Does Richard Rorty really matter?

I'm inclined to answer in the negative. Rorty was a much-lauded American philosopher, recently deceased, who espoused what he called "liberal ironism". He wrote several books, including Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, which gives the fullest exposition of his ideas. Father Neuhaus devotes the greater part of a lengthy chapter to him in American Babylon, in which he does a masterful job of puncturing the pretensions of his ironist project.

What is liberal ironism, you might well ask? In a nutshell: "Liberal ironists, says Rorty, know that the Enlightenment project is dead, and what is most dead about it is the rationalist notion that there is reality "out there" that is intellectually apprehensible and that can provide certain knowledge about how the world is and what we ought to do about it. Liberal ironists know, Rorty writes, that there is no universally valid answer to moral questions such as, 'Why not be cruel?'" (American Babylon, p. 128).

The goal for liberal ironists is self-realization through conceiving one's life in terms of one's own "final vocabulary", a term Rorty uses for the words we use to individuate ourselves, to tell our life story. They want to be absolutely their own unique creation, free from any "inherited contingencies". What this means in terms of their attitude towards posterity is one of the most interesting parts of the chapter. Neuhaus says: "Although Rorty does not quite put it this way, his purpose -- the drive to self-creation by the achievement of utter novelty, the urge to be one's own judge, the struggle for liberation from inherited vocabularies -- is closely associated with sterility and death. It follows that successors are the enemy. Children entangle us with others, compromising our singularity. They are hostages to the future, thereby binding us to a future from which we would be free; and they are potential judges, thereby compromising our judgment of ourselves on our own terms" (p. 138-139).

In answer to his own question whether Richard Rorty is really worth all this attention, Father Neuhaus responds:

"I think the answer is yes. Not only because of his influence in our intellectual culture, but because, with rare relentlessness, he followed through on one possible response to our human circumstance in exile. His is a way of responding to that circumstance: Make it up as you go along; take ironic delight in the truth that there is no truth; there is no home that answers to our homelessness; defiantly (but light-headedly!) throw the final vocabulary that is your life in the face of nothingness. And if your neighbor or some inner curiosity persists in asking about the meaning of it all, simply change the subject. Such is the way of muddling through in an "Age of Irony." Richard Rorty matters because contemporaries beyond numbering, most of whom have never heard of Richard Rorty, are living their lives in the mode of the liberal ironism he depicted with such rare and chilling candor" (p. 162).

This is well said; almost thou dost persuade me. But there is so much other stuff to read! I don't think I'm personally up to the mental effort of trying to follow the twisted logic of a man who insists he has overcome logic, moved beyond it; who responds to charges of intellectual inconsistency with a shrug. (In this context, Neuhaus quotes Walt Whitman: "Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself! (I am large, I contain multitudes)"). So I think I'll give Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity a pass.