How can one write a historical narrative about metaphysics without becoming just another metaphysician? Throughout his life as a philosopher, Heidegger saw the necessity of confronting this question. He advanced the idea that with Nietzsche’s inversion of Plato metaphysics had finally exhausted its possibilities. Heidegger’s critique of metaphysics, from his inaugural lecture (at Freiburg) “What Is Metaphysics?” (1929) to the “Letter on Humanism” (1949), was supposed to prepare the ground for a genuinely postmetaphysical thought. When philosophers thought to speak Being (“Sein”) but eventually ended up speaking of beings (“Seiendes”) and when, moreover, a regard for metaphysics still governs all attempts to overcome metaphysics — and this implies that these attempts still use the vocabulary of metaphysics — then the question must be posed whether it will ever be possible to escape from the grasp of metaphysics without simply translating Platonism into a new jargon. According to Heidegger, by thinking the truth of being, metaphysics is “overcome (überwunden)”: “Metaphysics remains what comes first in philosophy. What comes first in thinking, however, it does not reach. When we think the truth of Being, metaphysics is overcome” (1998: 279). It is crucial to appreciate that the question of whether it is possible to articulate a postmetaphysical version of humanism is intimately linked to the question of whether Heidegger was right when he thought we could create a new, historically situated way of speaking that is more than simply a reaction against the Platonic vocabulary that one has found in place.

“Should we still keep the name ‘humanism,’” Heidegger asks in the “Letter on Humanism,” “for a ‘humanism’ that contradicts all previous humanism — although it in no way advocates the inhuman?” (2008: 248). His contention is that traditional humanism has failed to grasp the subject correctly. Consequently, he sees it as his task to develop a new humanism that does not think metaphysically. Heidegger is convinced that his postmetaphysical form of humanism offers a radically new perspective that is more than just a worldview, more than just anthropology, and deeper than traditional philosophy that is still focused on theory and practice. His critique of humanism had a profound impact on philosophers as varied as Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, and Levinas. For many decades, French poststructuralism as a version of Heideggerian and Nietzschean antihumanism dominated the intellectual scenes in the US and Europe.

Pragmatism is a humanist philosophy. It offers a postmetaphysical version of humanism that radically differs from the Heideggerian one. A pragmatist humanist would be disinclined to state that Heidegger is the first truly postmetaphysical thinker. From William James, F.C.S. Schiller, and John Dewey to Richard Bernstein, humanist ideas have been central to pragmatism’s development. Hence, it is deplorable that debates centering on the renaissance of pragmatism since the 1980s have almost completely ignored the significance of humanism. Richard Rorty’s version of pragmatism offers the most far-reaching and stimulating contemporary example of a pragmatist humanism. Seemingly en passant, Rorty, in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, speaks of “the sort of humanism and pragmatism advocated in this book” (1989: 116). The fact that he calls his own approach a humanism has been almost completely ignored in Rorty studies so far.[1] What makes Rorty’s pragmatist humanism so valuable is that, like Dewey’s version, it offers one the possibility of appreciating how pragmatism, humanism, anti-authoritarianism, and postmetaphysics are linked.[2] After the exhaustion of antihumanist theories, this link has enormously gained in importance. Rorty’s pragmatist humanism demonstrates how the modern antirepresentationalist and antifoundationalist story of progress and emancipation is connected with the development from finding to making and how it continues, in a truly stimulating manner, the project of the Enlightenment. A pragmatist humanism, as Rorty makes clear in many of his texts, emphasizes human beings’ creativity of action, their poetic agency. It is of the utmost importance to see that this stress on creative practice is incompatible with a notion and a gesture that are central to metaphysical thought. A pragmatist humanism radically questions the notion of the human answerability to the world, to something nonhuman, as well as the gesture of a convergence to the antecedently real, true, or pure. In other words, there is no form of nonhuman authority that human beings must obey and there is nothing out there to which they have to be adequate. A Rortyan pragmatist humanist will critique any attempt to strive for the certainty, reliability, immutability, solidity, or purity of what would be more than another human creation or invention. Her endeavor to demetaphysicize or detranscendentalize the world is central to the humanist story of progress, intelligent action, and poetic imagination.    

One of Nietzsche’s most radical ideas can be found in section 301 of The Gay Science: “Only we have created the world that concerns man!”[3] The idea of a pragmatist humanism becomes clearer when one notes how this Nietzschean suggestion is linked to James’s famous dictum that “the trail of the human serpent is […] over everything” (1907: 33), and how Nietzsche and James’s proposals are connected with Rorty’s scenario of a de-divinized, that is, poeticized and postmetaphysical culture: “The process of de-divinization […] would, ideally, culminate in our no longer being able to see any use for the notion that finite, mortal, contingently existing human beings might derive the meaning of their lives from anything except other finite, mortal, contingently existing human beings” (Rorty 1989: 45). From this one can see that Rorty’s humanist ideal culture is anthropocentric in a Protagorean, Nietzschean, Schillerian, and Deweyan sense. This signifies that instead of seeking metaphysical comfort in the confrontation with contingency and insisting on continuing to use terms and expression like representation, imitation (or mirroring), discovery (or metaphors of finding), and being adequate, the ideal member of a Rortyan literary or poeticized culture will gladly accept the instability and historicity of our vocabularies, the contingency of our ways of speaking and moral standards, as well as the unpredictability of the consequences of our actions. Moreover, she will not hesitate to acknowledge her finitude. The story that illuminates the advantages of a Rortyan poeticized culture teaches us “that there is nothing deep down inside us except what we have put there ourselves, no criterion that we have not created in the course of creating a practice, no standard of rationality that is not an appeal to such a criterion, no rigorous argumentation that is not obedience to our own conventions” (Rorty 1982: xlii). Only in his ideal poeticized culture, the humanist Rorty holds, would one achieve full human maturity and dignity.[4]

In contrast to the pragmatist humanist, the metaphysician strives to bridge the gap between appearance and reality, time and eternity, or language and the nonlinguistic. However, her ultimate goal is to break out of the world of appearance, time, contingency, and idiosyncrasy into the world of enduring truth. While Heidegger, for instance, tried to rise above his time and find something purer and deeper than philosophy, the pragmatist humanist intends to use her attempt to break free of metaphysics, free of the world that Platonism made, in order to help her fellow human beings to reach a point where they no longer deify anything or look for God-substitutes, and where they no longer see the necessity of using notions such as the Really Real, the Intrinsic Nature of Reality, or the Will of God. This also means that, in contrast to Heidegger, the pragmatist humanist does not hold that after the end of metaphysics something called “thought” will remain. Rather, she hopes that a postmetaphysical humanism will renew our energies creatively to confront the problems of men and women in the Deweyan sense. Instead of striving to find something purer than philosophy, Dewey tells a story of progress and intelligent practice that depicts a process of emancipation that questions traditions and traditional forms of authority and that, moreover, insists on the significance of human beings’ creativity and imagination for a reconstructed philosophy. The idea of progress, if one follows pragmatist humanists like Dewey and Rorty, implies the subject’s realization that everything transcendental and metaphysical is man-made. By telling a contingent and humanist story of progress of the West, pragmatist humanists highlight the intimate link between the idea of a postmetaphysical culture and the endeavor to continue the project of the Enlightenment. “A postmetaphysical culture,” as Rorty avers, “seems to me no more impossible than a postreligious one, and equally desirable” (1989: xvi).   

While Hilary Putnam, in Ethics without Ontology, develops the idea of a “Third Enlightenment,” which he calls a “pragmatist Enlightenment” (2004: 96), Robert Brandom maintains that American pragmatism can be regarded “as a movement of world historical significance – as the announcement, commencement, and first formulation of the fighting faith of a second Enlightenment” (2011: 36). We complete the project of the Enlightenment, as Brandom has also made clear in his texts on Rorty, by doing for epistemology what the first phase of the Enlightenment did for religion. Brandom helps one to understand the far-reaching implications of the idea that “we should learn to understand cognitive assessments in terms of relations among humans, without needing to appeal to any sort of authority apart from that manifested in social practices” (Brandom 2000: xii). Furthermore, pragmatist humanists propose “that philosophy now has a desperately important mission: liberating humanity from the most deeply rooted form of superstition, mystification, and disavowal of our responsibilities that we are now in a position to bring into view” (2000: xii).  

In Philosophy as Cultural Politics, his final volume of essays, Rorty establishes a contrast between theists, realists, and pragmatists. He holds that only the latter will contribute to the establishment of “the first truly humanistic culture”:

Intellectuals cannot live without pathos. Theists find pathos in the distance between the human and the divine. Realists find it in the abyss separating human thought and language from reality as it is in itself. Pragmatists find it in the gap between contemporary humanity and a utopian future in which the very idea of responsibility to anything except our fellow-humans has become unintelligible, resulting in the first truly humanistic culture. (2007: 135)

Furthermore, Rorty underlines that this fully humanist culture “will emerge only when we discard the question ‘Do I know the real object, or only one of its appearances?’ and replace it with the question ‘Am I using the best possible description of the situation in which I find myself, or can I cobble together a better one?’” (2007: 137). In this context it is important to note that one will not understand Rorty’s desire for a humanist culture when one ignores the significance of Romanticism for his thinking. His antirepresentationalist and antifoundationalist story of progress and emancipation begins with the Romantics.[5] It continues with Nietzsche’s radical anti-Platonism and with Schiller’s, James’s, and Dewey’s respective versions of a pragmatist humanism. What is of primary importance for Rorty is the Romantic emphasis on the power of the imagination. He establishes a link between the antifoundationalist understanding of intellectual and moral progress and an “increase in imaginative power”: “More specifically, we can see both intellectual and moral progress not as a matter of getting closer to the True or the Good or the Right, but as an increase in imaginative power. We see imagination as the cutting edge of cultural evolution, the power which – given peace and prosperity – constantly operates so as to make the human future richer than the human past” (1999: 87). When Rorty contends that imagination ought to be seen as “the cutting edge of cultural evolution,” then it becomes obvious why his modern antifoundationalist story of progress, his narrative about humanity’s permanent desire for linguistic novelty and alternative descriptions, starts with the Romantics.

On Rorty’s account, the Romantic poets initiated a process of creative redescription and imaginative recontextualization that would eventually allow one to recognize the possibility of establishing a postmetaphysical culture characterized by anti-Platonism and antirepresentationalism. What I wish to suggest in this context is that one understands this antifoundationalist and antirepresentationalist, or Deweyan and anti-authoritarian, story of progress and emancipation better when one sees it as continuing the humanistic tradition that links Emerson, Nietzsche, and James’s texts. In their different manners, Emerson, Nietzsche, James, and Rorty demonstrate that the modern antifoundationalist story of progress is a humanist story of poetic agency. The latter brings creative practice, intelligent action, and poetic imagination together and, emphasizing the act of making, seeks to convince us that instead of asking ourselves whether there are truths out there that we still have to find or discover we should ask whether it would not be more stimulating to invent new ways of speaking and acting.

Although Romanticism plays a crucial role for his thinking, Rorty seeks to demystify or deromanticize it. This attempt must be regarded as a part of his endeavor to dedivinize the world and the self, and thus of his attempt to complete the process of secularization. Rorty proposes that the Romantic poets did not radically break with humankind’s deep metaphysical need. In other words, they only prepared the establishment of a postmetaphysical culture. To what degree did Nietzsche go further than the Romantics? Rorty reads Nietzsche as a poet-philosopher who is fascinated with the radical gesture of the Romantics, but who at the same time realizes their limitations. For writers like Coleridge and Emerson it had been possible “to run together romanticism with idealist metaphysics” (Rorty 2007: 110). Rorty, like his fellow anti-Platonist Nietzsche, wants a kind of Romanticism without idealist metaphysics. Nietzsche, on Rorty’s reading, radicalized Romanticism by ridiculing the idealist metaphysicians’ “cowardly unwillingness to acknowledge our finitude,” and by vehemently criticizing the hope “to find something that would trump poetry” (2007: 110). As Rorty interprets his German fellow philosopher, nothing will ever trump poetry.

Rorty thinks that Nietzsche and James were enormously important as regards the replacement of Romanticism by pragmatism, since “[i]nstead of saying that the discovery of vocabularies could bring hidden secrets to light, they said that new ways of speaking could help us get what we want” (1982: 150). Furthermore, Rorty’s contention is that “Romanticism was aufgehoben in pragmatism, the claim that the significance of new vocabularies was not their ability to decode but their mere utility” (1982: 153). The Romantic notions of depth, profundity, the ineffable, and the poetically sublime are almost diametrically opposed to this pragmatist utilitarian understanding of art. New and stimulating vocabularies are useful because they open another chapter in the modern story of progress, but they must not be seen as offering a sudden unmediated vision of what is deep down inside us and what defines who we really are.

It was left to the pragmatists to make their fellow humans understand that in a world of blind, contingent, and mechanical forces, they must not expect, and do not need, any kind of metaphysical comfort. What Rorty’s discussion of Romanticism boils down to, I think, is that he sees the Romantics “as toolmakers rather than discoverers” (Rorty 1989: 55). Not yet fully escaped from Platonism and still governed by a metaphysical need or urge, the Romantics creatively contributed to the development of conceptual tools (for instance, imagination, redescription, vocabulary, plurality, metaphor, and self-creation) that would eventually offer the possibility of establishing a postmetaphysical poeticized culture. In other words, it was the Romantics’ position between metaphysical need and imaginative conceptual innovation that initiated a process that would eventually lead to the establishment of a humanist culture.

Contrary to what many philosophers and theorists have maintained in the last four decades, humanism is not dead. Pragmatism helps one appreciate that humanism does not need to be resuscitated since it has played a significant role for the modern story of progress and emancipation that began with the Romantics. Rorty’s texts show the importance of the idea that there is no outside authority which we must obey or to which we can appeal and, moreover, that the world of human practices is the only world we have and need. The question is whether intellectuals in the 21st century will see the need to continue the process of Enlightenment in a pragmatist manner and whether they will be inclined to regard pragmatism, with Rorty, as a form of humanism. 

[1] However, a detailed, and convincing, analysis of Rorty’s humanism can be found in Emil Višňovský’s “Rorty’s Humanism: Making It Explicit,” European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy XII-1 (2020); (accessed June 26, 2020). 

[2] I discuss the significance and far-reaching implications of this link in my trilogy of books: Romanticism and Pragmatism: Richard Rorty and the Idea of a Poeticized Culture (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); Marxism, Pragmatism, and Postmetaphysics: From Finding to Making (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019); and Pragmatism and Poetic Agency: The Persistence of Humanism (forthcoming).

[3] In the first part of Pragmatism and Poetic Agency, I discuss the relationship between Nietzsche and the pragmatists, seeking to elucidate the full implications of his idea that only we have created the world that concerns us as human beings. My argument in this book is also directed against the poststructuralist reading of Nietzsche as an antihumanist (think of Derrida and Foucault), which I consider to be utterly nonsensical.

[4] For a detailed discussion of the idea of a literary or poeticized culture, see the chapter “Richard Rorty’s Notion of a Poeticized Culture” in my Romanticism and Pragmatism, 31-41.

[5] In this context, see the chapter “’Toolmakers rather than discoverers’: Richard Rorty’s Reading of Romanticism” in my Romanticism and Pragmatism, 120-33. See also Rorty’s Philosophy as Poetry. One of the most interesting aspects of this posthumously published text is that he now regrets having ever used the terms literary culture and poeticized culture. He writes: “In the past I have sometimes described such a culture as one in which literature and the arts have replaced science and philosophy as sources of wisdom. But that description now seems to me misguided. I think it would be better to say that it would be a culture in which the meaning of the word ‘wisdom’ had reverted to its pre-Platonic sense” (2016: 58). Rorty’s refusal to continue using the terms literary culture or poeticized culture, and replace them with “intellectual culture” (2016: 60), is truly unfortunate and unconvincing.       

References

Brandom, Robert (2000). “Introduction,” Rorty and His Critics, ed. Brandom. Malden, MA: Blackwell. ix-xx.

__________ (2011). Perspectives on Pragmatism: Classical, Recent, and Contemporary. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP.

Heidegger, Martin (1998). Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill. New York: Cambridge UP.

__________ (2008). Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell. Revised and Expanded Edition. New York: HarperCollins.

James, William (1907). Pragmatism and Other Writings, ed. Giles Gunn. New York: Penguin, 2000.

Nietzsche, Friedrich (1974). The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage.

Putnam, Hilary (2004). Ethics Without Ontology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP.

Rorty, Richard (1982). Consequences of Pragmatism: Essays 1972-1980. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

__________ (1989). Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. New York: Cambridge UP.

__________ (1999). Philosophy and Social Hope. New York: Penguin.

__________ (2007). Philosophy as Cultural Politics: Philosophical Papers, Vol. 4. New York: Cambridge UP.

__________ (2016). Philosophy as Poetry. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press.