“Toolmakers rather than discoverers”: Richard Rorty’s Reading of Romanticism

Abstract

Like Hegel, Nietzsche, and Dewey, Rorty tells a story of human emancipation. According to this story, as we have seen, humans find themselves in a godless universe, deprived of forms of transcendence and incapable of discovering absolute truths about the world. In a world of practice, they finally come to understand that achieving full maturity means that they must no longer strive to get in touch with something nonhuman out there, and that instead of submitting to standards constituted by the things themselves, they should realize the possibilities offered by inventing new and creative ways of speaking about the world. An antifoundationalist story of progress, as I have sought to demonstrate, highlights the significance of poetic self-creation in a literary culture and, moreover, it shows how pragmatism, humanism, postmetaphysics, and anti-authoritarianism are linked. No longer deifying anything, a Rortyan literary intellectual answers the questions “What can I do with my aloneness?” and “How can I contribute to humanity’s never-ending conversation about what to do with itself?” by placing books into new contexts, by creatively combining various vocabularies and inventing new ways of speaking (or writing poems), and by letting her fellow human beings see that a culture that stresses the importance of creativity, imagination, novelty, and future orientation is clearly preferable to one dominated by religion, philosophy, or the natural sciences.