The Ironic Politics of Richard Rorty
developments within the field of philosophy in recent years, and the implications of those developments for political thought and practice, might do well to begin with the works of Richard Rorty.' Rorty's writings do a great deal to clarify and synthesize themes from a wide range of important thinkers, including Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida, Habermas, Dewey, and Kuhn. Since much of his work consists of attempts to locate and explain his own writings in reference to these other thinkers, it provides a reference point from which to map current disputes within the postmodern movement.2 Also, Rorty's self-consciously American range of allusions and his jargon-free writing style make him more accessible to many than the works of continental philosophers. The attempt to understand Rorty's thinking does, however, present certain difficulties, despite his use of clear, even blunt language. Certain of his political views, for instance, carry connotations of human nature and natural rights which seem incompatible with his overall anti-essentialist outlook. A related difficulty is the question of whether Rorty's own writings reflect the sort of rhetorical strategies which, he argues, should replace the rigid and universalistic logics of traditional philosophy. Since Rorty's recent books consist of articles and lectures composed throughout the 1980s for various purposes, I shall attempt in this essay to provide a systematic outline of Rorty's major themes.3 In the first section I shall explore his views of reality and science, self and society, including his response to charges of "relativity" as self-refuting
The Ethics of Difference in the Zhuangzi
Most ethical systems that we are familiar with are, to a greater or lesser extent, what I regard as ethics of commonality, as they assume that all human beings are similar, if not the same, in all morally relevant senses. Thus what is the right thing to do to one person must be the right thing to do to another, and what I would like to be done unto me must be what others would like to be done unto them. I argue in this essay that such an ethics, if it ever has been appropriate, is no longer when we are living in an increasingly global village, where we have daily interactions with people who are very different from us in terms of ideas and ideals, interests and preferences, habits and customs, and cultures and religions. While there have been strong criticisms of such an ethics of commonality, particularly in contemporary philosophy, such criticisms have been characteristically relativistic, which makes it almost impossible to make any moral judgments. In this essay, inspired by one of the most important Chinese Daoist classics, the Zhuangzi, I develop an ethics of difference, which pays full attention to individual differences without falling into relativism (at least not any type of relativism that is problematic and that we are familiar with). According to such an ethics of difference, whether an action is morally right or wrong should be ultimately determined by the recipient of this action.
Crossing Borders: Time, Memory, and the Construction of Identity in Song of the Exile
This article analyzes the construction of memory in Ann Hui's Song of the Exile as it intersects with issues of cultural identity, national allegory, and women's autobiographies.