Rorty Ror Ror

Someday I'll make time to read Richard Rorty, who seems like a pretty down-to-earth sorta philosopher and who seems to offer some pretty interesting takes on the big issues - freedom, liberalism, rationality, et cetera. Even without reading, say, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, this 1992 essay, "Trotsky and the Wild Orchids," is a gem. This was especially brilliant, and not only for killing off the idea of "human nature" in 300 words or less:

Most people - even a lot of purportedly liberated postmodernists – still hanker for something like what I wanted when I was 15: a way of holding reality and justice in a single vision. More specifically, they want to unite their sense of moral and political responsibility with a grasp of the ultimate determinants of our fate. They want to see love, power and justice as coming together deep down in the nature of things, or in the human soul, or in the structure of language, or somewhere. They want some sort of guarantee that their intellectual acuity, and those special ecstatic moments which that acuity sometimes affords, are of some relevance to their moral convictions. They still think that virtue and knowledge are somehow linked - that being right about philosophical matters is important for right action. I think this is important only occasionally and incidentally.

I do not, however, want to argue that philosophy is socially useless. Had there been no Plato, the Christians would have had a harder time selling the idea that all God really wanted from us was fraternal love. Had there been no Kant, the nineteenth century would have had a harder time reconciling Christian ethics with Darwin's story about the descent of man. Had there been no Darwin, it would have been harder for Whitman and Dewey to detach the Americans from their belief that they were God's chosen people, to get them to start standing on their own feet. Had there been no Dewey and no Sidney Hook, American intellectual leftists of the 1930S would have been as buffaloed by the Marxists as were their counterparts in France and in Latin America. Ideas do, indeed, have consequences.

Read the rest of the essay to see what Rorty thinks does matter. It's worth fifteen minutes of your time.