A Rorty Appreciation from the Chronicle of Higher Ed
| From the issue dated June 29, 2007 |
Richard Rorty (1931-2007): the View From Somewhere
When Richard Rorty turned 75 last October, no symposia, conferences, or Festschriften marked the occasion. Such academic nods require true-believing disciples. Philosophy as a discipline spawns them like trout — middle-aged professors with the souls of eternal teaching assistants — but great originals like Rorty don't attract them. For the most high-impact American philosopher of the past 30 years, the silence at 75 confirmed a hoary truth: You can love philosophy, but it will never love you back — not if you piss off the professional philosophers or, worse, endanger them. Even his death this June from pancreatic cancer attracted more notice and encomia from outside the field than within.
The big chill began with his 1970s apostasy from positivistic analytic philosophy. We Princeton University philosophy majors, hatching into the field at the time, watched it happen. The department, smug with its No. 1 ranking among analytic philosophers, proud of Saul Kripke, Donald Davidson, and others, was slightly embarrassed by Nietzsche scholar Walter Kaufmann and Rorty, a developing maverick with dour wit who'd recently edited one of analytic philosophy's most widely used anthologies, The Linguistic Turn (University of Chicago Press, 1967). For many of us, Rorty functioned as the truth teller, an ironic role for a thinker who became known as an "ironist" skeptical of truth.
Princeton philosophy professors and grad students at that time liked to act as if any work not mimeographed within the past three years, and circulated exclusively in the department, was probably too passé to be worth studying. Rorty, by contrast, stood for reading widely in both historical and analytic philosophy, for not dissing a thinker before you'd read her or him. As his work-study assistant in the mid-70s, I noticed one similarity among many volumes in his McCosh Hall office. They lacked the crisp pages of new books that later became familiar to me as a critic who receives hundreds weekly. He'd turned many of those pages. Years later, Harvard philosopher Hilary Putnam would tell me, "I don't know anyone who reads more than Dick does."
Rorty's synoptic bent set him apart from many colleagues. At Princeton the strongest contrast came with a professor who taught philosophy of language. Once, after making some putatively universalist point in class about sentences, that professor followed, with his trademark half-smirk, by commenting, "I think this is true in French. Anyone here know French? And I believe it's true in German, but I'm not sure." His students were embarrassed for him, but he didn't notice.
Rorty's most crucial deviation from colleagues came in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton University Press, 1979). In the shrinking Fach of academic philosophy — its territory truncated by psychology, invaded by literature, long ago reduced by natural science — Rorty challenged the theory of knowledge, the last remaining crop philosophy professors could sell to overlord deans and presidents, and declared it practically carcinogenic.
Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, followed quickly by Consequences of Pragmatism (University of Minnesota Press, 1982), signaled Rorty's midlife break with his past as a quasi-scientific philosopher who believed that "philosophy makes progress." As if exiting a phone booth, he'd emerged as a red-white-and-blue Nietzsche, philosophizing with a hammer meant to bring down Western philosophy's 2,500-year-old essentialist, ahistorical tradition of dissecting capitalized abstractions such as "Truth," "Knowledge," and "Meaning." One explanation couldn't fit all cultures, times, and languages, he argued, and 20th-century positivistic philosophy's hope that it could be a handmaiden to science had proved an illusion.
Instead, Rorty celebrated and revived the democratic, public-spirited pragmatism of William James and John Dewey as "the chief glory of our country's intellectual tradition." He now shared their belief that philosophical concepts operated not as eternal verities but as demarcators of distinctions that, in Charles Peirce's famous edict, had to make a difference in practice. He bemoaned how professional philosophers had become "isolated from the rest of culture."
Rorty further outraged the analytic philosophical establishment by drawing on the work of its most prestigious senior figures, notably W.V.O. Quine, Wilfred Sellars, and Donald Davidson, to construct a tale about modern philosophy meant to stop epistemology in its tracks. As final salt in the wound, Rorty, true to his syncretic ambitions, suggested that such still-controversial figures in modern philosophy as Ludwig Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger, the latter notorious as the opaque German philosopher analysts loved to hate, might possess philosophical wisdom they needed to hear.
Rorty's new views started off unconventional, and grew more so over the 1980s and 90s. He insisted that the theory of knowledge as mirrorlike representation of the world in language had imploded from within; that scientific method in philosophy amounted to a myth; that we should see philosophy and science as forms of literature; that one could avoid realism without adopting relativism; that philosophy might best be understood as conversation, not a tribunal for judging other types of knowledge. As a result, his slow distancing from professional philosophers began. He left the Princeton philosophy department in 1982 for a broader humanities professorship at the University of Virginia, then headed to the Stanford comparative-literature department in 1998 for his final years.
But the discipline's attempted marginalization of him didn't work, or, at best, only in its most hermetic precincts. Lifted by both his ideas and his punchy journalistic prose, he won readers across the intellectual world. By the turn of the century, philosophers in cities as diverse as Helsinki, Paris, Oxford, Seoul, São Paolo, and Rome clashed over their positions on his work. Broader intellectual honors piled up: a MacArthur Fellowship; the Northcliffe Lectures in London; the Clark Lectures at Trinity College, Cambridge; endless citations in indexes; a Rorty and His Critics volume; a wave of secondary works. He'd achieved the stature of being, like Habermas in Germany or Derrida in France, a major — if not the major — philosopher of his country.
Rorty's death begins the process of asking crucial questions about his legacy. Did he stop epistemology cold? Of course not. Has the Enlightenment stopped otherwise rational people from believing organized religion's most palpable nonsense? No. Does watching American plans self-destruct in Iraq stop our policy? No. Does knowing that seat belts save lives and prevent grave injuries lead a smart fellow like New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine to wear one? No.
Getting things right and getting self-interested people to act on it are two different things. In the face of Rorty's devastating exposure of positivistic philosophy's ahistorical, pocket-full-of-examples approach to knowledge, philosophy professors largely kept to their program for the same reason Afghans keep growing poppies — it's either this, or we're out of business.
One effort to delegitimize Rorty's work rests on claims that he got everyone crucial to his work — Dewey, Heidegger, Wittgenstein — wrong. But specialist scholars on these figures typically confuse their agenda — trying to mirror and represent their subject's corpus — with Rorty's. It might seem that a thinker who stressed the contingency of vocabularies but kept adopting new tags for his position — "neo-Hegelian," "quietist," "polytheist" — suffered from self-contradiction. Such a view would misunderstand Rorty's unconcern for a vocabulary that "fit the world." A pragmatist to the end, Rorty saw adopting new terms the way a doctor sees alternate therapies: a set of options, one of which might solve "the problem," which was not representing the world, but achieving our purposes.
As a pragmatist, Rorty thus focused not on what a philosopher thought his work meant, but an understanding of that work that fit the larger philosophical vision in which Rorty believed. Philosopher Crispin Sartwell of Dickinson College tells the story of a UVa seminar on the German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer to which Rorty invited the great man. Rorty summarized Gadamer's views. Gadamer then protested in heavily accented English: "Dick, you've got me all wrong." Rorty, Sartwell recalls, grinned, shrugged, and replied, "Yes, Hans, but that's what you should have said."
For all that confidence, Rorty evolved as he matured. He slowly outgrew the notion, bred in him by his conditioning as an analytic philosopher, that he should keep his politics and his philosophy in separate corners. Addressing the Eleventh Inter-American Congress of Philosophy, in Guadalajara, Mexico, in 1985, Rorty declared that "we should not assume it is our task, as professors of philosophy, to be the avant-garde of political movements." By 1998 he'd published his first overtly political work, Achieving Our Country (Harvard University Press), which revealed him to be the "Irving Howe liberal" he once said he wanted to be. By this year, living under the death sentence of his diagnosis, canceling appearances and racing to finish two last projects, he'd come to understand that the natural consequences of his own worldview required engagement in "philosophy as cultural politics," the title he chose for the fourth and final volume of his papers from Cambridge University Press.
Always intellectually generous, he began in those pages to anoint as his philosophical successor Robert Brandom, of the University of Pittsburgh, his former student who similarly rejects a "representationalist" approach to knowledge. Rorty's final volume also displays all the standard Rortyean moves that remain open to criticism. Rorty's routine request that we simply stop asking certain questions ("Is the spatiotemporal world real?") or engaging in certain talk (such as about God's existence) contained no advice on what to do when the world turned down the request. Even here, his wish that one turn away from "anyone who purports to tell you how things really are" and switch to cultural politics ignores a key reality — that telling people how things really are forms a crucial part of cultural politics as actually practiced.
In the end, nonetheless, the "ironist" who popularized that term in contemporary humanistic criticism, and who credited the views of other thinkers so profligately that his rat-a-tat prose suffered only one semantic illness — runaway eponymous sentences beginning, "From a Sellarsian, Davidsonian, Brandomian, or Hegelian viewpoint" — proved more genuinely original and unique than any of the thinkers he deferred to. Unlike his former colleague at Princeton, Thomas Nagel, whose book, The View From Nowhere (Oxford University Press, 1986), sought to keep alive philosophical objectivity and the "ambition of transcendence," Rorty over the years articulated a convincing, imaginative "view from somewhere." He urged creative intellectual storytelling and resourceful vocabularies that assume context, tradition, and language matter.
In Philosophy and Social Hope (Penguin Books, 1999), one of his last books, Rorty wrote that he'd come to see the term "philosopher" as "the most appropriate description for somebody who remaps culture — who suggests a new and promising way for us to think about the relation among large areas of human activity." Bertrand Russell identified Rorty's peculiar cartographic achievement in advance. "To teach how to live without certainty," Russell wrote, "and yet without being paralyzed by hesitation, is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can still do for those who study it."
Richard Rorty did that — magnificently and magisterially.
Carlin Romano, critic at large for The Chronicle and literary critic for The Philadelphia Inquirer, teaches philosophy and media theory at the University of Pennsylvania.
http://chronicle.comSection: The Chronicle Review
Volume 53, Issue 43, Page B9
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