The lecture wasn’t supposed to begin until 3:30, but by 2:30 on Friday, November 1, half of the 400 seats in Loyola University’s Galvin Auditorium were already full. College students and faculty from all around Chicago and as far away as Michigan, Indiana, and Wisconsin filtered in steadily, tossing their coats over large swaths of seating to save room for friends who had yet to arrive. Around three o’clock there were even a few seat-saving skirmishes down near stage left.
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The discussion they were going to have actually began in 1972, when Richard Rorty invited Jurgen Habermas, then teaching in his native Germany, to speak at Princeton, where Rorty was then on the faculty. At the time Western academic philosophy was powerfully segregated, with the so-called Analytic philosophers working in England and the United States and the Continental philosophers holding court in Germany and France. (This is still largely true today.) The two camps had different concerns and different vocabularies and generally didn’t talk to each other except to exchange insults. Rorty asking Habermas to Princeton was the academic equivalent of Run-D.M.C. collaborating with Aerosmith.
Rorty and Habermas are odd bedfellows even on a personal level. Rorty was born in 1931 to Trotskyites in New York; Habermas was born in 1929 in Dusseldorf, and like most of his peers he joined the Hitler Youth–though since the end of World War II, when he heard the Nuremberg trials on the radio, he’s argued forcefully against oppression, racism, anti-Semitism, fascism, and political violence. Habermas’s writing is thick, heavy and dense in the best German tradition, while Rorty’s is wry and playful.
The auditorium fell silent as Huntington took to the stage to welcome everyone. After a brief introduction, Rorty began his speech, entitled “Universalist Grandeur, Romantic Depth, Pragmatist Cunning.”
Rorty proceeded to critique the love affair some philosophers have had with “deep” and “grand” ideas. Instead, he said, he was interested in ideas that would lead to “mere happiness.” Then he opened the floor to questions.
Habermas then took the stage to give his talk, “When Must We Be Tolerant? On Competing World Views, Values and Theories.” It was purportedly a direct response to Rorty’s lecture, but the combination of Habermas’s prose and his accent made it tough to comprehend. “I only got about two out of every three words,” admitted Jacob Heiss, a philosophy undergrad at Northeastern Illinois. “The Q and A was useful,” said Abigail Derecho, a comp-lit grad student at Northwestern. “Otherwise I wouldn’t have understood a single word.”
Greenman was unsatisfied, but before he could follow up, Rorty slipped away to the other side of room, where he finished his beer in peace.
