Abstract
In this chapter I will bring together two seemingly irreconcilable aspects of Rorty’s intellectual biography: on the one hand its consistency, loyalty, and deference to what I call his “vision,” and on the other, the expansiveness, capaciousness, voraciousness, and encyclopedic thrust of that vision. I argue that in contrast to many canonical philosophers, Rorty did not undergo a turn, a “Kehre,” a shift, a revelation, a Damascus moment. Rather, when reading his epochal texts, and numerous essays, one gets the impression of an Amazonian river widening its shores and drinking its tributaries, relentlessly moving forward following its own course. I thus argue that we think of Rorty, following Berlin’s famous allegory, as a foxy hedgehog, one that pursued one truth, while rummaging inquisitively along the plains and forests of Western culture. From Platonism to metaphilosophy, from metaphilosophy to post-philosophy, and from there to the project of a liberal utopia, which brings together what I called his Brechtian patriotism, with his honest, open, and sincere ethnocentrism, the Rortyan vision has been held steady by one thought: “There are only languages that serve some human purposes better than others. Human purposes and human languages change in tandem with each other” (Rorty 2010, p. 22). Another way of expressing this vision is to say that what makes humans a unique animal is that we can recreate ourselves by means of changing our vocabularies.
I want to express my gratitude to Matthias Lutz-Bachmann, who invited me to be a research fellow at the Forschungskolleg-Humanwissenschaften in Bad Homburg v.d. Höhe for the spring of 2020, where I was taken care of by a wonderful team lead by Frau Koban and Frau Sutterlüty, and where I did most of the research and writing that resulted in this text. I want to thank Ramón del Castillo, Christopher J. Voparil, Martin Woessner, and Santiago Zabala, who over the years have shared their thoughts and writings on Rorty and who thus have shaped the way I think of his work. I also have to express my deep gratitude to Martin Müller, who first invited me to contribute to this companion, and then gave me extensive and detailed feedback on the text as it grew through several iterations.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
For instance, Rorty delivered in 1996 the Ferrater Mora lectures at the University of Girona, in Spain. These lectures were published as El Pragmatismo, una version. Antiautoristarismo en epistemología y ética, translated by Joan Vergés Gifra (Barcelona, Editorial Ariel, 2000), while some of the lectures were published subsequently as papers, nearly half of the volume has not appeared in English. See also Richard Rorty, Philosophie & die Zukunft (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 2000), which is a unique selection of his essay from the 1990s, with an important introduction, which again, is not available in English.
- 2.
See the list of publications at the end of Rorty (2006, pp. 161–205).
- 3.
See for instance Richard Rorty. 2020. On Philosophy and Philosophers: Unpublished Papers 1960–2000, edited by W. P. Malecki, and Christopher J. Voparil. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- 4.
- 5.
See https://slate.com/culture/2007/06/richard-rorty-remembered.html. Accessed: March 26, 2019.
- 6.
Now in Habermas (2009, pp. 3–16).
- 7.
See Gross (2008, pp. 123–125) for a description and discussion of the M.A. thesis.
- 8.
See Gross (2008, pp. 131–132) for the description of the faculty during the time Rorty was a student at Yale.
- 9.
The 1992 edition includes a 10-year and 25-years retrospective essays by Rorty.
- 10.
See Gross (2008, p. 199). I think that Gross dissimulates what is evident from the texts by Amélie Rorty, namely that she also had her philosophical and professional ambitions and that they were not going to take second place to those of Richard Rorty. It is clear that since she wanted to take her 2-year fellowship at King’s College, Cambridge, and Richard Rorty did not “hold to this idea,” she left for England and took a divorce to boot.
- 11.
- 12.
See Rorty 1982, p.ix. See also Martin Woessner (2011, Chap. 7): “Richard Rorty and The Riddle of the Book that Never Was.” The present author heard Rorty give a fascinating little paper at Stanford in the late 1990s or early 2000s, shortly after he moved to Stanford University, on the different stages of his reading of Heidegger. First, he read him as a pragmatist, along the lines developed by Hubert Dreyfus, from whom he had received “translations” of the not yet translated Being and Time (see the first part of Rorty (1991a)); Second, then Rorty came to appreciate him instead as a great historian of philosophy, in which the history of being became an illuminating and cutting-edge way to retell the history of philosophy (see “Overcoming the Tradition: Heidegger and Dewey” in Rorty 1982, pp. 37–59); third, and as Heidegger later writings began to appear, Rorty came to appreciate him not just as a philosopher but as a “great poet,” who increasingly saw philosophy and poetry on the same level (see Rorty (2007)). It would be tempting to see the development of Rorty’s own work going through those very stages: pragmatic, historical, poetic.
- 13.
Edited version of these two lectures appeared in different places, but they are the first two chapters in Rorty (2007). The present author is preparing an annotated version of these lectures in English, to appear with Harvard University Press.
- 14.
See Mendieta (2006), p. xvii.
- 15.
I have found Robert B. Westbrook (2005) one of the best analysis of Rorty’s view of democracy, how it links to pragmatism, and his unique form of patriotism.
- 16.
I am indebted to Michael Bérubé’s beautiful introduction “The Assent of Man” in Richard Rorty, Philosophy as Poetry for the discovery of this wonderful term (Bérubé 2016, xxvii).
- 17.
Holbo’s incisive suggestion is elaborated in his post on the blog “Crooked Timber.” (see List of References).
- 18.
References
Balslev, Anindita Niyogi. 1999. Cultural Otherness: Correspondences with Richard Rorty, 2nd edn. Atlanta: Scholars Press.
Bernstein, Richard J. 1991. The New constellation: The ethical-political horizons of modernity/postmodernity. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Bernstein, Richard J. 2008. Richard Rorty’s Deep Humanism. New Literary History 39(1): 13–27.
Bernstein, Richard J. 2010. The pragmatic turn. Cambridge: Polity.
Bérubé, Michael 2016. The Assent of Man. In Philosophy as Poetry, ed. Richard Rorty, vii–xxix. Charlottesville/London: University of Virginia Press.
Brandom, Robert B. 2000. Rorty and his critics. Malden: Blackwell.
Brandom, Robert B. 2011. Perspectives on pragmatism: Classical, recent, & contemporary. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
del Castillo, Ramón. 2015. Rorty y el giro pragmático. Barcelona: Batisfaco.
Fraser, Nancy. 1989. Unruly practices: Power, discourse and gender in contemporary social theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Gross, Neil. 2008. Richard Rorty: The making of an American philosopher. Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press.
Habermas, Jürgen. 2009. ‘…And to define America, her athletic Democracy’: In Memory of Richard Rorty. In Europe. The faltering project. Trans. Ciaran Cronin, 3–16. Cambridge: Polity.
Holbo, John. 2007. Rorty’s Rhetoric of Anticipatory Retrospective. Blog “Crocked Timber”. https://crookedtimber.org/2007/06/13/rortys-rhetoric-of-anticipatory-retrospective/. Accessed: 26 Mar 2019.
Janack, Marianne. Ed. 2010. Feminists Interpretations of Richard Rorty. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press.
Klepp, L. S. 1990. Every Man a Philosopher King. The New York Times, December 2.
Luttwak, Edward. 1993. The Endangered American Dream: How to stop the United States from becoming a third-world country and how to win the geo-economic struggle for industrial supremacy. New York: Touchstone.
Malachowski, Alan. Ed. 2002. Richard Rorty: Sage masters of modern thought, 4 Volumes. London: Sage.
Mendieta, Eduardo. 2006. Introduction: ‘Take care of freedom and truth will take care of itself’: Toward a postphilosophical politics. In Take Care of Freedom and Truth Will Take Care of Itself: Interviews with Richard Rorty, ed. Richard Rorty, xi–xxx. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Rorty, Richard. 1961. Recent Metaphilosophy. The Review of Metaphysics 15(2): 299–318.
Rorty, Richard. 1979. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Rorty, Richard. 1981. Der Spiegel der Natur: Eine Kritik der Philosophie. Trans. Michael Gebauer. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
Rorty, Richard. 1982. Consequences of Pragmatism. (Essays from 1972–1980). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Rorty, Richard. 1989. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Rorty, Richard. 1991a. Essays on heidegger and others: Philosophical papers, Vol. 2. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Rorty, Richard. 1991b. Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical papers, Vol. 1. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Rorty, Richard. Ed. 1992 [1967], The Linguistic Turn. Essays in Philosophical method. With two retrospective essays. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Rorty, Richard. 1998a. Achieving our country: Leftist thought in twentieth-century America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Rorty, Richard. 1998b. Truth and progress: Philosophical papers, Vol. 3. New York: Cambridge.
Rorty, Richard. 1999. Philosophy and social hope. New York: Penguin.
Rorty, Richard. 2006. Take Care of freedom and truth will take care of itself: Interview with Richard Rorty, edited and with an introduction by Eduardo Mendieta. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Rorty, Richard. 2007. Philosophy as cultural politics: Philosophical papers, Vol. 4. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Rorty, Richard. 2009a. Philosophy and the mirror of nature, Thirtieth-Anniversary Edition, with a new introduction by Michael Williams, and a new afterword by David Bromwich. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Rorty, Richard. 2009b. The Unpredictable American Empire. In Pragmatism, Nation, and Race: Community in the Age of Empire, eds. Chad Kautzer and Eduardo Mendieta, 209–221. Bloomington/Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
Rorty, Richard. 2010. Intellectual Autobiography. In The Philosophy of Richard Rorty, eds. Auxier, Randall E. and Lewis Edwin Hahn, Volume XXXII of the Library of Living Philosophers, 1–24, Chicago and La Salle, IL: Open Court.
Rorty, Richard. 2011. An ethics for today: Finding common ground between philosophy and religion, introduction by Gianni Vattimo. New York: Columbia University Press.
Rorty, Richard. 2014. Mind, Language, and Metaphilosophy. Early Philosophical Papers, edited by Stephen Leach and James Tartaglia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe. 2003. The Major works, including poetry, prose, and drama, edited with an Introduction and Notes by Zachary Leader and Michael O’Neill. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Skinner, Quentin. 1981. The End of Philosophy? The New York Review of Books, March 19th, 46–48.
Stoll, Timothy. 2020. Hans Vaihinger. In The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy (Spring 2020 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2020/entries/vaihinger/. Accessed 26 Mar 2019.
Voparil, Christopher J. 2006. Richard Rorty: Politics and vision. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield.
Voparil, Christopher J. 2010. General introduction. In The Rorty Reader, eds. Voparil, Christopher J. and Richard J. Bernstein, 1–52. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Westbrook, Robert B. 2005. Democratic hope: Pragmatism and the politics of truth. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.
Woessner, Martin. 2011. Heidegger in America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Recommended Literature for Further Reading
Bernstein, Richard J. 2008. Richard Rorty’s Deep Humanism. New Literary History 39(1 (Winter)): 13–27. Richard J. Bernstein was without question Rorty’s oldest friend. Over the years they sparred on many philosophical times, but they also shared many commitments. This is a deeply personal, but also philosophical biography of Rorty’s deepest commitments.
Brandom, Robert B. 2011. Perspectives on Pragmatism: Classical, Recent, & Contemporary. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Brandom is one of the most authoritative interpreters of Rorty. In this collection of essays, some of which deal exclusively with Rorty, he is placed within the larger arc of the evolution of pragmatism.
Hall, David L. 1994. Richard Rorty: Prophet and poet of the new pragmatism. Albany: SUNY Press. This is a sweeping overview, reconstruction and synoptic overview of how Rorty’s work relates to classical pragmatism. It is balanced, insightful and sympathetic. One of the best books to read to get a sense of the architectonics of Rorty’s work.
Rorty, Richard. 1999. “Trotsky and the Wild Orchids” in Rorty 1999, pp. 3-20. This autobiographical essay from 1993 is an indispensable resource for understanding the expansion of Rorty’s thought, but also for glimpsing the deep sources of his political, social and ethical commitments.
Rorty, Richard. 2006. Take Care of Freedom and Truth Will take Care of Itself: Interview with Richard Rorty, edited and with an introduction by Eduardo Mendieta. Stanford: Stanford University Press. This collection of interviews with Rorty is, after Rorty’s autobiographical essays, the most important resources for getting an eagle’s overview of his professional career, his intellectual itinerary, and as well as his political views. Some of the interviews date from the periods after 9–11 and cover the early years of the Bush presidency that lead the U.S. into the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Rorty, Richard. 2010. Intellectual Biography. Auxier and Hahn 2010: 3–23. This is Rorty’s second most important autobiographical essay, written for the volume devoted to his thinking in the famous library of living philosophers. The essay covers some autobiographical material, but it is mostly devoted to his “intellectual” development. In this text, penned shortly before he died of pancreatic cancer in 2007, Rorty makes it clear that his thought has been guided by the basic insight that “Human purposes and human languages change in tandem with each other.”(Rorty 2010, p. 22)
Voparil, Christopher J. and Richard J. Bernstein. Eds. 2010. The Rorty Reader. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. This is without question the single best source for material from Rorty’s expansive library of writing, which is organized thematically and chronologically. It also republishes a series of often hard to find essays. It closes with an autobiographical section that publishes some of the best by Rorty on Rorty. The introductory essay by Voparil is probably the single best essay length overview of Rorty’s philosophy.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Section Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2023 Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, ein Teil von Springer Nature
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Mendieta, E. (2023). Richard Rorty’s Intellectual Biography. In: Müller, M. (eds) Handbuch Richard Rorty. Springer VS, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-16253-5_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-16253-5_5
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer VS, Wiesbaden
Print ISBN: 978-3-658-16252-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-658-16253-5
eBook Packages: Social Science and Law (German Language)