Shattering philsophy's mirror: a conversation with Richard Rorty - philosopher - Cover Story

Commonweal, May 6, 1994 by Gordon D. Marino

The Rorty that I met was a somewhat hunched and shuffling figure, dressed in drab colors. In his greeting, he does,not give you the sense that he is particularly glad to see you. Rorty does not make a lot of eye contact. Ask him a question and he is likely to scrunch up for a moment, fold his hands on the table, look out the window, and respond. He speaks in a voice that is somewhere between subdued and melancholic. Psychoanalysts teach that we can learn a lot about a person by keeping a third eye on the way he or she makes us feel. Rorty made me feel like shaking him. As he leaned back in his chair and offered his monotonic life story, I had the distinct impulse to shout, "Cheer up, you've hit an intellectual gear that very few people reach, you've a wide and eager audience, and a great deal to say." But there are qualities about Rorty that speak above his reticence.

Unlike many of the masterminds who soon forget how quickly they will be forgotten, Rorty is devoid of pretensions. Attribute an idea to Rorty and he is more than likely to say that he got it from someone else. Academics reveal something important about themselves in the way they handle the often nebulous issue of intellectual debt. In both his conversations and his prefaces, Rorty is believably munificent. He seems on the whole to be refreshingly insouciant about racking up philosophical patents. The herd of Rorty's colleagues come to discussions as though it were almost always a case of mortal ego combat. Not Rorty. He does not get his back up when you press him with a question of potentially critical import. At one point in our discussion, I challenged him about his occasionally stated mission to dedivinize everything he possibly could. I suggested that he might be mistaken about the corrosive effects of the sacred. On my reckoning, it was an empirical question as to whether or not faith was salutary for a society. Rorty reflected for a moment and then easily conceded the point, which might seem highly unremarkable to anyone inexperienced in grilling philosophers about their published positions.

There is a gentleness about Rorty. The target of many vitriolic attacks, he rarely responds in kind. Nor is he dismissive. One of the things that Rorty found chafing about analytic philosophy was the tendency of its practitioners to pass judgment upon certain voices and exclude them from the conversation of philosophy. Rorty is able and willing to draw from a wide variety of philosophical descriptions. In a famous, or if you prefer infamous, footnote addressing the fact that one of his heroes, the metaphysician Heidegger, was a Nazi, Rorty remarks:

On the general question of the relation between Heidegger's

thought and his Nazism, I am not persuaded that there is

much to be said except that one of the century's most original

thinkers happened to be a pretty nasty character ... but

if one holds the view which I put forward ... one will be

prepared to find the relation between the intellectual and

moral virtues, and the relation between a writer's books