i'm working on a paper on my dissertation supervisor, richard rorty, for a conference in poland this summer. now when philosophers describe me, they often start with the fact that i was rorty's student. at slippery rock u last month i was introduced (among other things) as 'a student of richard rorty, the most famous american philosopher of the twentieth century.' this description of rorty shocked me a bit, actually, but rorty's now-posthumous presence just seems to increase all the time.
i often assert, which surprises people i guess, that i disagree with everything rorty ever said, adding that i frigging loved his persona of ironist/provocateur and that he was a conscientious supervisor despite the fact that the dissertation was incompatible with his whole schtick. and despite the fact that i did not at all share his politics either, which he knew perfectly well. and politics, it turned out more and more, was central to his persona and his philosophy. also when i was working with him (1985-89), he was going from significant figure to world-bestriding colossus; he was always jetting off to debate habermas or chill with derrida. yet he read my stuff quickly and pretty carefully. at the time i was pushing various versions of 'representative realism,' correspondence theory of truth, and so on: it was a mere reactionary stance (and rorty would have regarded it that way more than anyone; by that time he thought positions like that were boring), and i have abandoned these positions, even while maintaining a version of worldly realism and an anti-social conception of truth.
now, i have never really tried to refute rorty's philosophy or even argue with it in any direct or elaborate fashion, despite a bit of a stab in end of story. the reason for this is because everyone else in the world was already attacking him, and even though i thought they sometimes had good points, i have also been a bit protective. and all that attack is exactly what has made him a candidate for 'most famous american philosopher of the 20th century'; every attack has elevated his status, and if you do think his philosophy is mediocre or wrong or whatever, you're a fool to keep paying obsessive attention. meanwhile a strand of much more positive rorty-interpretation has emerged, especially since his death.
at any rate, i've been reading achieving our country (1997). now there is much to admire. for one thing, it does show the real moral seriousness that was there all the time underneath. also, the defense of left reform over left revolution, and the attack on marx (rorty defines his position as 'leftist anti-communism') are compelling, or could be compelling in debates within the left. but, since the man's dead, i might as well say it: the book also shows many of the problems with rorty's authorship. i'll give a couple of examples.
rorty there as everywhere else habitually lines up lists of names like that is an argument, and even keeps sort of asserting that his own philosophy is the future, because he's just narrated the history of modern philosophy to culminate in it. indeed, i think this was his primary argument for his positions, and the fact that it is irrelevant to their truth might cause one to reflect. see we labored under all this cartesianism, kantianism, foundationalism, 'representationalism,' 'logocentrism,' etc. but look, said rr, the most eminent philosophers of the twentieth century were all agreed that our experience of the world was linguistic all the down (and on all rorty's other basic teachings): are you really going to argue at once against the whole flow of intellectual history, or stand athwart it? (matter of fact i am. why not? but i wouldn't say i need to with regard to these doctrines.) athwart dewey, heidegger, wittgenstein, derrida, sellars, quine, brandom, davidson, all of whom said the same thing?
Dewey abandoned the idea that one can say how things really are, as opposed to how they might best be described in order to meet some particular human need. In this respect he is in agreement with Nietzsche, and with such critics of 'the metaphysics of presence' as Derrida and Heidegger. For all these philosophers, objectivity is a matter of intersubjective consensus among human beings, not of accurate representation of something nonhuman. Insofar as human beings do not share the same needs, they may disagree about what is objectively the case. But the resolution of such disagreement cannot be an appeal to the way reality, apart from any human need, really is. The resolution can only be political: one must use democratic institutions and procedures to conciliate these various needs, and thereby widen the range of consensus about how things are. (34-35)
so, you might think for a minute about whether nietzsche, for example, or heidegger, thought that "objectivity is a matter of intersubjective consensus among human beings". dude, you have got to be kidding; not only is that not their position; it's a position that cannot even be formulated on either of their terms. what role does 'objectivity' and its definition have in the philosophy of derrida, or any of these figures? it's true that in rorty's writings, all the people he admired just ended up saying what he wanted them to say without regard to what they did say. also it's true that this strategy - rorty's basic strategy - is a non-stop appeal to authority, and would be at least as fallacious as that would indicate even if the interpretations were better.
i just want to say that 'truth is whatever is polling well this week' is the very worst theory of truth ever articulated: you'd be better off with 'truth is whatever appears in a green font,' say. (see, now if you attack that view, you're begging the question, because after all the view itself appears in a green font and so is true according to itself.) and you would certainly be better off with the negation of rorty's theory. or this is my theory: truth is what your contemporaries torture you to death for saying. i also don't think that the pragmatic theory of truth is even vaguely plausible, but it is not as bad as rorty's theory. and his view that these are the same theory is false no matter what color the font. on the other hand, 'truth is what your contemporaries let you get away with saying' and all those incredibly dismissive formulations might just be a way of saying: this truth stuff is useless. let's talk about something else. he was just saying that truth is boring and the concept is really doing no work: certainly not at the abstract level of a theory or definition of truth. course the way he framed it made us all scream and refute, just a bonus for the playful strategy.
there is a defense of political correctness in the academy in achieving our country. and that is a completely typical rorty provocation; where most leftists pretend not to know what 'pc' means, rorty just embraces it, as he did 'bourgeois liberalism'; i'm telling you, at provocation, the man was an incomparable genius. and more widely, he gives an argument, or rather asserts, that the academy ought to be, or even by definition is, dominated by various leftist orthodoxies. now first of all, he portrays the left-right spectrum as an obviously valid trans-temporal structure for understanding political positions. i assert that it is a wacky conceptual mess that emerged in the nineteenth century, and that there's no hope for anyone to articulate a coherent position within it. also rorty has an egregiously simplistic and entirely tendentious conception of the left-right spectrum. "the right never thinks that anything much needs to be changed," he writes, for example. er, what?
or how about this: "It is doubtful whether the current critics of the universities who are called 'conservative intellectuals' deserve this description. For intellectuals are supposed to be aware of, and speak to, issues of social justice." that's just mind-numbing jive. i could define you out of the debate or your job entirely too, dick, by asserting that 'intellectuals are supposed to be x.' what are they supposed to be and by whom? well, i personally suppose that intellectuals are supposed to think freely even about such concepts as justice.
at any rate, with all that and much more, dick rorty is a beloved memory for me now. just that little sparkle in his eyes, that half smile, the shrug when someone attacked him, was more than worth the price of tuition. on a good day, he was playing, batting stuff back and forth, relishing disagreements, even vituperative ones. i actually think it was this playfulness and the apparent lack of seriousness that it apparently entails, that pissed people off as much as anything. seriously, you'd hit him with the decisive refutation you'd spent the last few months working up, and he'd just kind of smile and shrug and throw something intolerably meta back at ya. that sort of play is one of the things i always wanted from philosophy, and the extreme seriousness of most academics is inversely proportional to the seriousness with which most people take them. if this isn't a game, it's pretty much indefensible; it's not like we're going to answer the questions, etc.
above all, my experience of richard rorty was of a really kind and decent person, which might be a better reason to take his positions seriously than those he actually gave. i have obviously gotten some professional mileage out of being rorty's student, and i'm grateful for that. i'm also uncomfortable having that centralized in my biography, for precisely the sorts of reasons i've been giving and because i'm all oedipal and shit and want to consider myself rorty's equal. (however, though i have often hinted that i came to my positions by systematic rejection of his, that's not true, fundamentally. i came is as an anarchist/libertarian, and also as a realist who believed in a hard real physical world to which truth is a surrender.) also because i don't want to be associated except under inversion with his positions. also because i am opposed to discipleship in philosophy. (or i might go a little further and say discipleship, or even real reverence for particular figures, is the opposite of philosophy, entirely incompatible with it. i would not at all associate philosophy conceptually with reason. but there is no philosophy where there isn't independent thought.) one of rorty's teachers was rudolf carnap, btw, so i imagine maybe he felt some of the same things.
