I once heard Richard Rorty make a distinction I now realize can be used to gauge his importance as a philosopher, or that at any rate might count as a test for what he has achieved. There are great philosophers, he said, whose ideas and arguments are discussed, disputed, and pursued by other philosophers, and great philosophers whose ideas and arguments have dissolved into common ways of speaking and become disassociated from anything philosophical. Some of Rorty’s philosophical heroes (as he so often called them) belonged in the second category (I remember him mentioning Dewey in this respect). Also, a much smaller number of philosophers have managed to secure a solid reputation on both fronts — Plato still inspires many a footnote, but he also engineered commonly used locutions such as “I have an idea.”
Rorty’s distinction suggests that the effects of philosophy appear to be measured by the sheer volume of philosophical debate and, in rarer cases, of its impact on our shared ways of speaking. Some philosophers would, however, insist that there is more to doing philosophy than merely talking in certain ways; they would insist that claiming that you have an idea does not commit you to Plato’s theory of forms. This does seem intuitively correct. Doing philosophy surely requires active engagements with people doing similar things, whose works you read, and to whose arguments you react.
And yet this emphasis on contemporary communities of argument may prove only to be a compressed form of history, namely the history of those recent discussions. Recent discussions are felt to be more relevant than old arguments; and appeals to actual relevance are inimical to historical retrospection. They are however far less ahistorical than their authors usually believe them to be. Calls for the overcoming of history always suggest the whiff of the local historian. Recent discussions may be no different in kind to our stories about remoter ancestors.
The difference between two main strands of philosophy, the infamous Analytic/Continental division that Rorty contributed so much to discredit, might instead be a discernable difference in tone, temperament, and prose; it is certainly also a difference in what philosophers believe they are doing, and in what philosophers believe their apprentices ought to read. This is not, however, a difference between doing philosophy and doing history of philosophy. A philosopher once remarked that philosophers are fated to remain “journalists of humankind.” If so, philosophy is, and perhaps always has to be, taught as that journalism, that is, as the history of philosophy. Traditional history of philosophy is journalism that dares not speak its name; and nontraditional history of philosophy is local history. In fact, interlocution requires a measure of agreement; and agreement always is about something someone has said (only philosophers immune to agreement can become immune to history; Kant called this latter type “philosophers in a state of nature”).
Rorty’s intellectual career is often described as his moving away from philosophy of the first kind into the not-quite philosophy of the second. According to the persuasion of the chronicler, it is considered to be a case of apostasy or a process of emancipation. Such descriptions seem to miss on a number of important aspects. Although fewer and fewer of Rorty’s former interlocutors recognized him as a philosopher, he was always identified as a philosopher by his newer non-philosophical friends. Whatever Rorty was, he always was what non-philosophers call a philosopher. Non-philosophers may not be familiar with many things philosophical, but they care comparatively little for the finer differences between Princeton and Stanford. At the same time, he never became a plausible hero to his newer friends, and he never gladly suffered most of his newer friends’ heroes. To the end, however, Rorty remained a philosopher, if not always to the same people. One of his old friends, Daniel Dennett, was perhaps describing Rorty’s constancy when he defined the noun ‘rort’ in his very funny Philosophical Lexicon, as “an incorrigible report, hence rorty, incorrigible.”
Richard Rorty had of course written a memorable paper on incorrigibility. Could he also have been incorrigible? In his most detailed intellectual autobiography, “Trotsky and the Wild Orchids,” he defined his ambitions as a fifteen-year-old as the reconciliation of his enthusiasms for Trotsky and North American orchids. “Trotsky,” he conceded, “would not have approved of my interest in orchids.” The following year, at the University of Chicago, he would come across the description of his own ambitions in Yeats’ A Vision: “to hold in a single thought reality and justice.” Although his budding Platonism did not survive Leo Strauss’s classes at Chicago, Rorty’s Yeatsian ambitions remained unchanged throughout. One need not determine whether orchidean goings-about are on the side of reality or of justice. After all, professions of social justice trivially claim to be about reality; and attention to orchids is commonly believed to be a case of doing them justice. What matters instead is Rorty’s stubborn insistence in not separating out his opinions about the likes of orchids from his opinions about the likes of Trotsky. This is what is incorrigible about him.
Rorty’s Yeatsian incorrigibility puts into perspective his otherwise prominent calls for distinctions between public and private, or irony and social hope. Indeed, about truth or justice one cannot be ironical and one need not be hopeful. Truth claims are never in this sense private matters; and so they may only be trivially public. By implying that there are contexts proper to orchideal pursuits, and occasions necessary to conduct Trotsky-like business, the public/private distinction, as well as the contrast between irony and social hope, prove in the end to be obstacles to the Yeatsian ambition of holding one’s opinions and one’s life within a single vision. They intimate, against Rorty’s uncorrected instincts, that our opinions come in kinds, rather than as connected wholes.
One would be hard-pressed these days to tell from an active philosopher’s professed philosophical opinions what his philosophical opinions about anything else are. That might not be altogether a bad thing: in its current pruned-back way academic philosophy has thrived as never before. However, one might also not be wrong in assuming that what Aristotle thought about perception bears some relation to what he thought about justice, and that what Hume thought about perception is perhaps not unconnected to what he thought about succession law, and like them, and unlike most, so Rorty on Trotsky and wild orchids. For us flourishing professionals Richard Rorty’s incorrigibility portends much philosophical excitement, but also a road not taken. Were it to have been pursued, we would be busy describing philosophical opinions in wider contexts, though perhaps, as Rorty well saw, not necessarily in our thriving philosophy departments. Still, it might be worth considering Kripke on justice; Quine on anti-trust regulation; and perhaps Adorno on hypotheticals.
