ABSTRACT
Is Richard Rorty the postmodern Nietzsche? An irresponsible relativist, frivolous perspectivist, or languid and decadent aesthete? Someone who occupies a dangerous middle ground between Roderick Usher and Huysmans’s Des Esseintes? These questions are entertaining but not helpful. It seems impossible to approach the complexity of Rorty’s pragmatism without considering the significance of Nietzsche. The latter had a profound influence on Rorty’s ideal of a postmetaphysical and poeticized culture. Rorty read Nietzsche as a German fellow pragmatist and learned much from him. This chapter discusses this influence from Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) to his final book, Philosophy as Poetry (2016), a truly Nietzschean title. At the center of the author’s discussion is Rorty’s interpretation of Nietzsche’s notion of the subject’s world-shaping power. Rorty repeatedly underlines that Nietzsche’s romantic anti-Platonism is of the utmost importance if one seeks to understand the modern development from finding or discovery to making or creation. At the same time, however, Rorty clearly differentiates between Proust, as an ironist novelist, and Nietzsche, as an ironist theorist. This chapter also explains the significance of this differentiation. As a postmetaphysical theorist, according to Rorty, Nietzsche wants more than beauty or more than a Proustian arrangement of contingent small things. He wants sublimity; and it is this desire that Rorty, as a nominalist historicist, critiques.
