Journal of Discourse Review
Open Access Humanitarian scholarship
7 days
Time to first decision
Open Access Humanitarian scholarship
Time to first decision
Volume: 1 Issue: 3
Year: 2025, Page: 221-228,
Received: Aug. 30, 2025 Accepted: Sept. 15, 2025 Published: Oct. 27, 2025
The paper explores Richard Rorty's novel approach to individual identity, emphasizing its narrative and contingent nature, and its implications for fostering solidarity in contemporary society. There have been several attempts since the Greek period to the modern times to have dwelled in to the notion of subjectivity. However, in particular to Descartes’ cogito, the vast majority of modern philosophers regarded it as an ontological problem, investigating into ‘what is self’ rather, concentrating on the entirety of ‘self’, itself. Although, it was Freud who had shifted the narrative from ‘what’ to ‘how’ and ‘who.’ Nevertheless, the legitimacy and the relevance of the concept have been questioned by several contemporary thinkers which can be grouped into various extremes, giving us interdisciplinary answers to ‘who,’ ‘what’ and ‘how’ notion of self, subjectivity and identity is, and can be. So, the primary aim of this paper is to elucidate how Rorty's anti-essentialist perspective on identity, influenced by Hume's skepticism and Nietzsche's creative subjectivity, challenges traditional notions of selfhood and promotes a more fluid understanding of individual and social identity keeping in mind the objectives of examining the interplay between language, memory, and social interaction in constructing identity, and analyzing the role of irony and solidarity in ethical and intercultural contexts. Furthermore, the study would imply significant outlook in understanding identity in a globalized world marked by intercultural conflicts and ethical relativism, offering a pathway for reconciling individual and collective identities in diverse socio-cultural landscapes.
Keywords: Self; Narrative Identity; Rorty; Contingency; Solidarity, Intercultural Ethics.
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© 2025 JDR Academic Trust. This is an open-access publication distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0). https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Aliya. (2025). Self as a Tissue of Contingencies: Rorty’s Model of Narrative Identity and Solidarity. Journal of Discourse Review, 1(3), 221-228.