An Uncertain Scholar
I am a graduate
student, I should say, of literature and not of philosophy. My professor
instructed my seminar class to find an archive and to write a paper about the
experience. I loved the assignment for its openness—just do something
interesting, she seemed to say. Passing
over old log books, a diary, collections of photographs, a beautiful book of
paintings, and the delicate letters of Samuel Richardson, I searched a few days
for the right project: I needed to be grabbed. Thankfully the Woodson Center
has an online database of all archival materials. Every collection, or
manuscript, or archival item is listed, usually with a detailed list of its
contents. Such a search brought the Kolenda papers to my attention after keying
in “American Philosophy” and, on a whim, “William James”.
I should say a
quick word about my attachment to James. English majors of a certain
temperament tend to fall in love with dead people more easily than, perhaps,
their relatively well-adjusted fellow human creatures. But intellectual
backgrounds and erotic attachments notwithstanding it would be fairer to say
that certain writers “do it” for us, no matter the temperament. And for me
William James, even more than his brother Henry, was one who could “do
it.” As if anticipating my scholarly
needs, James articulates this very phenomenon in The Varieties of Religious Experience: “Most of us can remember the
strangely moving power of passages in certain poems read when we were young,
irrational doorways as they were through which the mystery of fact, the
wildness and the pang of life, stole into our hearts and thrilled them.” “The wildness and the pang of life”: I’m reminded here of Rebecca
West’s famous observation of the James brothers that philosopher William wrote
like a novelist, and novelist Henry wrote like a philosopher. William James was
a brilliant thinker and a gifted
writer. He insisted on clarity whenever possible, and retained a sense of
play as well as a sense of humor in all of his work. John Dewey (a tedious writer with brilliant mind) noted in
James’ prose a “clearness and a picturesqueness that will long be the despair
of other philosophers.”
Persons drawn to
James’ pragmatic philosophy tend to be simultaneously attracted to what seems
to be the nobility of an intellectual enterprise taking for its target the
largest and most important questions ever posed, all the while being sensible
to the perils of reveling for a lifetime in a project that may have no real
application outside the classroom. Philosophizing can
sometimes seem “as free from interruption as a plan for threading the stars
together,” as George Eliot told us. But James has an answer: “What you want is a philosophy that
will not only exercise your powers of intellectual abstraction, but that will
make some positive connexion with this actual world of finite human lives.” [Note 1] If
Kolenda had worked on William James I could fulfill the assignment and also
read up on American pragmatism: here was the first hook. Admittedly, it was initially
strange to me that a man with a foreign name could have been invested in
American pragmatism, a strain of philosophy neglected by Americans themselves.
Of course, if Tocqueville was right the nativity of any strain of philosophy
would make no difference since “in no country in the civilized world is less
attention paid to philosophy than
in the United States.”
I scanned the
“Guide to the Konstantin Kolenda Papers, c.1950-1990 MS 436.” After spotting
some papers on James, I glanced at the Collection’s abstract: “[t]he majority
of this collection consists of Kolenda’s own writing (notes, drafts, source
material). The next largest group consists of source material only on four
philosophers (Peirce, Rorty, Ryle and Wittgenstein)…” Rorty?
Scanning the box index for Kolenda’s business correspondence I found Rorty’s
name again, Box 5 Folder 29. I didn’t know who Konstantin Kolenda was but I was
certainly familiar with the name Richard Rorty. Arguably the most prominent
enfant terrible of the academic philosophic establishment from the 1980s until
his death in 2007, Rorty was celebrated and reviled for his abandonment of
epistemology-centered philosophy; philosophy, that is, with the central purpose
of discovering big-T Truth.
Most often considered
a neo-pragmatist, Rorty turned away from his Chicago-school analytic
training—quite the betrayal at the time—and toward a reexamination (and
recovery) of thinkers like James and John Dewey. He found resonances between
these American pragmatists and continental philosophers like Derrida, Heidegger,
and Wittgenstein. “It is as if Rorty decided to mix apples, oranges, and nuts,”
writes Kolenda in Philosophy’s Journey, “But…Rorty
knew what he was doing.” Explaining further in his 1990
book Rorty’s Humanistic Pragmatism Kolenda
writes that
The claim that it is the
philosopher’s job to uncover the Truth about the Secret is the main target of
Rorty’s criticism. Leaning on other thinkers preceding him, he points to the
confusions underlying attempts to discover the foundations of all knowledge….He
claims that…the entire Western philosophical tradition from Plato to Kant was
motivated by this incoherently incoherent project…
The work of an ambitious man, surely. Rorty could be
sardonic as when describing his escape from under the “collapsed circus tent of
epistemology—those acres of canvas under which many of our colleagues still
thrash aimlessly about” and also unironically hopeful (“My
sense of the holy, insofar as I have one, is bound up with the hope that
someday, any millennium now, my remote descendants will live in a global
civilization in which love is pretty much the only law.” The casual “pretty much” is typical of a philosopher whose prose, like
his philosophy, bristles with the everyday. A rich correspondence, I imagined,
awaited me: a trove of letters stuffed in some dusty old box stuffed in the
corner of some old basement stuffed, as it were, in the Woodson archives of
Rice University. I could already see the headline: BRILLIANT YOUNG SCHOLAR
DISCOVERS UNKNOWN RORTY LETTERS NEW INSIGHTS PENDING DOZENS OF RORTY SCHOLARS
EAGERLY AWAIT PUBLICATION. No ink would be spared. I joked as much to myself, and yet I think a
part of me took the idea seriously, the idea of finding something of vital
interest in the letters between these philosophers—both prolific, one famous:
was the other terribly overlooked?
I’m not sure what I expected, but archives
are both extraordinary and mundane. I found myself in the Woodson Center in a
room of glass, carpet, and fluorescent lighting where two boxes were waiting
for me on a cart near a large table. The Center’s archivists are wonderfully
trusting, letting you handle most materials by yourself which is not always the
case. The first boxes I had requested were chosen simply because I had seen
names I liked: Richard Rorty, William James, Middlemarch. The latter two were folders with stacked loose pages
of written notes, most scrawled in a barely legible hand. I skimmed through but
decided to go to the Rorty letters instead. The folder, a slice of papers neatly slid (not stuffed) in a
clean cardboard box, was disappointingly slim. And yet it wasn’t nothing, and
my disappointment melted away as soon as I saw the penned signature at the
bottom of the first typed letter: “All the best, Dick.” I always suspected
Rorty to have been cuddlier than his philosopher persona—the casual “Dick” only
encouraged me.
The letters were
typed, which was a relief. Unlike other folders of
correspondence I later looked through, the Rorty folder had copies letters
Kolenda had written and sent himself. Was this correspondence more important to
keep intact? Did it mean more to him? The letters were in no particular order
so I first had to spend time rearranging them from earliest to most recent. In
doing so I was made more aware that I had no idea if I actually had the
entirety of the correspondence, most of the correspondence, or only a
sliver—I’d have to work with what I had. The first letter was dated 9 May 1983, and it was brief. But
my eyes were drawn to the second paragraph under the greeting which had begun
“Dear Konnie”:
It is nice of you to see me as a
rejuvenator of philosophy, but I am not sure enough about whether there is such
a thing to be sure of whether it ought to be rejuvenated. You are right in
suggesting that I would prefer to regard myself as an intellectual, but not
“just” an intellectual. As far as I can see, being an intellectual is about as
far as one can go.
In 1983 Rorty would have
been on the rise, but still quite controversial (not that he ever wasn’t
controversial). My archival subject was an early admirer of the post-analytic
Rorty it seemed. Kolenda replied that he was “exhilarated” by Rorty’s work and
would be “reading as much of your stuff as I can lay my hands on.” Rorty writes
that he was “very flattered” that Kolenda thought “[his] stuff worth working on.”
The letters weren’t quite as deeply
philosophical as I had expected. They talked about attending conferences, and
about what the other was working on, like Kolenda’s Rorty’s Humanistic Pragmatism or Contingency, irony, and solidarity which was in the works in
1987-88. Kolenda had, in fact, offered editorial advice and is eventually acknowledged
by Rorty in the book’s preface for “suggest[ing] a crucial rearrangement of
topics.” Reading the letters though, my focus was on Rorty,
since I assumed he would be the more interesting subject for my project—Kolenda
was just a way in. But a letter caught my attention; it was in the Rorty file,
but the sender instead was an Oxford publishing company called Basil Blackwell.
Dated 18 January 1988 it began “Dear Professor Kolenda”:
I
now have heard from our advisor about your proposal for the book on Richard
Rorty. While the report is prefaced by a note to me saying that he thinks that
the work is in fact very impressive both his and my feeling is that we oughtn’t
to be publishing two books on Rorty in such a short time. As I think I
mentioned in my last letter we’ve already contracted a book called Reading
Rorty (a collection of essays about Rorty’s work and influence).
Regretfully, therefore, we shall not be able to make you an offer for your
book.
The sender assured they
were “very sorry” for the “cautious response since I would have enjoyed working
with you on the book.” This afterthought of an apology felt a bit cheap and
insincere even if it wasn’t. Maybe this kind of vaguely saccharine rejection was
a common occurrence for publishing academics, but I felt disappointed for
Kolenda. Why couldn’t two books on Rorty be published?
It was my first palpable response to
Kolenda that had little to do with Rorty, and I think I felt a weird guilt at
accessing Kolenda’s papers for a
reason that had little to do with the work he had done over a lifetime, a life
and work that could somehow be reduced to a dozen or so boxes of letters, and papers,
and pictures, and manuscripts, and old date books. His papers had been given
with the assumption that they would be of interest, that he was of interest, and that his intellectual work had been for
something even if I had never before heard his name. Like finding a bleeding
man on the sidewalk, I couldn’t in good conscience keep walking by. I was here,
had chosen to be here; here to look, and respond, and (maybe) do something even
if that just meant taking some time to read what he’d written, and taking too a
good look at a life I had previously had nothing to do with. I would leave
Rorty for another time. I turned to other boxes to begin answering a question I
hadn’t yet asked: who was Konstantin Kolenda?
[1] In “Philosophical Conceptions and
Practical Results,” James clarifies what he means by “positive connexion[s]”:
“…Suppose there are two different philosophical definitions, or propositions,
or maxims, or what not, which seem to contradict each other, and about which
men dispute. If, by supposing the truth of the one, you can forsee no
conceivable practical consequence to anybody at any time or place, which is
different from what you would foresee if you supposed the truth of the other,
why then the difference between the two propositions is no difference,--it is
only a specious and verbal difference, unworthy of further contention.” We might think here of the dilemma of free will. Do we have free
will, or are we blown about by the whims and drives of our own biology? The
question itself is problematic, presupposing an intact “I” that either owns or
is owned by the I’s body. Whether or not I really choose to eat a slice of pie,
for example, or am instead driven by various physiological and environmental
factors to eat pie, I’ll still either eat the pie or not eat the pie. Nothing
else of practical significance is at stake for the moment.
