Rorty and America, Overseas

Descartes c'est la France, as André Glucksmann has it, to which might be added: Rorty c'est les États-Unis.¹ America is seen by many intellectuals, here in Europe, as Rorty proposed that we should see it. But Glucksmann's tag line, Descartes c'est la France, has a second clause: . . . mais la France n'est pas Descartes. And mutatis mutandis, the second clause also holds true for Richard Rorty and the United States.² His America was a we to which he was glad to belong, but his we was not a country or even a region. Rorty's was a "spiritual America"—the community of his fellow liberal intellectuals throughout the world. "We liberal democrats," he would say, or "we leisured Western intellectuals," "we pragmatists," "we enlightened members of the most inclusive society." So there is no reason, though he was the most American of philosophers, not to think of Rorty in European terms. Derrida characterized the maître-penseurs of his time—Lacan, Levinas, Foucault, Barthes, Deleuze, Blanchot, Cixous, Lyotard, Sarah Kofman—as la génération incorruptible, by which meant it was a generation sans compromis. Rorty was the incorruptible philosopher of America, its thinker (borrowing Derrida's phrase) sans concession même à l'égard de la philosophie.³ I would put that a bit differently: Rorty was, I think incomparably, a philosopher who could not be intimidated —not by authorities, not by institutions, and never by colleagues. He was a freethinker without compromise, and he made freethinking an adventure for the rest of us.

On the other hand, Rorty was a pragmatist—in every sense. He was perfectly capable of making practical compromises of the public-spirited kind. Notably, he split the difference between public and private uses of language. He had no problem making useful alliances and even compromises with movements and establishments. He was, in other words, not tendentiously, tediously, self-regardingly, or impractically uncompromising. After all, he was a democrat. To be an intellectual sans compromis is something different. An uncompromising thinker is one who constantly, relentlessly tests the limits and presuppositions of his own thinking. An American analytic philosopher of the sort Rorty was trained to be is incorruptible and uncompromising only if he looks deeply into the history of analytic philosophy, its relationship to the history of philosophy in general, its liaison with the administrative power structures of American universities, its impact on career possibilities for young scholars who prefer to be trained as Continental philosophers. You are an analytic philosopher sans compromis only if you are able to question the capacity of analytic philosophy to solve problems and only if you are open to the methods and projects of other philosophical movements. An analytic philosopher sans concession must be a serious reader of Heidegger, Habermas, Derrida's maîtrepenseurs.

No doubt, I see things this way because I was born in Hungary when Hungary was said to be in Eastern Europe, and Eastern Europe was known as the Soviet bloc. The philosophical training in Hungary was, naturally, Marxist (though I went west for my own). In the Eastern Europe of that era, one earned a reputation for incorruptibility as an intellectual only if one looked unyieldingly into the conditions in which one was being trained to think. In Hungarian intellectual life, Georg Lukács, Miklós Almási, Ágnes Heller, Ferenc Fehér, Mihály Vajda, György Márkus, György Konrád and then (in a later generation) György Bence, János Kelemen, János Kis, and Christoph J. Nyíri did all it took to withstand compromise and other forms of corruption. To be an incorruptible philosopher is what it is to be a philosopher—almost, one might say (though it would not be a very Rortian thing to say), a philosopher in the original sense. The incorruptible philosopher will be a neopresocratic thinker.

Rorty characterized himself (along with other liberal intellectuals in democratic societies) as a neosophist, but I would characterize him as neopresocratic. His intention, like that of (say) Heraclitus, was to think without presuppositions to the extent such was...