“Solidarity is not discovered by reflection, but created. It is created by increasing our senstivity to the particular details of the pain and humiliation of other, unfamiliar sorts of people. Such increased sensitivity makes it more difficult to marginialize people different from ourselves by thinking, ‘They do not feel as WE would,’ or ‘There must always be suffering, so why not let THEM suffer?’” Richard Rorty, 1931-2007.
2 thoughts on “The Philosopher and Social Hope.”
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I’d argue that it is only by reflection (contemplation, thoughtful consideration … however you want to say it) that we are able to increase our sensitivity to the suffering of others. I’d go so far as to say it is precisely because of a lack of reflection (not to put to fine a point on it: ignorance) that people think others don’t feel as they do and don’t have an answer to “why not let THEM suffer?” But I’m quibbling. Different path to the same conclusion. We’re a long way from achieving our country … taking big steps backwards these days … here’s hoping Rorty’s passing prods a few more people to reflect on our progressive tradition.
I’ll miss him, as his ideas came into my life at just the right time, at the end of college, when I was trying to reconcile the problems of disillusionment with the realities of both academic science and philosophy with a growing practical political urgency. Rorty, and the thinkers he led me to(James, Dewey, Kuhn, Davidson, West, etc, who we certainly weren’t reading in my undergrad philosophy dept) allowed me to realign all of those competing impulses in a new, flexible framework, and in many ways to get past the disillusionment and move on. Of course, like with him, moving on meant a self-imposed exile of sorts, because it turned out that philosophy and science weren’t actually doing what I had thought they were going in. But, I’m glad I figured that out when I did, instead of halfway into a Ph. D. somewhere.
He feels like a rather sad example of a road-not-taken, both in American politics and academics. There aren’t many classic old liberal/humanist public intellectuals like him left, and at least from within in the academy, I don’t see many more on the way. I wish he had won the argument instead of the rejectionist Chomsky types politically, and the inwardly focused and disciplinarily narrow types academically, but it was a losing fight from the start, for reasons structural and institutional as much as ideological. I’m glad and grateful he was still willing to fight it though.