“It is to be achieved not by inquiry but by imagination, the imaginative ability to see strange people as fellow sufferers. Solidarity is not discovered by reflection but created. It is created by increasing our sensitivity to the particular details of the pain and humiliation of other, unfamiliar sorts of people.”
Rorty presents the argument that our perception of reality is in the most part flawed because it is subjective and can hardly be truly objective. Thus, our inability to know the objective knowledge about humanity is a leeway to allow ourselves to adopt solidarity. He asserts our default setting is cruelty even though we think of ourselves as being kind and humble. To indeed adopt solidarity it requires extra effort in terms of accepting our predicament and be sensitive. Therefore, the statement encompasses the essence of solidarity that he is conveying to the reader. In that, since our outlook is contingent, we should focus on sincerely understanding others and their well-being.
“Vladimir Nabokov and George Orwell had quite different gifts, and their self-images were quite different. But, I shall argue, their accomplishment was pretty much the same. Both of them warn the liberal ironist intellectual against temptations to be cruel. Both of them dramatise the tension between private irony and liberal hope.”
In his quest to solidify his argument on humanity adopting private irony and liberal hope in catering to reality Rorty also mentions the authors. In that, we should give allowance to irony to our idea of reality because things could and often turn to be different than we perceive them. In the statement, he reflects on Nabokov and Orwell’s works to draw parallels in their acknowledgment of the tensions that exist between private irony and liberal hope. Since an ironist believes that their reality is contingent they give relevance to liberal hope, but sometimes through the authors’ works cruelty prevails. Our self-perception is to be given an allowance to irony as more than often we would make mistakes on truths.
