were you intrigued?”
“I think because of the sense of mastery and control you get out of philosophical ideas. You get the impression from reading philosophy that now you can place everything in order or in a neat arrangement or something like that, and this gratifies one's need for domination.”
The interviewer, it seems, is determined to have the last line.
“Compensation for shyness?”
“Yep.”
If the truth of a statement lies neither in its correspondence to a preexistent reality nor in its logical coherence but in its capacity to help a person cope with life, to carry him or her into a more fulfilling relationship with others, what kind of truth is established by this interview? Given Rorty's philosophical position, his reclusive childhood did not cause him to become a thinker, doomed to converse with himself because no one would talk to him. What he is telling the interviewer is that books and philosophy were not escapes from the harshness of the world but ways in which he coped with this world. “I wanted a way to be both an intellectual and spiritual snob and a friend of humanity,” he writes, “a nerdy recluse and a fighter for justice.”5 In pragmatism he would find a viable compromise between the life of the mind and the life of the social activist. And by placing philosophy on a par with art and craft, storytelling, religion, bird-watching, and life skills, he could simultaneously puncture the pretensions of academics who regarded intellectual cleverness as intrinsically superior to all other forms of cleverness and affirm a solidarity with men and women whose skills were practical, social, or aesthetic.
My wife and I invited Dick and his wife Mary to our house for dinner. Since Dick and Don Hirsch were close friends, we invited the Hirsches as well. It was a convivial evening, and though I have a clear memory of cooking Indian food I cannot now recall much of our conversation. A few weeks later, Dick and Mary invited us to their house for a meal. They rented a monocrete bungalow in Deakin, and their two children, Patricia and Kevin, were preparing for bed when we arrived.
From the start of the evening, it was clear that Dick had decided to assume the role of host. Moreover, I had the distinct impression that Dick had had to persuade Mary against her better judgment that this strict division of labor was a good idea. Not only did he cook and serve the food; he ensured that our wineglasses were filled and that we were properly introduced to the other guests, who included Tamsin and Ian Donaldson. Even now, twentynine years after the event, I retain a poignant memory of Dick's determination to prove himself equal to the occasion. But what moved me most was his obvious struggle with tasks that most of us take for granted—cooking a simple meal, bantering about the weather, commenting on current events, discussing travel plans. That none of this came easy to him was obvious. Perhaps he had never before cooked a meal for eight guests. The food was not very good, but the determination to please was overwhelming, and we responded as parents might respond to a child bringing them breakfast in bed, the toast burned, the egg underdone, the tea cold. I don't want to sound condescending, for when I later reflected on the evening, I felt only admiration that someone should push himself so hard to perform tasks that did not come naturally to him. For it seemed to me that the labor of producing a meal was greater, for him, than the labor of writing an essay on Dewey's critique of metaphysics.
After Canberra I did not see Dick Rorty again, though we corresponded for a couple of years. He sent me an inscribed copy of Consequences of Pragmatism, and I reciprocated with a copy of Allegories of the Wilderness, which also appeared in 1982. And when my wife died in September 1983, Dick sent his condolences with a phrase that conveyed that passionate acceptance of contingency without which it is difficult to survive any loss, yet communicating that sense of hope without which it is impossible to envisage a future: “I only wish there was something useful I could do.”
As it turned out, his work proved to be more useful than he, or I, could have imagined, for in the months after Pauline's death I spent several hours every day methodically reading, and taking notes on, the collected writings of William James and John Dewey. Had Richard Rorty not introduced me to these writers, I would perhaps never have realized how directly and profoundly pragmatism speaks to our struggle to recover a raison d'etre in the face of catastrophic loss. Unlike Boethius, whom I also read at this time, I found no consolation in thought as “the one true good”; rather, it was the realization of the limits of abstract thought that enabled me to yield to the natural processes of mourning, which always occur in their own good time.
One can never know for certain how one's actions or words will impact on others. But sometimes it is a person's struggle to be good, or decent, that impresses one more than his or her achievement of such virtues. In my observations of Kuranko initiation rites, I was impressed by the concerted effort of preceptors and neophytes alike to realize manhood or womanhood. So completely did social order and continuity depend on this transformation of sexually amorphous children into gendered adults (and, by implication, the strict separation of men and women in everyday life) that any failure to achieve this goal doomed a person to be a butt of jokes for the rest of his or her life. But the apotheosis was impossible. No one could fully realize the gender stereotypes and the ethical codes associated with them. Personal dispositions and the vicissitudes of life made it inevitable that men and women would sometimes fail in their duties or fall short of what was expected of them. As with gender, so with rank—one could only gesture ritualistically toward the ideal. This impossibility of ever closing the gap between collective ideals and real individuals may explain the theatrical plays on gender identity with which initiation rites are replete: men presuming to give birth to the male neophytes, nurturing them without the need of mothers; women aspiring to inculcate the stoic virtues they associate with men. In the many role reversals that occur in the course of public performances—women acting as hunters or soldiers, men obliged to perform tasks normally done by women—one sees the physical impossibility of the transformations to which initiation aspires. But the dramatic power of these performances lies in the very clumsiness and ineptitude with which the actors pretend to be someone they are not. The blurring of role distinctions ironically sharpens our sense of these distinctions, reminding us that identity is partly pure artifice. Something similar is true of philosophers who aspire to change the world. Not only are our philosophical pictures of the world artificial, as Rorty points out, but the world itself lies largely beyond our linguistic and intellectual grasp. Yet it is in those moments when thought struggles to become worldly or the world seems to conspire in our struggle to understand it that we most clearly see the impossibility of the unity of mind and matter but find in that disappointment a sense of oneness with those who have travelled the same path, engaged in the same struggle, and come to the same conclusion. Rorty once wrote that “the meaning of one human life may have little to do with the meaning of any other human life, while being none the worse for that.”6 But it is gratifying nonetheless to recognize affinities, sympathies, common ground when divergent backgrounds, affiliations, and intellectual capacities led one to expect none. In such recognitions we realize the usefulness of Rorty's observation that discovering unity beneath appearances may be less exciting than discovering that comity is compatible with radical and contradictory variousness, and that there is nothing necessarily wrong with bringing Trotsky and wild orchids together in a single story without first explaining what they have in common.
Not long before his death in June 2007, Richard Rorty wrote a piece called “The Fire of Life”7 in which he meditates on being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and speaks of the consolations of poetry. He concludes, “I now wish that I had spent somewhat more of my life with verse. This is not because I fear having missed out on truths that are incapable of statement in prose. There are no such truths; there is nothing about death that Swinburne and Landor knew but Epicurus and Heidegger failed to grasp. Rather, it is because I would have lived more fully if I had been able to rattle off more old chestnuts—just as I would have if I had made more close friends.”
I take Rorty to be saying something more than that poetry and friendship provide pleasure. He is saying that they carry us across the threshold of the self
