Richard Rorty’s critique of the concept of “The Truth” as a useless historic relic continues to enflame philosophers and cultural commentators alike. They see Rorty as the architect of the post-truth era and as morally culpable for the human suffering they think it causes. But that view grossly misunderstands Rorty’s philosophy whose aim was to liberate us from defunct authorities and remind us that all we have as our guide to knowledge is the evidence and reasons we can give each other, not some “Reality” out there, writes Neil Gascoigne. 

On the 1^st December 2020 the High Court published its judicial review of the Tavistock’s practice of prescribing puberty-supressing drugs to persons under the age of 18. Later that day the feminist and philosopher Kathleen Stock “tweeted” the following:

Their sources were not medical, but Richard Rorty, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler… they provided an intellectual rationale that wholly obfuscated the harms they were permitting in the name of progress. And wider philosophy and academia let them… One day soon, the full story will emerge… how therapists with backgrounds in post-structuralist philosophy… came to believe they were forging new “meanings” with kids bodies.

If anything links these “post-structuralist” thinkers it is the conviction that progress involves increasing human freedom, which necessitates challenging traditional sources of authority. For Foucault this meant exposing what he regarded as the human cost of the Enlightenment’s narrative of progress. But while Rorty mentions Foucault’s work often enough he had no interest in engaging with genealogies of punishment and madness; and although he wrote about feminism and Freud he says little about sex and gender. Indeed, when Rorty was attacked by the Left it was usually for being—in his own words—a bourgeois, ethnocentric liberal!