Rorty (np) attempted xlation of Habermas memoriam

[mikebailey]

Just about a year ago, I got the news via e-mail.  As so often in the
last years, Rorty expressed resignation over the "war president" Bush,
whose politics deeply disturbed Rorty - a patriot who had wished to
use his lifetime to improve his country.  After 3 or 4 (sentences?)
of sarcastic analysis came the unexpected sentence: "Alas,
I have come down with the same disease that killed Derrida."
To dispel (?) the horror of the reader, he jokingly followed up that
his daughter had the hypothesis, that this type of cancer was caused
by "too many Heidegger Lectures."

Richard Rorty had 3 1/2 decades ago freed himself from the corset of a
subject whose conventions bound him too tightly -- not in order to
free himself from the discipline of analytical thinking, but rather
to enable himself to follow untrodden paths in philosophy.

He mastered the craft of the profession perfectly.  In duels with the
best among his peers, with Davidson or Putnam, or Dennett, he
was always on the heights of the subtlest and keen-minded arguments.
But he hadn't forgotten that philosophy shouldn't forget the actual
problems of life while contending with the objections of one's colleagues.


Among the contemporary philosophers, I know of nobody who engaged his colleagues
- and not only his colleagues - over the decades,
with new perspectives, insights, formulations, as much as Rorty.
This awesome creativity owed much to a romantic, poetic spirit,
that no longer inspires the scientific philosophers.

It stemmed from the incomparable rhetorical fertility and immaculate
prose of an author who again and again shocked his readers with
unusual strategies of presentation, unexpected understandings of
oppositions, new vocabularies (one of Rorty's favorite techniques).
Rorty's essayistic art swung between Friedrich Schlegel and
Surrealism.

The irony and sadness of the playful and polemical tone of
an intellectual who revolutionized thinking exercised influence
worldwide, awaken an impression of a robust temperament.  This
impression misrepresents the gentle and vulnerable nature of a
person who was often shy and withdrawn, and always sensitive.

There's a short autobiographical article bearing the title "Wild
Orchids and Trotsky."  Rorty describes how, as a youth in the
flowery hills of northwest New Jersey, he roamed and imbibed the
smell of orchids.  At the same time he found in his leftist parents'
house a fascinating book that defended Trotsky against Stalin.
At that point began the vision that the young Rorty took to college:
philosophy is for reconciling the heavenly beauty of orchids with
Trotsky's dream of justice on earth.

To the ironist Rorty, nothing is sacred.  Asked what is "holy",
Rorty, a strict atheist to the end of his days, answered with
sentences reminiscent of the young Hegel: "the sense of holiness
has to do with my hope that the far-off day will come when I live
in a global civilization where love is recognized as the only law."