Remembering Rorty

by

Henry L. Carrigan, Jr.

When Richard Rorty died on June 8, 2007, of pancreatic cancer, America lost its most unique and creative philosophical voice since John Dewey and William James. His career spanned years of turmoil in philosophy in the American academy. He spent his early career at Princeton, but as he moved further away from philosophy and into broader inquiries into religion, politics, and literature, he moved to be a professor of humanities at the University of Virginia and ended his career as a professor of comparative literature at Stanford.

Always a maverick voice in the academy, Rorty challenged the philosophical guild at every turn. Early in his career, he could be counted among the crowd of analytic philosophy that dominated American philosophy in the 1950s through the 1970s. His book, The Linguistic Turn: Essays in Philosophical Method (published originally in 1967; republished in 1992 with Rorty’s reflections on the changes in American philosophy wrought in the twenty-five years since he first wrote the book), provided a tour-de-force of the state of philosophy in America in the late ‘60s. In those days when students were screaming for relevance in college classrooms and outside college administration buildings, philosophy had turned from a discipline seeking to know the world objectively to an analytic undertaking concerned with the nature and function of language (words, sentences, phrases) and its relation to reality. Taking the lead from pre-eminent language philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951), philosophers such as Saul Kripke, Wilfrid Sellars, W.V.O Quine, Hilary Putnam, Nelson Goodman, to name only a few, left behind the fertile fields of Continental philosophy where towering figures such as Kant, Hegel, Fichte, and Schelling had plowed furrow after furrow that would yield flowers of consciousness, self-consciousness and reason.

Although Rorty’s first book surveyed the field of analytic philosophy and its influence in late 1960s America, his 1979 book exploded like a bomb in the philosophical world. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, 1979) challenged the very nature of the philosophical enterprise itself, moving philosophy closer to the cultural center instead of relegating it to the professional occupation of ivory-tower intellectuals. Aristophanes once said that philosophers spent so much time contemplating the heavens that they failed to see the pile of manure into which they were about to step. Not so for Rorty’s philosopher; his philosopher need not be a professional but rather someone involved in an edifying discourse about the nature of the world. Early in the book, he delivers one among many blows to traditional philosophy: “The aim of [philosophy] is to edify—to help readers, or society as a whole, break free from outworn vocabularies and attitudes, rather than to provide ‘grounding’ for the intuitions and customs of the present.” Using Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Dewey as his guides, Rorty argues that “in [an] ideal society, culture is no longer dominated by the ideal of objective cognition but by that of aesthetic enhancement. In that culture . . . the arts and sciences would be the ‘unforced flowers of life.’” Throughout his carefully argued book, Rorty observes that “philosophy as a discipline thus sees itself as an attempt to underwrite or debunk claims to knowledge made by science, morality, art or religion. It purports to do this on the basis of its special understanding of the nature of knowledge and of mind. Philosophy can be foundational in respect to the rest of culture because culture is the assemblage of claims to knowledge, and philosophy adjudicates such claims . . . To know is to represent accurately what is outside the mid; so to understand the possibility and nature of knowledge is to understand the way in which the mind is able to construct such representations.” In the end, philosophy is not simply the search for objective knowledge but the entrance into a ongoing conversation in which we learn about ourselves and the world around us. Philosophy—without trying to sound too much like Dr. Phil or some New Age guru—is a journey to self-discovery that we take while walking alongside the great philosophers of the past, listening and talking to them about ideas. In the end for Rorty, philosophy is simply “edifying discourse.” “For edifying discourse is supposed be abnormal, to take us out of our old selves by the power of strangeness, to aid us in becoming new beings.” He concludes by observing that “philosophers’ moral concern should be with continuing the conversation of the West, rather than with insisting upon a place for the traditional problems of modern philosophy within that conversation.”

In his later books, Rorty continued to develop the notion of edifying discourse. Consequences of Pragmatism (University of Minnesota, 1982) ranges over topics from “keeping philosophy pure,” “overcoming the tradition,” and “philosophy as a kind of writing,” to a wonderful survey of academic philosophy, “philosophy in America today.” By the late 1990s, Rorty had taken his notion of philosophy as edifying discourse to its due course and was writing about politics and literature. In fact, for Rorty, the best way to do philosophy is to read novels, and he includes brilliant essays about Dickens, Kundera, Nabokov, Orwell and Proust in his later books. In a collection of essays, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge, 1989), he “tries to show how things look if we drop the demand for a theory which unifies the public and private, and are content to treat the demands of self-creation and of human solidarity as equally valid, yet forever incommensurable.” He develops the notion of the liberal ironist—which he carries through some of his later writings. “Liberal ironists are people who include among these ungroundable desires their own hope that suffering will be diminished, that the humiliation of human beings by other human beings may cease.” In one of his final books, Philosophy and Social Hope (Penguin, 2000)—a kind of philosophical memoir as well as politico-philosophical treatise talks about his own move away from Plato and toward the American pragmatism of William James and John Dewey. Carrying on from Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, he contends that what finally matters is not that truth corresponds to some external and absolute reality but that our ideas enable us to carry out practical tasks and help us fashion a more just and democratic world.

Rorty’s tremendous creativity reshaped American philosophy and challenged a whole generation of students to think differently about the nature of philosophy. Although his death leaves a void in American philosophy (and there is really no one to take his mantle; a statement for which I will surely be scolded by those who think of themselves as wearing the mantle), we still have his tremendously rich writings to sustain us and direct us. Reading Rorty is like reading Nietzsche: one must learn to dance with him as he waltzes around every corner of the philosophical universe. It has been exciting to have him lead us away from the walls where we’ve been sitting and to teach us a brand new dance.


Henry Carrigan dreamed of being a rock ‘n roll star with a life of coast-to-coast tours and wild parties with Van Morrison and Joni Mitchell among others. But books intervened, and instead he went to Emory University to major in Religion and Literature. Later, teaching humanities in college, he took up writing about books—this time to avoid reading students’ papers. Henry soon became Library Journal's religion columnist, then religion book editor for Publishers Weekly. While working as editor-in-chief for Northwestern University Press and editing classic books for Paraclete Press, he still continues to write for LJ and PW, as well as the Washington Post Book World, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the Charlotte Observer, ForeWord magazine—and now, BiblioBuffet. And he still enjoys playing his guitar. Henry can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it