Geuss on Rorty (and on Geuss)

Raymond Geuss (Cambridge University) and the late Richard Rorty were colleagues in the Princeton Department in the late 1970s.  Geuss has some characteristically interesting, amusing and iconoclastic remarks about Rorty here, which illuminate both Rorty and Geuss.  (Thanks to Rob Sica for the pointer.)  An excerpt:

[One day] Dick happened to mention that he had just finished reading Gadamer's Truth and Method.  My heart sank at this news because the way he reported it seemed to me to indicate, correctly as it turned out, that he had been positively impressed by this book. I had a premonition, which also turned out to be correct, that it would not be possible for me to disabuse him of his admiration for the work of a man, whom I knew rather well as a former colleague at Heidelberg and whom I held to be a reactionary, distended wind-bag. Over the years, I did my best to set Dick right about Gadamer, even resorting to the rather low blow of describing to him the talk Gadamer had given at the German Embassy in occupied Paris in 1942, in which Gadamer discussed the positive role Herder could play in sweeping away the remnants of such corrupt and degenerate phenomena as individualism, liberalism, and democracy from the New Europe arising under National Socialism.  All this had no effect on Dick. His response to this story was that Gadamer had probably wanted to finance a trip to Paris—a perfectly understandable, indeed self-evidently laudable aspiration—and, under the circumstances, getting himself invited to the German Embassy was the only way to do this. As I persisted in pointing out that this in itself might “under the circumstances” not exactly constitute an exculpation, I came up against that familiar shrug of the shoulders which could look as if it meant that Dick had turned his receiving apparatus off. In this case, the shrug also made me feel that I was being hysterically aggressive in pursuing a harmless old gent for what was, after all, no more than a youthful indiscretion. In retrospect, I am not sure but that I don't now think Dick was right about this last point, but that was not my reaction at the time....

On another [occasion]...Dick described to me a new undergraduate course he wanted to give. It was to be called “An Alternative History of Modern Philosophy” and would sketch a continuous conversation from the end of the Middle Ages to the beginning of the twentieth century without once naming any of the standard canonical figures. This would be a history of philosophy without any reference to Descartes, Locke, Leibniz, Hume, or J. S. Mill. I don't recall in all detail how the alternative story was to run, but I do remember very vividly that it was to start from Petrus Ramus. Dick had an extremely low opinion of Descartes as a philosopher, thinking of him as no more than a minor disciple of Petrus Ramus. I also remember that some of the high points were to be Paracelsus, the Cambridge Platonists, Thomas Reid, Fichte, and Hegel. I think the course was to end with Dewey, although I may be making that up.... [BL comment:  Rorty, in fact, taught a course, which I had with him in the Spring of 1982, called "From Kant to 1900," which covered Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and William James; when Geuss re-joined the Princeton faculty, he had the course eliminated from the books saying [I still recall this], "This course can not be taught."  Of course, Rorty had a message to convey, which is why he could get away with it--it was an excellent course for undergraduates, but I can see why Geuss, who did not share Rorty's agenda, would not think it teachable.]

Dick had two different worries about his planned new course. The first was that, if the Committee on Instruction knew what he was up to, “They” would never permit it. Dick spoke of the Committee on Instruction as if it was a kind of academic Thought Police. One must, as it were, he said, consider the University as a complex machine with two interlocking parts, a Generator that was devoted to producing excellence in relatively abstract areas of research, primarily scientific research, and then a Transformer which turned the prestige acquired through this excellence into a force of repression, directed at legitimizing the deepest possible cultural and political conservatism. The combination of excellence and a strictly-enforced, backward-looking cultural ethos made the University an almost irresistible magnet for the extensive funding from the alumni, large corporations, and the government that fuelled the Generator. The Committee on Instruction was the transmission belt between the two parts of the machine. “That is the way a great university protects itself from change,” Dick would say to me, as a kind of refrain during the late 1970s, meaning by “change,” I presume, in the first instance, cultural change. I naïvely objected that Dick's description couldn't possibly be correct because such a structure couldn't possibly maintain itself: it was like a confidence trick or a perpetual motion machine; reality would eventually break through at some point. Dick, however, was, at that time, significantly more disillusioned, or perhaps more realistic, than I was....

Dick's second worry about this planned course was that he did not quite see how he could tell his story without mentioning Kant at all, and even to mention Kant would be to violate the rationale of the enterprise. Since I had at least as negative an opinion of Kant as Dick had of Descartes, I encouraged him to move directly from Jacobi to Fichte, bypassing Kant altogether. He didn't seem very taken with this idea, although it was not clear to me why not. I suppose anyone who knew Dick knew his sometimes uncanny capacity simply to allow a train of thought that was moving in a direction he found uncongenial to peter out without it ever being completely clear why no further step in the conversation was made. This was not merely a gift or skill he had, but a personality trait that was integral to an aspect of Dick's philosophical make-up which I have already mentioned: his deeply rooted anti-Cartesianism.  Once one has set the origin of a system of Cartesian coordinates, and specified the axes, one can continue to count off in any direction ad libitum....

Dick was deeply tolerant and amazingly generous both in action and in spirit. When I was appointed at Princeton, he had, I think, some hopes of acquiring a colleague with whom he could discuss the more metaphysical parts of the German philosophical tradition that were near the center of his attention at that time. It must have been at least a mild disappointment to him that I had little interest in any kind of metaphysics and spent my time studying philosophers like Adorno who were of no interest to him and thinking about “social theory”—at that time a purported academic discipline that has now disappeared as completely as Davidson's [a now defunct market in Princeton, mentioned earlier in a part of the essay not excerpted here]. Characteristically, Dick used to say to people that my first book, The Idea of a Critical Theory, showed the uselessness of the concept of “ideology,” whereas I thought it showed the reverse. We could also find no common ground in aesthetics because of my own obsession with the philosophy of music. Dick seemed not only, as I have mentioned, to be deeply unmusical, like Freud, but he sometimes seemed even slightly irritated by the very existence of music and certainly by the thought that someone could take it sufficiently seriously to try to think about it in a sustained and systematic way. Finally, I think it puzzled him that I cleverly avoided ever giving any instruction in the university on Heidegger. None of this in the least diminished the unstinting intellectual and academic support he gave me in the most diverse contexts over decades, which went far beyond anything I can have been thought to deserve.

As the years went by, and we both left Princeton, I am afraid the incipient intellectual and emotional gulf between us got wider, especially after what I saw as Dick's turn toward ultra-nationalism with the publication of Achieving Our Country. Dick had always been and remained to the end of his life a “liberal” (in the American sense, i.e., a “Social-Democrat”): a defender of civil liberties and of the extension of a full set of civic rights to all, a vocal supporter of the labor unions and of programs to improve the conditions of the poor, an enemy of racism, arbitrary authority, and social exclusion. On the other hand, I found that he also enjoyed a spot of jokey leftist-baiting when he thought I was adopting knee-jerk positions which he held to be ill-founded. That was all fair enough. I tried not to rise to the bait, and usually succeeded, but this did not contribute to making our relations easier or more comfortable for me. The high (or low, depending on one's perspective) point of this sort of thing occurred some time in the 1980s when Dick sent me a postcard from Israel telling me he had just been talking with the Israeli official responsible for organizing assassinations of Arab mayors on the West Bank. He closed by saying he thought this was just what the situation required....

Achieving Our Country, though, represented a step too far for me. The very idea that the United States was “special” has always seemed to me patently absurd, and the idea that in its present, any of its past, or any of its likely future configurations it was in any way exemplary, a form of gross narcissistic self-deception which was not transformed into something laudable by virtue of being embedded in a highly sophisticated theory which purported to show that ethnocentrism was in a philosophically deep sense unavoidable. I remain very grateful to my Catholic upbringing and education for giving me relative immunity to nationalism. In the 1950s, the nuns who taught me from age five to twelve were virtually all Irish or Irish-American with sentimental attachment to certain elements of Celtic folklore, but they made sure to inculcate into us that the only serious human society was the Church which was an explicitly international organization. The mass, in the international language, Latin, was the same everywhere; the religious orders were international. This absence of national limitation was something very much to be cherished. “Catholica” in the phrase “[credo in] unam, sanctam, catholicam, et apostolicam ecclesiam” should, we were told, be written with a lower-case, not an upper-case, initial because it was not in the first instance part of the proper name of the church, but an adjective meaning “universal,” and this universality was one of the most important “marks of the true Church.” The Head of the Church, to be sure, and Vicar of Christ on earth, was in fact (at that time) always an Italian, but that was for contingent and insignificant reasons. The reason most commonly cited by these nuns was that, as Bishop of Rome, the Pope had to live in the “Eternal City,” but only an Italian could stand to live in Rome: it was hot, noisy, and overcrowded, and the people there ate spaghetti for dinner everyday rather than proper food, i.e., potatoes, so it would be too great a sacrifice to expect someone who had not grown up in Italy to tolerate life there. I clearly remember being unconvinced by this argument, thinking it set inappropriately low standards of self-sacrifice for the higher clergy; a genuinely saintly character should be able to put up even with pasta for lunch and dinner every day. I have since myself adopted this diet for long periods of time without thinking it gave me any claim on the Papacy. In any case, it was obvious even to a child of six or seven that none of these sisters had ever been within a thousand kilometers of Rome....

Hegel says at some point that a great man causes others to write commentaries about him and his work. I have probably spent more time thinking about Dick than about anyone else outside my narrow circle of intimates. His philosophical position contains much of great interest and importance, along with, as one would expect, some things I cannot bring myself to agree with, but that position is clearly and plausibly put. His writings have a human richness and substance which are not present in most contemporary philosophy. As a person, however, he remained a complete mystery to me. I rarely had the sense I understood why he did anything he did. I don't usually find most people that unfathomable. Perhaps it is simply that I cared enough to want genuinely to understand him, because I admired him, more than I cared about understanding other people, and so was not satisfied in his case with the superficial “explanations” of people's behavior which we normally accept.

As a person, Dick was thoroughly lovable, and as a philosopher both extraordinarily perceptive, and, at times, intensely irritating. The one thing he was not—not ever—was predictable or boring. I won't see his like again in my lifetime. I hope he would have been pleased to know that he would be remembered as this kind of person and this kind of philosopher.

Comments

[Kurt Mosser]

I was an utterly forgettable student of Raymond Geuss's at Chicago; I audited a couple of things, and actually enrolled in his course on Hegel's Philosophy of Right.

I think he would make an outstanding Pope. Should we start a petition?

[Derek Pierson]

Thanks very much for posting this piece by Geuss, Brian. While I find much of Rorty's philosophical outlook maddeningly wrong-headed, I have to admit that it is impossible for me to not take a deep interest in any biographical trinkets about the man that I happen to come across.

On that note, and for the sake of other readers who can't get enough of the personal side of Rorty, I may as well give a plug to Neil Gross' wonderful new biography, "Richard Rorty: The Making of an American Philosopher" (U. of Chicago Press).

[Michael Sevel]

I once asked Alex Mourelatos (a student of Wilfrid Sellars in the 1960s) who, in his experience, was the most impressive philosopher he had ever met. He did not hesitate to say, after Sellars, it was clearly Rorty. He was quick to qualify this by saying he disagreed profoundly with Rorty's ideas, but that Rorty's reading and re-reading of the history of philosophy was without fail more perceptive and interesting than anyone else's, and displayed great philosophical acumen. (This was all the more striking coming from a most distinguished scholar of ancient philosophy!)

And another anecdote: I was at Virginia Tech around 2000, when Rorty gave a paper at a conference in honor of the philosopher of science Marjorie Grene. In her reply, Marjorie (in her usual excitable way) seemed almost offended by Rorty's paper. (I remember her saying something like, "My response to Dick's paper is, basically, anger.") And yet there was clearly a deep respect between the two.

I was reminded of these by Guess's mindful distinction (and one rarely made) between a man and his ideas, offering praise for one and disdain for the other. It is a curiosity that this kind of distinction is made on nearly occasion in which Rorty is discussed.

[grad student]

There was a little posthumously published comment from Rorty in the November 2007 issue of Poetry Magazine that can be read here:
http://poetrymagazine.org/magazine/1107/comment_180185.html

There was a quote from it printed on the back cover that I found particularly devastating, and that perhaps adds to the mystery that Geuss refers to in his comments about what Rorty was like as a person:

"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."

[Richard Moore]

This comment from Geuss struck a chord with me:

"I suppose anyone who knew Dick knew his sometimes uncanny capacity simply to allow a train of thought that was moving in a direction he found uncongenial to peter out without it ever being completely clear why no further step in the conversation was made. This was not merely a gift or skill he had, but a personality trait that was integral to an aspect of Dick's philosophical make-up[.]"

I only met Rorty once, at a UC Berkeley memorial conference for Derrida, held two weeks after Derrida's death in late 2004. Rorty gave an interesting paper that argued (as I remember it) that Derridean philosophy was strictly anti-metaphysical. When it ended I took the opportunity to ask him about a comment he had made in a paper published 15 or 20 years earlier, and that seemed relevant to his talk, and that also seemed wrong. He had anticipated then that the appeals to mysterious, mystical explanatory elements in Derrida's early philosophy of language was an aberration and that it would disappear from his later work. His paper that day seemed to be saying that that was what had happened. But this struck me as a serious misreading of Derrida, and I was able to quote to Rorty four or five passages from relatively recent Derrida papers in which the mystical elements were at play and stronger than ever. In Derrida's essay on Kafka 'Before the Law', it's possible to reconstruct the claim that the (platonic) form of literature is "an impossible nothing" that does not and could not exist but that nonetheless "calls in silence from its place of hiding" and "makes things happen". Similarly, in Monolingualism of the Other, there is a suggestion that messianic and eschatological principles are at work in language.

I put this to Rorty and was taken aback by his response. He said something like, "I know. You're right. It's true. I always hoped he'd stop but he didn't. But Derrida was my friend and I tried to overlook that stuff." And he looked sad. It was an honest and touching and deeply humane response, but not what I had been expecting and not, I thought, philosophically credible.

What he said also reinforced an opinion that I'd been forming before then. This was that, as much as Rorty had a reputation as a wonderful reader of other philosophers, a lot of his readings bore no great resemblance to the works on which they were written. By contrast, I always enjoyed his analytic philosophy and his use of continental ideas in his critique of the analytic mainstream. I'd have loved to attend the class he taught on Gadamer and Davidson. It's a shame his lecture notes weren't (so far as I know) published.

[Rob]

A 65 minute Google Video of Rorty and Davidson in conversation (circa late 1990s, I think):

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8442907408947441860&q=rorty&ei=rEYqSJPEJ6S-rAK5o4SbCg

[Rob]

"Richard Rorty talks about his childhood" (You Tube):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=11CqZd3B8B8