I’ve recently pulled out my Richard Rorty books. I first read him in my junior year, with Dr. Hyman (Core 3 part 2… one of the best classes I took), and I quickly fell in love with him. The kind of love where half the time I want to shake him till his teeth rattle, and not having this opportunity I do the best I can by writing angry notes in the margins, and occasionally throwing the book across the room.

What gets to me about Rorty is his sheer audacity. Philosophically he’s a pragmatist, veering towards relativism: he’s much more interested in what works and what doesn’t, what effects ideas have, than in matching ideas to some absolute truth. Dabbler that I am, I haven’t read any other pragmatists (except a wee bit of William James), so it’s possible my reaction to him would apply to the whole school of thought. But Rorty’s the one I read, so we’ll just talk about him.

This is what he does. I’m reading Contingency, irony, and solidarity, and in the first chapter he lays out a very simple and coherent argument that “truth” is only ever relative and contingent. The argument runs thus: “truth,” as applied to statements about the world, is a property of language. Language is made and used by humans, and the universe actually cares diddly-squat about how humans look at it. (Need I say that that’s a ridiculously simplistic and careless way of putting it? I’m just trying to get across the general notion… I’d love to discuss that idea, but if anyone wants to get into it with me please give me a chance to express it better. Kthanks.)

Then he does this:

But if we could ever become reconciled to the idea that most of reality is indifferent to our descriptions of it, and that the human self is created by the use of a vocabulary rather than being adequately or inadequately expressed in a vocabulary, then we should at last have assimilated what was true in the Romantic idea that truth is made rather than found. What is true about this claim is just that languages are made rather than found, and that truth is a property of linguistic entities, of sentences.

Italics his, bolds mine. Is it just me, or is that fucking gorgeous? It’s like, “here, let me show you exactly how this tool is broken, and let me continue to use it while doing so.” It’s more than philosophy, it’s poetry. It communicates the heart of his thought (as I read it, anyway) more directly than paragraph on paragraph of explanation could do.

I can see why the Ginny of three and six years ago wanted to throw him across the room, though. It is audacious, no? I don’t doubt for a minute that he knew exactly what he was doing… in other works I’ve read, he’ll do the same kind of thing — make use of words and concepts while explaining that they’re broken — and then he’ll point it out. To the well-ordered mind, it’s infuriating. But my mind is less well-ordered now, and I love it.

I still have quibbles with him — his attitude toward science, rationality, and argument lacks the charity he extends to almost every other kind of human passion. I don’t know if he doesn’t realize that it is a passion for some of us, or if he thinks it’s one that’s too dangerous to let live. But a relationship would be no fun if we agreed on everything all the time, so I’m pretty much just delighting in him all-around.