The Nature of Political Theory

252 The Nature of Political Theory

and closure, as collectively ‘ontotheology’.^21 John Rawls, for example, becomes in
Connolly’s terminology an overt ‘ontotheologist’ trying to escape into some form of
liberal hermeneutic in his later work (Connolly 1991: 73). Thus, for both Connolly
and Rortyallwe have are interpretations or perspectives (or viewed from another per-
spective, metaphors). They are essential to life, however, such interpretations often
congeal and masquerade as a foundational reality and need to be deconstructed or
genealogically exposed. Both Connolly and Rorty therefore seek a political theory that
recognizes its own contingency. Rorty, for example, notes favourably Kierkegaard’s
remark that if Hegel had prefaced his greatScience of Logicby remarking that this was
just another thought experiment he would have been the greatest philosopher ever
(Rorty 1989: 104).
Rorty’s account of truth is again deeply Nietzschean, although with a much lighter
and wittier touch. Providing his own genealogy, Rorty suggests that made truth has
a comparatively recent history, part of which is reliant on the idea of the nineteenth-
century romantic poets’ notion of self-creation. In philosophy, the German Idealists
were the first to grasp the self-constitution or self-creation nettle. However, the Ideal-
ists, although seeing much of the construction of the world as tied to the mind, still
insisted that mind or spirit had an essential underlying nature and teleology (Rorty
1989: 4).^22 For Rorty, however, nothing has an essential nature or teleology. He
therefore distinguishes the claims that ‘the world is out there’ from ‘the truth is out
there’. To say that truth is not out there is ‘simply to say that where there are no
sentences there is no truth, that sentences are elements of human language, and that
human languages are human creations’ (Rorty 1989: 5). There are, in other words, no
sentence-shaped chunks in the world. The idea that truth is ‘out there’ waiting to be
discovered or mirrored, for example, in the natural sciences, is for Rorty a legacy of
the contention that God (or Being) is out there waiting to be discovered. If we change
our views, it is not forced upon us by the world, rather we get out of the habit of
using certain words and we adopt others. Nothing actually ‘fits’ the world. There is
no real self, no essential nature to the world, and no essence to politics. Nothing is
essential to the self any more than sensitive genitals are essential to the body (Rorty
1989: 188). There are only different vocabularies (or conventional perspectives) that
make claims to finality. As Rorty contends, ‘if we could ever become reconciled to
the idea that most of reality is indifferent to our descriptions of it...then we should
at last have assimilated what was true in the Romantic idea that truth is made rather
than found’ (Rorty 1989: 7). Vocabularies are not representational jigsaws that fit
over the world, rather they are pragmatic tools made by human beings.^23 Truth, as
Nietzsche emphasized, is metaphor—or more precisely what are called truths are
worn-out metaphors. Scientific revolutions are metaphoric redescriptions.^24 Human
history is a succession of grand metaphors. To see the world this way is to dedivinize
it. In short, viewed as a sequence: love of God was replaced by love of truth; love of
truth by love of science; love of science was replaced by love of self (in the romantics);
and now love of self has been replaced by love of nothing (or whatever comes along
for private self-creation). In future, according to Rorty we should aim for ‘tingles’
rather than ‘truths’ (Rorty 1989: 152).