Don Hirsch, Zygmund Baumann, Paul Connerton, Russell Keat, Patrick McCarthy, and others I got to know less well. I was writing essays on embodiment, profiting from long conversations with Paul, who was writing his book on bodily social memory, and Russell, who was preparing his critique of Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception. It was my hatha yoga practice that had inspired my explorations of body consciousness; unfortunately, it had also turned me into an obnoxious fundamentalist who believed that the respiratory and psycho-physical disciplines of yoga enabled one to achieve a truer and more realistic relationship with the world, and that discursive thought was largely illusory. Rorty objected to the essentialist overtones of my view, arguing that efforts to ground knowledge in the body or the mind, in reasoned discourse or strong intuition, were equally misguided. And he cautioned me against explaining any human experience in terms of some prior cause or first principle. In my defense, I pointed out that a philosophical argument against foundationalism could not be transferred to the real world, since all human beings have recourse to notions of firstness, foundations and fundamentals in their everyday lives. If it is existentially the case that life is insupportable without such notions, what is the point of making philosophical arguments to the contrary? Moreover, I felt that the Deweyan argument, to which Rorty subscribed, against Platonic dualisms like body-mind, true-false, and subject-object left unconsidered the way we deploy these antinomies to capture different modes of experience. Making epistemological claims for such distinctions is absurd, but recognizing the phenomenological differences they communicated was, I thought, vital to understanding human experience.
I suppose I was ineptly asking whether philosophy has anything to say that might make a real difference to our lives, and whether its insights had value only within the academic circles where they served as currency. I quickly learned that these were also burning questions for Rorty, for beyond the philosophical issue of whether we can ever truly represent what lies outside our minds—whether human thought can mirror nature—lies the much more pragmatic issue of whether the insights of thinkers can change the world.
Though Rorty's parents broke with the Communist Party in 1933, they turned to the political philosophy of Leon Trotsky, even sheltering John Frank, one of Trotsky's secretaries, for several months following Trotsky's assassination in Mexico in 1940. “I grew up knowing that all decent people were, if not Trotskyites, at least socialists,” Rorty would later write, reflecting on the influence of his parents. For even as a boy, he believed that the very “point of being human was to spend one's life fighting social injustice.”3 One wonders whether this shy, bookish, and precocious twelve-year-old appreciated the ironic contradiction between his desire to reform the world and his reclusive personality that would incline him to understand the world from afar.
In an interview that first aired on Dutch TV, Rorty is asked to describe himself as a child.
Appearing almost ingenuous, Rorty searches for the right words. “Shy, withdrawn, ingrown,” he says carefully. “Um, constantly afraid of being beaten up in the schoolyard. Hmm. Not playing much of a role in any activities. Hoping to get away from school as soon as I could.”
“Why?”
“Because…I just felt awkward and unable to join in things.”
“For what reason?”
“Because…dunno. It's just a fairly early memory of being asocial.”
Watching this video, I am immediately struck by Rorty's matter offactness—his refusal to reduce his shyness to some sinister cause, to find fault with his parents and upbringing, to judge his behavior as either good or bad. But the interviewer is determined to press him, to pin him down, to fathom this solitary behavior and use it as a key to unlock the secrets of the man.
“The schoolyard, then. You're standing alone, or…”
“You know, actually my memories aren't very strong until about the age [of] eight or seven…something like that. I was always being moved from school to school. I think I went to seven or eight different primary schools. In each one I would always wonder if I was going to make any friends, and then never did.”
“But do you know why? This shyness, where did it come from?”
“Dunno.”
“Did it accompany you all your life, or…?”
“I've never been very easy in my dealings with people. I'm a lot better than when I was a child, but still I tend to avoid parties because I can't think of any small talk to make.”
“As a shy boy, escaping the schoolyard, escaping the others in the classroom, going from school to school seven or eight times, you might suppose there's somebody who reads books in the silence of his room, at home? Am I correct?”
“Yeah, yeah. According to my parents I pretty much taught myself to read when I was four or thereabouts and spent most of the rest of my life reading books.”
If Rorty is bored or irritated by the interviewer's probing, he is at pains not to show it. He listens to the question and tries to answer it, even if the picture that he is allowing to emerge is of a nerd who felt indifferent to the rough-and tumble of the world.
“The world in these books, was it perhaps more important to you than the world outside?”
“Yeah, much more. The world outside never quite lived up to the books except for a few scenes in nature, animals, birds, flowers.”
Rorty is alluding to his childhood passion for collecting wild orchids, flowers that may have attracted him because they were “hard to find,” “socially useless,” and made him feel, at certain Wordsworthian moments, that he had been “touched by something numinous, something of ineffable importance.”4
But the interviewer wants to know “what kind of world” this boy was “creating by reading books and combining them.”
“Oh, fantasies of power…ah…of control…um…of omnipotence. The normal childhood fantasies…um…you know. Turning out to be the unacknowledged son of the king, that kind of thing.”
“Power. Control. The control and power you missed in the schoolyard?”
“And I think I was basically looking for some way to get back at the schoolyard bullies by turning into some kind of intellectual and acquiring some kind of intellectual power. I wasn't clear how this was going to work.”
“Did you manage to come back to them as the intellectual?”
“No, I just lost touch with them by living in a world of intellectuals.”
“After primary school, did the situation remain the same, that is, you were escaping, escaping into a world of books and fantasy?”
“Well, actually, I was very lucky, because when I was fifteen I went to the university. And it was a particular program in a particular university where no one talked about anything except books, so it was, you know, ideal for me, and it was the situation in which I felt more or less at ease and in control of things.”
“Was there any feeling in your childhood or early adulthood that you would become a philosopher?”
“I think philosophy was somewhat accidental. I think that I could equally well have become an intellectual historian or a literary critic, but it just happened that the course I was most intrigued by when I was sixteen was a philosophy course, and so I sort of kept taking more and more philosophy courses and signing up for more and more degrees.”
