"My sense of the holy is bound up with the hope that some day my remote descendants will live in a global civilization in which love is pretty much the only law." richard rorty
richard rorty died two years ago today.
i've had the good fortune of studying w/some real intellectual powerhouses. greg ulmer & john levy at uf were pretty impressive. doug bergren at new college could make your jaw drop w/his brilliance. for the most part, i can't really vouch for them as human beings. they seemed pretty much afflicted w/all the personality defects i'd seen in my up close & personal dealings w/profs from new college. when i think of these guys, i think of the unforgettable scene in barton fink, when the devil(played by john goodman)is running down the burning hallway firing a shotgun, sceaming "i'll show you the life of the mind!!!" pompous self-absorbed intellectuals drive even the devil insane.
rorty was different. he drove the pompous intellectuals insane, while maintaining one of the sharpest intellects i've ever seen. to hear him summarize kant's idea of the sublime or hegel's dialectic in perfectly clear & understandable articulation was to hear someone truly exercising the life of the mind & sharing it unstintingly. his generosity was enormous. i didn't always agree w/his positions. for example, he seemed much too optimistic about the direction of things than i ever could be. i could never accept the terror or the holocaust as "glitches" in the general positive movement of mankind. i always thought that if he'd spent a few years drinking at the outrigger, his worldview would have been more aligned w/my own.
maybe not, tho. like i said, rorty was different.
habermas is a notorious hard case, allegedly a nasty vicious little man. when i heard him lecture at uva, i couldn't imagine him saying a kind word about anyone. what do i know?
"Among contemporary philosophers, I know of none who equalled Rorty in confronting his colleagues - and not only them - over the decades with new perspectives, new insights and new formulations. This awe-inspiring creativity owes much to the Romantic spirit of the poet who no longer concealed himself behind the academic philosopher. And it owes much to the unforgettable rhetorical skill and flawless prose of a writer who was always ready to shock readers with unaccustomed strategies of representation, unexpected oppositional concepts and new vocabularies - one of Rorty's favourite terms. Rorty's talent as an essayist spanned the range from Friedrich Schlegel to Surrealism." jurgen habermas
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