KOnce the grief over his death in 2007 was over and subsided, Richard Rorty became quiet. At the turn of the millennium he was still considered the most influential American philosopher alongside John Rawls, but the debate about his work has lost momentum in the meantime. Perhaps this is because you now know where you stand with him: Rorty writes so laconic and elegantly that the need for carpeting is exhausted at some point. Or perhaps the narrow-mindedness of academic philosophers, which Rorty has bemoaned and fought for decades, has now grown further beyond the reach of a forum for someone like him.
In any case, the waning of interest can hardly be due to the themes that Rorty dealt with in his writings. Liberalism, in defense of which he presented his book “Contingency, Irony, Solidarity” just in time for the fall of the Wall, is in the wind – and violently at that. He anticipated the current controversy about the lifestyle left in his 1998 book “Pride on our country”. From his first book Der Spiegel der Natur (1979) to his most recent writings, he has expressed his skepticism about ultimate truths, anticipating the discussion of the post-truth era.
In the latter years of his life Rorty was so lavishly showered with honors and invitations that he indulged in a propensity he had valiantly fought in earlier years: the propensity for the small form, an essay here and a paper there, to please friends and interested parties . Since he was suspicious of the big system anyway, it didn’t bother him to let a thick stack of paper that had the makings of a major work gather dust in a drawer and cannibalize it for shorter publications. This stack consists of lectures given by Rorty in Girona in 1996, which were then published in Catalan and Spanish translations, but only in 2021 in English – and now in German under the title “Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism”. As editor and Rorty expert Eduardo Mendieta writes, the original manuscript appears “amazingly complete, as if it could go straight to the typesetters. It reads like clockwork.” That’s true.
Don’t be afraid of the game
Rorty has made a name for himself as a representative of pragmatism – that is, as a thinker who subordinates theory to practice and for whom the moment of truth comes when something proves its worth, is going well, and serves the good life. What this has to do with anti-authoritarianism can now be seen in a section entitled “Pragmatism as Liberation from the Primeval Father” which is based on Sigmund Freud’s Oedipus theory.
Rorty divides people – and thinkers – into two groups. Some are out to “ally themselves with an authority figure”, “to snuggle up to something that is too pure and good to be really human”. They longed for “a haven of peace in the spinning world, for something you can always rely on”. Think of Plato, Descartes, Kant or – currently – Thomas Nagel. The others chased this authority or father figure from court, hoping for a “brighter future to be achieved through a greater degree of brotherly cooperation among men.” “Only pragmatism” – advocated by John Dewey and his disciple Richard Rorty – “reaps the full benefits of patricide.”
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