Rorty and the Priority of Democracy to Philosophy

I missed knowing Richard Rorty at Yale in the 1950s when we overlapped as graduate students in different fields. Our acquaintance and, later on, our warm friendship started with an encounter at a lecture he was giving at Stanford, in the academic year 1980–81 when I was at the nearby Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. I came to hear his talk because I had just read Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature with great admiration for the quality of its thinking and writing. Our first encounter was quintessential Rorty; it prefigured the pattern of many subsequent conversations. His lecture included a strong attack on the ideas of Hans Reichenbach, my hero at the time because of his powerful argument in a book of 1920 saying that Einstein had refuted Kant's notion of the a priori.¹ Rorty was objecting to something different—Reichenbach's idea that philosophy's main job was to stay one step ahead of the sciences, and should try to make coherent sense of what they are currently telling us about reality.² After the lecture, during the question period, I skeptically asked an earnest question whose import I now don't remember at all. It had this structure: "If that's the case, then how can we blah, blah, blah?" The thing I still remember vividly is Rorty's response: "Yeah, that's the sixty-four-dollar question."³

Rorty's quizzical and impish manner was the same whether in a lecture hall or in a seminar, where he enthralled his students, or in private conversation. He took philosophy very seriously in one sense, and in another, not very seriously at all. He loved the professional gossip in the field. He admired and produced good technical work. He defended the integrity of the subject, and its professional standards—especially against a proscience interloper like Steven Weinberg. He loved the thrust and parry. But, despite his high craftsmanship and productivity, he was as ironical about the pretensions of philosophy as he was about himself. He was immensely serious about the subjects he wrote on. But self-irony, gentle satire, and wittiness were as much a part of his deepest character as was his genuine seriousness. He was an homme sérieux, but his seriousness was complex. In this piece I want to record just a few unknown things about Rorty's sixteen productive years at the University of Virginia, and then stress a theme in his thought.

The way he came to Virginia was in this wise. While I was at the CASBS at Stanford, I read Mirror, heard Rorty's stimulating lecture, and learned that he wanted to leave Princeton. I remember saying to the head of the Stanford philosophy department, who was also spending a year at the Center, that "You really should hire this guy. It would be a real coup for you." I was an innocent. I didn't know that philosophy departments were not seeking intellectual diversity in those days. The head of the Stanford department was a committed analytical philosopher. From his responses I inferred that if Rorty was really, really good that was all the more reason to avoid him—not that anyone with such views could be truly excellent. The possibility that such a person would excite the young and set them to thinking and talking, maybe in the wrong direction, was all the more reason not to hire him. Rorty's work still causes this aversion reaction among some analytical philosophers.

The early 1980s were big years for literary theory. Upon my return to the Virginia English department in the fall of 1981, I resumed my duties as chairman, and I had no difficulty in persuading the department that we needed to hire a theorist, who, unlike me, could deal intelligently, knowledgeably, and sympathetically with deconstruction and other postmodern ideas. This was a welcome idea to my colleagues. They agreed that the department should offer expertise in these recent currents of thought. Often a university department will resist a truly distinguished appointment because it endangers the status...