“A esperança está na imaginação do terceiro mundo” (R. Rorty)
«Rorty foi um crítico ferocíssimo das verdades absolutas e exteriores ao discurso, dedicou a vida a um desporto muito saudável: detonar toda e qualquer metafísica.»
Rorty é considerado um dos pensadores mais importantes da filosofia contemporânea. Nasceu em 1931 em Nova Iorque numa família com simpatias pelo trotskismo ( o pai era um militante trotskista) e faleceu aos 75 anos no passado dia 8 de Junho em Palo Alto, Califórnia. Era um filósofo irónico e provocador que investia contra as certezas e as verdades absolutas. Os seus livros «A filosofia e o espelho da natureza» (Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature” ) e «Contingência, Ironia e Solidariedade» são as suas obras mais marcantes e nelas são plasmadas as teses do neo-pragmatismo norte-americano, também designado por pós-empirista.
Muito criticado quer pela direita quer pela esquerda, quiseram-no fazer dele um teórico do liberalismo. Mas a verdade é que Rorty era um activista ferrenho contra os chefes, as oligarquias e as grandes empresas, e não escondia a sua simpatia pela esquerda libertária que enfrenta o poder estabelecido. Contra a velha esquerda e nova esquerda Rorty era igual a ele mesmo ao defender uma «Nova Velha Esquerda» . Nos últimos anos, o anti-filósofo surpreendeu os críticos quando começou a intervir cada vez mais em política. Assim, num ensaio de 1997 apelou às universidades para regressarem a uma política de esquerda e "que, no essencial, visava impedir que os ricos desvalorizem o resto da população."
As suas principais influências derivam, por um lado, da tradição pragmática norte-americana ( Dewey, mas também William James, Peirce ) , por outro lado , do pós-nietscheanismo de um Wittgenstein e Heidegger, e recebe ainda, finalmente, as influências dos filósofos que desenvolveram as críticas ao essencialismo e ao representacionalismo como são os casos de Quine, Sellars e Davidson.
As suas principais influências derivam, por um lado, da tradição pragmática norte-americana ( Dewey, mas também William James, Peirce ) , por outro lado , do pós-nietscheanismo de um Wittgenstein e Heidegger, e recebe ainda, finalmente, as influências dos filósofos que desenvolveram as críticas ao essencialismo e ao representacionalismo como são os casos de Quine, Sellars e Davidson.
Professor de Filosofía nla Universidade de Princeton até 1983 acabou por renunciar à sua cátedra ao escolher ser professor de Humanidades na Universidade de Virginia, opção essa a que não foi alheia o seu anti-essencialismo e antifundamentalismo , e por meio dos quais Rorty ataca a filosofia como busca privilegiada das cauas primeiras, preferindo antes relacioná-la com a poesia, a arte e a crítica literária, com isso pretendendo dizer que se deve abandonar toda a pretensão ao conhecimento do Ser, da Verdade ou do Absoluto. Na sequência desta linha ele desmonta os pressupostos e as bases do conhecimento enquanto representação. Considera por isso ilegítima a pretensão da filosofia em arrogar-se em tribunal da cultura e da ciência, pelo que o filósofo não se encontra num pedestal nem em qualquer posição privilegiada. O filósofo irónico prefere a literatura e a poesia mais do que a redoma em que querem encerrar a filosofia. E via nisso não só o resgate da filosofia como um importante reforço da democracia.
(“He rescued philosophy from its analytic constraints” and returned it “to core concerns of how we as a people, a country and humanity live in a political community.”)
Para ele a verdade nunca é exterior, separada das nossas crenças. Ela é imanente à pragmática de cada um, ou seja, na teoria epistemológica dele, o conhecimento advinha de uma prática social, isto é, de algo convencional, intrínseco ao discurso, acabando consequentemente por rejeitar o conceito de objetividade
O conceito de verdade como representação é então substituido pelo acordo não forçado dentro de uma dade comunidade endagante, algo que confere protagonismo ao ser humano face à tirania dos factos e que permite a revisão contínua da «verdade» - em nome da qual se construiram tantos crimes – e que permite comprender afinal em que medida os vários ramos do saber não pasma de construções sociais. No fundo, a verdade é aquilo que os membros das comunidades de indagação decidem que seja.
Rorty é visto como o inimigo número 1 daquele personagem que ostenta a “carteira profissional” do filósofo , o filósofo engravatado numa cátedra académico e guardião das filosofias tradicionais. Aos olhos desse tipo de filósofo, o projecto de Rorty é anti-filosófico, uma tentativa destruir a filosofia. Tal personagem, o filósofo profissional, sente-se ofendido, pois Rorty considera um desejo pueril de infância e juventude querer reunir verdade e justiça numa visão unitária, num essencialismo totalitário como pretendem as várias variantes do platonismo
Num texto autobiográfico «Trotsky and the Wild Orchids», ele escreve:
“At 12, I knew that the point of being human was to spend one’s life fighting social injustice,” ( aos 12 anos soube que o importante na vida humana era lutar contra a injustiça social)
Pode-se ler uma entrevista com Rorty intitulada Against Bosses, Against Oligarchies em: www.prickly-paradigm.com/paradigm3.pdf
O seu obituário publicado no New York Times:
Richard Rorty, whose inventive work on philosophy, politics, literary theory and more made him one of the world’s most influential contemporary thinkers, died Friday in Palo Alto, Calif. He was 75.
The cause was complications from pancreatic cancer, said his wife, Mary Varney Rorty.
Raised in a home where “The Case for Leon Trotsky” was viewed with the same reverence as the Bible might be elsewhere, Mr. Rorty pondered the nature of reality as well as its everyday struggles. “At 12, I knew that the point of being human was to spend one’s life fighting social injustice,” he wrote in an autobiographical sketch.
Russell A. Berman, the chairman of the Department of Comparative Literature at Stanford University, who worked with Mr. Rorty for more than a decade, said, “He rescued philosophy from its analytic constraints” and returned it “to core concerns of how we as a people, a country and humanity live in a political community.”
Mr. Rorty’s enormous body of work, which ranged from academic tomes to magazine and newspaper articles, provoked fervent praise, hostility and confusion. But no matter what even his severest critics thought of it, they could not ignore it. When his 1979 book “Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature” came out, it upended conventional views about the very purpose and goals of philosophy. The widespread notion that the philosopher’s primary duty was to figure out what we can and cannot know was poppycock, Mr. Rorty argued. Human beings should focus on what they do to cope with daily life and not on what they discover by theorizing.
To accomplish this, he relied primarily on the only authentic American philosophy, pragmatism, which was developed by John Dewey, Charles Peirce, William James and others more than 100 years ago. “There is no basis for deciding what counts as knowledge and truth other than what one’s peers will let one get away with in the open exchange of claims, counterclaims and reasons,” Mr. Rorty wrote. In other words, “truth is not out there,” separate from our own beliefs and language. And those beliefs and words evolved, just as opposable thumbs evolved, to help human beings “cope with the environment” and “enable them to enjoy more pleasure and less pain.”
Mr. Rorty drew on the works of Freud, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Quine and others. Although he argued that “no area of culture, and no period of history gets reality more right than any other,” he did maintain that a liberal democratic society was by far the best because it was the only one that permits competing beliefs to exist while also creating a public community.
His views were attacked by critics on the left and the right. The failure to recognize science’s particular powers to depict reality, Daniel Dennett wrote, shows “flatfooted ignorance of the proven methods of scientific truth-seeking and their power.”
Simon Blackburn, a philosopher at Cambridge University, has written of Mr. Rorty’s “extraordinary gift for ducking and weaving and laying smoke.”
Mr. Rorty was engaged with and amused by his critics. In a 1992 autobiographical essay, “Trotsky and the Wild Orchids,” he wrote that he was considered to be one of the “smirking intellectuals whose writings are weakening the moral fiber of the young”; “cynical and nihilistic”; “complacent”; and “irresponsible.”
Yet he confounded critics as well, by speaking up for patriotism, an academic canon and the idea that one can make meaningful moral judgments.
His reason for writing the 1992 essay, he said, was to show how he came by his particular views. Richard McKay Rorty was born in 1931 to James and Winifred Rorty, anti-Stalinist lefties who let their home in Flatbrookville, N.J., a small town on the Delaware river, be used as a hideout for wayward Trotskyites. He describes himself as having “weird, snobbish, incommunicable interests” that as a boy led him to send congratulations to the newly named Dalai Lama, a “fellow 8-year-old who had made good.”
Later, orchids became another obsession, and his love of the outdoors continued throughout his life. An avid birder for the last 30 years, Mr. Rorty liked to “head over to open spaces and walk around,” his wife Mary said yesterday from their home in Palo Alto. His last bird sighting was of a condor at the Grand Canyon in February. In addition to his wife, Mr. Rorty is survived by three children and two grandchildren.
When he was 15, Mr. Rorty wrote, he “escaped from the bullies who regularly beat me up on the playground of my high school” to attend the Hutchins School at the University of Chicago, a place A. J. Liebling described as the “biggest collection of juvenile neurotics since the Children’s Crusade.”
In his early career, at Wellesley and Princeton, he worked on analytic philosophy, smack in the mainstream. As for the surrounding 1960s counterculture, he said in a 2003 interview, “I smoked a little pot and let my hair grow long,” but “I soon decided that the radical students who wanted to trash the university were people with whom I would never have much sympathy.”
By the 1970s, it became clear that he did not have much sympathy for analytic philosophy either, not to mention the entire Cartesian philosophical tradition that held there was a world independent of thought.
Later frustrated by the narrowness of philosophy departments, he became a professor of humanities at the University of Virginia in 1982, before joining the comparative literature department at Stanford in 1998.
Over time, he became increasingly occupied by politics. In “Achieving Our Country” in 1998, he despaired that the genuine social-democratic left that helped shape the politics of the Democratic Party from 1910 through 1965 had collapsed. In an interview, he said that since the ’60s, the left “has done a lot for the rights of blacks, women and gays, but it never attempted to develop a political position that might find the support of an electoral majority.”
In recent years, Mr. Rorty fiercely criticized the Bush administration, the religious right, Congressional Democrats and anti-American intellectuals. Though deeply pessimistic about the dangers of nuclear confrontation and the gap between rich nations and poor, Mr. Rorty retained something of Dewey’s hopefulness about America. It is important, he said in 2003, to take pride “in the heritage of figures like Jefferson, Lincoln, Wilson, Roosevelt, Martin Luther King, and so on,” he said, and “to use this pride as a means of generating sympathy” for a country’s political aims
Texto publicado em The Independent sobre o falecimento de Rorty
Richard McKay Rorty, philosopher: born New York 4 October 1931; Professor of Philosophy, Princeton University 1970-81, Stuart Professor of Philosophy 1981-82; Professor of Humanities , University of Virginia 1982-96; Professor of Comparative Literature, Stanford University 1998-2005 (Emeritus); married 1954 Amélie Oksenberg (one son; marriage dissolved 1972), 1972 Mary Varney (one son, one daughter); died Palo Alto, California 8 June 2007.
Richard Rorty was perhaps the most eminent of his generation of American philosophers, certainly the best known worldwide, his work much translated, his name casually invoked well outside academic and philosophic circles, an invitation once reaching him from Bill Clinton's White House to come and tell the President what to think about contemporary ethics.
His enormous fame rested first on his vigorous and comprehensive breaking up of the view that the human sciences may be practised on the same terms as the natural sciences. But he went well beyond this to establish the "anti-foundational" argument that political and moral theory cannot be built on so-called objective grounds, but only on the compelling claims of human sympathy and solidarity. In doing so he rejuvenated the great tradition of American pragmatism and restored John Dewey, his intellectual hero, to a central position in the philosophic Pantheon.
Richard Rorty was born in New York in 1931 to parents prominent in the strong American leftist movement of the Depression. His father edited the controversial socialist journal New Masses; by the age of five the young Richard was an experienced protest marcher and throughout his boyhood a familiar of the leaders of working-class politics. Refusing Marxism, as one would expect, for its dogmatism and insupportable claims to being an objective science, he none the less kept up his lifelong allegiance to the egalitarian and socially equitable politics he learned from his parents.
In 1945, when only 15, he enrolled at Hutchins College, Chicago and, coming under the influence of the famous conservative Leo Strauss, set himself the task of holding reality and social justice in a single anti-Straussian vision. After military service, during which he worked with great intellectual profit on early computers, he then, after completing his BA and MA and marrying between times the formidable philosopher Amélie Oksenberg, registered in 1954 for a PhD at Yale.
His first full academic appointment was at Wellesley in 1958, his second at Princeton in 1961, but after beginning his career by publishing at a cracking rate, he stalled for a while in deep depression when his wife left home in 1971.
The fallow period yielded rich fruit. Between 1971 and 1979 he remarried and worked at what would become his best known book, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. This classic of philosophic literature starts out from the canonical essayists of sceptical scientism - Donald Davidson, Wilfrid Sellars, W.V. Quine - in order to establish the impossibility of traditional theories of hard knowledge. These taught that epistemology will one day devise a system of concepts and symbols so perfectly lucid that it will mirror reality with absolute exactness.
Rorty's critique proved this to be an illusion. His preferred philosophic heroes were John Dewey, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida: American pragmatist, subversive analyst of the uses of language, metaphysician of being, mischievous deconstructor of all stable meanings. Armed with these heretics, he argued in a sequel, Contingency, Irony, Solidarity (1988), for a passage from the theory of knowledge to the theory of interpretation, and for a philosophy preoccupied less with truth than with "edification", or right feeling.
The two books caused a mighty upheaval in philosophy departments, as well they might. Some complained, with justification, that Rorty had substituted the relaxed reading of literature for the exacting discipline of philosophic thought. Others objected strongly to his dandy figure, the "liberal ironist", who presides over the second book and is not really distinguishable from Rorty himself: certainly a liberal (nowadays, it is shameful to report, a term of abuse in Washington, DC), and an ironist because unpersuaded by claims about ethical objectivity and "final vocabularies", preferring instead the uncertain, necessary instruments of human hopefulness and the powerful, homely sentiment of solidarity. In both guises, it should be added, friendship itself remained for him the key human value and moral bearing.
He carried this domesticated criticism with great pungency against those left-sympathising practitioners of grand theory who had, he thought, lost in abstraction a keen enough sense of human misery and injustice. In his splendid collections, Truth and Progress (1998) and Philosophy and Social Hope (1999), he routs alike dead old Stalinists and new totalitarians of theory in the name of a practical programme of social welfare. Utterly impatient with the notion, distorted from the work of Michel Foucault, that the symbolic wounds of language and identity are more atrocious than lousy pay, dangerous work and filthy housing, in tireless essays, journalism and conference addresses, he called his fellow-leftists back to traditional class politics and the repair of poverty.
He was a wonderful interlocutor and a thrilling teacher: vivid, disarmingly sympathetic with disagreement, dauntingly quick with a rebuttal, entirely without condescension, funny, relaxed and domestic in the best American way.
During the almost 30 years since he published Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature at Princeton in 1980, he moved first as Professor of the Humanities to the University of Virginia, on whose exquisite colonial campus he retained an office as well as widespread and loyal affection, and then as Professor of Comparative Literature to Stanford.
It is certainly the case that the philosophers objected to exactly these non-philosophic appellations. Professors of literature have no business writing extra-murally about Plato. But Rorty moved gracefully and confidently from literature to politics to epistemology. Indeed it was the point of his life's work as a free man to do just that. Consequently, over those same years, in a headlong series of essays, he kept up his revision and restatement of American pragmatism (Consequences of Pragmatism, 1982) and, in Emerson's words, its "domestication of culture", together with his fierce opposition to the conventions of a so-called absolute truth and objectivity, and his blithe acceptance of the dangers of relativism (Objectivity, Relativism, Truth, 1991).
His styles of thought, of prose and of his life match one another happily in a blend of easy colloquialism, trenchant summary of difficult arguments, cheerful plainness of idiom, an elegant turn of phrase, each quality held firmly in place by his rugged and rueful integrity. Ardently patriotic about the great achievements of American liberalism, perhaps his most accessible book, the one which won him an invitation to Clinton's White House, is Achieving our Country: leftist thought in 20th-century America (1998).
