The Contingency of Value: Sartre, Rorty, and the Burden of Moral Foundation
Abstract
Both Jean-Paul Sartre and Richard Rorty mount devastating critiques against the existence of pre-ordained, universal moral foundations, rejecting the notion of an objective human essence or an ahistorical Archimedean point for value. Despite this shared anti-foundationalist starting point, they arrive at profoundly different conclusions regarding the existential burden placed upon the individual. Sartre frames this lack of external validation as a radical condemnation, plunging the solitary agent into inescapable anguish and absolute responsibility. Conversely, Rorty adopts a pragmatic view, contextualizing our ethical commitments within historical contingency and replacing metaphysical dread with the social cultivation of human solidarity. This paper examines how each thinker responds to the threat of moral nihilism. Ultimately, it argues that Rorty’s pragmatic turn toward solidarity does not successfully escape or resolve the existential anguish Sartre identifies; rather, it functions as a psychological defense mechanism that temporarily obscures the individual’s radical, irreducible responsibility.
I. Introduction: The Death of the Absolute
For centuries, Western ethical philosophy sought to ground human morality in a series of immutable absolutes, anchoring right action to divine command, natural law, or the transcendental structures of human reason. However, the mid-to-late twentieth century witnessed a radical philosophical convergence that systematically dismantled these traditional scaffolds. Jean-Paul Sartre, writing from the crucible of European existentialism, and Richard Rorty, working from the tradition of American neopragmatism, both assert that values possess no cosmic or metaphysical foundation.
Yet, when the absolute is stripped away, human beings are left to confront the vacuum of moral contingency. The collapse of these grand narratives exposes a fundamental question: how can we sustain ethical commitments in a universe devoid of inherent value? While both thinkers fiercely reject moral nihilism, their paths diverge when mapping the psychological and structural consequences of this vacancy. Sartre demands that we look directly into the void, bearing the full, agonizing weight of our self-creation. Rorty, by contrast, suggests that we look sideways—at each other—building an inclusive social fabric that requires no cosmic permission to exist.
II. Sartre and the Radiance of Anguish
In his foundational lecture Existentialism is a Humanism, Jean-Paul Sartre establishes the premier axiom of existential thought: existence precedes essence. For objects manufactured with a specific purpose—such as a paper knife—essence precedes existence; the artisan conceives of the object's utility and design before physically creating it. Traditional theology and rationalist philosophy viewed human beings through this exact mechanical lens, assuming a divine creator or a universal human nature defined our moral purpose from the outset.
Sartre shatters this assumption. If God does not exist, there is at least one being who exists before he can be defined by any concept: human reality. Man simply is. He does not possess a pre-determined blueprint; he is nothing other than what he makes of himself.
SARTREAN ONTOLOGICAL SEQUENCE
┌──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ Step 1: Raw Existence (Man Is) │
└────────────────────────────┬─────────────────────────────┘
│
▼
┌──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ Step 2: Act of Choice (Radical Self-Projection) │
└────────────────────────────┬─────────────────────────────┘
│
▼
┌──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ Step 3: Essence/Value Created Retroactively (Responsibility)│
└──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
This absolute autonomy, however, is not a liberating cause for celebration; it is a profound existential sentence. Sartre famously declares that man is "condemned to be free." We are condemned because we did not create ourselves, yet we are entirely free because, once thrust into the world, we are responsible for everything we do.
This realization triggers what Sartre defines as anguish (l'angoisse). Anguish must not be confused with simple fear; fear is directed at external objects, whereas anguish is the mind's confrontation with its own absolute freedom of choice. When an individual chooses a moral path, they do not merely choose for themselves. Because there are no objective guidelines, the individual’s choice serves as a monument of what a human being ought to be. To choose is to legislate value for all humankind.
Sartre illustrates this total responsibility through his famous example of a student torn between staying to care for his lonely mother or leaving to join the Free French Forces to fight fascism. No ethical system—neither Christian charity nor Kantian duty—can resolve this dilemma for the young man. If he seeks advice from a priest or a philosopher, he has already chosen which advisor to consult, implicitly choosing the color of the answer he receives. The student is entirely alone, forced to invent his own morality on the spot, carrying the total responsibility of his choice without a single external alibi.
III. Rorty and the Comfort of Contingency
Decades later, in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Richard Rorty approaches the absence of moral foundations from a radically different angle. Rather than viewing the collapse of metaphysics as a source of existential dread, Rorty treats it as an invitation to political maturity. Utilizing an American pragmatic framework, Rorty argues that our language, our concepts of selfhood, and our moral values are entirely products of historical contingency. They are historical accidents, shaped by language games and social evolutionary shifts rather than matching an objective reality out there in the world.
Rorty introduces his premier psychological archetype: the liberal ironist.
A liberal is someone who believes that cruelty is the worst thing we can do.
An ironist is someone who faces up to the contingency of their own most central beliefs and desires—someone historicist and nominalist enough to abandon the idea that their central convictions refer to an intrinsic, non-human reality.
RORTY'S LIBERAL IRONIST
┌──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ THE LIBERAL │
│ "Cruelty is the worst thing we do." │
└────────────────────────────┬─────────────────────────────┘
│ (Synthesized via Pragmatism)
▼
┌──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ THE IRONIST │
│ "My moral vocabulary is historically contingent." │
└──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
For Rorty, the threat of moral nihilism is an artificial problem generated by a stubborn attachment to Platonism. The nihilist panics only because they still cling to the outdated assumption that a value must be eternal and universal to be meaningful. Once we discard the demand for cosmic validation, we realize that the lack of an objective foundation does not make our standard vocabularies useless. A tool does not need a divine origin to help us build a community.
Instead of navigating Sartre’s internal abyss, Rorty redirects our energy outward toward the pragmatic cultivation of human solidarity. Rorty defines solidarity not as a latent metaphysical essence shared by all humans, but as a continuous imaginative achievement. It is the hard work of expanding our moral boundaries to see unfamiliar people as "fellow sufferers."
We do not achieve solidarity through abstract philosophical arguments about universal human rights. Rather, we build it through cultural products—novels, journalism, films, and ethnographies—that make us sensitive to the distinct varieties of pain inflicted on others. By replacing the search for universal truth with the search for social justice, Rorty attempts to defuse existential panic entirely, turning the individual away from agonizing self-scrutiny and toward democratic community building.
IV. Comparative Synthesis: Responses to Nihilism
Sartre and Rorty offer competing blueprints for navigating an anti-foundationalist universe, summarizing their conceptual differences across key philosophical dimensions:
Sartre’s response to moral nihilism requires achieving fierce authenticity. To succumb to nihilism or to claim that one "cannot help" acting a certain way is to fall into bad faith (mauvaise foi)—the act of pretending we are passive objects rather than free agents. The authentic individual acknowledges the void, accepts their absolute isolation, and creates value through the sheer momentum of committed action.
Rorty’s response to nihilism, conversely, relies on imaginative hope. He argues that looking for a non-human anchor for our moral vocabulary is a form of cognitive immaturity—a lingering desire for a parental god-figure to tell us what to do. For Rorty, nihilism is bypassed when we realize that our shared aversion to pain and cruelty is all the foundation we need to build a compassionate society.
V. Critical Evaluation: Does Solidarity Erase Anguish?
We now confront the critical core of the debate: is Rorty’s pragmatic move toward solidarity a successful escape from Sartrean anguish, or does it merely obscure the individual’s radical responsibility?
Rorty’s framework offers an attractive, comforting alternative to existential dread, but its comfort comes at a steep philosophical cost. By placing the source of value within historical contingency and peer agreement, Rorty effectively shifts the burden of ethical choice from the isolated individual to the surrounding social collective. He implies that our moral choices are largely guided by the historical vocabulary we happen to inherit.
This shift, from a Sartrean perspective, is the ultimate manifestation of bad faith. Rorty’s pragmatic turn works as a clever psychological buffer designed to hide a terrifying truth: society does not choose; only the individual chooses. When Rorty instructs us to focus on the vocabulary of our community to avoid cruelty, he glides over the terrifying moments when a community’s vocabulary is precisely what justifies cruelty.
┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ THE INTELLECTUAL LIMIT OF SOLIDARITY │
├─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│ Rorty's Pragmatism: Look to social consensus to evaluate actions. │
├─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│ The Sartrean Critique: Social consensus can normalize systematic evil. │
│ The individual remains the ultimate judge. │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
Consider an agent living within a historically contingent, highly cooperative totalitarian society. If that agent looks exclusively to social consensus to guide their actions, they remain trapped within the dominant ideology. Rorty's ironist can easily look at systemic evil and shrug it off as an unfortunate historical language game.
It is precisely in these dark historical turning points that Rorty’s solidarity fractures, revealing that it cannot erase Sartrean anguish. The moment an individual must decide whether to conform to their community’s vocabulary or rebel against it, they are cast back into Sartre’s isolated space. They discover that the historical community cannot make the choice for them.
Rorty’s neopragmatism does not solve or outgrow existential anxiety. Instead, it builds a comfortable home over an active fault line. The pragmatic focus on solidarity creates a useful social playground, but it cannot dissolve the cold, underlying reality that every individual remains completely alone, holding the radical responsibility to invent who they are with every single choice.
VI. Conclusion
Ultimately, Jean-Paul Sartre and Richard Rorty reveal two necessary, deeply entwined dimensions of the post-metaphysical world. Rorty provides a beautiful, indispensable map for social engineering, showing how democratic societies can cultivate compassion and reduce cruelty without needing a divine mandate. His vision of human solidarity reminds us that our shared vulnerabilities are more than enough reason to build a just world.
However, this social project cannot escape its existential foundations. As Sartre brilliantly demonstrates, social institutions and historical vocabularies do not possess an autonomous life of their own; they are continuously sustained, modified, or destroyed by the radical choices of individual agents. Solidarity is not an accidental wave of historical momentum; it is an active choice made by individuals who choose to stand with their fellow human beings.
By grounding ethics in the unyielding reality of individual choice, Sartre ensures that we cannot hide behind social norms to excuse our personal actions. Value remains contingent, and because it is contingent, it remains a heavy burden. We can use Rorty’s solidarity to build a better world, but we must use Sartre’s authenticity to look clearly into our own hearts, acknowledging that we are, and always will be, the sole authors of our moral destinies.
Works Cited
Kant, Immanuel. Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals. Translated by Mary Gregor, Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science. Translated by Walter Kaufmann, Vintage Books, 1974.
Rorty, Richard. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge University Press, 1989.
---. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton University Press, 1979.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness. Translated by Hazel E. Barnes, Washington Square Press, 1993.
---. Existentialism is a Humanism. Translated by Carol Macomber, Yale University Press, 2007.
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