Contingency, Irony and Solidarity

I grew up knowing that all decent people were, if not Trotskyites, at least socialists...I knew that poor people would always be oppressed until capitalism was overcome...I knew that the point of being human was to spend one's life fighting social injustice.

But I also had private, weird, snobbish, incommunicable interests...[such as the] 40 species of wild orchids [that] occur in [the] mountains [of north-west New Jersey]...Wild orchids are uncommon, and rather hard to spot. I prided myself enormously on being the only person around who knew where they grew, their Latin names and their blooming times. When in New York, I would go to the 42nd Street public library to reread a nineteenth-century volume on the botany of the orchids of the eastern U.S....

At fifteen I [entered] Hutchins College of the University of Chicago...Insofar as I had any project in mind, it was to reconcile Trotsky and the orchids. I wanted to find some intellectual or aesthetic framework which would let me--in a thrilling phrase which I came across in Yeats--"hold reality and justice in a single vision." By reality I meant, more or less, the Wordsworthian moments in which, in the woods around Flatbrookville (and especially in the presence of certain coralroot orchids, and of the smaller yellow lady slipper), I had felt touched by something numinous, something of ineffable importance. By justice I meant...the liberation of the weak from the strong. I wanted a way to be both an intellectual and spiritual snob and a friend of humanity--a nerdy recluse and a fighter for justice.

[After about 40 years of trying], I decided that the hope of getting a single vision [that would combine both justice and reality as I had defined them was futile]...So I decided to write a book [Contingency, Irony and Solidarity which] argues that there is no need to weave one's personal equivalent of Trotsky and one's personal equivalent of my wild orchids together...."

~ Richard Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope, pp. 6-8, 13.