The Inspirational Power of a Shy Philosopher

Listening to Richard Rorty taking part in a discussion or indeed hearing him lecture was always a rhetorical pleasure and an intellectual event, quite apart from how much you agreed or not with his ideas. Walking with him across campus to such an event, by contrast, could turn into a minor form of torture. In personal conversation Rorty often came across as distant and sometimes even awkward, although his feelings and his strong opinions resonated unmistakably in his words. For the birthdays of his wife Mary, whom he doted on with the enthusiasm of a young student, Rorty had hit on the perfect solution to the problem. Decked out in an appropriate green apron, he would play the role of a waiter, allowing him to convey his sympathy toward the guests without having to talk about anything more taxing than specific types of wine and cocktails.

Like only a few greats among his predecessors, Richard Rorty lived out his philosophy of intense attentiveness to others with an uncompromisingly agile determination. When he changed universities for a last time ten years ago, his new colleagues were elated, not least because of the increased prestige that would result from being able to list Rorty's name in the course catalogue of a university renowned primarily for its work in engineering and the natural sciences. But Rorty committed himself to his new department and its students more wholeheartedly than even the junior professors not yet qualified for tenure. He appeared, well prepared, at every department meeting, he read carefully and made detailed comments on every seminar paper, he revised the content and the pedagogy of his lectures again and again. Such was, I believe, his understanding of the role of a democratic citizen. All this may not have been entirely unconnected to the polemical delight he took from working in a department of Comparative Literature—and the hope that by doing so he could provoke, on a daily basis, those "analytically" oriented colleagues whose canon and style of thought have exercised an unchallenged dominion over Anglo-American philosophy for decades now. Rorty's own career, this is now a fact from the History of Philosophy, had begun under the auspices of analytic philosophy but, driven by the conviction that this style of thinking had propelled itself into a thought-confining specialization that rendered it irrelevant in nonacademic situations, he had, as a public intellectual and charismatic teacher, become internationally known as its most powerful alternative.

Being able to think and to arrange one's life without authoritarian presuppositions—these may well have been the highest public and private values for Richard Rorty. His debt to the heritage of the Enlightenment was as much a matter for Rorty as for his personal friend Jürgen Habermas, yet Rorty was convinced, to the point of everyday blindness, that such freedom must necessarily produce a wholehearted commitment to all one's suffering and oppressed fellow human beings. When such expectations were not met, the soft-spoken philosopher could stick to his guns and throw out reproaches with sectarian stubbornness. In a discussion during the early Bush years he seriously demanded that his own university not hire any more scholars who were suspected of having ever voted for the Republican Party. When a colleague ironically wondered, in response, if such "vigilance" was not paving the way for intellectual concentration camps, no one laughed louder—and with more obvious sympathy for the objection—than Rorty.

To teach and write on a daily basis alongside Richard Rorty—the thin-skinned, infinitely well-read, and so often truly inspired colleague—was to have the heartening certainty of being in the presence of intellectual greatness. Since his death last June, before the most intense pain of an untreatable illness took final hold of him, the name of Richard Rorty has taken its place in a canon of critical yet optimistic American writers and thinkers of the past, a canon that he created and made known: Whitman, Emerson, Dewey, and finally Davidson. Such thinkers are irreplaceable for all of us who cannot live without...