A Requiem for Rorty

The lack of NYT obit is pretty surprising. If there's a more famous American philosopher who was living as of a week ago, I'm pained to name him/her.

#3 remembers correctly--and, really, given some of the battles we had in grad school over this, how could he forget?--I've never much liked Rorty. In merging American pragmatism with European post-modernism, he damaged both, producing a smug, lit crity, know-nothingism that managed to scorn truth, science, and religion, all at the same time. His celebration of the "ironist" reflected a self-satisfied elitism more interested in mocking the world (from a privileged height) than in evaluating or improving it.

Here's an irony: although he meant to champion "perspective" a la Nietzsche, by denying "truth" he degraded literature into mere amusement, implicitly rejecting the notion that lit might liberate through its ability to REVEAL the world's difficult or hidden realities. For Rorty, there was nothing to reveal: one "language game" was as good as another, as long as it distinguished public and private, a line that Rorty could nonetheless never hope to ground in any "reality" other than his own aesthetic vision. To deny truth is to empower power (and the powerful), a point that Nietzsche understood but that Rorty did not.

For me, Rorty symbolized the collapse of liberal intellectual endeavor. No longer believing in anything beyond its own aimlessly peripatetic search for new and different perspectives, liberalism descended into a navel-gazing relativism incapable of inspiring either serious art or committed citizenship (not to mention religious devotion, metaphysical speculation, or spiritual striving). He helped turn liberalism into the lame caricature long-promoted by conservatives. To be fair, having come of age in the late 60s and 70s, he probably reflected this trend more than he initiated it. There were better ways to accomplish similar objectives. Isaiah Berlin embraced "value pluralism" to a point I found unacceptable (and got tangled up in a problematic conception of "liberty"), but showed degrees of historical understanding, analytical rigor, and literary flair that Rorty lacked. Unlike Rorty, Berlin made pragmatist relativism look good.

I wonder about Rorty's influence. My best guess is that the Bush era's contempt for truth and science will produce a long-term liberal recoil from the sorts of doctrines with which Rorty is most closely associated. Ironically, he foreshadowed more in the emrging conservative mind than in the liberal. In the long run, I suspect that Orwell, Berlin, Shklar, and even Rawls will be better touchstones of 20th century liberal ideals than Rorty. If liberalism survives, that is.