Rorty, Richard

views updated Jun 08 2018

Rorty, Richard 1931-2007

Richard Rorty was at his death a professor of comparative literature and philosophy at Stanford University and one of the most influential and controversial American philosophers of the twentieth century. He crafted a unique version of pragmatism from a blend of Anglo-American analytic philosophy with the Continental tradition, and his impact was felt across a broad range of the humanities and social sciences, including philosophy, literature, political science, and the fine arts.

Rorty was the grandson of Walter Rauschenbusch (1861–1918), a founder of the Social Gospel movement. Though he began his career in academic philosophy, Rorty later emerged as a social critic and political theorist of the first rank, connecting his earlier interest in epistemology with a critique of the foundations of twentieth century liberalism. His early work in philosophy was limited to the Anglo-American tradition, but in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) he connected the radical implications of the doctrines of Wilfrid Sellars (1912–1989), W. V. O. Quine (1908–2000), and Donald Davidson (1917–2003) with the insights of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951), John Dewey (1859–1952), and Martin Heidegger (1889–1976).

Rorty’s main target, in both epistemology and political philosophy, was the hegemony of the paradigm of “representation” that had been in ascendance since the time of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). According to Rorty, this tradition privileged a conception of truth that sought to bring the objects “out there” in the world into correspondence with the representations “inside” our heads. This led philosophers into a misguided search for ways of purifying representations (hence the analytic tradition’s emphasis on clarifying linguistic propositions); however, instead of searching for a “final vocabulary” that could somehow bring the world and our representations into complete correspondence, philosophers should have taken up the more mundane tasks issuing from the pragmatism of John Dewey. Since philosophy and language are tools, not objective measuring sticks for determining truth, philosophers should avoid questions of validity, opt for an ironic detachment toward their own pronouncements, and reorient their discipline as therapeutic storytelling rather than rational adjudication.

Rorty’s pragmatism and antifoundationalism were disturbing to both sides of the political spectrum. To the Right he represented the worst of liberal relativism, and to the Left his “liberal ironist” pose seemed to justify political quiescence. From Rorty’s standpoint both sides mistake the issue—we need neither ontological foundations to justify our political stances, nor a fixed vocabulary to inspire us to political action. In any event, Rorty argued, rationality and foundationalist claims to knowledge are never the effective agents in history, since contending ontological positions (say between a Thomist and a Kantian liberal) are not themselves capable of rational resolution—it is in the “sad, sentimental” stories that we tell to one another that ultimate hope for the elimination of cruelty is to be found. This shift in the self-understanding of philosophy is Rorty’s most lasting contribution to the Anglo-American philosophic tradition, and while his idea of philosophy is not universally accepted, it is almost always the one proffered by his opponents as the relevant position to be refuted.

SEE ALSO Critical Theory; Epistemology; Linguistic Turn; Philosophy; Political Science; Pragmatism; Representation; Storytelling

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Rorty, Richard, ed. [1967] 1992. The Linguistic Turn: Recent Essays in Philosophical Method. 2nd enlarged ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Rorty, Richard. 1979. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Rorty, Richard. 1982. Consequences of Pragmatism: Essays, 1972–1980. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Rorty, Richard. 1987. Thugs and Theorists: A Reply to Bernstein’s “One Step Forward, Two Steps Backward.” Political Theory 15 (4): 564–580.

Rorty, Richard. 1989. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.

Rorty, Richard. 1991. Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers I. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.

Rorty, Richard. 1993. Human Rights, Rationality, and Sentimentality. In On Human Rights: The Oxford Amnesty Lectures, ed. Susan Hurley and Stephen Shute, 112–134. New York: Basic Books.

Stefan Dolgert

International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences

Richard Rorty

views updated Jun 11 2018

Richard Rorty

American philosopher and man of letters Richard Rorty (born 1931) gave new life to the pragmatist tradition and brought it into the public discussion of democracy and liberalism.

Richard Rorty had a major impact on American philosophy and culture. Within the world of academic philosophy he had the reputation of a thinker who, after mastering the most difficult challenges of analytic philosophy (in the tradition of G.E. Moore, Bertrand Russell, and Ludwig Wittgenstein), went on to challenge the notion of philosophy as an enterprise seeking truth in the manner of the sciences. He further suggested that philosophy was not so different from literature and so one need pursue no higher goals than making an edifying contribution to public conversation. From his perspective there could be no higher goal for philosophy to pursue. In a broader context, Rorty became known as a public intellectual, a man of letters more in the European mold rather than the American, insofar as he brought a wide and deep knowledge of history, philosophy, and literature to bear on questions concerning the nature of democracy, the relation between individuality and social cohesion, and feminism. Critics on the right attacked Rorty for being a relativist, while those on the left often claimed that he did no more than offer a bland defense of the status quo.

Born in New York City in 1931 to parents who were literate political radicals (they were followers of Trotsky), Rorty was intellectually precocious. He absorbed the Marxist theories and politics of his parents' circle, read voraciously, and developed aesthetic interests (for example, in wild orchids) that he feared were incompatible with the program for creating a classless society. As Rorty described himself, even after he outgrew Marxism, he felt a continuing tension between the literary and artistic cultivation of the self and the commitment to achieving social justice and articulating a conception of objective truth. On his account he was not able to reconcile these claims until relatively late in his career (and the achievement involved surrendering an objective notion of truth), but when he did so it was in a manner that was intended to be more than a mere individual solution.

Rorty enrolled at the University of Chicago when he was 15 (B.A. 1949) and received his Ph.D. in philosophy from Yale (1956). At Chicago Rorty absorbed the history of philosophy in an atmosphere where such thinkers as Leo Strauss and Richard McKeon wielded great influence. At Yale and as a young professor at Wellesley (1958-1961) and Princeton (where he taught 1961-1982), Rorty also immersed himself in analytic philosophy of the sort that had been brought to the United States by such German and Austrian emigres as Rudolf Carnap, Hans Reichenbach, and Alfred Tarski. He became caught up in the project, in which American philosophers sought to assimilate the later thought of Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Rorty was quickly recognized for his contributions to analytical philosophy of mind and language. The anthology he edited, called The Linguistic Turn (1967; the title was borrowed from Gustav Bergmann), seemed to establish a set of thinkers and issues that would be canonical for future work in philosophy.

During the 1970s Rorty's views shifted in important ways. What was new was not his broad historical and cultural interests (which already distinguished him from most of his colleagues) but his definitive abandonment of the search for foundations in knowledge and ethics, which was marked by the publication of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979). He now brought together John Dewey, Martin Heidegger, and the later Wittgenstein as the heroes of a nonfoundationalist philosophy, who in different ways sought to redirect the discipline to focus on social and historical change or on language as a human practice rather than on the illusory pursuit of timeless truths. Philosophy was to be reconfigured in terms of hermeneutics so as to be devoted to the interpretation of history (including the history of thought) and culture.

While his views were stirring up philosophical controversy, Rorty was demonstrating that he could be an adroit academic statesman. He became president of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association in 1979, at a time when a number of scholars, making common cause as "pluralists," claimed that Anglo-American analytic philosophy had attained a disproportionate and exclusionary power within the professional organization. As president, Rorty not only gave an address aimed at showing how his own perspective rendered a number of ostensibly different philosophical positions more compatible than the disputants supposed; he also took the lead in working out compromises and accommodations between the analysts and the pluralists that had a lasting effect on the American philosophical profession.

In 1981 Rorty was awarded a five-year fellowship from the MacArthur foundation. In 1982 he left Princeton to become university professor of the humanities at the University of Virginia. Both of these events marked Rorty's growing public status as a philosopher who had important things to say to an audience beyond the usual bounds of his discipline.

At the same time American intellectuals and academics were rapidly assimilating and confronting new waves of European thought, identified with thinkers such as Jürgen Habermas, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-Francois Lyotard. Rorty's critical essays on these figures became one of the primary means by which Americans who wanted to understand the significance of critical theory, deconstruction, and post-Modernism could inform themselves. His views were becoming widely known in Europe and Japan; his writings were translated, and he became a thinker of truly international interest.

Rorty, however, came to identify himself increasingly as an American, rather than as a disembodied philosopher. Having called himself a pragmatist for some time, he now addressed questions of culture and politics even more explicitly. In Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1988) Rorty moved from a powerful new statement of his anti-foundationalism (contingency) to a defense of individual freedom that combined traditional liberalism with the motif of self-creation in European high culture (as in Nietzsche and Proust) to an argument that democracy can exist without foundations and is compatible with self-creation (solidarity). In this and other writings of the late 1980s and 1990s, Rorty evinced a growing suspicion of the way in which, as he saw it, many American intellectuals were using European theory in order to argue for a politics of difference that would undermine a sense of national identity.

From Rorty's point of view, it was important to recognize that liberal democracy (specifically in the American form that he ironically referred to as "Postmodern Bourgeois Liberalism") was simply the best and most hopeful social arrangement yet devised. This despite the fact that it could be justified by no transcendental argument and that it continued to struggle with enormous challenges in a difficult and radically uncertain world.

Rorty's anti-objectivist view concepts such as truth and knowledge stresses the importance of community perceptions of what is and the language used within that community to configure the world. Rorty wrote frequently on political issues, attempting to clarify issues and strategies in the light of his approach. Thus, since people are members of many groups simultaneously, democratic liberal activism and advocacy become in significant part a matter of projecting outward the world view of a particular group to people not identifying themselves as members of that group. This approach eschews the strategy of the 90's left, which more commonly seeks recourse to claims of rights, which Rorty, borrowing from Harvard legal philosopher Mary Ann Glendon, describes as "unconditional moral imperatives," an approach which leads to a "blind alley," a pointless, distracting discussion of which rights exist and which do not. Instead, Rorty argues that what is really needed is a strategy by advocacy groups to get non-members to put themselves in their shoes, to see and understand the world from their perspective.