Richard Rorty, 1931-2007

David Luban

The incomparable Richard Rorty has died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 75. Rorty was without a doubt the most influential living American philosopher, and (in my opinion) one of the two or three greatest. Many academic philosophers disagree, in no small part because Rorty argued that academic philosophy, especially analytic philosophy, is a pointless discipline that we should simply ignore. This view appeared in his 1979 masterpiece Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, but it became increasingly spirited and blunt in the essays he wrote over the next twenty years, collected in six anthologies. (Full disclosure: I was the target of one of those essays, in Philosophy and Social Hope.) Rorty based his critique on a deep diagnosis of the history of philosophy – and the breadth and depth of his knowledge was staggering. Rorty infuriated analytic philosophers with what appeared on the surface to be a nonchalant dismissal of most of the problems they study. He simply didn't think there is much of a story to tell about the theory of knowledge or the philosophy of language – other than a historical story of how a series of mistakes got enshrined in an entire academic discipline. He didn't think there is a deep problem of truth, or of how "words represent the world." One of his best papers is titled "The World Well Lost," and one of his last books – a collection of interviews published a year or so ago – bears the wonderful title Take Care of Freedom and Truth Will Take Care of Itself. The titles say it all.

One result was a kind of exile from philosophy departments. When Rorty left the Princeton department (at the time the best analytic department in the country) – years later, he explained that "I'd spent years trying to be one of the boys, and now I didn't want to be one of the boys any more" – he became a university professor of humanities at U. Va. When he moved to Stanford, his professorship was in comparative literature. Much to the chagrin of philosophers, many theorists in comparative literature concluded from reading Rorty that they didn't actually need to read philosophers to opine about them; all they needed to know was in Rorty. Rorty was unfazed, but he once told me that in fact he didn't have a lot in common with many of his comparative literature colleagues.

In fact, Rorty never stopped reading philosophy, and he expressed tremendous admiration for Robert Brandom, his own student and one of the most complex contemporary analytic philosophers. Rorty himself had cemented his early reputation with some particularly hard-nosed work on the mind-body problem. In effect, his anti-philosophical work was a paradox, because even though Rorty never stopped calling for an end to philosophy, he never stopped writing it either, and his own career was in that way a terrible advertisement for his views.

As the Times obituary (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/11/obituaries/11rorty.html?ref=obituaries ) mentions, Rorty grew up in a prominent left-wing family, part of the left anti-Stalinist intellectual "aristocracy." In his last twenty years, Rorty returned to origins and wrote more and more about political issues, often in a surprising way. (For example, in his brilliant essay on human rights in the Oxford Amnesty Lectures, he denied that there is any philosophical foundation for human rights, or even any knock-down argument for human rights, beyond telling "sad, sentimental stories" about the victims of violations - but that is enough.) He developed a position he called "liberal irony," argued for "social hope," and staked out a remarkable form of progressive American patriotism.

Rorty was wonderfully witty, both in person and in print. But in person you had to listen carefully to hear the wit, because his self-presentation was deeply understated. He spoke slowly, calmly, quietly, and – it sometimes seemed – without moving his teeth. Once – almost twenty years ago – I asked him about his own future plans, and he said, "Oh, I guess I'll crank out a few more defenses of pragmatism and then retire." (He published seven more books after that, all of them incredibly original.) He presented the most radical views in the most unradical manner. In 2005, I attended a vintage Rorty talk on reason and religion, in which it seemed that he was deliberately setting out to antagonize everyone in the room no matter what their beliefs. He argued for two main theses: that there are absolutely no rational grounds for preferring scientific accounts of nature to New Earth creationism; and that nevertheless this provides no basis for giving New Earth creationists equal time in the universities, because it's "politically important that universities remain bastions of anti-clericalism." All of this he delivered in such a low-key, understated way that (to my amazement, and no doubt to Rorty's disappointment) he failed to provoke anyone.

This was very different from a talk he gave to a large audience in New York ten years earlier, where it became clear in the question-and-answer session that many in the audience had been waiting for years to unload on Rorty in public. He faced one hostile question after another, delivered in scathing rhetoric, mostly having nothing to do with the paper he had just presented (which happened to be a defense of polytheism!). Rorty was absolutely unflappable, utterly polite, very low key – but he never backed down an inch. I happened to be sitting next to Richard Posner, who whispered to me "I love the way Rorty handles questions." Well, me too! For someone who held flamboyant views, and who could be quite devastating in print, Rorty was both deeply civil and deeply civilized.

When Rorty learned that he had pancreatic cancer, his daughter reminded him that Derrida had it as well and told him it came from reading too much Heidegger, which greatly amused him. He kept writing, lecturing, and attending conferences until very recently, when he became too weak to continue. (A good example of how incisive Rorty remained during his illness is his New York Times review of Marc Hauser's Moral Minds.) Near the end, he was racing death to complete a reply to his critics for a volume devoted to him in the "Library of Living Philosophers."
Posted 11:29 AM by David Luban [link]