Why Rorty?

By Dan Conley

I’ve decided to spend my next chunk of blogging time examining the writing of American philosopher Richard Rorty. For those unfamiliar with Rorty (and, I should point out, it’s very hard for me to write his name often without sometimes accidentally writing Rotary,) I suggest staying away from his Wikipedia page and instead taking a look at the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Rorty believed that his 1987 book “Contingency, Irony and Solidarity” was his most successful, so I’m going to use it as the starting point for my examination. It’s the Rorty book I quote most often and it’s the one he said he received the most positive public commentary about. He’s better known within the philosophy world for his 1979 book “Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature,” and I might continue on to that work if I feel like I need to continue the project after the first.

For those who are familiar with my writings on Montaigne, you’ll know that I pull from Richard Rorty quite frequently, especially in regards to his thoughts about contingency. To boil down Rorty to the most simple element possible, all you have to do is read the first paragraph of “Contingency, Irony and Solidarity:”

About two hundred years ago, the idea that truth was made rather than found began to take hold of the imagination of Europe. The French Revolution had shown that the whole vocabulary of social relations, and the whole spectrum of social institutions, could be replaced almost overnight. This precedent made utopian politics the rule rather than the exception among intellectuals. Utopian politics sets aside questions about both the will of God and the nature of man and dreams of creating a hitherto unknown form of society.

All of Rorty’s thoughts spring from this paragraph. With the French Revolution came an entirely different form of human being in Europe, and this fact astonished people. Everything became possible. Rorty believed that it was new forms of language that made this change possible, that once you started to rewrite the history of your country and the story of what it means to be human, new possibilities emerge.

To an American of this era, the French Revolution doesn’t mean all that much. For a Baby Boomer, the 1960s are a better touch point. The world changed radically in that decade. I believe the last 10 years have included just as much social change, in surprising ways. Rorty helps contextualize the kinds of shifts we’ve seen.

Montaigne wrote extensively about cultural mores and how customs defined how people lived much more than laws. But what Montaigne lacked was an ability to explain how customs changed—but he did, at times, demonstrate this truth. Why did noblemen during the renaissance, for example, suddenly start talking and writing about their friendships in a particular way? Because Aristotle’s thoughts about friendship were popularized and became the template for how noble friendships were judged. So Montaigne writes a beautiful tribute to his late friend Etienne de La Boetie, by far the most emotional and affecting essay in his collection, but it doesn’t at all seem odd to readers of that age because that’s the way men of the noble social class spoke of their close friendships. They were obliged to follow Aristotle.

We read “On Affectionate Relationships” now and it’s startling. The first thought out of any contemporary reader’s mind is were these two men gay, in love the way our culture would interpret it? The second thought is, why is Montaigne so much more affectionate towards La Boetie than his wife, any of his children, his father, his mother … the list is endless. Montaigne for 107 essays insists regularly that he’s not one to fall madly in love with any woman, even though he’s no stranger to sex and enjoys discussing it. But his late friend is described as someone who is a part of him, whose death makes him feel less whole inside.

It’s hard to find an answer to these Montaigne riddles, unless you listen to Rorty. His theories make it all seem easy to understand and basically inevitable. Montaigne was simply playing the language game of his times. A nobleman of his time and place was supposed to have a deep, affectionate love for one friend, who would become an alter-ego of sorts. But he was not supposed to speak so openly of his wife, and definitely not any lover he took either before marriage or during. Montaigne emoted within the safe space of his times. To do otherwise would have seemed as odd to readers then than his choice of emotional example does to us now.

That’s just one example of why I’m moving to Rorty’s terrain now. It will be interesting to evaluate him on his own terms and not as a way of evaluating other texts. Let’s see how well he holds up.