Chapter 6 - Effects 2
Richard Rorty, Sea change and/or ironic scraping
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2014
Summary
The opinion that is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate the truth in any depth is now what we mean by truth, and the object represented in this opinion is the most real. Logicality requires that our interests shall not stop at our own fate, but must extend to all races of beings with whom we can come into immediate or mediate intellectual relations.
charles sanders peirce, Collected Papers, Volume 5, Paragraph 654And they said then, “But play, you must,
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves ….”
wallace stevens, “The Man With the Blue Guitar”In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.
ralph waldo emerson, “Self-Reliance”[O]ur Glassy Essence is something we share with the angels, even though they weep for our ignorance of its nature.
richard rorty,Philosophy and the Mirror of NatureIn Praise of Therapeutic Philosophy and Against System Building
So effective was Richard Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) for me when I first read it in 1981 (the 1980, second corrected edition) that long before I came to inhabit and be inhabited by James’s Pragmatism and later coming to identify myself as a pragmatist, I felt comfortable, safe, after moving through Rorty’s mirror, in setting aside the thornier problems troubling hundreds of years of thinking about thinking contained in the canonic texts I had studied as a student of philosophy. One could say that Rorty liberated me, primed me to become self-reliant, Emersonian. I reread Rorty’s volume during the summer of 1998 in West Cork, Ireland in the shadow of Mount Gabriel, and appropriately recalled its annunciation as I prepared readings for the graduate seminar I was to offer that fall in “American Aesthetics,” one in a series I give every year at The Graduate Center, CUNY exploring and cultivating the field whose yield includes A Natural History of Pragmatism and now – having gone through Rorty’s Mirror a third time – the chapters of this text.
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- Pragmatism and American ExperienceAn Introduction, pp. 159 - 202Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2014