Temptations and risks of an ethical utopia

The article deals with the ethical turn in philosophy and literary theory. Special attention is paid to Richard Rorty’s conception of non-prescriptive ethics, which forms the basis for the vision of an ideal democratic society. This inspiring, comprehensive and controversial thought about a liberal, tolerant, just and diverse society, formed by literature and ethical reading, is reconstructed, analysed and discussed. The author claims that responsibility is an essential element of postmodernist ethics and shows three areas which it relates to: responsibility for the text, for the reader’s experience and for the reader’s identity. These three areas concern individual experience and private reading, but Rorty attempts to connect them with the public sphere and organization of a society. The author advances a thesis that this is not possible and that we cannot derive a tolerant and diverse democratic society from ethical reading without joining ethics with politics. In the work of the famous American pragmatist, contrary to the author’s thesis, the world where tolerance wins with prejudice is not the consequence of postmodern ethics and literature, but the effect of accepting the dictionary of neopragmatism.

The article deals with the ethical turn in philosophy and literary theory. Special attention is paid to Richard Rorty’s conception of non-prescriptive ethics, which forms the basis for the vision of an ideal democratic society. This inspiring, comprehensive and controversial thought about a liberal, tolerant, just and diverse society, formed by literature and ethical reading, is reconstructed, analysed and discussed. The author claims that responsibility is an essential element of postmodernist ethics and shows three areas which it relates to: responsibility for the text, for the reader’s experience and for the reader’s identity. These three areas concern individual experience and private reading, but Rorty attempts to connect them with the public sphere and organization of a society. The author advances a thesis that this is not possible and that we cannot derive a tolerant and diverse democratic society from ethical reading without joining ethics with politics. In the work of the famous American pragmatist, contrary to the author’s thesis, the world where tolerance wins with prejudice is not the consequence of postmodern ethics and literature, but the effect of accepting the dictionary of neopragmatism.