Harold Bloom, one of the world’s most prominent literary critics, considers Richard Rorty the most interesting philosopher of our time. Rorty, who traveled to Tehran in 2004 and delivered one of his most remarkable lectures on “the primacy of democracy over philosophy,” faced mixed reactions. Most of our country’s mediocre intellectuals—who neither understood philosophy nor took democracy seriously—were offended, claiming that Rorty seemed to think he was speaking to children. One cannot help but be astonished at such folly among Iranian intellectuals. As Hafez puts it:
“It is time that blood should surge in the ruby heart, | From this deceit, whose market the earthenware breaks.”
No, friends! The purpose of this piece is not to interpret this delightful poem by Hafez, but rather a poem by Philip Larkin, which Rorty analyzes to show that humans have neither an inner essence, nor an eternal nature, nor a fixed substance, nor a personality independent of language and experience.
According to Rorty, at the depths of our being, there is nothing except what we ourselves have put there. There is no “authentic” or hidden self waiting to be discovered; a human being is essentially an empty vessel, shaped by the beliefs and desires, words, experiences, and narratives that we and others have placed within it. What makes us “us” is not an inner essence, nor a secret hidden deep inside, but precisely these things—the beliefs and desires—that make Abbas Abbas and Manouchehr Manouchehr.
This is part of Larkin’s poem[1]. Since translating poetry is always a difficult and challenging task, below are two different translations of this poem so that readers may choose between them. The first version is taken from the book Incident, Play, and Solidarity.
And once you have walked the length of your mind, what
You command is clear as a lading-list.
Anything else must not, for you, be thought
To exist.
And what’s the profit? Only that, in time,
We half-identify the blind impress
All our behavings bear, may trace it home.
But to confess,
On that green evening when our death begins,
Just what it was, is hardly satisfying,
Since it applied only to one man once,
And that one dying.
This poem expresses a fear of death and nothingness—a fear that Larkin himself acknowledged in his conversations. Rorty argues that the fear of annihilation and nonexistence is an empty phrase; for in reality, there is no literal fear of obliteration, only a fear that can be grasped, tangible and specific. Therefore, what Larkin truly fears in his own destruction is his unique record, his singular contribution. It is this particular understanding of life and existential philosophy that distinguishes Larkin’s “self” from any other “self.”
According to Rorty, this loss of distinction—the very facet that makes each person unique—is precisely what every poet, every creator, every person who hopes to produce something new, fears. Anyone who has spent a lifetime seeking to offer a fresh answer to the question, “What is possible and important?” fears the destruction of that unique answer.
The key point, as Rorty emphasizes, is not merely that someone fears the obliteration or forgetting of their works; the true fear lies in the possibility that no one will find anything remarkable in them.
The poet fears that he has failed to imprint his mark upon the language and thought of his time. A poet who has spent his life working only with pre-existing fragments has, in effect, had no “self” at all; his creations and his existence are merely better or worse examples of familiar patterns. This is the sense that, according to Rorty, Harold Bloom calls “the anxiety of influence in the capable poet”: the fear that the poet is merely a duplicate or copy.
Rorty poses the question: what could success mean, in Larkin’s view, in discovering the source of that indiscriminate stamp that fate has placed on all our deeds? It seems that this success amounts to nothing other than the discovery of one’s own distinction—the difference between one’s own “list of deeds” and that of others. If the individual has been able to record this distinction on paper, on canvas, or in film; if he has found a unique signature in words or forms, then he has shown that he is not merely a copy.
However, Rorty accuses Larkin of pretending to disdain his own craft, especially where Larkin says that discovering the source of his distinction “does not bring much satisfaction.” From Rorty’s perspective, this indifference stems from Larkin’s belief that such success is ultimately nothing more than inscribing a line on paper that reads: “Once, it served a man | And that man is dying.”
Rorty rightly shows that Larkin can only confront death with calm once he has discovered something universal and common to all humans, at all times—not a fleeting, individual experience. Larkin pretends that merely being a poet is not enough; he feigns that his satisfaction lies in being a philosopher, in discovering continuity and order, rather than revealing rupture and dispersion. For a philosopher seeks to master the accidents and disorder of life, to attain some coherent totality or rational system, whereas a poet pursues self-creation, accepting accidents without imposing an imposed rational order or meaning.
As Rorty notes, what makes Larkin compelling is precisely this inner conflict between poetry and philosophy. Ultimately, Larkin embraces Nietzsche’s idea that the true hero of humanity is the capable poet—the “creating human”—not the scientist, who is usually considered the “seeking and discovering human.”
Rorty rightly observes that the capable poet’s fear of death is, in fact, a sign of fear of incompletion. This fear reminds us that no new idea for re-describing the world and the past, and no program for constructing ourselves through unique and novel metaphors, can escape the fate of being marginalized and dependent on others. Language, after all, is a tool for communication, social interaction, and connecting us to others.
Finally, Rorty concludes that even the most capable poet is dependent on others; the poet draws inspiration from his contemporaries and owes much to the goodwill and acceptance of unfamiliar readers. To illustrate this dependency, Rorty cites a brilliant quotation from Bloom:
“The bitter truth is that poems have no inherent unity, form, or meaning … So what does a poem have with which it creates? Alas, a poem has nothing and creates nothing. Its presence is a promise. Part of the essence of the things whose meeting we hope for, attests to the existence of things we have not yet seen. Its unity lies in the good faith of the reader … Its only meaning is that a poem exists, or existed.”
Nabokov, in one of his interviews, even goes beyond the notion of the “good faith of the reader,” confessing that he writes for a specific group of readers—those who, in his words, possess the “art of reading,” whom he calls “artist readers.” Interestingly, the author of these lines was also inspired by this very point of Nabokov’s.