Richard Rorty 1931-2007

'Incorrigible' Richard Rorty, one of America's great contemporary philosophers, died from pancreatic cancer on Friday.

Rorty was a progressive humanist and a pragmatist, the sort of thinker who believes that the quest for certainty through religion (or indeed philosophy) is little more than an attempt to escape from the world: "We should give up the idea that knowledge is an attempt to represent reality. Rather we should view inquiry as a way of using reality."

Utility not truth should thus be the aim of all our intellectual endeavours, he suggested, because there is no 'way things are', no way to fit justice and ultimate reality snugly together, and rather than aligning ourselves to one or other view of the nature of objective truth, we would be best advised to try to maximise the amount of intersubjective agreement in the world.

"To say that a belief is, as far as we know, true, is to say that no alternative belief is, as far as we know, a better habit of acting."

Rorty opposed essentialism with what he called panrelationism. Instead of turtles all the way down, he was convinced that it's "relations all the way down, all the way up, and all the way out in every direction." In this worldview all possible descriptions of reality are equally extrinsic and relational. Reality is thus a complex nexus and our involvement with it should be about creating ourselves, and not about knowing ourselves.

"The need to be God is just one more human need. Or to put the point less invidiously, the project of seeing all our needs from the point of view of someone without any such needs is just one more human project."

I suspect that Rorty probably had little time for Richard Dawkins's standard pitch about the role of science in our society, given that he regularly dissed the kind of investigation which aims to penetrate appearances incrementally in order to 'reach' the reality behind them. For him this kind of science is just another attempt to assume a God's eye view − not useful and perhaps not even moral. Instead, the object of scientific inquiry should be the kind of accurate predictions that make it easier to gratify human desires. (It's not for nothing that he was called a pragmatist!)

I found Rorty's views on morality − morality without principles − particularly interesting.

"People can be very intelligent without wide sympathies. It is neither irrational nor unintelligent to draw the limits of one's moral community at a national, or racial or gender border. But it is undesirable − morally undesirable. So it is best to think of moral progress as a matter of increasing sensitivity, increasing responsiveness to the needs of a larger and larger variety of people and things...you cannot aim at moral perfection but you can aim at taking more people's needs into account than you did previously."

Notions which might, in a European mind, have led to the not-especially-useful sort of relativism, instead led Rorty to assert that it is wrong to believe things for which there is no evidence. "For believing is inherently a public project. We all have a responsibility to each other not to believe anything which cannot be justified to the rest of us."

Intersubjectivity therefore replaces both "objectivity as fidelity to something non-human," and the laxer kind of pluralism, yet ought be pursued he felt, within a society dedicated to fostering the widest possible diversity.

Rorty preferred to regard Christianity as a force working for human decency rather than as a claim to knowledge: "We should read the New Testament as saying that how we treat each other on Earth matters a great deal more than the outcome of debate concerning the existence or nature of another world." He noted though that "we have been waiting a long time for prosperous Christians to behave more decently than prosperous pagans."