When Hitler will be fast asleep.
Gandhi in deep trance,
spinning his wheel.
That's when,
We shall play hide and seek.
– Sindhi Poet Vimmi Sadarangani
Two of the more remarkable philosophers of our time passed away recently. On 8 June, at his home in California, Richard Rorty succumbed to pancreatic cancer. He had been fighting the disease for a long time, and his departure, at age 75, was not unexpected. Five days later, on our side of the globe, Ramchandra Gandhi quit his own haunt unannounced, without leaving a forwarding address for his limited circle of admirers. The 70-year-old was found dead on 13 June at the India International Centre in New Delhi.
It is unclear whether Rorty and Ramu (as they were known to their peers) ever met one another, but they shared some similarities. Rorty drifted from analytical philosophy to the humanities and then on to comparative literature. For his part, Ramu went from teaching to dialogue and conversations, before turning to hybrid fiction to express his most profound thoughts. According to the theologian W L Reese, Rorty once proposed that, in place of building theories about 'reality', attempts should be made to "poetize culture, rather than rationalize or scientize it, celebrating not truth but play and metaphor". Meanwhile, Ramu did just that, through his plays and prose.
Of the two, Rorty was better known as a public intellectual. Though reviled equally by critics from left and right, his eclectic output intrigued the press. He opposed Western ethnocentrism, but supported the idea of promoting democracy and human rights around the world. He prophesied that democrats in the US would be forced to support the war in Iraq declared by George W Bush due to the "terror" of looking effete, but continued to oppose it all the same. It may not have been his motto, but Rorty affirmed Walt Whitman's famous declaration, "Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes."