“French Revolution”
Rorty writes, “About two hundred years ago, the idea that truth was made rather than found began to take hold of the imagination of Europe. The French Revolution had shown that the whole vocabulary of social relations, and the whole spectrum of social institutions, could be replaced almost overnight.” The revolution strengthens Rorty’s argument concerning truth. Through the revolution, the French demonstrate that truths regarding French politics are not fixed. Truth is dependent on circumstances which are not constant. French engaged in the revolution to refute the longstanding truths governance in French.
“Conscious and Unconscious”
Rorty expounds, “In Freud's account, our conscious private goals are as idiosyncratic as the unconscious obsessions and phobias from which they have branched off.” The ‘conscious and unconscious’ needs vary among individuals and they are contingent on their objectives. Accordingly, there are no universal ‘conscious and unconscious’ needs because individuals lead different lives and have dissimilar pasts which shape their desires.
Platonism
Rorty explains, “But if we avoid Nietzsche's inverted Platonism - his suggestion that a life of self-creation can be as complete and as autonomous as Plato thought a life of contemplation might be - then we shall be content to think of any human life as the always incomplete, yet sometimes heroic, reweaving of such a web.” Plato explains that contemplations define an individual’s Self. Comparatively, Nietzsche endorses the concept of autonomous lives which are created by individuals. In both ideologies, life is similar to a web which should be reconstructed continuously.
“Culture of liberalism”
Rorty expounds, “For in its ideal form, the culture of liberalism would be one which was enlightened, secular, through and through. It would be one in which no trace of divinity remained, either in the form of a divinized world or a divinized self. Such a culture would have no room for the notion that there are nonhuman forces to which human beings should be responsible.” A liberal cultural would encourage humanity to seek the truth. Furthermore, it would focus more on the world and the desires of the human spirit rather than the divine forces. The cultural would not uphold morality because it would endorse the values of relativism whereby doctrines are shaped by divergent factors in various environments. Moreover, liberalism would endorse tolerance towards various ideologies.
Morality
Rorty expounds, “Oakeshott, following Hegel, suggests the answer: We can keep the notion of "morality" just insofar as we can cease to think of morality as the voice of the divine part of ourselves and instead think of it as the voice of ourselves as members of a community, speakers of a common language.” According to Oakeshott, morality and divinity are distinct concepts which should not be confused. Oakeshott elucidates that divinity does not cause morality; accordingly, moral individuals are not inherently spiritual or divine.
