People say when Richard Rorty was a professor of philosophy here in the '80s and '90s, the most frequently spoken phrase on Grounds was, "I disagree with Richard Rorty." The second-most common was, "I agree with Richard Rorty -- to an extent."
These became the most frequently printed phrases in the self-consciously intellectual branches of the American press June 8, 2007 -- the New York Times, Slate, Salon.com, the like. That was the day 'all men are mortal' and 'Rorty is a man' came to their inevitable conclusion. Everyone had something to say. He had either been the most influential American philosopher of the century or the most over-hyped windbag to walk the halls of academia. Plenty of people said he was both, which says a lot for American philosophy of the 20th century.
But no one mentioned what I think is the crucial kernel of this man's intellectual life: He wrote in purple ink.
What kind of man writes in purple?Now there's a philosophical question. Preadolescent girls with crushes on their algebra teachers write in purple, possibly. That's acceptable. But if you are going to be an irascible, ironical, iconoclastic giant, you'd look better sticking with black or -- in forgivably whimsical moments -- blue.
I ought to be fair. It's entirely possible that 99 percent of his written productions did not come in violet. I never -- to my regret -- actually met him, and I've seen only one piece of his penmanship. But that, I assure you, is as purple as Barney's backside.
And it's right out there for everyone to see -- for everyone, that is, who walks down to the second floor of Alderman and pulls from one particular shelf one particular copy of one particular slim book: C.P. Snow's "The Two Cultures."Open the cover (which is, I might add, a nice respectable blue), and you cannot miss the marks of a felt-tipped purple pen: "Rorty 1972."
He owned the book originally, I've been led to believe. Apparently he owned hundreds of volumes, and when he left Charlottesville a decade ago, many of them ended up in used bookstores, which must be a trawling zone for the U.Va. Library System. Rorty was not a fan of the Snow text. The margins are full of his violet (violent?) interjections: "No" he scribbles often, or else "meaningless," "?!" or "why bother?" The best is a question he's suspended next to Snow's statement that scientific culture "contains a great deal of argument, usually much more rigorous, and almost always at a higher conceptual level, than literary persons' arguments." The purple pen asks: "How does one measure height?"
He was a clever man, to be sure. Still, that hardly excuses the indignity of the pen. Philosophers are supposed to write cleanly, precisely and nobly. Bertrand Russell liked longhand: He wrote 10 pages of elegant script every day, and he rarely needed to edit them before publication. W.V.O. Quine had a stately old typewriter upon which he composed all his papers. He'd removed the exclamation point and the question mark keys and replaced them with the existential and universal quantifiers. Someone once asked how he got along without the question mark, and he said, "I deal in certainties." You see? These are proud men.
What about Rorty? What was he thinking, grabbing any stylus at random, ignoring its clearly unseemly color? Had he no shame?
Then again, maybe it was intentional. To put it much too bluntly, Rorty tended to think traditional philosophy was bunk. So too, maybe, were reputable writing tools. Who cares if you write in purple? In fact, you should write in purple, so no one mistakes your message: "It's not that I think you are wrong, Mr. Snow," I imagine him saying, "It's just that I think you are silly. And silliness warrants purple." I imagine him saying that, and then I am certain he was the greatest American philosopher of any century.
Of course, that's all speculation. I really have no idea why Rorty picked that pen. Aside from the couple papers I've read and the book I started (and never quite finished), I don't know the man at all. He had gone to pasture (read: Stanford) years before I came to U.Va. I consequently never had the chance to place myself among his chorus of critic-cum-disciples. But here is what I would say to him, if he were here today:
"Professor Rorty, on the issue of purple, I agree with you -- to an extent."
Rachel's column runs biweekly Thursdays. She can be reached at rachelcarr@cavalierdaily.com.
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