Richard Rorty

From Philosopedia

Rorty, Richard (4 October 1931 - 8 June 2007 )

One of the most widely read American philosophers and a gadfly of contemporary philosophy, Rorty is the son of parents who were atheists and Trotskyites. His maternal grandfather was Walter Rauschenbusch, the theological genius of the Social Gospel.

Reviewing his Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America (1998), philosopher Alan Ryan wrote,

• Richard Rorty is a scandal to his profession. He is a philosopher who thinks that philosophy is a distraction from more important matters. He has for years argued that the pursuit of Truth - as distinct from the humbler search for usable truths - is fueled by self-deception. He has insisted that even if humanity all too often behaves cruelly and sadistically, we would be better off without a sense of sin. Nevertheless, Rorty has a substantial streak of filial piety. It was his hero, John Dewey, who first scandalized his philosophical readers almost a century ago by urging them to turn away from “the problems of philosophy” to “the problems of men.” Achieving Our Country is an appeal to American intellectuals to abandon the intransigent cynicism of the academic, cultural left and to return to the political ambitions of Emerson, Dewey, Herbert Croly, and their allies.

Ryan praises Rorty’s favoring of the kind of “participatory” grasp of the world celebrated by Whitman and Dewey, and finds few thinkers other than American pragmatists “have had the courage to insist that it is life itself that justifies our ideas about what is true, good, or beautiful.”

In Achieving Our Country, Rorty credits the New Left for helping end American involvement in Vietnam but blames it for retreating from pragmatism into theory. As a result, members of the left “give cultural politics preference over real politics, and to mock the very idea that democratic institutions might once again be made to serve social justice. . . . It leads them to prefer knowledge to hope.”

Although not ruling out a place for religious forces in any reformist coalition, Rorty simply makes no reference to them. The most influential philosophers of the 20th century, Rorty wrote, were John Dewey, Martin Heidegger, Bertrand Russell, and Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Rorty’s other works include Consequences of Pragmatism (1982), Pragmatism from Pierce to Davidson (1990), and Essays on Heidegger and Others (1991). In 1994 he wrote “After Philosophy, Democracy” in The American Philosopher, a collection of conversations with Quine, Danto, and others, edited by Giovanna Borradori. Also, he was a contributor to American Philosophic Naturalism in the Twentieth Century (1994).

His 1994 “Trotsky and the Wild Orchids” is found in Challenge to the Enlightenment, In Defense of Reason and Science. Included is his complaint about right-wing conservatives who assume that he is a moral relativist because of his atheism:

• The orthodox tend to think that people who, like the postmodernists and me, believe neither in God nor in some suitable substitute, must feel that everything is permitted, that everybody can do what they like.

Richard Shusterman of Temple University calls Rorty “probably the most influential contemporary American philosopher on literary theory,” citing the two volumes of his Philosophical Papers written between 1980 and 1989. These, adds Shusterman in an article in The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism (1994), “include articles defending pragmatist views of interpretation and scientific inquiry against varieties of representationalism, as well as articles connecting pragmatism with Heidegger and others in the Continental tradition of philosophy and literary theory.”

In 1994, David L. Hall wrote Richard Rorty, Prophet and Poet of the New Pragmatism, in which he contrasts Rorty’s thought with that of Donald Davidson, W. V. O. Quine, Jürgen Habermas, Michel Foucault, Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, and others. The State University of New York in 1994 also published a work, Recovering Pragmatism’s Voice: The Classical Tradition, Rorty, and the Philosophy of Communication, in which various authors show that pragmatism fosters inquiry and pluralism by rejecting strategies for closure, questioning prevailing metanarratives, and encouraging the development of new habits of conduct through a critical practice that is fundamentally self-reflective.

“During the quarter century in which various forms of imported eliminitivist analytic philosophy had much institutional power in American academe,” Peter H. Hare has written,

• many naturalists were unfairly treated. This unjust treatment caused understandable bitterness and resentment. Although these feelings are understandable, hypersensitivity to any philosophy deeply critical of American naturalism has unfortunate consequences. Year after year of intense preoccupation with Richard Rorty, for example, is - at the very least - distracting. Shortly after Rorty’s book Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature was published in 1979, it was quite adequately shown that Rorty’s so-called pragmatism was radically inconsistent with the pragmatism of American naturalism and not a genuine threat. But today hypersensitive naturalists continue refuting Rorty.

Rorty, who enjoys cleverly baiting his critics, encourages this pointless activity. Neglect is what Rorty’s philosophy now calls for, in my view,” Hare states. He then adds that fifty years from now “when historians look back at this period in American philosophy they will consider that Rorty played a significant role only because the discussion of his charming prose stimulated useful clarification of the character of American naturalism.

The American naturalist tradition is too resilient and resourceful to be seriously threatened by Rorty. In the long run, Rorty is enriching the tradition he is laboring to discredit.” That 1979 work, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, argued against the idea that it is possible to pass judgment on what we believe based upon some objective, transcendental standpoint. What Rorty has tried to show is that no belief is more fundamental than any other and that philosophy, which cannot establish anything, should be understood as a conversation with, in the words of Trinity College’s (Oxford) Right Honorable Lord Quinton, “the same sort of claim to finality as the conversations of cultural and literary critics. Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and Dewey are invoked as a kind of pantheon for this undermining of the conception philosophers have ordinarily held of their philosophical activity.”

Rorty. in a witty book review (The New York Times (22 September 1996) wrote, * Suppose some newly discovered scrolls provided good reason to think that Christianity was a fraud perpetrated by a con man named Paul (formerly Saul). Seeing a commercial opportunity in the resentment of the poor and downtrodden, Paul invented a religion teaching that God’s only wish is that we should love one another, and commissioned hacks to write the Gospels and the Epistles. After putting this discovery together with what we already know about the forged Donation of Constantine, the Spanish Inquisition and the televangelists, and with the absence of scientific evidence for the claim that Jesus was both God and man, should we conclude that we ought to cleanse our minds and our culture of Christianity? . . . .No, we might reflect that bad men occasionally come up with good ideas, and that the egalitarian and altruistic strains in Christianity have done a lot for liberal democracy and human rights. So we might decide to throw away only the rotten parts of Christianity (the creeds and the clergy, perhaps), while keeping the good bits.

Analogously, he added, although Freud may have been in error about many things, we “can continue to explain our quirks, fantasies and neurotic miseries by reference to unconscious beliefs and desires—especially beliefs about our parents and desires for offbeat sex.”

According to his wife, Mary Varney Rorty, pancreatic cancer was the cause of Rorty's death. Toward the end of his life, he had been critical of the George W. Bush administration, the religious right, Congressional Democrats, and anti-American intellectuals. In a New York Times obituary by Patricia Cohen,

• Though deeply pessimistic about the dangers of nuclear confrontation and the gap between rich nations and poor, Mr. Rorty retained something of [John] Dewey's hopefulness about America. It is important, he said in 2003, to take pride "in the heritage of figures like Jefferson, Lincoln, Wilson, Roosevelt, Martin Luther King, and so on.' he said, and 'to use this pride as a means of generating sympathy' for a country's political aims."

(See Richard Rorty, “Remembering John Dewey and Sidney Hook,” Free Inquiry, Winter 1995-1996)

{CA; E; OCP; The New York Times, 16 May 1998; Peter Steinfels, "The New Humanist Laureate in the Council for Secular Humanism's International Academy of Humanism," The New York Times, 11 July 1998}.

Selected Bibliography

• Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth Century America: Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998.
• Achieving our Country: Leftist Thought In Twentieth Century America: (Harvard UP, 1998)
• Consequences of Pragmatism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982.
• Contingency, Irony, Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
• Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers II. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
• The Future of Religion: Columbia University Press, 2005 (with Gianni Vattimo)
• Objectivity, Relativism and Truth: Philosophical Papers I: Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
• Philosophy and Social Hope: (Penguin, 1999)
• Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature: Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979.
• Philosophy in History: Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. (co-editor)
• Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, VOL. 3 (Cambridge UP, 1998)