When it comes to religion, Richard Rorty thinks belief is a matter of “cultural politics,” that is, instead of trying to find some rational basis for religion, we should ask whether religious beliefs and practices are conducive to human flourishing or not. It is up to particular communities to make their case that their religion facilitates social and political goals. That is a matter of cultural politics, as opposed to philosophizing on ontological questions about what supernatural entities, if any, exist. Having relaxed evidentialist restrictions against religious beliefs, Rorty insists that religious beliefs are best when they are private and subjective. Religion is like poetry, which can be intensely meaningful for individuals’ lives, and it should be assessed as such. Indeed, he endorses a spirituality of sorts, along these lines. But when religious beliefs are brought into public discourse to support or oppose a policy or a law, they stop conversation short. Ultimately, Rorty acknowledges we shouldn’t prohibit such appeals to religion, but we should discourage and oppose them when they support oppression and inequality.

One of the most remarkable aspects of Richard Rorty’s legacy is the sheer variety of the philosophical imprint from which has thought was formed. His thought not only ranged across Analytic, Continental, and of course Pragmatist philosophy but extended as well into engagements with history, literary criticism, and a wealth of novels. Rorty’s command of such a wide philosophical range is expressive of a kind of metaphilosophical pluralism that was largely missing in his own philosophical milieu and which continues to be sorely needed today. This essay characterizes Rorty’s metaphilosophical pluralism. It begins with an excavation of Rorty’s metaphilosophy in terms of his signature idea of vocabularies. With this in view, it then turns to a neglected source for Rorty’s metaphilosophical pluralism. This source is found in an unexpected branch within philosophical pragmatism, namely that of his onetime teacher, Richard McKeon. Like other pluralisms that preceded his, Rorty’s metaphilosophy will be of enormous value just so long as philosophy remains unsettled about how to account for its disagreements, which is to say just so long as philosophy generates needs for addressing metaphilosophical questions, which is effectively to say just so long as there is such a thing as philosophy.

Taking as its starting point Rorty’s marked turn to the literary, this chapter focuses particularly on the philosopher’s key concept of “redemption.” A fascinating yet significantly undertheorized aspect of his late work, redemption for Rorty carries spiritual as well as secular significance. It relates to the power of the literary imagination and becomes increasingly important in his consideration of solidarity and social justice. We will explore the development of this concept in Rorty’s oeuvre with particular reference to John Boyne’s 2017 novel, The Heart’s Invisible Furies. Uniting the work of Rorty and Boyne, we will argue, is a critique of standard religious practice and an affirmation of the human as ultimately redemptive.

This chapter examines the erotic theories of classical Islamic culture. While this culture differs greatly from that of pre-modern Japan, examined in the next chapter, they nevertheless share a distinctive feature. Both are significantly derivative cultures. As Islamic culture built heavily on Jewish, Christian, Greek, Persian, and Indian traditions, so Japan borrowed extensively from Chinese culture, not only its form of writing and its arts but also its distinctive Zen version of Buddhism, derived from China’s Chan Buddhist tradition. Both cultures, moreover, postdate the famous “axial age” that essentially defined Western, Indian, and Chinese thought. Coined by Karl Jaspers (perhaps building on the work of Max Weber), the notion of the axial age defines a period stretching from 800 to 200 BCE that encompasses the founding thinkers of Western and Asian civilizations. These include Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle in Greece, the Hebrew prophets in Israel, Zarathustra in Persia, the Buddha and the writers of the Upanishads in India, and, in China, Confucius, Mozi, the legendary Laozi, and Zhuangzi.1 Key to the axial age was a sense of the crumbling of old ideas and their replacement by a new form of thinking that posited an ideal transcendental order beyond the ordinary mundane world and affirmed the active role of intellectual elites to reshape the world in terms of that transcendental vision. As the birth of Islam and the burgeoning of Japanese culture both postdate the axial age, so their erotic theories display their belated, derivative status.

The Latin term ars erotica, while sometimes referring to works of fine art with overtly erotic content, is more notably used to designate skilled methods or styles of lovemaking that are thereby elevated with the honorific term “art.” This notion of the art of love – with its various techniques, strategies, and aims – is the principal focus of this study. In what way, however, is such art truly artistic in the aesthetic sense that theorists of art and beauty have traditionally identified with art and have persistently sought to explain? This book, an exploratory essay of philosophical somaesthetics, provides materials for answering this question by examining the most influential ways that ars erotica has been theorized in different historical cultures and periods.1 To what extent those past cultures actually practiced such erotic methods lies beyond our scope of inquiry, which is essentially theoretical. Though historically informed, the book aims at exploring key philosophical ideas and arguments rather than providing a full-blown cultural history of lovemaking. Its study of past theory has the forward-looking goal of helping us to avoid possible blind spots in our current understanding of lovemaking by revisiting some elements of ancient erotic thought.

Of all the ancient sexual traditions, India’s is the most prominent in our contemporary erotic consciousness, where its founding text, the Kamasutra, often serves as a symbol or synonym for the general field of ars erotica. Although Chinese sexual theory is probably older and may have influenced Indian sexual mysticism (particularly in its use of coitus reservatus and injaculation), there is no reason to view Indian erotology as derivative. It has a distinctively rich and original character that easily rivals China’s, and this character is profoundly aesthetic. If one construes Foucault’s notion of ars erotica as implying an emphasis on the aesthetic pleasures and artfulness of lovemaking in contrast to a scientia sexualis that focused on truth and health (whether physical, mental, or spiritual), then Indian erotic theory provides a better paradigm for such art. While China’s sexual theory drew most heavily on medical texts and derived its concern for pleasure from the key medical aims of health and progeny, Indian erotology drew most heavily on the fine arts and their sensuous aesthetic pleasures, especially the traditional Indian art of drama, which was also an art of dance. Nonetheless, Indian sexual theory cannot fully support Foucault’s sharp distinction between esoteric ars erotica and scientia sexualis, because it defines itself in essentially scientific terms as providing knowledge about empirical matters based on observation. Moreover, this knowledge was openly published in texts articulating principles and rules rather than focusing on recondite skills secretly transmitted by an expert master to carefully chosen pupils.1

Traditionally known as “the good book” and certainly a rich treasury of wide-ranging wisdom and poetic beauty, the Bible is not a good source for erotic artistry. Despite its frequent accounts of sexual encounters whose diversity extends to same-sex relations and incest, we find no substantial vision of ars erotica and indeed almost no concern for the aesthetics of lovemaking. Given the Bible’s enormously formative influence on Western culture, its ancient neglect of sexual aesthetics has cast a very long historical shadow, discouraging even nonreligious thinkers from theorizing lovemaking in aesthetic terms while even leading some to view the aesthetic and the erotic as fundamentally in conflict. Before examining, in Chapter 8, how Western erotic thought has struggled with its biblical roots, we should explore the Bible’s treatment of sexuality and probe deeper into some of the logical reasons for its neglect of aesthetic eroticism.

The Greeks provided Western culture with the foundations for whatever aesthetic richness its erotic theory enjoys. This includes the paradoxical eros of chastity that Christianity developed by drawing on Greek models of philosophical idealism and asceticism, whose influence continued through the Roman Empire when Christianity absorbed them. The richness of Greek erotic thought lies partly in its multiple ambiguities, and part of this ambiguity can be traced to the polysemic polytheism of Greek religion, whose influence on Roman civilization also impacted its erotic theory. Although the Greek god Eros (whom the Romans called Cupid) gave eroticism its name, he was not the only god central to Greek views of lovemaking and sexual desire. Aphrodite, goddess of love and beauty (known as Venus in Rome), also played a defining role. Moreover, within each of these two seemingly singular Greek gods we find a nest of divergent personae or meanings. Greek mythology provides us with at least three different forms of the god Eros. The first Eros to appear, in Hesiod’s Theogony (116), is not the familiar chubby, child-like, winged son of Aphrodite. Instead, Hesiod portrays Eros as one of the very first or oldest gods, existing before the birth of Aphrodite and the other Olympians. “Verily at the first Chaos [Air] came to be, but next wide-bosomed Earth [Gaia], the ever-sure foundation of all the deathless ones who hold the peaks of snowy Olympus, and dim Tartarus [Hell] in the depth of the wide-pathed Earth, and Eros [Love], fairest among the deathless gods, who unnerves the limbs and overcomes the mind and wise counsels of all gods and all men within them.”1