A conversation with Rorty that starts in a bar and ends at the Aeropagus
I just finished listening to one of the most moving podcasts I’ve ever heard: Episode 7 — Charles Peirce and Inquiry as an Act of Love with David O’Hara on Damn the Absolute! The entire discussion was illuminating for me, but what brought me to tears was Prof. David O’Hara’s answer to host Jeffrey Howard’s final question. David relates a personal anecdote about his encounter as a graduate student with Richard Rorty, and his subsequent engagement with Rorty’s views regarding religion and inquiry.
David puts the conclusion he draws from this experience beautifully: “What we need to do is spend enough time together that we can start to translate our ideas into each other’s language and include one another in this community of inquiry. And that is the work of love.”
Here is the full transcript of David’s story:
JH: Despite what seems to me as a lot of genius in Peirce, there’s obviously a lot of people who disagree with some of his views as well as disagree with some of your views. Who do you find to be one of the most convincing critics, or maybe a volume out there that really hits against the way you think: “Ah, you know, maybe I need to reconsider here.”
DO: Well, let me add something then once again about myself. I really value those critics; not really interested in hanging out in an echo chamber of people who say, “Yeah you and I agree about Peirce exactly the same way. Let’s stop asking more questions.”
Years ago Richard Rorty came to speak at the school where I was studying. For those of your listeners who don’t know — I imagine most of them do, but for those who don’t know — Richard Rorty died just a few years ago and was one of the most famous and influential pragmatist philosophers. A really brilliant man. He also thought that religion was a conversation stopper. Those are his words. And part of that is something that he said in one of his last two books: that he hated the way that people use religion to try to get an extra vote for themselves. To put it differently, he said in one of his last two books, “I’m not an atheist; I’m an anti-clericalist. By that I mean a priest or a clergyperson. A cleric doesn’t get an extra vote or they don’t get extra credit to their beliefs.”
Rorty and I argued briefly that night about whether or not we could talk about religion and he regarded my conversation as a conversation stopper and walked away. I’m not sure which one of us was right in that.
JH: Is this is a true anecdote from your from your life?
DO: Yeah, that’s right.
JH: Oh, what a special treat to have to share with people. That’s wonderful.
DO: Yeah. I mean I was a graduate student. He had just given a talk. We met at the bar after the talk and he didn’t know me. I of course knew him because he was the keynote speaker. So he didn’t have any reason to stay and talk with me for long. But he just walked away. So he stopped the conversation. And afterwards I was reflecting, “Okay, which one of us the conversation stopper.” But I don’t blame him because again, I wanted to have a conversation with him that he had had many times, and he felt like, “I’ve done this enough. I don’t want to spend more time on this.”
When I started teaching at Augustana University where I teach now, I wanted to go back to read more of Rorty and see where I had misunderstood him. I wound up writing about him, and reading more, and I feel like I really lit into him. And I thought Rorty is wrong. He is wrong to stop the conversation because this is an important part of the community, and so on. And the more I read him the more I realized that he was being pretty humble in ways that I hadn’t recognized at first. And he wanted to make sure that we included as many people as possible in the conversation. And if religion is something that stops that conversation, then we should stop talking about religion so that we can bring those people on board into the conversation, too.
And in one of those last books — it’s a book that he wrote as a dialogue with Gianni Vattimo (Vattimo was a Catholic philosopher) — Rorty says, “In the end, Vattimo and I actually nearly agree. Vattimo tends to look backwards at the history and the tradition. I tend to look forwards at hope. But I think that we’re talking about the same thing. And if I had to express my hope in simple terms, I would probably use the language of St. Paul’s epistle to the Corinthians, First Corinthians 13, where he talks about love.
I read that and I started to cry. I read it after Rorty died and I was crying in part because (I think I’m going to start crying right now, Jeffrey) I felt like I’d been unjust to Richard Rorty. I felt like here was Rorty — I don’t want to get mystical, but it’s like Rorty sending me a letter from the grave saying, “Dave. Come on, man. You missed this all along. I was trying to say this, but you were just being this arrogant graduate student arguing with me in a bar. So like, do you get this?”
I saw that and I feel a little bit like St. Paul standing on the Areopagus in Athens and saying, “Oh, here’s some people that I thought I disagreed with — these Greek philosophers — and it turns out they were saying nearly the same thing.” What we need to do is spend enough time together that we can start to translate our ideas into each other’s language and include one another in this community of inquiry. And that is the work of love.
Again, not the kind of love that desires to own and possess and control, but the kind of love that looks at the other and says, “I desire to see you flourish as part of this community, which I also desire to see flourishing.”
JH: I love your message of inclusion here. I think the focus on love and connection to inquiry is beautiful.
I started to cry right as David did. I was deeply moved by his idea that broadening the community of inquiry is the work of love.
I urge you to listen to the entire podcast, and to read the Rorty essay “Anticlericalism and Atheism” regarding Vattimo and 1 Corinthians 13 that David references.
