This issue of Forma de Vida is devoted to the philosophy of Richard Rorty. Rorty wrote in the spirit of the “strong poet,” a term he borrowed from Harold Bloom, and his work was unusually wide-ranging. He blended the genres of philosophical writing, literary criticism, and political thought, and wrote across disciplinary boundaries and for non-academic audiences on what he considered, to use one of his phrases, to be “possible and important.” For this issue, we suggested our contributors write on matters they thought important while relating their thoughts to Rorty’s work; to his position and to his literary playfulness.
All the essays in this volume take the matter of Rorty’s writing into account: how he uses words, his rhetoric and language. New ideas and angles are tried out, and opinions expressed – we are very happy to have been able to provide a space for, precisely, such essays to be printed. What struck us as keenly interesting as these responses came together was the extent to which a pointer to Rorty’s literariness and playfulness resulted in considerations of him in moral terms. While all the contributions differ in what they centre and express, each one links Rorty’s rhetoric and style to his philosophical attitude or the stances we adopt towards his work. Taking his poeticism and the playfulness of his writings seriously meant taking a stand on whether Rorty was to be taken seriously—and on what the consequences of his seeming lack of seriousness were.
Stéphane Madelrieux begins with Rorty’s use of the word “without” and helps us see it as part of a larger rhetorical move to make room for Rorty’s original contribution. He also connects Rorty’s desire to write in small letters, to write a narrative with lesser ambitions, to Rorty’s anti-authoritarianism. Ulf Schulenberg advances a view of Rortian pragmatism as a humanist philosophy, a view derived from Rorty’s centring of human beings as imaginative, poetic agents. Acknowledging that Rorty might have taken greater care to evaluate the pragmatic effects of his rhetoric, Susan Dieleman suggests that Rorty’s conception of selfhood as a poetic “amalgam” of descriptions nevertheless might help us understand why our sense of self unravels in the fray of post-truth discourse. Cheryl Misak is less optimistic about the resources present in Rortian philosophy. She does not share Schulenberg’s hope that “a postmetaphysical humanism will renew our energies,” enabling us to better “confront the problems of men and women in the Deweyan sense.” Misak thinks there are resources in pragmatist thought but that Rorty’s rhetorical game is, ultimately, dangerous.
Christopher Voparil’s essay resists such a reading of Rorty. Voparil examines the tension—and the consistency—between the provocative and serious Rorty, and maintains that Rorty’s irreverent rhetoric should not be taken as indicative of a lack of moral or philosophical seriousness. As Voparil acknowledges, Michael Bacon and Neil Gascoigne have previously articulated a similar stance. In his essay for this special issue, Bacon formulates a view on Rorty as a “strong poet” in his own right, and this as important not just for understanding Rorty’s work but to our understanding of what philosophers do when they offer their redescriptive accounts of figures and traditions.
Brett Bourbon uses Rorty’s writings on the ontological status of fiction as a starting point for offering us a conception of fiction as a logical distinction and as a kind of writing capable of capturing wonder and awe. And Miguel Tamen closes this issue for us with some thoughts on Rorty’s failure to, in Tamen’s estimation, recognise that he did in fact hold on to a “one vision” view of the world, a Yeatsian phrase Rorty invokes in “Trotsky and the Wild Orchids.”
“Trotsky and the Wild Orchids” and Rorty’s fondness for birdwatching inspired the beautiful illustrations Marta Costa has created for this issue. In this semi-autobiographical piece, Rorty linked his own intellectual and moral development with that of the wider intellectual culture. As a young man, he searched for a philosophical theory that would let him articulate and justify both the kind of truth he thought to glimpse in moments of communion with nature—in the joy over finding a rare orchid—and the kind of truth he thought there must be in our commitment to other people; in the fight for justice. While Rorty tells us that he abandoned the quest for a unified vision, his love for nature endured, and Costa’s drawings render this side of Rorty as a complementary backdrop to the writings on his work this issue contains. We are sure her art and these texts will leave an imprint on our readers. We know the generosity of our contributors has left a lasting impression on us.
