The positive reaction to Richard Rorty's intellectual legacy in the immediate aftermath of his death on 8 June has been surprising. In the first decade or so after his influential Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) appeared, Rorty was the object of patronizing abuse from many intellectuals who pilloried him as a mere liberal humanist. He seemed to represent everything about American intellectuals that they objected to. In sum, he was seen as the liberal fig leaf for a conservative America.To the first of these charges, Rorty had no trouble pleading guilty, although the idea of humanism did not particularly interest him. He proudly joined the liberal tradition in America and associated it with Walt Whitman, John Dewey and the legacy of the New Deal rather than with Emerson, Thoreau or the New Left. Politically, Rorty has opposed American adventurism in Iraq, and was involved in a movement to revivify the one-time link between intellectuals and the labor movement, but also failed to see that the university-based “cultural left” did any really important political work. This latter position was the only thing he shared with one-time University of Chicago classmate Allan Bloom; otherwise, he had no use for American conservatism either.
Rorty's life and work teach us at least one major thing – the importance of intellectual daring and courage. After a couple of decades as an analytical philosopher who put the notion of the “linguistic turn” into general circulation, Rorty came to doubt the worth of what went on in Anglo-American philosophy departments. This is not to say that he bought the continental approach in toto. But his 1979 book gave notice that he could and would “work both sides of the street.” He began to speak favorably of Hegelian-inspired historicism and romanticism. Whether he was attacking foundationalism and the appearance–reality distinction or provocatively advocating the value of the “ethnocentric” (the local and the particular), Rorty sometimes sounded like an American version of his friend Jacques Derrida, while in recent years he stood particularly close to Jürgen Habermas. (But he always wrote more lucidly than either.) Thus Rorty forged an independent position but did so in dialogue with his fellow intellectuals and thinkers rather than working in splendid isolation. He actually believed in the pragmatic concept of a “community of inquiry” that embraced more than just other Americans.
Philosophy as Cultural Politics will be the last book Rorty read over before publication. Appearing just a few months before his death, it can be read, I think, as something of a final reckoning. For instance, few thinkers have been so religiously tone-deaf as Rorty. He could be wry and sardonic about the claims of religious faith – but just as wary of metaphysical or ideological faith. Though he recognized the importance of intellectual history in his last volume, he also quipped that “the judgement of history is quite likely to be wrong” (69). More sharply, Rorty objected to the way religion and bloc ideologies encouraged a “cowardly unwillingness to accept our finitude” (110), a view that theologians Paul Tillich and Reinhold Niebuhr might have found congenial – at least up to a point.
But final certainty did not come from philosophy, either. His final view was that philosophy was a “transitional genre” whose greatest historical contribution had been “to help us grow up” (124). Though Rorty rejected philosophy of history in the teleological sense, his idea of historical progress drew upon what Thomas Kuhn referred to as the Darwinian view: we may progress away from certain starting points but not inevitably toward anything better. The ideas we reject are not nonsense or neurotically conceived pseudo-ideas per se which philosophy as a form of therapy should cure. Rather, they have become so because of their failure to speak to new historical situations. Rorty was not much taken by philosophical linguistics, sociobiology or cognitive psychology, either. Regarding linguist Jerry Fodor's work, he observed that “finding out how the brain works will not help us to find out how the mind works” (158). He was a Darwinist on the macro- not the micro-level.
Finally, Rorty saw his task to be one of constructing the stories that help us imagine a better and more decent society. In fact, political and social considerations are the ultimate justification for intellectual and philosophical activity. Toward that end he increasingly looked to literature as the most valuable source of fruitful “re-descriptions” in our time. He was perhaps too impatient with overly philosophical conundrums and also seemed unaware that serious literature, like philosophy, no longer captured the imagination of many younger people. As a teacher and a colleague he was apparently conscientious and accessible. He came to faculty meetings prepared and even colleagues who disagreed with him respected his willingness to engage in public debate. In all respects he stayed the course and embodied in his life and thought the effort to be serious without being certain.
