BIOGRAPHY
Richard McKay Rorty was born in New York City to two writers--an interesting fact in light of Rorty's later philosophical attraction to literature. During Rorty's early childhood, his parents had worked closely with the American Communist Party, but with the party's increasing Stalinism they broke away in 1933. They were then attracted to the political philosophy of Stalin's rival, Leon Trotsky (1879-1940). The attraction was so deep that they sheltered one of Trotsky's secretaries after Stalin's agents had assassinated Trotsky in Mexico in 1940. Rorty reflected on the effect of his parents' politics: "I grew up knowing that all decent people were, if not Trotskyites, at least socialists.... [By the age of] twelve I knew that the point of being human was to spend one's life fighting social injustice."(1)
As he developed his social conscience, Rorty also discovered his appetite for obscure, socially useless subjects, such as the study of wild orchids. As he embarked for the University of Chicago at fifteen, he sought a way to combine his often wild and disparate interests into a single vision. As he put it, "I wanted a way to be both an intellectual and spiritual snob and a friend of humanity--a nerdy recluse and a fighter for justice."(2) At the University of Chicago, Rorty found two possibilities for a life vision: Christianity and Platonism. Christianity seemed impossible for Rorty on a personal level, so he became a committed Platonist: "Platonism had all the advantages of religion, without requiring the humility that Christianity demanded, and of which I was apparently incapable."(3)
When he completed his B.A. and M.A. in philosophy at Chicago and moved to Yale for his Ph.D., Rorty began to doubt his Platonic vision. There seemed no neutral standpoint from which to determine if Platonism was a correct vision. How was one to avoid circularity in establishing the first principles by which a particular vision is supported? As Rorty explains,
I gradually decided that the whole idea of holding reality and justice in a single vision had been a mistake--that the pursuit of such a vision had been precisely what led Plato astray. More specifically, I decided that only religion--only a nonargumentative faith in a surrogate parent who, unlike any real parent, embodied love, power, and justice in equal manner--could do the trick Plato wanted done. Since I couldn't imagine becoming religious, and indeed had gotten more and more raucously secularist, I decided that the hope of achieving a single vision by becoming a philosopher had been a self-deceptive atheist's way out.(4)
After receiving his Ph.D. in 1956, Rorty was drafted and served two years in the U.S. Army. He taught at Wellesley College from 1958 to 1961 and then moved to Princeton University. For the next twenty years, he developed his "visionless" philosophy. Building on the pragmatism of John Dewey, Rorty argued that instead of seeking objectivity, we should settle for "as much intersubjective agreement" as we can find. If philosophical truth cannot be Platonically objective, at least it can have the pragmatic value of tolerance.
In 1982, Rorty moved to the University of Virginia, where he is Kenan Professor of Humanities. "Professor of Humanities" is an appropriate title, for in his recent work Rorty has moved from philosophy to literature and the arts as better means for serving humanity. As his thought has changed, so has his style, moving increasingly from an argumentative to a narrative mode.
In Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979), his most famous book, Rorty attacks another philosophical vision: mind as the "Mirror of Nature." Ever since Descartes, philosophers have examined the relation between the subjective mind and the objective world. As Rorty explains, philosophers have looked for "privileged representations among those constituting the Mirror"--that is, they have looked for the representations that most accurately reflect nature. Descartes understood these privileged, foundational representations to be "clear and distinct ideas" and thus sought to "clean up" the Mirror so that it would more accurately reflect "reality." Recently, analytic philosophers, such as Russell and Carnap, have claimed privilege for certain foundational assertions--certain kinds or uses of language.
Developing the work of Wittgenstein, Wilfred Sellars, and Quine, Rorty argues that no "account of the nature of knowledge can rely on a theory of representations which stand in privileged relations to reality." Instead of providing insights into "reality," theoretical systems provide only descriptions of human behavior and so exhibit the values of a historical period. Epistemology no longer is the prestigious arbiter of meaning, offering nothing more to an understanding of knowledge and truth than common sense. As Rorty concludes,
If we accept these criticisms, and therefore drop the notion of epistemology as the quest, initiated by Descartes, for those privileged items in the field of consciousness which are the touchstones of truth, we are in a position to ask whether there still remains something for epistemology to be. I want to urge that there does not.
In his later writings, Consequences of Pragmatism (1982) and Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989), Rorty explores the implications of his dethroning of philosophy and suggests a return to Dewey's notion of social and political transformation. He displaces theory with practice, essence with function, the intrinsic with the contextual, and objectivity with solidarity. The question, says Rorty, is no longer the epistemological, "How do you know?," but the rhetorical, "Why do you find what you just said persuasive?"
According to Rorty, the vocabularies of social groups are contingent on time and place. Morality, then, "is a matter of what [Wilfred Sellars] calls 'we-intentions,' [so] that the core meaning of 'immoral action' is 'the sort of thing we don't do'."(5) Solidarity with a group's vocabulary supersedes ontological certainty as a basis for ethics. This does not mean that Rorty is a radical relativist; his pragmatism asserts that some vocabularies are better at eliminating cruelty than others. When disputes arise between groups and their "incommensurable" vocabularies, the best one group can do is show the other "how [that] other side looks from our own point of view," while at the same time imaginatively identifying with the other side's pain. It is the artist and the poet (not the moral philosopher) who can best elicit identification by creating vulnerable images of the "other" to which human beings can relate. Metaphor replaces logic as the language of change. Accordingly, Rorty's own goal is to persuade through metaphor and narrative, not philosophical argument.
Footnotes:
1 Richard Rorty, "Trotsky and the Wild Orchids," from Mark Edmundson, Wild Orchids and Trotsky (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1993), pp. 34-35.
5 Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 59.
By Forrest Baird © 2000 by Prentice Hall from Philosophic Classics, Volume V