Getting into some good stuff lately, most recently Richard Rorty's
Contingency, Irony and Solidarity. It's a really great, very accessible work of philosophy where Rorty basically adopts a literary-theory/criticism approach, and he makes great use of writers like Proust alongside thinkers such as Heidegger and Derrida.
His claim (which is a pragmatist/ironist one) is essentially that we must stop trying to square our own individual authenticity and being with an image of society (i.e. we should abandon the belief that a model of individual being can be successfully molded into, or grafted onto, a utopian model of society). In order to separate these pursuits, he says that individual thinkers/writers can be said to create their own personal understanding of their place in society and history, but that this understanding shouldn't be held up to the status of a universal character applicable to all human being(s). Individuals can create their own sublimity, but should not project it or (at worst) enforce it onto others; the latter, or course, often results in acts of atrocity perpetrated against specific marginalized groups (an example would be Heidegger's affiliation with and sympathy for the Nazis, culminating in him even selling out Husserl and championing Hitler for the removal of Jews from the universities).
Sublimity, thus, should be left to private creation; public politics and society, on the other hand, should be left un-sublimated, and should strive merely for a state of "decency." While self-creation, or private authenticity, can be a messy and complicated affair, we should avoid projecting this complexity into public life. Public politics, Rorty claims, should remain "untheoretical and simpleminded."
I'm not sure I agree with the claim, but it's certainly true that all historical efforts to combine individual self-creation with political utopianism have ended in, at best, failure; and at worst, ethical and physical disaster.
