The Quest for Uncertainty
Richard Rorty's pragmatic pilgrimage
by James Ryerson
THE TRANQUIL, HIBISCUS-LINED eucalyptus grove in the
UC-Santa Cruz arboretum is a nice spot for reflecting on philosophy's
age-old questions. Fortunately for Richard Rorty, a nature lover with a
distaste for those sorts of questions, it's also an excellent place for
bird-watching. We have driven here on a bright California morning to
do a bit of both. As we pass his binoculars back and forth, searching
the grevilleas for hummingbirds, it's hard to believe that this shy,
gentle-mannered sixty-nine-year-old Stanford professor is the same
man whose ideas have been widely denounced for the past twenty
years as cynical, nihilistic, and deeply irresponsible.
"I have even lost a friend in all of this," says Rorty of his fractious
career as America's most famous living philosopher. "It was Carl
Hempel, one of the best-loved figures in the profession and a model of
moral character." Hempel, a teacher of Rorty's, had fled Hitler's
Germany and symbolized all that was most inspiring about the
scientific, social democratic, truth-seeking world of Anglo-American
philosophy. "Hempel read my book Philosophy and the Mirror of
Nature and wrote me a letter saying, in effect, 'You have betrayed
everything I stood for.' And he really didn't like me after that. I'm still
very sad about it."
Rorty points to a bird flying overhead. "That's a kestrel," he adds
without a pause, in his doleful, sighing voice, "the smallest American
falcon."
The charge of betrayal is one Rorty has learned to accept over the
years. Like his idol John Dewey, whom he credits with breaking
through "the crust of philosophical convention," he has pursued twin
careers as disciplinary bad boy and high-minded public philosopher.
He has set out to deflate the aspirations of his profession—he rejects
the idea of truth as an accurate reflection of the world—while placing
his own unorthodox philosophical views at the center of an ambitious
vision of social and historical hope. In recent writings especially, he
champions an unlikely brand of "postmodern bourgeois liberalism" that
has largely infuriated postmodernists and liberals alike.
A lucid writer with a penchant for dropping the names of virtually all the
major thinkers in the philosophical tradition, Rorty has a knack for
making his radical rejection of truth and objectivity seem an easy and
agreeable shift of one's current perspective. Harold Bloom is not alone
in judging him "the most interesting philosopher in the world today." But
the success of philosophy's preeminent anti-philosopher has not come
easily. Seemingly everyone who is impressed with one facet of Rorty's
work harbors severe reservations about another. Those who share his
admiration for analytic philosophers like Donald Davidson, Wilfrid
Sellars, and W.V.O. Quine are angered by his opinion that analytic
philosophy does not exist "except in some such stylistic or sociological
way." Political theorists are dismayed by his proposal that their work be
replaced by "genres such as ethnography, the journalist's report, the
comic book, the docudrama, and, especially, the novel." Fellow
enthusiasts of Hans-Georg Gadamer, Jacques Derrida, and Martin
Heidegger aren't comfortable seeing their favorite Continental thinkers
discussed in the frank, Anglo-American idiom in which Rorty was
trained. And radical postmodernist fans of his assault on the idea of
objective truth are disappointed to hear that his politics are "pretty
much those of Hubert Humphrey."
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