Aging & Wisdom Quote by Richard Rorty

Rorty skewers the marble-bust reverence we tend to grant philosophy by reducing its founding saint to an almost tabloid contrast: an “ugly little plebeian” and a “handsome young nobleman” who turns that encounter into literature. The line works because it’s not really about Socrates’ face or Plato’s cheekbones; it’s about who gets remembered, and how intellectual authority is staged. Socrates, famously bookless, survives as a character written by someone with the leisure, education, and social standing to convert street-corner provocation into “long dialogues on large topics.” Rorty’s joke is a sociology-of-knowledge thesis compressed into a single sneer.

The intent is gently corrosive. Rorty, the anti-foundational pragmatist, wants to loosen our grip on the idea that philosophy is a pure, disembodied hunt for timeless truths. He nudges us toward seeing it as a cultural practice shaped by bodies, class, aesthetics, and narrative craft. “Plebeian” and “nobleman” aren’t incidental descriptors; they’re the hidden infrastructure of the canon. Even the “usual picture” phrase implicates the reader: you, too, inherited a museum-ready myth.

Context matters: late-20th-century American philosophy was still shadowboxing with analytic purity and continental grandeur. Rorty’s broader project was to demote Philosophy-with-a-capital-P and elevate conversation, contingency, and redescription. Here, he treats the Socrates-Plato origin story as the first great act of branding: the thinker as inconvenient irritant, the writer as legacy machine.