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(Tenured Radical)

Wednesday, June 13, 2007

'Complete Lack of Pretension as a Person.'

My man McLemee, at Inside Higher Ed, has a marvelous meditation on Richard Rorty this morning, which includes a lengthy statement by Morris Dickstein. Here's part of what Dickstein said:

“To my mind... [Rorty] was the only intellectual who gave postmodern relativism a plausible cast, and he was certainly the only one who combined it with Dissent-style social democratic politics. He admired Derrida and Davidson, Irving Howe and Harold Bloom, and told philosophers to start reading literary criticism. His turn from analytic philosophy to his own brand of pragmatism was a seminal moment in modern cultural discourse, especially because his neopragmatism was rooted in the ‘linguistic turn’ of analytic philosophy. His role in the Dewey revival was tremendously influential even though Dewey scholars universally felt that it was his own construction. His influence on younger intellectuals like Louis Menand and David Bromwich was very great and, to his credit, he earned the undying enmity of hard leftists who made him a bugaboo.”



McLemee notes

Rorty’s consistent indifference to certain pieties and protocols. He was prone to outrageous statements delivered with a deadpan matter-of-factness that could be quite breathtaking. The man had chutzpah.

It’s a “desirable situation,” he told an interviewer, “not to have to worry about whether you are writing philosophy or literature. But, in American academic culture, that’s not possible, because you have to worry about what department you are in.”