Richard Rorty (1931-2007):
The View From Somewhere

by Carlin Romano
The Chronicle Review
Volume 53, Issue 43, Page B9

Edited by Andrew Ross

Richard Rorty edited one of analytic philosophy's most widely used anthologies, The Linguistic Turn (1967). For many of us, Rorty functioned as the truth teller, an ironic role for a thinker who became known as an "ironist" skeptical of truth.

Rorty's synoptic bent set him apart from many colleagues. His most crucial deviation from colleagues came in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979), followed quickly by Consequences of Pragmatism (1982). He'd emerged as a red-white-and-blue Nietzsche, philosophizing with a hammer meant to bring down Western philosophy's 2,500-year-old essentialist, ahistorical tradition of dissecting capitalized abstractions. One explanation couldn't fit all cultures, times, and languages, he argued. Instead, Rorty celebrated and revived the democratic, public-spirited pragmatism of William James and John Dewey as "the chief glory of our country's intellectual tradition."

Rorty further outraged the analytic philosophical establishment by drawing on the work of its senior figures to construct a tale about modern philosophy meant to stop epistemology in its tracks. Rorty insisted that the theory of knowledge as mirrorlike representation of the world in language had imploded from within; that scientific method in philosophy amounted to a myth; that we should see philosophy and science as forms of literature; that one could avoid realism without adopting relativism; that philosophy might best be understood as conversation, not a tribunal for judging other types of knowledge.

One effort to delegitimize Rorty's work rests on claims that he got everyone crucial to his work — Dewey, Heidegger, Wittgenstein — wrong. As a pragmatist, Rorty focused not on what a philosopher thought his work meant, but an understanding of that work that fit the larger philosophical vision in which Rorty believed. At a seminar on the German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer to which Rorty invited the great man, Rorty summarized Gadamer's views. Gadamer then protested in heavily accented English: "Dick, you've got me all wrong." Rorty grinned, shrugged, and replied, "Yes, Hans, but that's what you should have said."

In the end, the "ironist" who popularized that term in contemporary humanistic criticism, and who credited the views of other thinkers so profligately, proved more genuinely original and unique than any of the thinkers he deferred to. Unlike his former colleague at Princeton, Thomas Nagel, whose book, The View From Nowhere (1986), sought to keep alive philosophical objectivity and the "ambition of transcendence," Rorty over the years articulated a convincing, imaginative "view from somewhere." He urged creative intellectual storytelling and resourceful vocabularies that assume context, tradition, and language matter.

In Philosophy and Social Hope (1999), Rorty wrote that he'd come to see the term "philosopher" as "the most appropriate description for somebody who remaps culture — who suggests a new and promising way for us to think about the relation among large areas of human activity."


Carlin Romano, critic at large for The Chronicle and literary critic for The Philadelphia Inquirer, teaches philosophy and media theory at the University of Pennsylvania.