In an interview that first aired on Dutch TV, Rorty is asked to describe himself as a child.
Appearing almost ingenuous, Rorty searches for the right words. “Shy, withdrawn, ingrown,” he says carefully. “Um, constantly afraid of being beaten up in the schoolyard. Hmm. Not playing much of a role in any activities. Hoping to get away from school as soon as I could.”
“Why?”
“Because…I just felt awkward and unable to join in things.”
“For what reason?”
“Because…dunno. It's just a fairly early memory of being asocial.”
Watching this video, I am immediately struck by Rorty's matter offactness—his refusal to reduce his shyness to some sinister cause, to find fault with his parents and upbringing, to judge his behavior as either good or bad. But the interviewer is determined to press him, to pin him down, to fathom this solitary behavior and use it as a key to unlock the secrets of the man.
“The schoolyard, then. You're standing alone, or…”
“You know, actually my memories aren't very strong until about the age [of] eight or seven…something like that. I was always being moved from school to school. I think I went to seven or eight different primary schools. In each one I would always wonder if I was going to make any friends, and then never did.”
“But do you know why? This shyness, where did it come from?”
“Dunno.”
“Did it accompany you all your life, or…?”
“I've never been very easy in my dealings with people. I'm a lot better than when I was a child, but still I tend to avoid parties because I can't think of any small talk to make.”
“As a shy boy, escaping the schoolyard, escaping the others in the classroom, going from school to school seven or eight times, you might suppose there's somebody who reads books in the silence of his room, at home? Am I correct?”
“Yeah, yeah. According to my parents I pretty much taught myself to read when I was four or thereabouts and spent most of the rest of my life reading books.”
If Rorty is bored or irritated by the interviewer's probing, he is at pains not to show it. He listens to the question and tries to answer it, even if the picture that he is allowing to emerge is of a nerd who felt indifferent to the rough-and tumble of the world.
“The world in these books, was it perhaps more important to you than the world outside?”
“Yeah, much more. The world outside never quite lived up to the books except for a few scenes in nature, animals, birds, flowers.”
Rorty is alluding to his childhood passion for collecting wild orchids, flowers that may have attracted him because they were “hard to find,” “socially useless,” and made him feel, at certain Wordsworthian moments, that he had been “touched by something numinous, something of ineffable importance.”4
But the interviewer wants to know “what kind of world” this boy was “creating by reading books and combining them.”
“Oh, fantasies of power…ah…of control…um…of omnipotence. The normal childhood fantasies…um…you know. Turning out to be the unacknowledged son of the king, that kind of thing.”
“Power. Control. The control and power you missed in the schoolyard?”
“And I think I was basically looking for some way to get back at the schoolyard bullies by turning into some kind of intellectual and acquiring some kind of intellectual power. I wasn't clear how this was going to work.”
“Did you manage to come back to them as the intellectual?”
“No, I just lost touch with them by living in a world of intellectuals.”
“After primary school, did the situation remain the same, that is, you were escaping, escaping into a world of books and fantasy?”
“Well, actually, I was very lucky, because when I was fifteen I went to the university. And it was a particular program in a particular university where no one talked about anything except books, so it was, you know, ideal for me, and it was the situation in which I felt more or less at ease and in control of things.”
“Was there any feeling in your childhood or early adulthood that you would become a philosopher?”
“I think philosophy was somewhat accidental. I think that I could equally well have become an intellectual historian or a literary critic, but it just happened that the course I was most intrigued by when I was sixteen was a philosophy course, and so I sort of kept taking more and more philosophy courses and signing up for more and more degrees.”
“Why were you intrigued?”
“I think because of the sense of mastery and control you get out of philosophical ideas. You get the impression from reading philosophy that now you can place everything in order or in a neat arrangement or something like that, and this gratifies one's need for domination.”
The interviewer, it seems, is determined to have the last line.
“Compensation for shyness?”
“Yep.”
If the truth of a statement lies neither in its correspondence to a preexistent reality nor in its logical coherence but in its capacity to help a person cope with life, to carry him or her into a more fulfilling relationship with others, what kind of truth is established by this interview? Given Rorty's philosophical position, his reclusive childhood did not cause him to become a thinker, doomed to converse with himself because no one would talk to him. What he is telling the interviewer is that books and philosophy were not escapes from the harshness of the world but ways in which he coped with this world. “I wanted a way to be both an intellectual and spiritual snob and a friend of humanity,” he writes, “a nerdy recluse and a fighter for justice.”5 In pragmatism he would find a viable compromise between the life of the mind and the life of the social activist. And by placing philosophy on a par with art and craft, storytelling, religion, bird-watching, and life skills, he could simultaneously puncture the pretensions of academics who regarded intellectual cleverness as intrinsically superior to all other forms of cleverness and affirm a solidarity with men and women whose skills were practical, social, or aesthetic.
My wife and I invited Dick and his wife Mary to our house for dinner. Since Dick and Don Hirsch were close friends, we invited the Hirsches as well. It was a convivial evening, and though I have a clear memory of cooking Indian food I cannot now recall much of our conversation. A few weeks later, Dick and Mary invited us to their house for a meal. They rented a monocrete bungalow in Deakin, and their two children, Patricia and Kevin, were preparing for bed when we arrived.
From the start of the evening, it was clear that Dick had decided to assume the role of host. Moreover, I had the distinct impression that Dick had had to persuade Mary against her better judgment that this strict division of labor was a good idea. Not only did he cook and serve the food; he ensured that our wineglasses were filled and that we were properly introduced to the other guests, who included Tamsin and Ian Donaldson. Even now, twentynine years after the event, I retain a poignant memory of Dick's determination to prove himself equal to the occasion. But what moved me most was his obvious struggle with tasks that most of us take for granted—cooking a simple meal, bantering about the weather, commenting on current events, discussing travel plans. That none of this came easy to him was obvious. Perhaps he had never before cooked a meal for eight guests. The food was not very good,