Last word from Richard Rorty.

• Author: Postel, Danny
• Position: Q&A - Interview

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Richard Rorty, one of the most influential philosophers of our time, died on June 9 after a painful struggle with cancer. What follows is an excerpt from what was to have been a long and wide-ranging interview, but sadly had to be abandoned midstream.

Q: How do you feel about the spirited engagement with your work in Iran today?

Richard Rorty : When I was told that another figure much discussed in Tehran was Jurgen Habermas, I concluded that the best explanation for interest in my work was that I share Habermas's vision of a social democratic utopia. In this utopia, many of the functions presently served by membership in a religious community would be taken over by what Jurgen Habermas calls "constitutional patriotism." Some form of patriotism--of solidarity with fellow-citizens, and of shared hopes for the country's future--is necessary if one is to take politics seriously. In opposition to religious leaders such as Benedict XVI and the ayatollahs, Habermas argues that the alternative to religious faith is not "relativism" or "rootlessness" but the new forms of solidarity made possible by the Enlightenment. In a theocratic country, a leftist political opposition must be prepared to counter the clergy's claim that the nation's identity is defined by its religious tradition. So the left needs a specifically secularist form of moral fervor, one which centers around citizens' respect for one another rather than on the nation's relation to God.

In the early decades of the twentieth century, John Dewey helped bring a culture into being in which it became possible for Americans to replace Christian religiosity with fervent attachment to democratic institutions (and equally fervent hope for the improvement of those institutions).

The Pope recently said: "A culture has developed in Europe that is the most radical contradiction not only of Christianity but of all the religious and moral traditions of humanity." Dewey and Habermas would reply that the culture that arose out of the Enlightenment has kept everything in Christianity that was worth keeping. The West has cobbled together, in the course of the last 200 years, a...