Richard Rorty was born on October 4, 1931, in New York City. His parents,
James and Winifred Rorty, were activists, writers and social democrats. His maternal grandfather,
Walter Rauschenbusch, was a central figure in the
Social Gospel movement of the early 20th century. His father experienced two nervous breakdowns in his later life. The second breakdown, which he had in the early 1960s, was more serious and "included claims to divine prescience." Consequently, Richard Rorty fell into depression as a teenager and in 1962 began a six-year psychiatric analysis for
obsessional neurosis. His colleague
Jürgen Habermas's obituary for Rorty points out that Rorty's childhood experiences led him to a vision of philosophy as the reconciliation of "the celestial beauty of orchids with Trotsky's dream of justice on earth." Habermas describes Rorty as an ironist: Nothing is sacred to Rorty the ironist. Asked at the end of his life about the "holy", the strict
atheist answered with words reminiscent of the young
Hegel: "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." continuing at
Yale University for a PhD in philosophy (1952–1956). He married another academic,
Amélie Oksenberg (
Harvard University professor), with whom he had a son, Jay Rorty, in 1954. After two years in the
U.S. Army, he taught at
Wellesley College for three years until 1961. Rorty divorced his wife and then married
Stanford University bioethicist Mary Varney in 1972. They had two children, Kevin, now Max, and Patricia. While Richard Rorty was a "strict atheist" (Habermas), In 1998 Rorty became professor of
comparative literature (and philosophy, by courtesy), at
Stanford University, where he spent the remainder of his academic career. Rorty's doctoral dissertation,
The Concept of Potentiality was a historical study of the concept, completed under the supervision of
Paul Weiss, but his first book (as editor),
The Linguistic Turn (1967), was firmly in the prevailing
analytic mode, collecting classic essays on the
linguistic turn in analytic philosophy. However, he gradually became acquainted with the American philosophical movement known as
pragmatism, particularly the writings of
John Dewey. The noteworthy work being done by analytic philosophers such as
Willard Van Orman Quine and
Wilfrid Sellars caused significant shifts in his thinking, which were reflected in his next book,
Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979).
Pragmatists generally hold that the meaning of a proposition is determined by its use in linguistic practice. Rorty combined pragmatism about truth and other matters with a
later Wittgensteinian
philosophy of language, which declares that
meaning is a social-linguistic product, and sentences do not "link up" with the world in a correspondence relation. Rorty wrote in
Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989): Truth cannot be out there—cannot exist independently of the human mind—because sentences cannot so exist, or be out there. The world is out there, but descriptions of the world are not. Only descriptions of the world can be true or false. The world on its own unaided by the describing activities of humans cannot. (p. 5) Views like this led Rorty to question many of philosophy's most basic assumptions—and also led to his being apprehended as a
postmodern/
deconstructionist philosopher. Indeed, from the late 1980s through the 1990s, Rorty focused on the
continental philosophical tradition, examining the works of
Friedrich Nietzsche,
Martin Heidegger,
Michel Foucault,
Jean-François Lyotard and
Jacques Derrida. His work from this period includes
Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989),
Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers II (1991), and
Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers III (1998). The latter two works attempt to bridge the dichotomy between analytic and continental philosophy by claiming that the two traditions complement rather than oppose each other. According to Rorty, analytic philosophy may not have lived up to its pretensions and may not have solved the puzzles it thought it had. Yet such philosophy, in the process of finding reasons for putting those pretensions and puzzles aside, helped earn itself an important place in the history of ideas. By giving up on the quest for
apodicticity and finality that
Edmund Husserl shared with
Rudolf Carnap and
Bertrand Russell, and by finding new reasons for thinking that such quest will never succeed, analytic philosophy cleared a path that leads past
scientism, just as the
German idealists cleared a path that led around
empiricism. In the last fifteen years of his life, Rorty continued to publish his writings, including
Philosophy as Cultural Politics (Philosophical Papers IV), and Achieving Our Country (1998), a political manifesto partly based on readings of Dewey and
Walt Whitman in which he defended the idea of a
progressive, pragmatic left against what he felt were defeatist,
anti-liberal,
anti-humanist positions espoused by the
critical left and continental school. Rorty felt these anti-humanist positions were personified by figures like Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Foucault. Such theorists were also guilty of an "inverted Platonism" in which they attempted to craft overarching, metaphysical, "sublime" philosophies—which in fact contradicted their core claims to be ironist and contingent. According to Eduardo Mendieta "Rorty described himself as a 'postmodern bourgeois liberal', even if he also attacked the academic left, though not for being anti-truth, but for being unpatriotic. Rorty’s
Zen attitude about truth could easily be confused for a form of political relativism—a
Machiavellian type of politics." Rorty's last works, after his move to Stanford University concerned the place of religion in contemporary life, liberal communities, comparative literature and philosophy as "cultural politics." Shortly before his death, he wrote a piece called "The Fire of Life" (published in the November 2007 issue of
Poetry magazine) in which he meditates on his diagnosis and the comfort of poetry. He concludes: 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. Cultures with richer vocabularies are more fully human—farther removed from the beasts—than those with poorer ones; individual men and women are more fully human when their memories are amply stocked with verses. On June 8, 2007, Rorty died in his home from
pancreatic cancer. ==Major works==