This essay brings Hans Blumenberg and Richard Rorty into dialogue to examine how contingency shapes the human form of life. Despite divergent traditions—Blumenberg’s phenomenologicalanthropology and Rorty’s pragmatist anti-essentialism—both treat contingency as the defining feature of human existence. For Blumenberg, contingency signifies the absolutism of reality: humanity’sexposure to a world without necessity. Culture emerges as a fragile act of self-preservation through distance, creating meaning amid uncertainty. His metaphorology shows how absolute metaphors orient life where conceptual thought fails, stabilizing experience under contingent conditions and sustaining collective memory. Rorty, conversely, interprets contingency as liberation. His liberal ironist embraces the historicity of vocabularies and seeks continual self-creation through redescription. Rejecting metaphysical foundations, Rorty situates philosophy within cultural politics, where new metaphors expand empathy and freedom by replacing argument with imaginative speech. The essay identifies Blumenberg’s aesthetic liberalism as a counterpart to Rorty’s aesthetic pragmatism: both conceive philosophy as rhetorical invention rather than foundational doctrine. Reading them together reveals contingency as both risk and resource—threat and opportunity for creativity, memory, and renewal. Philosophy thus appears not as the search for certainty but as a contingent, poetic practice that continually reshapes human self-understanding.
Mendelssohn and Cavell both use Shakespeare’s Othello to motivate and illustrate their thoughts about skepticism. This striking parallel, philosophically unexplored thus far, receives its first in-depth treatment in this paper. It delineates their differences and commonalities in thinking about skepticism and human self-alienation. It also brings out their joint metaphilosophical vision in opposition to a current trend. That trend casts traditional philosophical problems as artificial or unreal, and thus as avoidable. A prime example, particularly on debates about truth and skepticism, is Rortyian ironism: it proposes to move beyond such debates and towards an “ironic” outlook that privileges literature over philosophy in finding the right “vocabulary” no longer beset by skeptical doubts. Mendelssohn and Cavell conversely insist on the pervasiveness of skepticism and philosophical problems in the everyday: they see us human beings as always vulnerable to skeptical worries that render us alien unto ourselves. What is more, both agree that literature serves to bring out rather than escape these pervasive problems. The upshot of the paper is a better understanding of this Mendelssohnian-Cavellian parallel, and of the stakes of skepticism as dependent on our human vulnerability to self-alienation.
The present mini-edition makes available Richard Rorty’s lecture course “Philosophy 333, Philosophy From Kant to 1900,”1 delivered at Princeton University in the winter term (February-April) of 1982.
This article takes a look at Rorty’s posthumously published book “Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism.” In this work, he pursues a new line of thought unknown from other texts, in which he presents the shortcomings of the traditional Enlightenment. As being focused on practical freedom, it neglects to carry through with the same line of thought for theoretical thought (epistemology), shunning authorities in thinking as well. Indeed, only in refusing to bow before authorities also in theoretical considerations can the human race achieve freedom. Rorty thus shows himself to be closer to traditional German philosophy than otherwise acknowledged.
