EUGENE GOODHEART
227
Rorty's sensitivity to danger, however, doesn't communicate to his
own practice, when he imposes his own atheistic values on other human
beings in an attempt to de-divinize a whole culture. This is the most seri–
ous instance of coercive practice, but hardly the only one. For example,
Rorty reads a passage of a poem by Philip Larkin about "the fear of dy–
ing, of extinction" and rebukes both the phrase and the sentiment behind
it. Rorty tells us that there is no such thing as a fear of inexistence, only
of some concrete loss. Here is the passage:
And once you have walked the lengthp fyour mind, what
You command is as 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 man dying.
Rorty dismisses the sentiment that it is "hardly satisfying" to trace
one's own distinctiveness. He says that "Larkin is affecting to despise his
own vocation, on the ground that to succeed in it would merely be to
have put down on paper something which applied only to one man
once/ And that one dying." He characterizes the sentiment as an affecta–
tion not on the basis of a close reading of the poem, the sort of reading a
literary critic would perform in which the reader watches for tensions and
listens for tone, but rather on the basis of a philosophical or theoretical
prejudice derived from Harold Bloom, that it is enough to be a strong
poet and that Larkin knows or should know that one "does not have to
find something common to
all
men at
all
times," a meaningless universal–
ist ambition. Rorty speaks of the passage as a reminder of the quarrel
between philosophy and poetry, in which paradoxically Larkin is on the
side of philosophy and Rorty of poetry. What is at stake for me in this
quarrel are not the rival merits of either view, but the presumptuous
claim that Larkin is affecting an attitude and cannot mean what he is say–
ing. There is simply no evidence for this claim. One can only surmise that
Rorty is engaged in the coerciveness of redescription from a need to as-
