Our moment

 Flying home Sunday morning I opened Philosophy as Poetry. (My random earbudded seatmate was also reading an actual book. That's exceptional nowadays, in my limited flight experience.)

Rorty's old student Michael Berube says in the Introduction that he saw philosophy as "a creative enterprise of dreaming up new and more humane ways to live." That's hopeful and happy and melioristic, especially if our conception of what it means for humans to be humane includes the classic virtues of honesty and humility. 

Dishonest and arrogant creativity, as we've been seeing demonstrated more and more in the fifteen years since Rorty left us, leads to lies and heartbreak. I'm sure he'd not approve. I'd like to think he'd say the baby in the bathwater of misdirected empiricism is a more radically attentive commitment to acknowledging what actually happens, and doesn't, in our experience. That's the baby we've got to save and nurture and grow.

What I liked best about that book was the afterword by Rorty's widow Mary.

HE READ A LOT, THAT MAN. HE STARTED EARLY, AND he kept it up. Seeing where it took him, it’s easy to suspect that he persisted in philosophy after his (very) early years at Robert Hutchins’s University of Chicago because, of all possible majors, it was the one least likely to restrict the range of things he could justify reading. But he read not just out of antiquarian affection for the best that has been thought and said—but also with constant attention to the implications of what he read for our time, our moment in history. And he read—and wrote—because of his conviction that words matter, that our language is our world, and that by our words we can change our world...

"Dangerous women read," said the airport souvenir I almost brought home for wife or Younger Daughter (who was happy instead to have the Cubs decal for her rear window). Dangerous anti-philosophers too. And poets. Anyone who reads with constant attention to the implications for our time is going to have to notice that the most dangerous humans do not read, do not reflect, do not promise to ameliorate our world for the better. 

I think they're also going to have to notice that there's more to our world than our language. The right words can change our world. The wrong ones will doom it. And the tradition I favor, which seeks the tonic release of nature, helps the best philosopher-poets mark the difference.

Richard Wilbur was one of those. It's his birthday. I'll bet Rorty, late Rorty anyway, would have agreed with him: “I would feel dead if I didn’t have the ability periodically to put my world in order with a poem. I think to be inarticulate is a great suffering, and is especially so to anyone who has a certain knack for poetry.”

I agree with him. I also agree with Thoreau that we need some wildness in us, with Emerson that it is possible to experience a great exhilaration merely "crossing a bare common," and with James that sometimes it's best to "think of nothing and do nothing."

And then write about it. And then do something, with attention to the implications for our moment in history.