Truth Drops Out

Abstract

Philosophers are fond of creating make-believe disasters. Richard Rorty conjures one of his own by asking us to imagine the West obliterated in a thermonuclear war. Some texts have been preserved and, if there were a choice, which of these, Rorty asks, would best communicate to non-Westerners the collection of attitudes that made the West what it was? If the non-Westerners were philosophers, Rorty wonders why should they want any text other than a work of philosophy to survive? As philosophers, they would want to discover the West’s essence, the idea that was fundamental to it, the notion that could not be erased without losing the existence of the West itself. They might even look for a theory of Western life and the ideals that animated it. If they were fortunate enough to chance upon a text by Heidegger that had escaped the disaster, they might argue about how the West had exhausted its sense of being, how it had become played out.