ABSTRACT
Rorty is an anti-essentialist: he does not think things are essentially physical and only accidentally of aesthetic, moral, or economic value, and he does not think things are essentially mental or spiritual either. This is because he denies that there is any ultimate context of the sort required to make sense of the assertion that one way of describing a thing is more fundamental or essential to it than all others. There are only limited contexts set by changing circumstances and purposes; as Dewey once put it, ‘Anything is “essential” which is indispensible to a given inquiry and anything is “accidental” which is superfluous’ (Dewey 1938: 138). Rorty begins his last chapter, then, with the suggestion that it is essentialism which is the overarching prejudice we need to overcome for the sake of cultural progress; the Mirror of Nature was just a subservient idea. According to the essentialism which is ‘common to Democritus and Descartes’ (357), it is of the essence of human beings to seek to acquire knowledge by discovering essences, as for instance in the search for fundamental particles in physics, or for first principles in philosophy. This picture of ‘man-as-essentially-knower-ofessences’ (364) generates a conception of inquiry as the search for
truth, where to know the truth about something is to know its ess - ence. Rorty’s plan is to sketch an alternative by combining Gadamer’s hermeneutics with some themes drawn from Existentialism.
