3
suffering by insulating it from the disruptions and dangers associated with unfettered self-
development (CIS 63, 85).
I argue that Rorty’s severing of individual self-cultivation from the pursuit of
social justice through his public-private divide undermines his larger reformist project,
and attempt to suggest how relaxing his strictures on individual self-creative energies will
reanimate the political goals of his pragmatism. Taking greatest issue with Rorty’s
appropriation of Mill, whom he reads through Isaiah Berlin, I claim that rather than
suggesting we "leave people’s private lives alone," Mill viewed inner self-reform as a
crucial concomitant to the reform of society and institutions. Indeed, this is the crucial
insight he derives from his youthful mental or psychological crisis – namely, that
institutional reform pursued independently of self-cultivation and to the neglect of "the
internal culture of the individual" and "the cultivation of the feelings" runs the risk of
becoming a hollow invocation of ideals that results in indifference and stagnation, or
worse, a paralyzing disenchantment.
The cultivation of character for Mill is also needed to remedy the lack of self-
reliance that leads citizens to look to the majority rather than to forge their own views.
5
This is significant because Rorty has come to see the pragmatist rejection of
representationalism and the move away from seeing human beings as answerable to
either God, Truth, and Reality as a movement toward increasing self-reliance.
6
Yet while Mill, like other precursors of the pragmatist tradition, including
Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman, defended self-cultivation as a means of strengthening
the democratic public, Rorty claims conversely that his sharply delineated realms are
required to keep individual self-creative energies from undermining the quest for social
Convention