In the New York Times obituary Rorty is quoted as saying, "At 12, I knew that the point of being human was to spend one's life fighting social injustice."
Rorty saw his life as fundamentally political (fighting injustice on the basis of conviction, not knowledge) and not philosophical. At the age of 12, after all, one does not "know" the purpose of life; one has opinions or faith.
In his book Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Rorty wrote, "About two hundred years ago, the idea that truth was made rather than found began to take hold of the imagination of Europe." In other words, it was believed that human reason can discover nothing of importance about the world except for man's utter dependency on his contingent historical setting and circumstances - on "truth" that is "made" by man. The meaning of reality is determined not by reason but by will or command. Rorty's postmodern "philosophy" was perfectly consistent with his choice for the political life over the philosophic life, the life of faith or submission to authority over the life of reason.
In his book Persecution and the Art of Writing, Leo Strauss wrote that "it is in contrast to the essentially solitary philosopher that the truly good or pious man is called 'the guardian of his city,' phulax poleos." Rorty saw himself deep down not as a philosopher in Strauss's sense, but as "fighting social injustice." Rorty saw himself as a "guardian of his city" (the utopian "city" of today's liberalism). To justify his political-religious commitment, Rorty enthusiastically embraced postmodernism. One wonders, then, if postmodernism is nothing more than a sophisticated set of arguments which are meant to make men at home with what Locke called "the smoke of their own chimneys," i.e., with whatever authoritative opinions they happen to be shaped by, whether before or after the age of 12.
Plato's metaphor of the cave implies that most of us live most of the time blinded by the smoke of our own chimneys, stuck inside our contingent political, religious, and moral convictions. But for Plato, unlike Rorty, there is an escape. Philosophy, as Plato understood it, was the successful effort to ascend from the cave to the light of the sun, to see things as they really are.
Rorty's response to Plato was that there is no escape from the cave, and so there is no point in even making the effort. Rorty's position seems to have been anticipated in this 1948 remark of Strauss: "People may become so frightened of the ascent to the light of the sun, and so desirous of making that ascent utterly impossible to any of their descendants, that they dig a deep pit beneath the cave in which they were born, and withdraw into that pit."
This use of arguments borrowed from philosophers to deny that philosophy in the Socratic sense is possible or necessary is an old story. It is no accident that the philosophers whose teachings were most influential in the American founding held views closer to the Socratic understanding of philosophy as ascent from the cave (from the smoke of one's own chimney) than to Rorty's understanding.
Rorty was typical of many thinkers whose starting point is atheism. From that assumption everything Rorty said is understandable. Atheism leads one who follows its implications consistently, to epistemological and metaphysical despair. If there is no God then there is no truth worth knowing and no values which are any better than any other. We are chained in our philosophic caves, truth is whatever we want it to be, and there's no escape.
Ideas have consequences and no opposing pair of ideas is more gravid with consequences than atheism and theism, both for this life and the next. Richard Rorty's thought is an outstanding example.
RLC
