Richard Rorty (1931-2007)

Richard Rorty was one of the most influential philosophers at the turn of the century, perhaps not so much in the ranks of fellow philosophers as in the humanities and the social sciences. His reputation as the arch-iconoclast of the last decade or so was based upon a host of articles in which he radically questioned the foundations of the analytical tradition in philosophy as well as the very business of philosophy. In an autobiographical text he formulated his engagement in the philosophical discussion as one in which he had been ‘looking for a coherent and convincing way of formulating my worries about what, if anything, philosophy is good for’. From a variety of different angles and in different ways he formulated a multifaceted attack on traditional Philosophy, an activity which in Rorty’s (re)presentation has been preoccupied with finding secure bases, foundations for other human cultural activities in general and for science and ethics in particular. In one of his last and most accessible books, Rorty argues for a notion of Truth without correspondence to reality, a World without substances or essences and Ethics without principles. These late contributions to the cultural debate were perhaps formulated in an exalted and conspicuously extravagant modulus, but were in fact not alien offshoots of something less shocking or controversial. These formulations are very much the culmination of a lifelong engagement in the internal logic of analytical philosophy and its collaterations. So our initial characterisation of Rorty’s project as one which questions the foundations of analytical philosophy must be corrected or at least be made more specific: Rorty’s aim is to question the very claim that we – as scientists, aestheticists, ethicists etc – in short as fellow human beings – should need any foundations for our activities. Rorty even claims (but does not argue) that we would be much better off if we stopped thinking in terms of finding any timeless rationale for our pursuits.

Rorty became famous most of all for this attack on analytical philosophy, although he sometimes argued that he just carried through the analytical programme in which he had been bred. Now, a central theme in his work is the urge to contextualise and to historicise the ideas which one – anyone – holds. In this vein, he is arguing for a continuation of the process of secularisation, a process which has freed us from the idea that we have to obey, be true to, any higher entity like God. Now it is time, he argues, to take the second step of this de-divinisation of the world and carry it further into a phase in which we no longer think that we have to obey or be true to, correctly represent etc an objective reality. Rorty speaks about a ‘postmetaphysical culture’, a culture in which we are fully responsible for our own actions. He characterises this culture thus:

A poeticised, or postmetaphysical, culture is one in which the imperative that is common to religion and metaphysics – to find an ahistorical, transcultural matrix for one’s thinking, something into which everything can fit, independent of ones’s time and place – has dried up and blown away. It would be a culture in which people thought of human beings as creating their own life-world, rather than as being responsible to God or “the nature of reality,” which tells them what kind it is.

This is a very interesting view, but one wonders whether creating one’s own life-world would entail the complete renunciation of any such thing as the nature of being or of reality. Rorty’s theses have been one of the major influences in the formulation and spread of ideas which elsewhere have been labelled standpoint epistemologies and strategic theories, theories which are not true or false, but which serve a certain (often political) purpose. It would really be a wonderful world which allowed people always to ‘redescribe’ themselves, and innovatively and skilfully to recreate themselves at their own whim, but unfortunately the world is not that benevolent. Bertrand Russell’s characterisation of Economics as a science which studies how people make choices and Sociology as the science which teaches us that we don’t have any choice to make could function at least as a corrective to Rorty’s ultra-voluntaristic position.

We could perhaps recast Marx’ eleventh thesis on Feuerbach thus: Sociologists have hitherto only tried to change the world in various ways; the point is to understand it, or perhaps more accurately: In order to be able to change the world we have to understand it.

The ironic stance of Rorty did not allow for the seriousness which such an endeavour would require, so his hope of fostering novel kinds of solidarities came to nought and in the end the lasting memory of Rorty is one of an irritating and quite skilfull jester, but nevertheless a minor and quite contingent figure in the history of philosophy and the ongoing conversation of Mankind.