Saying Goodbye to Richard Rorty.

A window of opportunity amidst all of the computer assaults exists, so I will post this essay. I never know whether I will be able to continue writing or what new horror awaits me when I get on the computer in the morning. The number of visitors to this blog or to my books' sites is probably grossly underestimated. I am finding it difficult to get my ISBN number. I'll keep trying. Damage to these essays and more frustrations are always expected. The struggle continues, every day. See "Terry Tuchin, Diana Lisa Riccioli, and New Jersey's Agency of Torture."


Richard Rorty, "Trotsky and the Wild Orchids," in Philosophy and Social Hope (London: Penguin, 1999), p. 3.
Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 189-199.
Mark Edmundson, ed., Wild Orchids and Trotsky (London: Penguin, 1993), pp. 1-29.
Stephen F. Eisenman, The Abu Ghraib Effect (London: Reaktion 2007), entirety.


I was saddened to learn of Richard Rorty's recent death. I disagreed with some of his philosophical conclusions, while finding others very persuasive. I always enjoyed reading his cool and elegant prose. He is second only to Brand Blanschard as a prose stylist and philosopher of the post-war generation in America. It happens that I was reading some stories by Raymond Chandler and came upon his summary of Philip Marlowe's character, which (I believe) defines Rorty:

"To me, he is the American mind: a heavy portion of rugged realism, a dash of good hard vulgarity," -- Rorty could never be vulgar, but he was prosaic and unpretentious -- "a strong overtone of strident wit, an equally strong undertone of pure sentimentalism, an ocean of slang, and an utterly unexpected range of sensitivity."

Maybe that's me too. As a way of saying goodbye to our friend, Richard Rorty -- how about a closer look at his classic autobiographical essay "Trotsky and the Wild Orchids"?

I.

This essay is the most personal of Rorty's writings and provides a perspective on all of his works. Rorty begins by acknowledging his status as whipping boy for both the Right and Left of the political spectrum. Rorty's work has been criticized by those who haven't bothered to read it on the grounds that he is: 1) a "relativistic, irrationalist, deconstructing, sneering, smirking intellectual," an "elitist" who is also "unpatriotic"; and 2) Rorty is an alleged "intellectual snob" who has "nothing to say to blacks, or other groups who have been shunted aside by American society."

Notice that this is as much or more an insult directed against African-Americans and other minorities as it is against Rorty. People who say that African-Americans don't care about Kant, Hegel or Marx should have a chat with the internationally respected scholar of modern German thought -- Angela Davis. As for Richard Rorty's anti-Americanism, Rorty writes: "I see America pretty much as Whitman and Dewey did, as opening a prospect of unlimited democratic vistas."

I concur:

"I think that our country, despite its present and past atrocities, despite its continuing eagerness to elect fools and knaves to higher office -- is a good example of the best kind of society so far invented."

That statement doesn't sound unpatriotic to me. There is a duality in Rorty's psyche and intellectual project -- similar to a division found in most good minds -- between inner and outer selves, so-called subjective and objective aspects of a single human perspective. Rorty's aesthetic interests, symbolized in this essay by his childhood love of orchids, is contrasted with the philosopher's sense of social responsibility, aimed at overcoming the subjective/objective division, or what he might have described in his youthful Marxist phase as "praxis." Religious persons -- notably thinkers in the Third World's tradition of liberation theology -- speak of a "salvific mission," a calling to be of service to others in a communal project of liberation. Rorty says:

"I wanted to be both a ... nerdy recluse and fighter for justice."

Again:

"My starting point was the discovery of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, a book which I read as saying: granted that philosophy is just a matter of out-redescribing the last philosopher, the cunning of reason can make use even of this sort of competition. It can use it to weave the conceptual fabric of a freer, better, more just society."

Rorty's heros are Hegel and later Dewey, Proust and Nabokov. Rorty's diagnosis of the failure of the intellectual project of Western civilization, aside from scientific and technological achievements of an instrumental sort, is worth pondering:

"As I tried to figure out what had gone wrong, I gradually decided that the whole idea of holding reality and justice in a single vision had been a mistake -- that pursuit of such a vision had been precisely what led Plato astray."

In the absence of religion, there was one alternative:

"I decided the hope of getting a single vision by becoming a philosopher had been a self-deceptive atheist's way out, so I decided to write a book about what intellectual life might be like if one could give up the Platonic attempt to hold reality and justice in a single vision."

Rorty's life is an effort to hold reality and justice in a single vision. Rorty substituted what his orchid symbolized, literature and all art, for absolute (or objective?) truth, relegating philosophy to the secondary task of interpretation and description. Philosophy was to find MEANING rather than TRUTH. Big words get capital letters in Steven King's blue collar America, where I happen to live. If you don't like it, tough. In fact, TOUGH.

Rorty believed in the superiority of his moral view and in his obligation to work for the causes required by that moral view, while arguing for his unique brand of "cultural relativism." Is there a contradiction in these commitments and in Rorty's intellectual stance? Yes.

Despite Rorty's brilliant philosophical fencing. No one landed a hit against Rorty during his life in published exchanges with the best philosophical minds in the world. I would have done no better in debate against him. I am sure that there is indeed a contradiction in Rorty's project. But then, there is a contradiction in human life and in all of us. There is a similar tension in most or all of the best philosophical systems. There would have to be if we are living dual-aspect lives, as material and spiritual beings -- earth-bound and leaping into flight -- which we should be. We must live within contradictions. This is true even if we do not contain multitudes.

Problems not adequately explored by Rorty's critics include the question of whether Rorty merely discovered a new religion, the religion of art, as others fashioned the religion of science. Rorty certainly has a religious and Romantic mind. Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett display a somewhat excessive fondness for the methods of science in all aspects of life that seems much more bizarre -- and mystical -- to many people in the world than Rorty's fondness for, say, Nabokov.

The politically correct thought-police in New Jersey would happily burn Lolita, for example, with a glee worthy of Savonarola. Indeed, New Jersey's fashionistas are tempted and sometimes do burn people like Rorty, in the effort to make the world safe for Ralph Nader and "The Colbert Report." I have spent hours today seeking to post two poems, one by Lord Byron and the other by Shakespeare, neither of which (evidently) met with the approval of the forces of political correctness. True, neither of those poets was a woman. However, Shakespeare may be described as a male lesbian.

II.

I might have some fun at Rorty's expense by highlighting the contradictions at the center of his thinking, so as to suggest incoherence and collapsing foundations. Many lesser minds engage in book-length efforts to do exactly that, succeeding only in demonstrating their own obtuse lack of comprehension. Such a critique is unworthy of a philosopher and disrespectful of a great thinker who is no longer here to respond. I will do something different. Rorty did not set out to be the Kant who wrote The Critique of Pure Reason. In fact, Rorty's goal was not only to do the opposite, but to suggest that what Kant had done could no longer be done by anyone -- which was a way of trying to do what Kant had done.

I will take up Rorty's project, suggesting that we turn it on its head, as Marx is said to have done for Hegel. I will offer one interpretation, a liberal-ironic interpretation of Rorty that does not challenge or accept his foundational-anti-foundationalism. (This last sentence has already been altered several times by hackers.) We will leave our epistemological and metaphysical issues for another day. Let's get into the whole beauty thing. Let's play with Rorty's ideas. They're really fun and provocative.

Let us take up Rorty's gauntlet and examine the "engaged aesthetics" advocated by Yale's answer to France's Jean Paul Sartre. I contend (this would have been much to Rorty's surprise) that we will discover a very Kantian morality and also what we may designate by the word "God" at the center of the beautiful objects Rorty revered along with the shared moral struggle for which he worked. Somehow, on the way to becoming Dewey, Rorty discovered the idealist child inside his pragmatist's heart. Consider two quotations, the first from Rorty's Contigency, Irony, and Solidarity; the second, from an important recent essay by art historian Stephen F. Eisenman:

"... solidarity is not best thought of as a recognition of a core self, the human essence in all human beings. Rather, it is best thought of as the ability to see more and more traditional differences (of tribe, race, customs, and the like) as unimportant when compared with similarities with respect to pain and humiliation -- the ability to think of people wildly different from ourselves as included in the range of 'us.' That is why I said ... that detailed descriptions of particular varieties of pain and humiliation (in, e.g., novels or ethnographies), rather than philosophical or religious treatises, were the modern intellectual's principal contributions to moral progress."

Visual arts and films might be added to Rorty's list of art objects. Rorty goes on to criticize Kant for emphasizing rationality and obligation, rather than feeling. My answer: What about Kant's final Critique of Judgment? This view of Kant, without his Hegelian corrective and with too little emphasis on Kantian aesthetics and religious thinking, is debatable at best. I planned to suggest a reading of my essay on the ontological proof, but that essay has been damaged by hackers. If it still exists, please see "Is it rational to believe in God?" at Critique. http://www.Critique@groups.msn.com/ (MSN groups has closed?)

"The modern tradition in art -- from the late eighteenth to the late twentieth century -- has had multiple and diverse national iterations, and encompassed many styles and subjects, but whether made in Spain, the United States, France or Mexico, it has almost always articulated a vision of subjectivity that precludes the treatment of human beings as things. It exists under the modern rubric of the 'categorical impertive,' the idea, found in the philosophies of Kant, that individuals must act only according to those principles or maxims that they would wish to become a universal law. [I wonder where that idea comes from?] Whatever its particular politics, modern art -- whether a landscape by Cezanne, a mural by Rivera, a still-life by Picasso, or a drip painting by Jackson Pollack -- has implicitly represented the value of personal independence and autonomous thought. It has first of all obeyed the injunctions of art and the rules of imagination, not the dictates of party or faction. When modern works of art have done otherwise, they have flirted with authoritarianism. The torture photographs from Abu Ghraib precisely enshrine objectification and heteronomous thought: the idea that certain people by virtue of race, religion, rationality, gender or sexual preference may be denied rights to basic freedoms of action, association and thought (and even to life itself), and that the greatest ethical imperative is to follow orders. The Abu Ghraib pictures represent a moral universe in which people are used as mere (disposable) means to ends, the latter being the gratification of the torturer, the obtaining of information, the camaraderie of occupying forces and the coercive inscription on bodies and minds of national, racial and religious superiority or inferiority." (Eisenman, p. 14.)

As one who has been forced to dwell in that moral universe, the "theater of cruelty" (Artaud) depicted in the Abu Ghraib pictures -- only to have torturers comment on my ethics -- I feel the importance of the truth in Professor Eisenman's insight and its connection to Richard Rorty's best work, which was aimed against the seductiveness of cruelty. I have no doubt that the people who torture me, who delight in defacing and destroying my writings, would relish the opportunity to torture others at Abu Ghraib. (See "Terry Tuchin, Diana Lisa Riccioli, and New Jersey's Agency of Torture" and "New Jersey's Feces-Covered Supreme Court.")

The Abu Ghraib pictures are not art. Nevertheless, they cannot help gesture in the direction of high art works in the Western tradition, as their opposites, since the imagery of such revered works forms the structure of our thinking in terms of all images, linking with the cinematic discourse which now shapes human identity everywhere. At the center of our languages of images, I suggest, we will find a moral hope close to Professor Rorty's heart and a yearning for love. Alternatively, by turning away from that center, we walk towards Auschwitz and Abu Ghraib, or the Gulags.

What draws us to an encounter with great art is spiritual power. That spiritual power insists on showing us the "inmost parts" of us, where we discover not difference, but sameness. My suffering neighbor, the child entering a concentration camp, a man beaten and covered in feces, Abu Ghraib's "Shit Boy," the Muslim man "crucified" to his bunk is all of us -- because, in a language of symbols, every tortured person is Christ. To articulate the subjective, as Rorty suggested artists must do, is to transcend human subjectivity in unity with all of humanity and with that love which binds us together for which there is a short word, God. (See "The Art of Robert Downey, Jr." and "The Art of Melanie Griffith.")

That tortured and suffering human being is the negation of the Law in Judaism. The evil in torture or terrorism is the denial of the prophet's teaching, correctly understood, for Muslims, or the failure to see God's handiwork in others for Jews and Christians. One lesson learned in the twentieth century from Munch and Picasso, as much as from the experience of the Holocaust, is the possibility of terrors and horrors found even in great objects of art and in the most "accomplished" individuals, who are so easily transformed into servants of power, turning away from this message of unity, spirituality and compassion. (The word "turning" in this last sentence has been corrected in the same way three times so far.) This ambiguity that we are -- both Angels and Beasts -- is not often commented upon by Professor Rorty. It is the great subject for the critic George Steiner. Where we find love, we also find hate. Where we find beauty, we also find horror. Where we find peace, we also find strife:

"Amnesty International indexes more than one hundred nations (which includes Israel and Britain), [Cuba and the United States,] at whose behest torture is accepted practice. The sytematic economic and sexual abuse of children is thought, by qualified observers to be at its highest level in human history (the number of children in 'slave factories' or on serf farms is put at 200 million). Thus, the invention of the inhuman continues without end." (Errata, p. 119.)

Amidst all of this suffering we have the nearly unbearable beauty of one man's gesture of compassion or love; one woman's protection of a child; one person's feeding of another -- all resulting from the recognition that the other's pain is one's own. This recognition is the deepest meaning of the greatest painting of the twentieth century "Guernica."

If you can imagine the level of a person who might slash that masterpiece by Picasso because the artist was a "Communist," then you will appreciate the sadism involved in altering this essay (whatever its merits may be) for the pleasure of hurting its author, as he makes the same corrections many times.

Love is the resolution offered by Wyath's "Christina's World." It is love alone which redeems the human condition and provides meaning, even at Dachau, allowing us to see the beauty in others. This achieved synthesis of self and other is the meaning of a man's gentle touch of a woman's face that says: "I know ... I understand and accept this gift of the pain that you feel." (See "The Soldier and the Ballerina.") Rorty understood and argued this point in the eloquent American language of aesthetics and moral commitment. (See Santayana's Sense of Beauty.) An earlier philosopher, as I suggested in my critique of Rorty's ethics, offered the same message in more pithy phrases while suffering on a cross. That's not bad company, Richard. Rorty will debate some of his favorites -- Dewey, James, Derrida and Proust, Nabokov, Orwell, even Kant and Hegel as his books are read by generations of humble students, like me, with great respect and gratitude.

Dormi bene, Richard Rorty.