Neoliberalism in Rorty and Forster - Richard Rorty and E.M. Forster

In fairness to Trilling we should note that the celebrations and suspicions of Forster that Trilling initiates are not by and large sensitive responses to Trilling own's stated position on Forsterian liberalism. According to Forster, Trilling writes, "Liberal intellectuals have always moved in an aura of self-congratulation"; self-flattering, defensive, dismissive, blind to the "vices" which good will and the "love of humanity" may generate--ultimately they are "sad but comic" (124), and they must "not to be what most of us are--eschatological " (22).

As well will see, Trilling's Forster can at times sound remarkably Rortian, as in his refusal to be "conclusive" (16; Rorty's term is final"). (4) Though Born misunderstands Margaret's final performances, confusing her pragmatically ironic distance from passion with an essential and final "coldness" and "detachment" which is the result of her finally achieving her "goal" (one formulated "early on") of "moving beyond liberal guilt" (157), he, too, aptly perceives a Rorty/Forster connection which works both ways: "The activity of reading Rorty through the lens of Howards End may prove as informative a task as reading Howards End through the lens of Rorty" (144). Armstrong is another who believes that Forster's "politics has much in common with Richard Rorty's notion of |liberal irony'" (367). (5) Though some political thinkers, ironist and other, dismiss liberalism as impractical (Spragens, for example), my assumption here is that "bourgeois liberalism" is at least one of several sensibilities and politics which it may now be pragmatic to adopt. Rorty himself has found it pragmatic to describe "bourgeois capitalist society as the best polity actualized so far" even as he admits that it is "irrelevant to most of the problems of most of the people of the planet" (CIS 68). (6) Though Bradbury celebrates Howards End's admixture of Platonism and liberalism (it is a novel that "postulates an end that can be achieved, a contact with the infinite" [130]), he nevertheless notes, in a formulation much like Eliot's, "a pervasive sense of anarchy, which is central to this book as it is to its successor, A Passage to India" (143). For an account of the modernist apocalyptist's critique of their own apocalyptism, see Longenbach (844). (7) For Jameson the uneasiness with contingency creating the modernist demand for large meanings is produced, not by a desire for personal autonomy (as in Rorty), but by a desire for imaginative coherence and completeness. Jameson links the sensation of incompleteness to the imaginative experience of imperialism. The British, home-bound imperialist--the modernist is an example--suffers sensations of incompleteness ("a generalized loss of meaning" [50]) because "internal national or metropolitan daily life is absolutely sundered from this other world henceforth in thrall to it," the world of "the colonized" (58). For Rorty, Jameson sees an afflicting absence originating in a particular social arrangement when he should be seeing a constraining presence endemic to social life. (8) Though Crews argues that the novel "qualifies Forster's previously oversimplified antithesis between the inner and outer worlds" only "schematically" (122), he describes (contra Jameson et al.) Margaret's "nature" as "firmly rooted in prosaic fact" (121). What Parry terms "emblematic resolutions" Margaret does not embrace unironically (40); neither does she try "to articulate a new synthesis, to penetrate to a new metaphysic" (Rosecrance 148). (9) In arguing that Helen's "often-destructive actions" are "generated by liberal pity" Born ignores the definite change that comes over Helen after her very brief affair with Leonard and, presumably, her discovery that she is pregnant (157). Having met "Monica," "the crude feminist of the south, whom one respects but avoids" (233), Helen has herself turned into a kind of feminist separatist ("But for [Monica], I am and have been and always wish to be alone" [232]). All along Forster may be associating Helen's more "destructive" tendencies not with liberalism but with a capacity for what he regarded as social and intellectual radicalism. (10) "I borrow my definition of |liberal' from Judith Shklar, who says that liberals are the people who think that cruelty is the worst thing we do" (CIS xv). One might argue that Rorty inscribes a line of descent between Victorian Liberals and neopragmatists with every sentence he begins with "We liberals . . . " (198), and he begins a lot of sentences with these words. Nevertheless, some recent commentators (Shusterman 612ff; Conway 202--04) have tried to erase the "liberal" from Rorty's "liberal ironist." Treating Rorty much as revisionists have treated Forster, they have placed him squarely among postmodern and postliberal writers like Jurgen Habermas and Jameson. See Gunn, who shows how "pragmatism, or neopragmatism, as it is sometimes called, has come to be associated with cultural currents that are thought to be postliberal, if not antiliberal" (82). Gunn argues that Rorty's "project amounts to the most important critical and political attempt since John Dewey to resituate the tradition of American pragmatism within the broader framework of modern Western liberalism" (83). (11) See, for just a few examples of this most common objection to Rorty's enterprise, Conway, Born, and Shapiro, each of whom feels that "the idea of privacy Rorty invokes is deeply problematic" (Shapiro 40). As Shapiro writes, "the idea that it is possible to divorce public policy from competing philosophical conceptions of human nature, to make it neutral among them, is not plausible ... as the abortion debate over the past two decades reveals" (39). (12) Weiskel defines the positive sublime as one which suggests "a familial concord of mind and nature so that the power of each aggrandizes the other" (50). The experience of the beautiful patently lacks the element of power and grandeur--it is agreeable rather than aggrandizing. On the other hand, Margaret's image of a human Tragedy which is both vague and titanic suggests just this mutual aggrandizement. (13) As Rorty writes, "Although the young Heidegger worked hard to free himself from the notion of the philosopher as spectator of time and eternity, from the wish to see the world from above |as a limited whole,' the older Heidegger slipped back into a very similar idea" (EHO 51). Rorty eschews any causal relation between this slip and that "pretty nasty character" 's 1930s politics ("On the general question of the relation between Heidegger's thought and his Nazism, I am not persuaded that there is much to be said"--"the |turn' would still have been taken" [111] even without Hitler). But he does suggest a correlation; perhaps no philosopher who does not see himself as "the spectator of time and eternity" will have the confidence to set himself up as "a philosopher of our public life," "a commentator on twentieth-century technology and politics" (120). (14) So common is this claim that Abrams has codified it for undergraduates; "When the later events in France dashed their faith in political revolution as a means to the millennium, a number of Romantic writers . . . transferred the agency of apocalypse from mass action to the individual mind" (Norton Anthology 14).