Completely coincidentally, filed under "things that caused me no end of angst as a teenager."

Richard Rorty, from Philosophy and Social Hope, page 19:

I take this near unanimity among my critics to show that most people - even a lot of purportedly liberated postmodernists - still hanker for something like what I wanted when I was 15: a way of holding reality and justice in a single vision

Oh, was that ever me.

Continuing on directly:

More specifically, they want to unite their sense of moral and political responsibility with a grasp of the ultimate determinants of our fate. They want to see love, power and justice as coming together deep down in the nature of things, or in the human soul, or in the structure of language, or somewhere. They want some sort of guarantee that their intellectual acuity, and those special ecstatic moments which that acuity sometimes affords, are of some relevance to their moral convictions. They still think that virtue and knowledge are somehow linked - that being right about philosophical matters is important for right action. I think this is important only occasionally and incidentally.

I like Rorty already. Thanks, JAO.