4
justice. A fuller, less qualified embrace of the idea of character would accomplish two
things for Rorty: to reinvigorate the quest for social justice associated with the
Whitmanesque project of achieving our country that has become the hallmark of his more
recent work; and to provide the kind of contingent yet nonetheless ethically robust
grounding necessary for him to defend the “fundamental premise” of his pragmatism,
namely, that "a belief can still regulate action, can still be thought worth dying for,
among people who are quite aware that this belief is caused by nothing deeper than
contingent historical circumstance" (CIS 189).
As historian James Kloppenberg has argued, however, contemporary pragmatists
like Rorty and Fish, see the ethical and political consequences of their pragmatism as far
less central to their projects than did the classical figures, like James and Dewey.
7
Indeed, not only do both Rorty and Fish appear distinctly uncomfortable drawing
connections between their pragmatist philosophies and any conception of individual
character, on occasion they have articulated strident arguments against such linkages. I
argue that this is partly the result of the conflation of different senses of character and an
general undertheorization of the concept of character in contemporary discourse.
8
There is a liberal tradition of thinking about character, understood as self-
cultivation, with Romantic origins that receives expression via the idea of Bildung or self-
culture in the work of Wilhelm von Humboldt and resonates in the thought of Mill and
Matthew Arnold. This tradition parallels and sometimes intersects the Emersonian strand
in American thought that runs through Whitman, whose Democratic Vistas has its own
ties to Mill, to James, Dewey, and ultimately thinkers like Lionel Trilling and Rorty.
Dewey, in particular, linked a notion of self-realization as growth as a "moral criterion"
Convention