In his well-known autobiographical essay, “Trotsky and the Wild Orchids,” Rorty observed two contrasting dispositions that he developed as a young boy. On the one hand, as the son of two radical, fellow-traveling Trotskyists, he absorbed a firm commitment to social justice and democratic politics. At the same time, as a solitary, even lonely child, living in rural isolation, he also had “private, weird, snobbish, incommunicable interests,” such as an obsession with various species of wild orchids that grew near his home in northwest New Jersey. Much has been written about Rorty’s politics, about his “Trotsky” side. But relatively little has been said about his encounters with wild orchids, “Wordsworthean moments” in which he felt “touched by something numinous, something of ineffable importance.” Rorty said “there is no reason to be ashamed of, or downgrade, or try to slough off, your Wordsworthean moments.” Yet no one said less about these moments than Rorty himself; he seemed to slough them off. Why? My argument is that even acknowledging having had such moments (which he rarely did) seemed to him to pose a threat to his antifoundationalism, to his remarkably extreme view of human autonomy, and to his resolutely anti-authoritarian temperament. Alas.

Picturesque theorists disagree vehemently over whether the picturesque deformity that can be appreciated in buildings and landscapes could also be appreciated in people with deformities, be these people real or represented. William Gilpin writes about ruins and people in ways that suggest that they possess the same aesthetic value. Fitness for representation is Gilpin’s criterion for a certain type of aesthetic appreciation, and, using this criterion, he regards picturesque deformity in a positive light. Uvedale Price, however, offers the idea that beauty, the picturesque, and deformity exist on a continuum, making deformity a question of degree. The quality of being striking enables Price to think of people and things as giving aesthetic pleasure in the same way. Drawing on Addison’s aesthetics, Richard Payne Knight makes a distinction between real and represented deformity. Knight argues, like Percy Shelley, that art has a transformative power that makes deformity aesthetically pleasing. The picturesque theorists are concerned with reconciling deformity (as a quality of the picturesque) with the aesthetic pleasure that derives from it.