Dwie koncepcje ironii - Richard Rorty i Friedrich Schlegel

Abstract

Richard Rorty, one of the most controversial and, at the same time, most important philosophersof postmodernism, refers in his works to the most important thinking threads of Romanticismmany a time. What he considers particularly significant for the culture of the West isthe emphasis the Romantics put on the issue of self-creation of an individual, and a creative attitudeto the language, as well as philosophy openness to the issue of world unrecognizability anda linguistic nature of many “truths”. In Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, Rorty outlines a visionof the culture created by ironists-intellectuals making themselves aware of the passing nature ofthe language, world and individual self. In this theory one can notice a series of analogies to theconception of Friedrich Schlegl’s conception of Romantic irony, the most important of which isaccentuating a creative power of language, the possibility of self-creation, as well as particularfunctions of literature and philosophy in the culture, and the issue of a critical distance to sociallyestablished ideas.