Standing Problems 261the claim that ‘there is no standpoint outside the particular historically conditioned
and temporary vocabulary we are presently using’.^36 It is a liberalism that affirms
the need for a private narcissism of self-creativity together with a public solidarity
and loathing for cruelty. Rorty claims that this does justice to both self-creationists
and certain community rationalists (Rorty 1989: xiv). Rorty thus defends Isaiah
Berlin’s arguments on negative freedom and the incommensurability of values against
Michael Sandel’s accusations of moral relativism, by claiming that Sandel himself has
preclosed the whole debate by using Enlightenment language, which assumes itself to
be a ‘final vocabulary’ (see also Gray 1993: 289). Rorty’s (like Connolly’s) interest is
therefore to resist closure before one gets to the argument about relativism. Criticisms
of postmodernism as relativist are therefore dissolved rather than solved.
For Rorty, liberalism does not need a new ontological or metaphysical foundation,
conversely it needs to be poeticized (Rorty 1989: 53). Liberalismcannotbe justified.
Yet, Rorty also wishes self-creation to be privatized. He considers liberalism to be
about the avoidance or diminishment of cruelty. This potential solidarity is another
major component of his argument along with irony and contingency. However, the
language of liberalism is firmly tied to place, circumstance, history, and ethos. We
must accept this contingency, but we canstillloathe cruelty. Even if our language is
detheologized and there is no metalanguage to justify it, we can still affirm solidarity
with our fellow human beings. Even if we have ‘made’ the solidarity we can still die for
it—although this seems an amazingly tenuous notion of solidarity.^37 We have here
though a precise formulation of—what I would call—acontingent political liberalism,
which is essentially the same as Connolly’s dedivinizedagonistic liberalism.^38
Nietzsche however is not alone in this redemptive democratizing effort. Leslie
Thiele, in a comprehensive study of Heidegger, attempts to reassert Heidegger’s demo-
cratic potential. He remarks, for example, that ‘the affirmation of human plurality
that sits at the core of democratic politics must be retrieved from Heidegger in spite
of his withholdings’. He links this with Heidegger’s attack on humanism and meta-
physics and his focus on Being, remarking, ‘Heidegger’s philosophical dissolution of
metaphysics has its counterpart in a democracy infused with a disclosive freedom
that celebrates relations of self and other in their contingency’ (Thiele 1995: 163
and 167–8).
Lyotard has also been subject to the same redemptive exercise. In a passage, for
example, inThe Differend, Lyotard comments that in ‘the deliberative politics of
modern democracies, the differend is exposed’. In other words, democracies are more
likely to disclose heterogeneity. A few pages later he continues in the same spirit that
‘the deliberative is more “fragile” than the narrative...it lets the abyss be perceived
that separate genres of discourse from each other and even phrase regimens from
each other, the abysses that threaten “the social bond”. It presupposes and registers
a profound dislocation of narrated worlds’ (Lyotard 1999: 147 and 150). There are
those who consequently see a deep postmodern participatory democratic message
in Lyotard (see Keane 1992; Young 2002). However, Lyotard does add a rider to his
comment about deliberative democracy, which is worth reflecting on. He notes that
democracy contains the ‘transcendental appearance of single finality that would bring