Draw Breath

I am so sorry to hear, via Crooked Timber, that Richard Rorty died two days ago. Although I have never discussed Rorty's ideas in publishable work I did write a chapter on him in my PhD thesis (which counts, at best, as juvenilia) and have always wanted to draw out some ideas on him. I might do yet of course, but - and this is a rare thing to say - I'll miss reading new work by him.

All of which is a bit strange to say because the different things that I write are almost entirely removed from the things that Rorty was interested in. Nonetheless, he was an intriguing and unfairly overlooked figure in academic philosophy. And his deceptively easy prose made him about the most challenging figure to teach in contemporary political philosophy (something I'm not sure I ever did well) in that students were generally persuaded by him but hadn't accounted for the nuances of what he had to say. Which is a roundabout way of saying that I didn't quite get him...

Rorty had a huge number of strings to his bow,¹ including an excellent essay on prospects for the American left (he was, as the wonderful term goes, raised a red diaper baby), but his primary focus as an academic was on what it is that philosophy does. This, in turn, is related it to what it is that human description of the social world (and some suspect the world in general) does. For Rorty, the world is a product of vocabularies rather than any sorts of objective realities. So there is no such thing as 'justice.' There is however a certain sort of vocabulary in which 'justice' comes to describe a certain penumbra of thoughts about the world but nothing else. In other words, the vocabulary is itself alone, rather than seeking to 'mirror nature,' as his first major book's title suggests.

From a political philosophy point of view, the important implication is that our moral and social outlooks cannot be argued for as such. People whose worlds are defined by vocablaries other than our own will not be amenable to the basket of reasons that we dress our own moral thoughts with. As Rorty said in a 1993 Amnesty Lecture (reprinted in Chapter 9 of Truth and Progress), the problems with Serbs who are murdering Bosnians is not that he doesn't understand Human Rights talk but that he doesn't see the Bosnians as human.

That said people might be amenable to knowledge about the consequences of cruelty. So, he wrote, Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin had far more influence on the end of American slavery than all of philosophy. The key to building the just society, ultimately, was the development of feelings of solidarity, not the drive for a rational society.

Finally, Rorty was concerned with humiliation. The ultimate cruelty, he argued, was to dismiss someone's vocabulary. It's hard to know how Rorty can have an absolute prohibition on humiliation at the same time as promoting the idea that right and wrong is a function of our vocabularies (I think Norman Geras makes this point somewhere in his essay on Rorty). But I think Rorty we need to regard Rorty as having a thin absolute morality, to do with sympathy and solidarity, simultaneously to arguing that persuasion was about producing sympathy, not argumentation in itself. I'm not sure if I get this entirely (and if I'm describing Rorty particularly well), but if I am I think I largely agree.

The administration of government requires the production of good reasons for the most part (on why we ought to do x rather than y). But there are times when division is not reasonable, in the sense that we agree on how the world is ordered but not on what we ought to do about it. Sometimes we don't even agree on how whatever problem we all have came about (Northern Ireland being a case in point). In those circumstances, sympathy is precisely what's lacking and is what must be produced if cruelty is not to prevail. I've gone a little bit away from Rorty's philosophical concerns here but I think the point stands and is not made often enough.

Anyway, how sad to hear that he's dead. And here's hoping that the stature of his work grows.

Update: Good post by David Luban over on Balkinization.

1 By the way: Rorty's entry on Wikipedia is about the weakest thing I've read on the site. Here's the link but avoid it if you can...