Saturday, June 16, 2007

Richard Rorty, remembered

I have a hard time abandoning the prescriptive for the descriptive. "Ought" retains its place for me (although we shouldn't toss "ought" statements around casually). A world reduced to contingent "is" statements strikes me as chaos.

While our complex existence is awash in shades of gray, and there is room for a great deal of pluralism -- different conceptions of the good -- the world ultimately resolves in black and white -- concepts of right and wrong -- at the margins. We arrive at this point through unflinching reflection, the unrelenting application of reason, and an irrepressible imagination about a more humane and just future. It is crucial to remain intellectually honest and open to carefully evaluating competing claims during this continuous and evolving process.

Nonetheless, I feel the following comments are worth remembering and Rorty's work is deserving of further study, if nothing else than to remind us all to challenge our certitude -- a great deal of which is just native prejudice burnished with the passage of time -- every now and again. -WW

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On the passing of Richard Rorty, an American pragmatist philosopher:

"He believed that moral progress requires the cultivation of imagination and sympathy, an important truth that is too often overlooked."

-- Martha Nussbaum, professor of law and ethics at the University of Chicago


"Make your private life beautiful, and your public life humane, he taught us."

-- Virginia Heffernan, television critic for the New York Times


"Besides being modest, he was a beautiful writer and speaker, extremely sharp in debate though with never an indication of any annoyance or anger; for he refused to personalize disagreement."

-- Richard Posner, judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals, 7th Circuit


"One of the reasons Rorty's view of the world seemed so attractive was that it offered us humans a useful way to think about why it is that we disagree with each other about what those moral truths actually are: If you think you are acting in accordance with the eternal moral truths of the universe, after all, it is likely that you will think of people who think and act differently as being defective, deluded, or downright dangerous. On the other hand, if you think that morality is a matter of contingent vocabularies, you don't have to become a shallow relativist—you can go right on believing what you believe, except that you have to give up the conviction that there's no plausible way another rational person could think differently."

-- Michael Berube, professor of literature and cultural studies at Penn State University


"Rorty believed that human beings must stop looking for some nonhuman or extra-human reality, such as God, nature, spirit, matter, or even human nature; for some thing-in-itself that, though entirely independent of human knowing, would nonetheless provide us with universal laws for governing our actions and our thinking. Rorty believed firmly, and said as much repeatedly, in the predictive capacity of science and its supreme value to human use. He believed that Hitler and Stalin were evil. But he did not believe that, say, the germ theory of disease or revulsion in the face of persecution and fanaticism, no matter how passionately we believe they advance the cause of knowledge or dignity, can yield universal principles or tell us something about the intrinsic nature of reality. We are ineluctably human. No ecstatic encounters with the Other have been scheduled. We are stuck arguing with one another, in order to achieve, not truth, but consensus."

-- Stephen Metcalf


"My sense of the holy is bound up with the hope that some day my remote descendants will live in a global civilization in which love is pretty much the only law."

-- Richard Rorty