In the 1990's Rorty focused on literary criticism as the discipline best able to enlighten us about the different ways it was possible to be human, and so to expand our tolerance for diversity and our compassion for others conceived as different. The interest in literary studies was of a piece with the large role that an almost passive aestheticism had played in Rorty's outlook. For him the literary critic had replaced the philosopher in "the conversation of the west," and so explained why philosophy had almost lost out in the academy to English departments. The core area in which to look for wisdom was literature-- "plays, poems, and, especially, novels." To foster this interest, Rorty first supported pluralist efforts within the American Philosophical Association, but eventually, like Kuhn, gave up on the discipline of philosophy. His ideas had carried his fame beyond that profession. He left Princeton's department in 1982 for a position in the Humanities at Virginia, and, in 1998, for one in Comparative Literature at Stanford.
[Bruce Kuklick, A History of Philosophy in America: 1720-2000, OUP (2001), 279-280].
Coincidentally, 1982 was the year that I graduated from the University of Pittsburgh with a B.A. in philosophy and classics. Disillusioned with both fields, I was determined to go no farther professionally in either one. Instead, I turned to a deep reading of Wittgenstein, Santayana, Robinson Jeffers, and Wallace Stevens, followed by Rorty and Tolstoy. I had left my university studies in order to think "about the different ways it is possible to be human."
My over-riding ambition in life has always and only been a modest and yet maddeningly elusive one: to be a human being.
No comments:
Post a Comment