Commenter Paulie wants to know. Well, there’s no denying that postmodern theory is intimately intertangled with the "hermeneutic of suspicion." Ricoeur helped us level against Habermasian liberal thinkers the complaint that ideologies could become so clever that what appeared to be free and open discourse could in fact be systematically mendacious. I’m specifically using more psychological than political language here for reasons that might be plain in my post at The Confabulum on Brooks and the bogus need for a "sense of" authority.
But where some liberal postmoderns, like Rorty, want us to agree that "truth" is whatever outcome our liberal politics produces, Ricoeur helps us understand that we can’t get off that easy by delinking politics and psychology. Indeed, the self-aware, disciplined distance that I want to maintain between our culture and our politics is a psychological request that confirms how we can’t sever politics from psychology. We can’t expect politics to be our conscience. And so Rorty can’t account for what Philip Rieff calls "true guilt" or "sacred guilt."
Ricoeur — though he’s no easy read, often to my disappointment and frustration — helps us manage the thing left behind in Pandora’s box when postmodern theory came along: the meta-hermeneutical problem, which is: how suspicious should we be about our hermeneutics of suspicion? Rorty’s injunction to be comfortable in the possible glibness factor involved in our own adherence to our inherited authorities is an important aid in combatting the panic and despair that Brooks seems to be flirting with. But Rorty’s own glibness factor is simply too high, because he thinks we can successfully turn our hermeneutics of suspicion inward without creating a crushing, crippling ironic burden. I should say that the history of art and artists set Rorty a bar he could never climb over. It is simply ridiculous to insinuate, as he does, that we can be like Nietzsche in private if we arrange things so that our ironic idiosyncracies are even more radically privatized than Nietzsche’s were. We need a way to prevent ourselves from falling into the pit of our own contemplation of our private self-insufficiency — and to prevent ourselves from going mad under the tension of ever-more-expert attempts at dissembling to ourselves about it. This is a sort of strain that Machiavelli’s super-overworked and majorly sacrificial Prince could endure by recourse to certain public remissions — like hacking your enemies in half and leaving them on the stoop for the people to behold. Rorty’s postmodern person has a much narrower realm in which to run, and he or she still cannot hide for long.
Presumably Rorty opens up the field by helping us realize how fun it is to indulge in the vast, infinite contingency created by a flourishing bourgeois society of poetic irony and lived literary criticism. But this is exhausting, too, in its own way, and ultimately reliant on an economic and political system of the sort we see faltering badly today. Ricoeur rightly points us toward the way Freud challenges political philosophers to get too egotistical about the self-sufficiency of their enterprise. And Ricoeur and Rorty both point us toward Rieff, insofar as Rieff’s critique of Freud is what really brings us back to the main question, which is how a durable human order can proceed when repression itself is repressed. (Rieff’s answer is that it cannot long endure . . . at least, not ‘long’ as measured in divine time.)
