Is there objective truth: is Richard Rorty dead?

Richard Rorty, whose death at the age of 75 the newspapers reported last week, was one of the intellectual godfathers of “postmodernism” - the view that in human affairs there can be no such thing as objective truth; there are only subjective beliefs. According to Rorty, “each of us must search for our own conclusions about life and try to respect the differences among us.” This view became hugely influential in academia. In his main works, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) and Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (1988), Rorty argued that truth was not a correspondence between words and reality but rather “the widest possible intersubjective agreement.” In other words, if enough people say it's so, then it's so; if there is a widespread belief that the Nazi holocaust never happened, then it never happened.

The Times obituary reported that Rorty's parents were both Trotskyists. Although he called himself a socialist, he claimed that America was “an example of the best kind of society so far invented” and that “welfare-state capitalism” was the “best we can hope for.” Rorty's relativism is typical of many on the left-wing, that “everything is relative.” From the fact that many things are relative (e.g. morality), it does not follow that an objectively true account of the past and present is unattainable. Socialists are not merely giving a point of view about world capitalism; we are engaged in the revolutionary process of persuading others about what is really happening in the capitalist world. But more than that, we are not just interested in interpreting the world but in its revolutionary socialist transformation.

LEW