Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity.

I have few idols.

I am a historian; we are trained to be scholastically prudent.

Yet I was enraptured with Richard Rorty from the very first text I read of his, Philosophy as a Kind of Writing: An Essay on Derrida. We shared the same passion for post-Nietzschean continental philosophy: we loved Hegel's historicism but hated his philosophical idealism; we admired Derrida's playfulness but were weary of his search for the ineffable. Above all, we shared a mistrust of Kantians and their notion of (scientific) truth as a locatable and eternal object. Instead, we countered that all values are historically contigent, and no manner of evidence will ever be able to satisfy all audiences. That there is not a set of beliefs that all will find intuitively plausible.

In short, he introduced me to an entire school of thought I had initially discounted: pragmatism.

Rorty defined pragmatists as those who "do not believe that there is a way things really are... [and who] want to replace the appearance-reality distinction by that between descriptions of the world and of ourselves which are less useful and those that are more useful." This notion of utility is the operative word in pragmatic philosophy. It is a post-Darwinian concept; an aimless term void of any progressive or teleological direction. Of growth for its own moral end. For pragmatists, the conceptual metaphors are of width rather than depth, of increasing complexity rather than proximity.

As such, pragmatists believe "there is a potential infinity of equally valuable ways to lead a human life, and that these ways cannot be ranked in terms of excellence, but only in terms of their contribution to the happiness of the persons who lead them and of the communities to which these persons belong."

Rorty helped me see the connection between phenomenological Hegelianism and our own American post-modern bourgeois liberalism -- a personally profound and inspiring juxtaposition that wedded my Nietzschean abhorrence for all things Kantian with the very un-Nietzschean values of a philosophical pluralistic and secular society.

And so it was with a heavy heart that I found out that Richard Rorty had passed away over the weekend.

One could argue that his career was a process of sweeping away what Dewey called "the whole brood and nest of dualism" we inherited from the Greeks -- between essence and accident, substance and property, and appearance and reality.

Rorty's principle virtue as a philosopher was his accessibility. Even while discussing the densest of topics (ie. the Heideggerian notion of "getting beyond metaphysics"), he always managed to distill the material into simple and comprehensible language without sacrificing its original complexity.

Even in his arguments with critics, Rorty was never condescending and his writing was always polite -- and dare I say it, democratic: a sort of stylistic manifestation of his belief in philosophical pluralism and the need for inter-subjective agreement. There was never any hint of egoism with Rorty. Instead, he positioned himself behind his philosophical idol Dewey and draped his arguments in the disarming (and charming) first person plural [eg. "we pragmatists disagree" or "we coherentists are divided"].

Perhaps above all, Rorty should be remembered for his unflagging insistence on hope -- of his conviction in the openness and placicity of humanity and its ability for deliberate self-creation. And of his sheer exuberance for the potentials of a plural, secular democratic society.

To end this eulogy, here are the parting words from Rorty's auto-biographical essay Trotsky and the Wild Orchids:

"The democratic community of Dewey's dreams... is a community in which everybody thinks that it is human solidarity, rather than knowledge of something not merely human, that really matters. The actual existing approximations to such a fully democratic, fully secular community now seem to me the greatest achievement of our species."