Rorty and Kant on Ethics

The shift from the modern to the postmodern is sometimes described in terms of movement away from foundations, away from an anchor for reality, knowledge, and ethics. Richard Rorty diagnoses a sharp contrast between two constellations of moral views, Kantians and Hegelians. In advancing his theory, Rorty sides with the Hegelians against the Kantians: "If the Hegelians are right, then there are no ahistorical criteria for deciding when it is or is not a responsible act to desert a community, any more than for deciding when to change lovers or professions" ("Postmodernist Bourgeois Liberalism," in Pragmatism [ed. Menand], 330). Rorty's framework oversimplifies Kant's moral philosophy on the "ahistorical" matter, but as a heuristic it captures well an impulse -- namely, to derive ethical criteria from the human condition -- that runs from the Enlightenment, including Kant, to Rorty and beyond.

Butler and Rousseau on Identity

Discussions, often controversial ones, about same-sex marriage are largely, among other things, about one's gender identity.  And discussions about gender identity can vacillate from the deterministic pole ("I was born this way") to the performative pole ("I construct my own 'gender,' which might differ from my 'sex'").  A recent speech by Lori Watson, Director of the Women's and Gender Studies Program at the University of San Diego, illustrates especially the performative emphasis.  The speech was given in support of the Catholic university's Pride organization student group, which was organizing its 2nd Annual Drag Show.  In thinking about contemporary issues involving gender identity, I returned to the influential theorist Judith Butler.  Her 1990 book Gender Trouble is a seminal study of performativity that is influential in gender/queer circles such as Professor Watson's.

As I began Butler's 2004 book Undoing Gender, in which she clarifies her position on this passive/performative spectrum, I began to wonder about the pedigree of her central theoretical claims.  To what extent does her balancing act now between biological determinism and social construction resemble concerns about identity that also flowered in another era like the Enlightenment?

Although Judith Butler herself would likely not draw connections between her critique of gender and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s critique of the Enlightenment, some noteworthy echoes (and perhaps unacknowledged debts) exist. In particular, her insistence in Undoing Gender that gender “is a practice of improvisation within a scene of constraint” (p. 1) reflects, despite some important differences, a comparable tension that in his discourses Rousseau argued attended human self-invention in Enlightenment society: enslaving liberation, or alternatively liberated confinement. This similarity between Butler and Rousseau appears in several respects: recognition, the paradox of agency, and (in)authenticity.