On June 8, Richard Rorty, one of America’s most influential and progressive modern philosophers, died of pancreatic cancer.

Rorty, whose prodigious intellect was recognized early on, began studying philosophy at the University of Chicago at the age of 15. At 20, he moved on to Yale, where he received his PhD. After teaching for a spell at Yale and Wellesley and spending two years in the army, he settled at Princeton and began his extraordinary writing career. From early on, in works like Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Rorty, who identified himself as a liberal pragmatist, rejected the epistemological correspondence theory of truth, which claims that knowledge can (and should) truly correspond to an objective reality. Instead, like John Dewey, one of the founding fathers of American pragmatism, Rorty went against the grain of the history of western philosophy by advocating a more pragmatic approach to language and philosophy. Rather than getting entangled in semantic debates about universal truths, which he saw as so much metaphysical hocus-pocus, he believed that philosophers should see it as their job to come up with ideas that facilitate greater freedom, empathy, and solidarity among men.

Old-fashioned liberals

As Rorty so eloquently put it, “We can still be old-fashioned reformist liberals even if, like Dewey, we give up the correspondence theory of truth and start treating moral and scientific beliefs as tools for achieving greater human happiness, rather than as representations of the intrinsic nature of reality.”

Rorty, who was enormously influenced by Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, exhorted us to think of these beliefs like ladders which we shouldn’t shy away from leaving behind us when they’re no longer useful. In 1981, Rorty was one of the first recipients of the prestigious MacArthur “genius grant” for “talented individuals who have shown extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits and a marked capacity for self-direction.”

In 1982, annoyed by the constrained pedantry of philosophy departments, Rorty decided to give up teaching formal philosophy to become an interdisciplinary humanities professor at the University of Virginia. During his tenure there he continued to write prolifically, putting out a number of books and magazine articles on a wide variety of subjects.

Given his views on the nature of belief systems, it should come as no surprise that Rorty’s philosophical paradigms never stopped evolving. In later works, such as Essays on Heidegger and Others, and Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Rorty’s essays became increasingly suffused with a postmodern literary sensibility. Under the influence of Nietzsche, late Heidegger, Derrida, and Proust, Rorty spoke increasingly of the virtues of “endless self-creation” through pliable “language games” that oppose “final vocabularies” and “the crust of convention” that they engender. This view of philosophy as continuous with literature rather than science irked a great number of philosophy’s old guard, who saw Rorty’s ideas as a threat to the established notion of objective philosophical inquiry. But Rorty never shied away from conflict and made many enemies across the political spectrum. For example, he was equally merciless in his criticism of the ossified worldviews of both the religious Right and the Marxist Left, which he saw as antithetical to human freedom.

The academic left

In his later years, in books such as Achieving Our Country, Rorty was at his most incisive when he went after the rarefied aestheticism of what he referred to as “the academic Left”:

“When one of today’s academic leftists says that some topic has been ‘inadequately theorized,’ you can be pretty certain that he or she is going to drag in either philosophy of language, or Lacanian psychoanalysis, or some neo-Marxist version of economic determinism. . . . Recent attempts to subvert social institutions by problematizing concepts have produced a few very good books. They have also produced many thousands of books which represent scholastic philosophizing at its worst. The authors of these purportedly ‘subversive’ books honestly believe that they are serving human liberty. But it is almost impossible to clamber back down from their books to a level of abstraction on which one might discuss the merits of a law, a treaty, a candidate, or a political strategy. Even though what these authors ‘theorize’ is often something very concrete and near at hand—a current TV show, a media celebrity, a recent scandal—they offer the most abstract and barren explanations imaginable.”

For Rorty, postmodern infinitizing of ready-to-hand concepts is usually nothing more than fancy masturbation. Cogent leftist American attempts to solve America’s and the world’s problems “will require the culture Left to forget about Baudrillard’s account of America as Disneyland—as a country of simulacra—and to start proposing changes in the laws of a real country, inhabited by real people who are enduring unnecessary suffering, much of which can be cured by governmental action. Nothing would do more to resurrect the American Left than agreement on a concrete political platform, a People’s Charter, a list of specific reforms. The existence of such a list—endlessly reprinted and debated, equally familiar to professionals and production workers, imprinted on the memory both of professional people and those who clean the professionals’ toilets—might revitalize leftist politics.”

The way Rorty saw it, in order to remain relevant, more leftist philosophers need to step out of the ivory towers of abstract critical theory and get their hands dirty in the nitty-gritty realm of human politics. Needless to say, Rorty’s assertions didn’t go over very well with professional academics who’d invested a great deal in such fashionable theories. But they were like a breath of fresh air for those who were more interested in pursuing social justice than endlessly problematizing it.

After 9/11

This became all the more important after 9/11. In the lead-up to the Iraq War, at a time when both the American media and most of the Democratic Party were deafeningly silent on the Bush administration’s transparently mendacious case for war, Rorty bravely railed against what he saw as a pretext for “‘the military-industrial complex’ to extend its power over the US government in unprecedented ways.” Of course, now that the tide has turned against the administration, these claims sound quite common-sensical, even to many staunch Republicans. But it’s easy to forget that just a few years ago, many academics and regular citizens were sternly reprimanded and outright bullied for daring to question Bush and Cheney’s motives for going to war.

And right up to the time he died, Rorty continued to worry that another terrorist attack would give Bush or his successor the excuse they needed to completely corrode the rights and freedoms that many Americans have learned to take for granted as God-given and to wreak havoc on the unfortunate denizens of the next country the administration has in its crosshairs.

Though Rorty wasn’t fond of drawing such connections, the common thread between his epistemology, his literary sensibility, and his political philosophy was a disdain for totalitarianism. For Rorty, good philosophy and good politics require a markedly anti-foundationalist approach. That is to say that progressive thinkers must be willing to amend, abandon, and even destroy their own intellectual constructions—no matter how elaborate they are and how much time and energy they’ve invested in them—when the situation at hand calls for profoundly better architecture; otherwise, all we’ll be left with is an existential skyscape that’s ill-suited to provide shelter in the storms and earthquakes to come.

Whither progress?

We’ve been seduced into believing that the evolution of our scientific mastery of the world is being accompanied by concomitant secular moral/political progress. Counter-intuitively, however, fundamentalism is overtaking secularism both inside America and throughout the world. Why? Because it is a convenient emotional reaction against the horrible uncertainty of modernity, a retreat into a simplistic righteous-Us-vs-demonic-Them mentality, with God’s stamp of approval and guaranteed rewards in the life to come, of course.

After all, it’s so much easier for Bush’s friends General Boykin and the late Jerry Falwell to publicly demonize Islam on the basis of their ostensibly superior Christian God than address the real-world causes and potential results of the conflict. By the same token, Osama bin Laden, the Taliban, the Sudanese Janjaweed (or “faith warriors”), and the Iranian mullahcracy are confident that the Koran endorses whatever pain and bloodshed they cause—and we have to admit that the Bush administration seems eager to reinforce this sentiment.

Now, more than ever, we should hope (and, I dare say, pray) that Rorty’s prismatic, hands-on brand of anti-fundamentalism lives on and takes root in both popular consciousness and the upper echelons of power. The very fate of secular democracy may hang in the balance.

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