Abstract
This chapter describes the approach to romanticism which Richard Rorty develops in light of Isaiah Berlin’s work. It further shows how Nietzsche’s approach to romanticism contributes, much like pragmatism does, to undermining the metaphysical presupposition that the world is to be divided into appearance and reality, objectivity and subjectivity. Rorty is found to be in agreement with Nietzsche’s project of the de-divinization of truth, with his explanation of language as tool of communication and reason, and with the idea of words as dead metaphors. On the other hand, the chapter shows how Rorty’s philosophy of redescription is animated by a notion of imagination closer to Shelley’s than to Nietzsche’s.
“I am convinced that Nietzsche wrote the better poem. As I see it, the romantic movement marked the beginning of the attempt to replace the tale told by the Greek philosophers with a better tale.”
“Nietzsche de-divinized truth, like Freud de-divinized conscience and Harold Bloom de-divinized the poet.”
(Richard Rorty)
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Notes
- 1.
I discuss the problems concerning Rorty’s romantic description of vocabulary creation as a solitary act in Castro (2021).
- 2.
The perspectival thinking of Nietzsche about Nature has, I think, a lot in common with the Amerindian cosmovision in Brazil. See, Viveiros de Castro 2004 pp. 3–7.
- 3.
“Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world” (Shelley 2019).
- 4.
Dr. Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) was an English literary critic.
- 5.
I am deeply grateful to Martin Müller for his great editorial advice and to Martijn Buijs for his careful assistance in revising the English.
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Recommended Literature for Further Reading
Berlin, Isaiah. 2001. The Roots of Romanticism. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. This is a book which influenced Rorty’s interpretation of the impact of romanticism in philosophy.
Castro, Susana de. 2011b. Rorty and Nietzsche. Pragmatism Today 2 (1): 24–30. Here I explore the intellectual proximity and distance between the two authors in more detail.
Koopman, Colin. 2007. Rorty’s Moral Philosophy for Liberal Democratic Culture. Contemporary Pragmatism 4 (2): 45–64. In this article, Koopman shows the inconsistencies of Rorty’s use of the private-public distinction: his emphasis on one hand on imagination rather than reason as the most important basis of moral progress, and on the other hand his attachment to classical pragmatism’s political reformism and furthering public dialogue, and public engagement.
Schulenberg, Ulf. 2015. Romanticism and Pragmatism. Richard Rorty and the Idea of a Poeticized Culture. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. A great book which discusses the significance of romanticism in North-America, the chronological development of Rorty’s writings on romanticism, and a part of the history of romanticism forgotten by Rorty, namely the engagement of the romantic poets with the political issues of their time (they were not only intellectuals worried about their one imaginative creation).
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de Castro, S. (2023). Rorty, Nietzsche and Romanticism. In: Müller, M. (eds) Handbuch Richard Rorty. Springer VS, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-16253-5_27
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