Rorty (np) attempted xlation of Habermas memoriam

[Dave Monroe]

2/06/2007
Philosopher, poet and friend
Jürgen Habermas writes an obiturary for American philosopher Richard Rorty

The American philosopher Richard Rorty passed away on Friday. Rorty,
whose work ranges over an unusually broad intellectual terrain, was
the author of many works, including "Philosophy and the Mirror of
Nature" (1979), "Consequences of Pragmatism" (1982), and "Contingency,
Irony, and Solidarity" (1989).

I received the news in an email almost exactly a year ago. As so often
in recent years, Rorty voiced his resignation at the "war president"
Bush, whose policies deeply aggrieved him, the patriot who had always
sought to "achieve" his country. After three or four paragraphs of
sarcastic analysis came the unexpected sentence: " Alas, I have come
down with the same disease that killed Derrida." As if to attenuate
the reader's shock, he added in jest that his daughter felt this kind
of cancer must come from "reading too much Heidegger."

Three and a half decades ago, Richard Rorty loosened himself from the
corset of a profession whose conventions had become too narrow - not
to elude the discipline of analytic thinking, but to take philosophy
along untrodden paths. Rorty had a masterful command of the handicraft
of our profession. In duels with the best among his peers, with Donald
Davidson, Hillary Putnam or Daniel Dennett, he was a constant source
of the subtlest, most sophisticated arguments. But he never forgot
that philosophy - above and beyond objections by colleagues - mustn't
ignore the problems posed by life as we live it.

Among contemporary philosophers, I know of none who equalled Rorty in
confronting his colleagues - and not only them - over the decades with
new perspectives, new insights and new formulations. This
awe-inspiring creativity owes much to the Romantic spirit of the poet
who no longer concealed himself behind the academic philosopher. And
it owes much to the unforgettable rhetorical skill and flawless prose
of a writer who was always ready to shock readers with unaccustomed
strategies of representation, unexpected oppositional concepts and new
vocabularies - one of Rorty's favourite terms. Rorty's talent as an
essayist spanned the range from Friedrich Schlegel to Surrealism.

The irony and passion, the playful and polemical tone of an
intellectual who revolutionised our modes of thinking and influenced
people throughout the world point to a robust temperament. But this
impression doesn't do justice to the gentle nature of a man who was
often shy and withdrawn - and always sensitive to others.

One small autobiographical piece by Rorty bears the title 'Wild
Orchids and Trotsky.' In it, Rorty describes how as a youth he ambled
around the blooming hillside in north-west New Jersey, and breathed in
the stunning odour of the orchids. Around the same time he discovered
a fascinating book at the home of his leftist parents, defending Leon
Trotsky against Stalin. This was the origin of the vision that the
young Rorty took with him to college: philosophy is there to reconcile
the celestial beauty of orchids with Trotsky's dream of justice on
earth. Nothing is sacred to Rorty the ironist. Asked at the end of his
life about the "holy", the strict atheist answered with words
reminiscent of the young Hegel: "My sense of the holy is bound up with
the hope that some day my remote descendants will live in a global
civilization in which love is pretty much the only law."

The article originally appeared in German in the Süddeutsche Zeitung
on June 11, 2007.

http://www.signandsight.com/features/1386.html