Nietzsche and Heidegger are [Rorty's] heroes as ironists, historicists, and slayers of metaphysical chimeras, though Rorty takes them to task for exempting themselves from their own exuberant irony. Some historical or ontological apocalypse is always about to unfold for these German Dionysians, but Rorty insists incessantly on his own contingency. He wants us to believe that his words have no more truth than anyone else’s. He is merely changing the subject from two thousand years of dried-up metaphysics; he is talking about more useful and interesting things.

Rorty locates the original sin of western philosophy in Plato’s concept of mimesis, the idea that our experience of the world is a more or less opaque manifestation of the real world—which can conveniently only be accessed by philosophers. Rorty lauds the German Idealists and the Romantic poets for their rejection of external reality, but, in their fetishization and spiritualization of the Self, he sees mere Platonic claptrap. In Rorty’s view, humans and the world have no fixed essence or meaning. Instead, they are in perpetual flux, constantly dissolved and recreated by the language we use to make sense of our experience.

Although Rorty extols the great ironist philosophers of the 19th and 20th centuries, he finds them deeply troubling and precarious, precisely because philosophy will always hear the siren song of Truth, the irrepressible desire to be universal. Thus we get Hegel’s “absolute,” Nietzsche’s “will to power,” and Heidegger’s “being.” For this reason, Rorty believes that philosophy is done best in the context of the novel, because the novel seeks to express solely the contingent.

¶ 3:22 PM