Truth was not his bag: Richard Rorty, 1931-2007.

IF Richard Rorty hadn't existed, it would have been necessary for the academy to invent him. Rorty, who died at 75 on June 8, epitomized a hearty American version of the Teutonic epistemic gloom that has raged like wildfire through the American university from the 1970s to, well, at least to the day before yesterday. When I was in graduate school, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979), Rorty's declaration of intellectual apostasy, was regarded with awe, wonder, and adulation. Here was a man who had made his philosophical reputation through the careful analysis of concepts--his book The Linguistic Turn (1967) bears witness to his skill in that direction--and now he came preaching the gospel of relaxation: Truth, it turned out, didn't matter. Philosophy itself didn't matter. What mattered, Rorty said in one of the book's most famous phrases, was "continuing the conversation."

Here was something that graduate students--and not only graduate students--could get behind: philosophy as a sort of backyard chat, and what's more, a thoroughly disillusioning chat. "I do not," Rorty wrote, "have much use for notions like 'objective value' and 'objective truth.'" Wow!

Rorty had read Nietzsche. He had read Heidegger. He had read Jacques Derrida. He came bearing the news that their philosophies were (near enough) indistinguishable from the pragmatism of John Dewey and William James. Was this true? That was the wrong question. "It was Nietzsche," Rorty noted, "who first explicitly suggested that we drop the whole idea of 'knowing the truth.' " Rorty dedicated his career to packaging that renunciation.

The core contention of deconstruction is that (as Derrida put it in an early essay) "there is nothing outside the text." But the deconstructionist impulse comes in a variety of flavors, from bitter and minatory (Derrida's brand) to cloyingly sweet, which is the variety Rorty peddled. It turned out to have been quite a franchise. In the early 1980s, Rorty left his professorship at Princeton for an even grander one at the University of Virginia; in 1998, he went to Stanford to luxuriate in semiretirement. He was the recipient of numerous honors and awards, including a MacArthur Foundation "genius" award. By the 1990s, Rorty was widely regarded as he regarded himself: as a sort of secular sage, dispensing exhortations on all manner of subjects, as readily on the op-ed page of major newspapers as between the covers of an academic book of philosophical essays. The tone was always soothing, the rhetoric impish, the message nihilistic but cheerful. It has turned out to be an unbeatable recipe for success, patronizing the reader with the thought that there is nothing that cannot be patronized.

Rorty did not call himself a deconstructionist. That might be too off-putting. Instead, he called himself a "pragmatist" or--a favorite appellation--a "liberal ironist," i.e., someone who thinks that "cruelty is the worst thing we can do" (the liberal part) but who, believing that moral values are utterly contingent, also believes that what counts as "cruelty" is a sociological or linguistic construct. (This is where the irony comes in: "I do not think," Rorty wrote, "there are any plain moral facts out there ... nor any neutral ground on which to stand and argue that either torture or kindness are [sic] preferable to the other.")

Accordingly, one thing that was certain to earn Rorty's contempt was the spectacle of philosophers without sufficient contempt for the truth. "You can still find philosophy professors," he wrote with undisguised irritation, "who will solemnly tell you that they are seeking the truth, not just a story or a consensus but an honest-to-God, down-home, accurate representation of the way the world is." That's the problem with liberal ironists: They are ironical about everything except their own irony, and are serious about tolerating everything except seriousness.

As Rorty was quick to point out, the "bedrock metaphilosophical issue" here is whether we have any non-linguistic access to reality. Does language "go all the way down," as he put it? Or does language point to a reality beyond itself, a reality that exercises a legitimate claim on our attention and provides a measure and limit for our descriptions of the world? In other words, is truth something that we invent? Or something that we discover?

The main current of Western culture has overwhelmingly endorsed the latter view. But Rorty firmly endorsed the idea that truth is merely a human invention. He wanted us to drop "the notion of truth as correspondence with reality altogether" and realize that there is "no difference that makes a difference" between the statement "it works because it's true" and "it's true because it works." He tells us that "[s]entences like ... 'Truth is independent of the human mind' are simply platitudes used to inculcate ... the common sense of the West." Of course, Rorty is right that such sentences "inculcate the common sense of the West." He is even right that they are "platitudes." The statement "The sun rises in the east" is another such platitude.

Rorty looked forward to a culture--he called it a "liberal utopia"--in which the "Nietzschean metaphors" of self-creation are finally "literalized," i.e., made real. For philosophers, or people who used to be philosophers, this would mean a culture that "took for granted that philosophical problems are as temporary as poetic problems, that there are no problems which bind the generations together in a single natural kind called 'humanity.'"

Rorty recognized that most people are not yet liberal ironists. Many people still believe that there is such a thing as truth independent of their thoughts. Some even continue to entertain the idea that their identity is more than a distillate of biological and sociological accidents. Rorty knew this. Whether he also knew that his own position as a liberal ironist crucially depended on most people being nonironists is another question. I suspect he didn't. In any event, he was clearly impatient with what he refers to as "a particular historically conditioned and possibly transient" view of the world, that is, the pre-ironical view for which things like truth and morality still matter.

In his book Overcoming Law, the jurist and legal philosopher Richard Posner criticized Rorty for his "deficient sense of fact" and "his belief in the plasticity of human nature," noting that both are "typical of modern philosophy." They are typical, anyway, of certain influential strains of modern philosophy. And it is in the union of these two things--a deficient sense of fact and a utopian belief in the unbounded plasticity of human nature--that the legacy of Nietzsche bears its most poisonous fruit.

It is worth noting that the cognitive pessimism espoused by Rorty has moral as well as intellectual implications. When he said, expatiating on the delights of his liberal utopia, that "a postmetaphysical culture [is] no more impossible than a postreligious one, and equally desirable," he perhaps spoke truer than he purposed. For despite the tenacity of non-irony in many sections of society, there is much in our culture that shows the disastrous effects of Nietzsche's dream of a postmetaphysical, ironized society of putative self-creators. And of course to say that such a society would be as desirable as a postreligious society amounts to saying also that it would be just as undesirable.

Like his fellow liberal ironists, Rorty took radical secularism to be an unarguable good. For him, religion, like truth--like anything that transcends our contingent self-creations--belongs to the childhood of mankind. Ironists are beyond all that, and liberal ironists are beyond it with a smile and a wink. Like other disciples of Enlightenment, they come promising freedom and the end of various forms of servitude. But like so many other promises of emancipation, Rorty's liberal irony turns out to contain the seeds of new forms of bondage. Philosophy has been one important casualty of this development. It is no accident that so much modern philosophy has been committed to bringing us the gospel of the end of philosophy. Once it abandons its vocation as the love of wisdom, philosophy inevitably becomes the gravedigger of its highest ambitions, interring itself with tools originally forged to perpetuate its service to truth.

Today, the effects of that development are evident everywhere. At stake is not simply the future of an academic discipline but the deepest sources of our moral and intellectual self-understanding. In Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein remarked that "all philosophical problems have the form 'I have lost my way.'" At a moment when so much of our intellectual life has degenerated into an experiment against reality, perhaps our primary task is facing up to the fact that many of the liberations we crave have served chiefly to compound the depth of our loss. How ironical if the chief effect of Richard Rorty's liberal irony should be to remind us of this truth.

Mr. Kimball is co-editor and co-publisher of The New Criterion. Among his many books are Experiments Against Reality: The Fate of Culture in the Postmodern Age and Lives of the Mind: The Use and Abuse of Intelligence from Hegel to Wodehouse.