Richard Rorty (1931-2007): the View From Somewhere

The Chronicle: By CARLIN ROMANO

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. ...

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. ...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. ...

Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, followed quickly by Consequences of Pragmatism, 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'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. ...

Rorty's death begins the process of asking crucial questions about his legacy. Did he stop epistemology cold? Of course not. ...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. ...

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.