Carl J. Rasmussen: Editorial missed on Rorty's true legacy

The Capital Times:

Dear Editor: I write in response to your editorial for the weekend of June 16-17 about the philosopher Richard Rorty, who died recently. Rorty was clearly a major figure, but his legacy is perhaps less optimistic than you suggest. In 1982, Rorty wrote:

'When the secret police come, when the torturers violate the innocent, there is nothing to be said to them of the form, 'There is something within you which you are betraying. Though you embody the practices of a totalitarian society which will endure forever, there is something beyond those practices which condemns you.' There is nothing deep down inside us except what we have put there ourselves, no criterion that we have not created in the course of creating a practice, no standard of rationality that is not an appeal to such a criterion, no rigorous argumentation that is not obedience to our own conventions.' ('Consequences of Pragmatism')

Rorty's achievement was to advance his claims with unusual depth and clarity. That his claims are at best deeply problematic is suggested by the above quote. We can perhaps best honor the tradition in which Rorty wrote by demonstrating that there is more to us than obedience to our own conventions.

Carl J. Rasmussen, Madison

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.

Richard Rorty

Richard Rorty, Philosopher, Dies at 75

From The New York Times:

Mr. Rorty’s enormous body of work, which ranged from academic tomes to magazine and newspaper articles, provoked fervent praise, hostility and confusion. But no matter what even his severest critics thought of it, they could not ignore it. When his 1979 book “Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature” came out, it upended conventional views about the very purpose and goals of philosophy. The widespread notion that the philosopher’s primary duty was to figure out what we can and cannot know was poppycock, Mr. Rorty argued. Human beings should focus on what they do to cope with daily life and not on what they discover by theorizing.

To accomplish this, he relied primarily on the only authentic American philosophy, pragmatism, which was developed by John Dewey, Charles Peirce, William James and others more than 100 years ago. “There is no basis for deciding what counts as knowledge and truth other than what one’s peers will let one get away with in the open exchange of claims, counterclaims and reasons,” Mr. Rorty wrote. In other words, “truth is not out there,” separate from our own beliefs and language. And those beliefs and words evolved, just as opposable thumbs evolved, to help human beings “cope with the environment” and “enable them to enjoy more pleasure and less pain.”