary critics-the minor philosophers of late modem timesdemonstrate to her, not so much what she can gain by incorporating another set of values into her own, but how she can avoid inflicting pain and humiliation on others. (Povinelli 2001 : 328)

liberal irony, n.All

liberal irony