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The patriot

Richard Rorty was a philosopher who hated philosophy — and a lefty who loved his country

By Todd Gitlin

It may seem strange to say we have just lost our national philosopher. Is a philosopher, after all, like a bird or an anthem? It’s the wrong question, Richard Rorty would have answered. Rorty, who died June 8 in Palo Alto, Calif., was for some 30 years the chief conductor of such national philosophical conversation as we have about the nature, meaning, and traps of our collective life.

In the classical sense he was of course a philosopher — a lover of wisdom — and only another philosopher could have denied it.

Rorty was also, in the words of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “an anti-philosopher’s philosopher.” He was more widely read and influential among humanists and activists of a left-liberal stripe than in departments of philosophy, two of which (Wellesley and Princeton) he eventually left behind for appointments in the humanities (University of Virginia) and comparative literature (Stanford).

Still, in furtherance of America’s home-grown tradition of pragmatism, he went on publishing philosophical papers — that is, papers that took seriously the arguments made by philosophers. Here, he often challenged the notion that something called Truth was “out there,” luminous, hard, and knowable, in the actual universe, independent of observers and their conversations.

A lifelong man of the left, Rorty thought left-wing academics were wasting their time spinning postmodernist arabesques to justify political positions that didn’t require any vast theoretical justifications in the first place. Reviving an older left-wing tradition, he defended a straightforward patriotic liberalism that outraged academics for whom anti-imperialism and/or identity politics were the first orders of business. His position, deeply controversial when he set it out in his 1998 book “Achieving Our Country,” proved prophetic, especially after Sept. 11, 2001.

Rorty came by his politics — passionately liberal, passionately anti-communist — via family values. His father, James Rorty, was a prolific socialist writer, journalist, and poet. His maternal grandfather was the Social Gospel theologian Walter Rauschenbusch. But the pragmatist wasn’t a simple conservator of family traditions. “We should face up to unpleasant truths about ourselves,” he wrote, “but we should not take those truths to be the last word about our chance for happiness, or about our national character. Our national character is still in the making.”

Rorty liked pragmatism’s messiness and improvisations. What he hated — and this was the hinge that joined his philosophical, literary, and political passions — was the fetish of purity, the Marxists’ no less than George W. Bush’s.

It wasn’t just lefties Rorty provoked. He outraged many philosophers, too, when he declared, not always gently, that it was a waste of time to ask the old questions about how we know what we think we know. They thought he contradicted himself, betraying his early rigor.

Here, he stood squarely in the heretical line of his great 19th and 20th century predecessors, Friedrich Nietzsche and Ludwig Wittgenstein, but with a decidedly American accent and earthiness. He was, like them, a corrupter of youth and age alike, giving many intellectuals (myself included) a swift kick out of our dogmatic slumbers. In his ability to win the respect of those he provoked, he heeded Blake’s edict: “Opposiion is true Friendship.” On hearing of his death, a former student at the University of Virginia went online to comment: “He was so accessible and stimulating, it almost felt like we were at a university.”

His personal grace and generosity did nothing to weaken his influence. In the ’90s and afterward, Rorty did more than anyone else in the academy to articulate a liberal and social-democratic politics that was at once passionate, intellectually respectable, and unimpressed by radical gestures. Though an early importer of theorists like Jacques Derrida and Martin Heidegger, he chopped his way out from the underbrush of what came to be called Theory (with a very capital T) by rendering unto politics what politics was due — straightforwardness.

Talk about a straight-talk express: In “Achieving Our Country,” Rorty savaged the academic left for letting its rancor and fanciness get the better of it. “We now have, among many American students and teachers, a spectatorial, disgusted, mocking Left rather than a Left which dreams of achieving our country,” he wrote there.

By “achieving our country” — a phrase from James Baldwin — he meant fulfilling its small-d democratic potential by reviving a “reformist left,” exemplified in the New Deal. Though he favored most of what the Sixties’ New Left accomplished, he lashed out at its late, frequent, and tragic anti-American revels. Veterans of that era who remained unreconstructed thought he was too harsh; others, like this writer, thought he was dead on.

“Achieving Our Country” was well-received by writers on the liberal and social-democratic left who had wearied of academic smugness, jargon, and marginality. The political historian Alan Ryan lauded it in The New York Times Book Review for affirming “that national pride is the political equivalent of individual self-respect. Without it, nothing can be achieved.” No matter that unreconstructed partisans of the cultural left sneered at Rorty for insufficient anticapitalism — it went with the territory.

But Rorty’s version of a national pride that refuses to turn a blind eye to America’s sins also outraged conservatives. His attempt to reconnect the American left with the romance of two great small-d democrats — Walt Whitman, the chronicler of American energies, and John Dewey, the philosopher of public conversation — did not impress George Will, who devoted a Newsweek column to trashing “Achieving Our Country” (“a remarkably bad book” that “radiates contempt for the country”). In The Weekly Standard, David Brooks called some of Rorty’s predictions “loopy, paranoid, idiotic,” but his main complaint was that the very risible Rorty was a spotlight hog: “if you strip away Rorty’s grand declarations about the death of God and Truth and get down to the type of public personality that Rorty calls for, he begins to appear instead as the Norman Rockwell for the intellectual bourgeoisie.”

Rorty took pleasure in being read by scholars and activists from Iran to China. He was, in this sense, the consummate cosmopolitan. At the same time, he went on defending militant liberalism in behalf of American values. As this line of argument flourished after 9/11, even on the American liberal-left, he did not become jingoistic or illiberal — far from it. To his last days, he deplored the authoritarianism of the “war on terror.”

The last time I saw him, a couple of years ago, even as he was very dark about the Bush dominion, whose reckless purism offended him both philosophically and politically, he strived to be hopeful about a revival of sensible student liberals, and introduced me to the Stanford activists of the deftly named Roosevelt Institution. It might seem odd that America’s national philosopher shoud have had to struggle for his optimism, rather than inherit it by birthright; but then, it might have been Rorty the American, and not the Italian Antonio Gramsci quoting the Frenchman Romain Rolland, who devised the ever-timely aphorism: “Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.”

Todd Gitlin is a professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia University and the author of “The Intellectuals and the Flag.” His next book, “The Bulldozer and the Big Tent: Blind Republicans, Lame Democrats, and the Recovery of American Ideals,” will be published in September.

Remembering Richard Rorty

Christopher Hayes

It is rare that the death of a stranger brings a stab of mourning, but I felt one when I heard on Saturday night that the American philosopher Richard Rorty had succumbed to cancer at the age of 75. At the time of his passing Rorty was the single most important living American philosopher and one of the most influential and widely read thinkers in the English-speaking world. He was also the model of a truly engaged public intellectual, writing with verve, humor and insight for a general audience in magazines like the Nation and Dissent. The world in general and the global community of those fighting for a more just, humane and social democratic world are poorer for his loss.

Rorty made his first, and perhaps most famous, major contribution to philosophy in 1979 with the publication of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. The book offered a bracing and eloquent critique of the western philosophical tradition, which holds that there is an absolute reality independent of the human mind and that the job of those who seek knowledge is to “mirror” this reality. No, said Rorty. There’s just us – just humans grasping in the darkness, making meaning through argument and consensus, with no Platonic bedrock “out there” to sink our anchors into. In marching back the grandiose truth claims of much of western philosophy, Rorty succeeded in reviving the dormant tradition of pragmatism, an embedded, practical, distinctly American philosophical school pioneered by William James and Charles Peirce and further developed by one of Rorty’s great heroes, John Dewey.

After epistemology, Rorty turned his thoughts to moral and political philosophy, where he wrestled with the fundamental dilemma of post-modernity: if there is no divine law, no universal, capital-T Truth, then how to avoid nihilism and relativism? Is it true, as Ivan Karimazov said, that “If God does not exist, then everything is permitted?”

Fundamentalists, from Pennsylvania avenue to Pakistan, say yes. Without the absolute, unwavering divine law, they argue, there is chaos and cruelty. We cannot deny God, or Allah, or the Infinite Justice of America’s War on Terror, and retain any semblance of moral order. But Rorty disagreed with eloquence and force. Yes, he, said, there is no God, but that doesn’t mean everything is permitted: we need not descend into cruelty and inhumanity. We can, as humans with our limited faculties, hash things out amongst ourselves, and arrive at a just order, one that minimizes cruelty and suffering, and engenders equality and solidarity. How to go about that? No easy answers, said Rorty. “There is no basis for deciding what counts as knowledge and truth other than what one’s peers will let one get away with in the open exchange of claims, counterclaims and reasons.”

For his critics, this kind of pragmatist shrug could be maddening, but the intellectual humility it embodied seems wise beyond measure in the post-9/11 age. In the wake of that tragedy commentators declared the “death of irony”, and the Bush administration, with much of the nation’s support, rushed into a war convinced utterly of its own righteousness – convinced that there is a Good and Evil out there, that we are the former, and our enemies the latter. Perhaps it was Rorty’s own highly developed ironic sense that led him to vociferously oppose the war, arguing against it in a 2003 cover story for the Nation. For much of his life, Rorty called himself a “liberal ironist”, which is, in every way, the direct opposite of Bush, who is nothing if not an earnest reactionary.

I had the good fortune t meet Richard Rorty once, several years ago in Chicago. He was in town to debate his old friend and sparring partner, the German philosopher Jurgen Habermas. In person, the two men were quite different from their personas on the page – Habermas was jocular and charming; Rorty, droll and reserved. He seemed to view the world before him with an air of bemusement, and it occurred to me that his ironic sensibility was as much disposition as ideology.

When Rorty addressed the packed hall assembled for his debate with Habermas, he swung his leg at the podium and impishly pushed the crowd’s buttons. “We think of ourselves as having made progress as we grow older, more wise, less capable of doing harm,” he said. “Maybe we’re right and maybe we’re wrong.”

During the Q and A that followed, Rorty casually mentioned that it was “true” that “we are using too many of the world’s resources too quickly and irresponsibly.” Someone shot up their hand to ask him what exactly he meant by the word “true” in that sentence.

He responded: “In a free and open forum everyone would agree we’re using too many resources.”

“But not everyone does agree!” someone shouted from the audience in exasperation.

“I know,” Rorty responded dryly. “I’m still trying to figure that out.”

So, too, are we. And it will be a much, much harder task without him.