... Mr. Rorty was engaged with and amused by his critics. In a 1992 autobiographical essay, “Trotsky and the Wild Orchids,” he wrote that he was considered to be one of the “smirking intellectuals whose writings are weakening the moral fiber of the young”; “cynical and nihilistic”; “complacent”; and “irresponsible.”
Yet he confounded critics as well, by speaking up for patriotism, an academic canon and the idea that one can make meaningful moral judgments.
His reason for writing the 1992 essay, he said, was to show how he came by his particular views. Richard McKay Rorty was born in 1931 to James and Winifred Rorty, anti-Stalinist lefties who let their home in Flatbrookville, a small town on the Delaware river, be used as a hideout for wayward Trotskyites. He describes himself as having “weird, snobbish, incommunicable interests” that as a boy led him to send congratulations to the newly named Dalai Lama, a “fellow 8-year-old who had made good.” ...
In his early career, at Wellesley and Princeton, he worked on analytic philosophy, smack in the mainstream. As for the surrounding 1960s counterculture, he said in a 2003 interview, “I smoked a little pot and let my hair grow long,” but “I soon decided that the radical students who wanted to trash the university were people with whom I would never have much sympathy.” ...
<http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/11/obituaries/11rorty.html?hp=&pagewanted=print>
Carl
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