The American philosopher Richard Rorty, who died on 8th June at the age of 75, was the greatest philosophical essayist of his time. As a student at Chicago University in the late 1940s and early 1950s, he fell in love with the corrosive style of philosophy associated with Rudolf Carnap and became what might loosely be called a scientific positivist. He regarded himself as part of a valiant movement to eradicate old-fashioned capital-letter concepts like God, Mind and Spirit and replace them with dispassionate logical analysis of the "languages" or "conceptual frameworks" through which human beings view the world. These interests culminated in a celebrated anthology called The Linguistic Turn (1967), in which Rorty suggested that this new method had "succeeded in putting the entire philosophical tradition on the defensive." But he was already losing faith in the idea of a scientific philosophy, even if he didn't realise it at the time. Looking back on this moment many years later, he confessed that he could see nothing in it but "the attempt of a 33-year-old philosopher to convince himself that he had had the luck to be born at the right time—to persuade himself that the disciplinary matrix in which he happened to find himself was more than just one more tempest in an academic teapot."
In 1972, Rorty delivered a fateful address to the American Philosophical Association. Under the title "The World Well Lost," he announced that he had come to the conclusion that Science, Truth, Objective Reality, and Conceptual Frameworks would have to go the same way as the old fetishes of God, Mind and Spirit. It was as if the acid of linguistic analysis had eaten through the tank that once contained it. All traces of Rorty's old triumphalism deserted him, and he found he could no longer give a cuss about the issues that most philosophers regarded as hot. He wanted to crawl back to the provocatively prosaic traditions of John Dewey's American pragmatism, where truth was no more than "what works."
The disappointment of his early hopes for a modern, scientific philosophy provided Rorty with the basic themes for the remainder of his life's work. He engaged with an extraordinary range of subjects, from literature and politics to logic and the history of philosophy, but he did so in a tone of droll intellectual self-deprecation that would often lead to misunderstandings. His intellectual courage and directness was accompanied by personal shyness and patience, and he was constantly surprised by the hostility he encountered. Those who had never seen any point in philosophy found it all too easy to applaud his skittish iconoclasm, but then they were discombobulated and irritated by his underlying earnestness. Meanwhile the professional geeks in university philosophy departments took offence at what they regarded as disloyalty, indeed apostasy.
In The Linguistic Turn, Rorty observed that if philosophy could give up its claims to be a modern, scientific discipline, then it would be able to move on to a "post-philosophical phase," throwing away the cumbersome baggage of "pseudo-scientific argumentation" and reinventing itself as a "new art form." In his most famous book, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979), he stepped up to the plate, proposing that philosophy should be seen not as a hotline to Truth about the World but as a loose literary tradition which might from time to time provide the public with new metaphors to live by, or new stories for articulating the past or imagining the future. He was thus able to extend a hand of friendship to the kind of "continental philosophers" who had always been anathema to his colleagues; but then he made new enemies because the admirers of Heidegger, Gadamer and Derrida were not pleased to have their heroes bundled up with loose-talking American pragmatists who had given up on the idea of a shining path to truth.
Rorty's disenchantment with hard-edged scientism led him not only to the sorts of thinkers that most professional philosophers dislike, but also to a kind of politics that they found equally unpalatable. He liked to recall his bookish left-wing parents, and how he was "brought up Trotskyite' in rural New Jersey, even if he had since been "forced to admit that Lenin and Trotsky did more harm than good, and that Kerensky has gotten a bum rap." But that did not detract from his admiration for his parents: they were Trotskyists not because they awaited a social revolution that would sweep away capitalism and injustice once and for all, but because they believed in socialism, democracy and the self-reliant simple-life Americanism of Emerson and Thoreau.
In Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (1989), Rorty argued for a revival of radicalism, but cured of the old superiority complex that deluded it into supposing that it was in possession of some exclusive insight into the fundamental structures of history, society or morality. He was an eclectic in politics, saying that he hoped to combine the progressive values of the Enlightenment with "the least common denominator of Mill and Marx, Trotsky and Whitman, William James and Vaclav Havel." Politics was about solidarity rather than truth, and solidarity depended not on securing universal assent to principles that might be taken as self-evident, but on learning to love the fact that different people want different things from their lives, and that there is no reason why they shouldn't. In Achieving our Country (1998), Rorty managed to annoy most would-be leftists by declaring his affection for everything they professed to despise: humanism, liberalism, individualism, technologism, representative democracy, and indeed the American way of life. He was unable to abstain from the general loathing for Reagan, Bush and the intervention in Iraq, but he also proclaimed an unfashionable preference for Roosevelt or Hubert Humphrey over Mao or Fidel Castro. He believed in a democratic utopia not because it would embody some ultimate political truth, but because it would mean that people realised there was no such thing as political truth. Above all he was a believer in hope—the hope for an open secular community where nothing matters except solidarity, and "love is pretty much the only law."
