SOLIDARITY OR SINGULARITY?
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own terms. There is no question but that this is often humiliating, as when a child's favorite possessions are set next to those of a richer child and thereby made to seem tacky. To make matters worse, the ironist cannot claim that in redescribing others he is uncovering their true selves and interests, thereby empowering them and setting them free. Only the metaphysically minded politician can promise that. It follows that even were the ironist to profess support for liberal politics, he could not be very "dynamic" or "progressive."12 Considerations like these lead Rorty to a dramatic reversal of his earlier view. Now he no longer assumes that to substitute making for finding is to serve one's community, that to say goodbye to objectivity is to say hello to solidarity. On the contrary, Rorty now discerns a "selfish," antisocial motive in Romanticism, one that represents the very antithesis of communal identification. He finds that the Romantic's search for the sublime is fueled by a desire for disaffiliation, a need to "cut loose from the tribe." Thus, behind the strong poet's love for what is original and wholly new lurks a secret contempt for what is familiar and widely shared. This is especially disturbing when what is familiar and shared is a commitment to democracy. In a culture supposedly already organized around a metaphorics of liberation and social reform, to seek new, more vivid, less hackneyed metaphors is to court political disaster. Thus, Rorty voices a new worry that Romanticism and pragmatism do not mix. Whereas pragmatism is community-minded, democratic, and kind, Romanticism now seems selfish, elitist, and cruel. Whereas the pragmatist aims to solve the problems and meet the needs of his ordinary fellow citizens, the Romantic ironist is more likely to dismiss these as trite, uninteresting, and insufficiently radical. Accordingly, soi-disant left-wing poststructuralists are deluded in thinking they "serve the wretched of the earth" by rejecting the currently disseminated liberal political vocabulary. On the contrary, what they really do is express the traditional vanguardist contempt for their fellow human beings. Heideggerians, deconstructionists, neo-Marxists, Foucauldians, and assorted New Leftists — these are not differences that make a difference. All are potential Sorelians who confuse the ironist-intellectual's special yen for the sublime with society's general need for the merely beautiful.13 It is in this vein that Rorty has recently taken care explicitly to distinguish the pragmatic from the Romantic conception of philosophy. He argues that Romanticism and pragmatism represent two distinct reactions against metaphysics and that they ought not to be conflated with each other. Granted, both reject the traditional view of "philosophy as science" —as the search, that is, for a permanent neutral matrix for inquiry. But whereas Romanticism wants to replace this with a view of "philosophy as metaphor," pragmatism prefers to substitute the view of "philosophy as politics." It follows that the two approaches differ sharply in their images of the ideal person: in the metaphor view this must be the