7

Rhetoric Between Philosophy and Poetry:

Rorty as Essayist
WILLIAM M. CURTIS

[Rorty’s] style, which rests upon scholarly erudition and literary flair, ingeniously com-
bines critical expository analysis and illuminating historical narrative. It moves from
technical argumentation to cultural commentary with ease and wit. Never deceptive, and
more than clever, Rorty’s style leaves the reader always enlightened and exhilarated, yet
also with a quirky feeling that one has been seduced rather than persuaded, talked into
Rorty’s perspective rather than talked out of one’s own position. West (1989, 197)

Rorty’s stirring prose is one of his supreme philosophical achievements. Kelly (2008, 78)

In its July 2007 obituary for Richard Rorty, Prospect Magazine dubbed him “the greatest
philosophical essayist of his time.” This was meant as praise, of course, yet the label of
“essayist” is not something that a pukka Anglophone academic philosopher prizes.
After all, if there is anything to Samuel Johnson’s definition of the essay as “a loose sally
of the mind; an irregular, indigested piece, not a regular, orderly performance,” then
today’s professional philosopher wants to avoid penning essays at all costs (Johnson
2005, 167). Presenting a “loose sally of the mind” at an American Philosophical
Association (APA) conference would be like flinging chum to sharks. Indeed, the writers
of the Western philosophical tradition who are most associated with the essay form are
currently pretty marginal to the discipline. Montaigne, we all know, would not get
tenure today, and nor would Emerson (whereas Descartes would be a shoo‐in, and Locke
too, though Johnson would find his Essay Concerning Human Understanding mistitled;
Kant would be president of the APA). To be primarily an essayist would seem to con-
demn one to being a poor or unserious philosopher according to contemporary academic
standards. As Susan Sontag observes, “The culture administered by universities has
always regarded the essay with suspicion, as a kind of writing that is too subjective, too
accessible, merely belle‐lettristic. An interloper in the solemn worlds of philosophy and
polemic, the essay introduces digressiveness, exaggeration, mischief ” (Sontag 2012
[1992], 149). Anticipating her conclusion that it is a professional “demotion” for a

A Companion to Rorty, First Edition. Edited by Alan Malachowski.

© 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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­ hilosopher to be deemed an essayist, Argentinian intellectual Enrique Anderson

p
Imbert writes in 1946: “I lament emphasizing philosophy, but I have no other choice:
philosophy professors are those I have seen – with their very high eyebrows – disdaining
essayists” (Imbert 2012 [1946], 68). That Rorty gained a reputation as a consummate
essayist is, unsurprisingly, of a piece with his much‐discussed alienation from his native
academic discipline. It is no coincidence that he finished his career in Stanford’s
Comparative Literature Department.
Since Rorty’s essayistic style is, to borrow from Sontag, a conspicuous “interloper” in
contemporary philosophy, it attracts an inordinate amount of commentary. Friends
and enemies alike describe Rorty’s writing in terms – such as, “disarmingly chatty and
colloquial” (Mendieta 2005, xiv) and “almost folksy” (Horton 2001, 16) – that one
cannot imagine applying to the normally dense prose of today’s academic philosophical
writing. Rorty’s longtime friend and critic, philosopher Daniel Dennett, colorfully char-
acterizes Rorty as “Peter Pan on the page, swashbuckling and enthusiastic” (Dennett
2007). Stanley Fish, however, offers a contrasting description that Rorty’s readers will
also recognize, which attests to Rorty’s versatility: “When reading Rorty, one always
hears the voice – deep, low, a bit gravelly, world‐weary, and so deadpan that it seems
indifferent to the sentences it is uttering; sentences that are limpidly aphoristic and
appearing not to do much; although in succession, like perfectly rounded bullet beads
on a string, they acquire the force of a locomotive” (Fish 2007). Richard J. Bernstein
confirms that there are few philosophers who write with “as much wit, humor, playful-
ness, and seductive eloquence” as Rorty (Bernstein 1986, 46).
Predictably, critics complain that his engaging style leads readers to believe that they
have understood difficult concepts and arguments when in fact they have not (Kuipers
2013, 3). Rorty is guilty of “dumbing things down,” of mischaracterizing important
debates and philosophical positions, and also of being a showboat who is all flash and
little substance. Indeed, even Dennett recommends, only half‐jokingly, the hermeneu-
tical principle he calls the “Rorty Factor” to save his friend’s work from its own rhetor-
ical excesses: Multiply anything Rorty says by .673 and you will get the truth (Ryerson
2006, 4). The epigraph from Cornell West nicely expresses the troubling ambivalence
that Rorty’s style causes some readers to experience when encountering his work.
Others find Rorty’s cavalier verbiage downright annoying, smug, and frivolous. In a dis-
cipline that expects its practitioners to write as transparently and precisely as possible in
sober (boring?) prose, it is easy to conclude that Rorty’s poor standing in analytic philos-
ophy is of his own doing. But why did he do it? After all, he demonstrated in his earliest
articles (back when he was respectable), as well as in passages in his later work, that he
is perfectly capable of producing the dry, technical sentences that analytic philosophy
cherishes.
To understand what Rorty is up to, we have to recognize that his vast and multifar-
ious writings serve a robustly normative goal: encouraging the development of his ideal
liberal society, which he calls, with a whiff of irony, “liberal utopia.” Rorty’s liberalism
is unique because he insists that we should understand liberal values and practices as
based on nothing but the historically contingent social solidarity of the liberal
community. We should eschew the traditional philosophical enterprise of trying to
define and justify liberalism on the basis of metaphysical premises that invoke nonhuman

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authorities, like natural law, universal reason, or God. There is no essence to liberalism;
it is simply the evolving language‐game‐cum‐way‐of‐life that originated in, as Rorty
would say, the rich North Atlantic democracies. We should stop asking if the moral
premises of liberal practices are true, and instead pragmatically ask whether those prac-
tices are enabling us to live good and happy lives, in our own best judgment, relative to
plausible alternatives. Rorty exhorts us to drop the traditional language of metaphysics
because its pretense to identify necessary truth is rhetorically authoritarian and thus
oppressive of the freedom and pluralism that liberalism should ideally foster and pro-
tect. The consequence of adopting this pragmatic view of liberalism, Rorty hopes, will
be “a global commonwealth in which human rights are respected, equality of opportu-
nity is assured, and the chances of human happiness are thereby increased” (Rorty
2007, 73–4).
Once we grasp the pragmatic liberal impetus of Rorty’s project, we realize that Rorty
couldn’t not write essays (that is an ugly transition, but stick with me). What I mean to
say is that the essay form is a particularly apt vehicle for Rorty’s efforts, for it is a
pragmatic literary form. Like Rorty’s pragmatism, the essay is anti‐essentialist, anti‐
method, experimentalist, and purposefully provocative. As Christy Wampole writes in a
passage that is Deweyan to the core, the essay “is an invitation to maintain the elasticity
of mind and to get comfortable with the world’s inherent ambivalence. And, most
importantly, it is an imaginative rehearsal of what isn’t but could be” (2013). In his
jazzy exposition, Brian Doyle writes, “The essay is a jackdaw, a magpie, a raven. It picks
up everything and uses it. It borrows everything and bends everything to its nefarious
porpoises” (2013, 13). This playful riff is not only a wonderful example of Rorty’s
Davidsonian theory of metaphor – including malapropisms – as unfamiliar uses of
familiar words to produce an effect on the reader, but also describes Rorty’s inventive,
eclectic approach to the philosophical tradition and, indeed, even captures Rorty’s own
professional persona! Doyle’s essay on the essay is, of course, self‐referential, swinging
from literal assertions that contrive to nail down the quiddity of the essay, to poetic
tropes that sweep the legs out from under such attempts.
Here is another way to place the essay: imagine a linguistic continuum with the
ideals of logic and transparent, literal language at one pole, and the unorthodox flights
of poetry that challenge the very boundaries of sense at the opposite pole. Our tradition
going back to Plato sees the territory between the two poles as a no man’s land in the
grand quarrel between philosophy and poetry. Yet the essay springs out from this war‐
torn middle as a self‐consciously rhetorical genre aimed at persuasion and edification,
not demonstrative proof or sublime awe. Indeed, the essayist can utilize language from
both poles in her rhetorical endeavor; she can interweave logic and poetry, literalness
and metaphor, truisms and irony, argumentation and conversation to further her ends.
The essay is thus a highly flexible tool that Rorty deploys in his practice of cultural
politics, which is what he thinks important philosophy amounts to: the redescription
and recontextualization of stale patterns of thought and language in order to, in
Dewey’s phrase, “break the crust of convention” and get past current social conun-
drums. “[The essay] genre and its spirit,” Wampole agrees, “provide an alternative to
the dogmatic thinking that dominates much of social and political life in contemporary
America” (2013).

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Hanging the essay label on Rorty’s writings confirms for hard‐bitten acolytes of
analytic philosophy that his work is slipshod, that he is a philosophical poseur, like his
enfant terrible pal, Jacques Derrida, who misuses his intellectual chops to distort the
good names of the tradition’s heroes. But Rorty can be flanked on the other side, as well
(fortunately, as a political target of both the Left and the Right, he is, like the essay genre
itself, at home in a crossfire). Aficionados of the essay can protest that Rorty does not
write genuine essays. His work is too professional and specialized; he writes scholarly
articles. Carl H. Klaus notes that “The most striking and significant consensus can be
seen in the tendency of essayists in every period and culture to define the essay by con-
trasting it with conventionalized and systematized forms of writing, such as rhetorical,
scholarly, or journalistic discourse” (2012, xv). This consensus thus follows Johnson in
its conception of the essay, but finds the essay’s lack of system and precise purpose a
feature, not a bug. William Gass is a stalwart of this camp, insisting that “The essayist is
an amateur,” as opposed to a “Professor” who writes “that awful object, ‘the article,’”
for “immediate burial in a Journal” (2012 [1982], 106–7). Walter Murdoch complains
that “Half the things that masquerade as essays are really dissertations,” and goes so far
as to strip Emerson of his essayist credentials for writing sermons, not essays (2012
[1938], 66). Proper essays must be more meandering and spontaneous, more personal,
less goal‐oriented, and certainly less academic than Rorty’s offerings.
There are several things to say in defense of Rorty’s bona fides as an essayist (whether
one thinks it a demotion from “philosopher” or not). First, Rorty, unlike most academics,
did write popular pieces on a range of topics for an educated lay audience, which
cemented his status as a public intellectual. The immediate place to turn for some exam-
ples is his 1999 volume, Philosophy and Social Hope, though this only contains a small
fraction of the many writings and book reviews that Rorty published in newspapers and
nonacademic magazines. Tellingly, Philosophy and Social Hope contains the piece among
Rorty’s work that has the strongest claim for “essayhood”: his autobiographical
“Trotsky and the Wild Orchids,” which is indeed perhaps the most accessible key to
Rorty’s sprawling intellectual endeavor (1999, 3–20). In it, Rorty effectively strikes a
personal tone, narrating elements from his upbringing and education that brought him
to his current, idiosyncratic positions. He confesses that he is “hurt” when his col-
leagues dismiss his views as weird and frivolous and accuse him of being merely a self‐
promoting provocateur (p. 5). In response, he invites us into his personal story with the
hope that, at the very least, tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner.
When I originally began to contemplate drafting our present discussion, my assump-
tion was that I should focus on the Philosophy and Social Hope writings in pursuit of a
“Rorty as popular writer” angle, leaving his highly academic (“non‐essayistic?”) work
aside. Such a treatment would thus rest on a distinction between Rorty the essayist,
who writes for a “general audience” often on “political or semi‐political topics” (Rorty
1999, xii), and Rorty the author of scholarly articles that are abstruse and smell of the
lamp. Parsing Rorty’s opus this way and emphasizing his most accessible writings might
more readily convince doubters that Rorty merits the title of “essayist.” Yet one of the
lessons I have learned from Rorty’s pragmatism is to scrutinize distinctions if they cre-
ate problems. While Rorty’s more popular writings perhaps share a greater family
resemblance with traditional exemplars of the essay genre, much of the commentary
on Rorty’s famous style actually focuses on his academic work. In other words, the distinction

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does not hold because Rorty is conspicuously essayistic even in his scholarly articles,
and arguably became increasingly so as his career progressed; therein lies the scandal,
which caused him to become such a controversial figure in analytic philosophy. Rorty is
more interesting (he is more Rorty) if we reject any clear division of his work and instead
see him as always producing essays, some pitched at a general audience and others at
his fellow specialists.
Moreover, as wise defenders of the essay admit, it is difficult to convincingly define
the genre in order to exclude plausible contenders. As O. B. Hardison remarks, “Of all
literary forms, the essay most successfully resists the effort to pin it down, which is like
trying to bind Proteus” (1989, 11). Wampole writes, “I have generally found that for
every rule I could establish about the essay, a dozen exceptions scuttle up” (2013). The
essay’s indefinability has been evident since its inception. Both Hardison and Wampole
point to the signature differences between the writing styles our two hallowed progeni-
tors of the genre: Michel de Montaigne and Francis Bacon. Hardison elaborates:

Even in its infancy, the essay shows its Protean heritage. Montaigne’s essays are associative,
discursive, informal, meandering, and slovenly. Being the first of their kind, they ought to
have at least become models for what followed, in the same way that even disreputable
people – muggers, prostitutes, con men, and so forth – will become models if they are really
good at what they do. They did not. Bacon’s essays were inspired by Montaigne’s, but are, if
anything, anti‐Montaignian. Especially in their 1597 form, they are aphoristic, staccato,
assertive, hortatory, abrasive. (Hardison 1989, 15)

Wampole (2013) confirms, “the discrepancy in style and substance between the
texts of Michel and Francis was, like the English Channel that separated them, deep
enough to drown in.”
This mixed provenance of the essay makes it all the easier to claim that even Rorty’s
articles bearing ponderously academic titles, like “Inquiry as Recontextualization: An
Anti‐Dualist Account of Interpretation” (Rorty 1991a), qualify for inclusion in this
expansive, mongrelized genre. In this piece, Rorty urges us to see inquiry not as discov-
ering the true essence of reality but rather as imaginatively seeing things in new and
useful contexts, of “reweaving beliefs rather than discovering the natures of objects”
(Rorty 1991a, 98). Conceiving of inquiry, whether scientific, historical, or
philosophical, in this way enables us to be more properly anti‐essentialist and prag-
matically liberal. Here are the essay’s final five sentences; decide for yourself if they
sound essayistic:

From an ethico‐political angle, however, one can say that what is characteristic, not of the
human species but merely of its most advanced, sophisticated subspecies – the well‐read,
tolerant, conversable inhabitants of a free society – is the desire to dream up as many new
contexts as possible. This is the desire to be as polymorphous in our adjustments as possible,
to recontextualize for the hell of it. This desire is manifested in art and literature more than
in the natural sciences, and so I find it tempting to think of our culture as an increasingly
poeticized one, and to say that we are gradually emerging from the scientism which
[Charles] Taylor dislikes into something else, something better. But as a good antiessential-
ist, I have no deep premises to draw on from which to infer that it is, in fact, better – nor to
demonstrate our own superiority over the past, or the non‐Western present. All I can do is

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recontextualize various developments in philosophy and elsewhere so as to make them

look like stages in a story of poeticizing and progress. (Rorty 1991a, 110)

Even if difficult to follow because this tail has been detached from its body, and in
spite of some of the specialized terms, the reader can sense something of the “swash-
buckling” quality of Rorty’s prose in the sweeping, thought‐provoking suggestions he
makes.
Although they insist that we cannot describe with any precision what makes an
essay an essay, Wampole, Hardison, and others still pragmatically offer provisional
working definitions. Wampole’s, for instance, is: “short nonfiction prose with a medita-
tive subject at its center and a tendency away from certitude” (2013). Imbert renders a
“scholarly approximation” of a definition: “a composition in prose, discursive but
artistic enough through its richness in anecdotes and descriptions, brief enough that
we can read it in one sitting” (2012 [1946], 70). Hardison’s entire piece, “Binding
Proteus: An Essay on the Essay,” grapples with the development of the genre from many
angles and offers as one of his conclusions that the essay “is an enactment of the pro-
cess of accommodation between the world and the ‘I,’ and thus it is consciousness real-
izing itself ” (1989, 16). (Readers familiar with classical pragmatism will recognize in
this sentence a distinctly Deweyan‐Meadian ring.) Taking my cues from these writers,
I highlight some of the essayistic features that Rorty’s work habitually displays,
including: (1) its conversational voice; (2) its use of quotation; (3) its “literary” quality
and use of metaphor; (4) its pragmatic skepticism; and (5) and its playful experimen-
talism in the face of postmodern uncertainty.
(1) Reading a good essay is like having a conversation with a perceptive, knowl-
edgeable, and gregarious interlocutor about a topic we find interesting (though per-
haps we did not know it before we picked up the essay!). The successful essayist
creates an authentic voice of a real person in her pages with whom the reader can
have a personal relationship. Jeff Porter observes, “The trademark of the essay is its
intimacy, the human voice addressing an imagined audience” (2012, ix). Montaigne,
as usual, is the model; lovers of his oeuvre feel they know Michel as a friend.
Nineteenth‐century British essayist, Charles Lamb, confirms this relationship which,
like friendship, can be agonistic, in his review of William Hazlitt’s Table Talk essays:
“[t]he tone of them is uniformly conversational … You fancy that a disputant is
always present, and feel a disposition to take up the cudgels yourself [o]n behalf of
the other side of the question” (Lamb 2012 [1821], 19, 22). Emerson, “arguably
America’s greatest essayist” (Klaus and Stuckey‐French 2012, 23), pace Murdoch,
writes that the language of the essay “is the language of conversation transferred to
a book. Cut these words, and they would bleed; they are vascular and alive” (Emerson
2012 [1850], 24). And in the last century, Hilloc Bellaire likewise refers to the con-
versational aspect of the genre: “These modern essays of ours may be compared to
conversation, without which mankind has never been satisfied, which is ever diverse
(though continually moving through the same themes), and which finds in the
unending multiplicity of the world unending matter for discussion and contempla-
tion” (Bellaire 2012 [1929], 52).
It only makes sense that Rorty would use our most conversational genre of writing in
his attempt to nudge philosophy and wider culture to become more conversational and

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less dogmatic. He memorably tells us that liberal citizens may have to “josh” each other
out of our absolutist positions in order to have a healthy liberal politics (Rorty 1991a,
193). In his essay, “Analytic and Conversational Philosophy,” Rorty draws a contrast
between the former – philosophy that takes natural science as the gold standard for real
knowledge – and the latter, which is historicist and thus more relativistic about what
counts as knowledge (Rorty 2007, 120–30). “The hope to get something right, once
and for all, just as natural scientists do, is very precious to most analytic philosophers,”
who vehemently reject any reduction of their serious inquiry to “mere conversation”
(p. 127). Conversational philosophers, however,

are inclined to think that philosophy makes progress not by solving problems but by replac-
ing old problems with new problems – problems created by one use of words with problems
created by another use of words. This historicist outlook makes them dubious of
Wittgenstein’s suggestion that philosophy’s goal is “complete clarity” – an unproblematic
grasp of the way things really are. (Rorty 2007, 127)

Rorty writes, “I prefer conversational to analytic philosophy, so defined, because

I prefer philosophers who are sufficiently historicist as to think of themselves as taking
part in a conversation rather than as practicing a quasi‐scientific discipline” (2007,
126). Understanding philosophy and knowledge as conversational helps us appreciate
the contingency of knowledge, which makes us more tolerant and open to new ways of
seeing things. It helps us realize that, by changing our cultural conversation and the
social practices associated with it, we can be more prolific and flexible in our approaches
to the challenges of the human condition. As Rorty puts it in the final sentence of
Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, “The only point on which I would insist is that phi-
losophers’ moral concern should be with continuing the conversation of the West,
rather than insisting upon a place for the traditional problems of modern philosophy
within that conversation” (Rorty 1979, 394).
(2) Artful quotation of and adroit reference to other writers and sages is a hallmark
of the great essayists. “By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote,” writes
Emerson (2010, 94). Gass tells us that “The apt quotation is one of the essayists
greatest gifts … You know you are reading an excellent essay when you find yourself
relishing the quotations as much as the text that contains them, as one welcomes the
chips of chocolate in those overcelebrated cookies” (Gass 2012 [1982], 109). Phillip
Lopate adds that “The whole modern essay tradition sprang from quotation” (2012
[1989], 136).
Rorty is an inveterate name‐dropper and virtuoso quoter. In his liberal utopia, philos-
ophers and other literary intellectuals eschew “the search for theories that get at real
essence” (Rorty 1989, 88) and instead don the mantle of “cultural critic” to become the
sort of “all‐purpose intellectual” who

passes rapidly from Hemingway to Proust to Hitler to Marx to Foucault to Mary Douglas to
the present situation in Southeast Asia to Ghandi to Sophocles. He is a name‐dropper, who
uses names such as these to refer to sets of descriptions, symbol‐systems, ways of seeing.
His specialty is seeing similarities and differences between great big pictures, between
attempts to see how things hang together. (Rorty 1982, xl–xli)

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Quoting is, of course, literally an exercise in “recontextualization”: taking the ideas,

insights, bon mots, platitudes, and metaphors of others out of their original contexts
and placing them in the new context of one’s essay and time. For Rorty, the ability to
imaginatively juxtapose and synthesize disparate ideas is crucial to conceptual innova-
tion and problem‐solving in all areas of culture.
Charles Guignon and David R. Hiley note that Rorty practices what he preaches
“fearlessly and with considerable panache.” Like other great essayists,

He writes with self‐effacing charm, a quick and biting wit, a dizzying capacity for broad
analogy, and a way of dividing through diverse thinkers in a single sentence that in less
skilled hands would be mere pastiche … Rorty seems to read everything. He moves easily
from Wittgenstein to Heidegger or from Dewey to Derrida, but he is as apt to draw from a
Philip Larkin poem, from Proust, or from a Nabokov novel as from Kant or Nietzsche.
(Guignon and Hiley 2003, 2–3)

From Rorty’s pragmatic perspective, if philosophers want to play a meaningful role

in establishing an innovative, liberal society, they should follow his lead and write pro-
vocative essays that redescribe and reconcile old sets of concepts that stand in the way
of progressive change. They will become “polypragmatic, Socratic intermediar[ies] bet-
ween various discourses” (Rorty 1979, 317).
(3) Good essays unabashedly employ metaphorical, “literary” language to achieve
their effect (Atwan 1996, 21–37). Mariano Picón‐Salas, consistent with my contention
that the essay lives a hybrid existence between philosophy and poetry, writes, “The
function of the essayist – one like Carlyle, Emerson, Santayana, or Unamuno – would
seem to be to reconcile poetry and philosophy, to offer a strange bridge between the
world of images and that of concepts, warning the reader of the dark turns of the
labyrinth and hoping to help him seek an opening through which to pass” (Picón‐Salas
2012 [1954], 75). Imbert similarly remarks that “the essay’s very noble function con-
sists of poeticizing the plain exercise of the writer’s intelligence and fantasy, in prose.
The essay is a conceptually constructed work of art; it is a logical structure, but one
where logic begins to sing” (Imbert 2012 [1946], 70). Max Bense confirms, “in every
essay those wonderful sentences show up which are like seeds of the whole thing, from
which the essay can replenish itself again and again. I mean those enticing prose sen-
tences, in which one can see that there is no perfect border to poetry here” (Bense 2012
[1947], 72).
Like the essay genre itself, Rorty seeks to blur the line between philosophy and poetry
(Rorty 1991b, 85–106). He famously insists that we think of philosophy as a literary
genre, that we embrace Shelley’s revelation that poets are the unacknowledged legisla-
tors of the world, and that progress in all areas of culture depends on the continual
generation of new metaphors that challenge conventional language games (Rorty
1989, 5–22). We should cease to see epistemological progress as the philosophical tra-
dition has: a matter of achieving increasingly accurate mental representations of
reality until we finally possess the unvarnished truth at the end of inquiry. Instead, we
should take a Kuhnian view of culture and see our standards of justification as histori-
cally shifting paradigms of language and behavior. With luck, we will describe these
shifts as a process of improvement – things getting better than they were in the past; for

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liberals, this means that freedom, peace, prosperity, and perhaps even that elusive vari-
able of human happiness are all on the rise.
When a paradigm, or “vocabulary,” as Rorty would say, of an area of culture is
stable – when the once‐revolutionary metaphors that constitute it have become literal-
ized and hence no longer metaphorical – inquiry is conducted in the dominant literal
language, and there is broad consensus on the standards for what counts as progress in
addressing the problems generated within the paradigm. Those who attempt to
challenge this consensus by offering new standards will normally be marginalized; their
neologisms will seem wrongheaded and nonsensical. But when, on Kuhn’s story,
enough practitioners come to see the problems of the paradigm as fundamental and
damning, the practice and its standards become unstable; inquiry becomes “revolu-
tionary” as the community of inquirers creatively seeks to build a new consensus on
new terms. Suddenly, a novel set of metaphors catches on and is seen as a leap forward,
beyond the old problems, to a novel way of understanding the area of inquiry (Rorty
1991b, 88–9). Thus, for example, Copernican heliocentrism becomes no longer thought
of as simply a useful, though literally false (and perhaps theologically dangerous), met-
aphor on the background of the literal Ptolemaic truth. Instead, it becomes the new
literal truth as Ptolemaic cosmology is dispensed with.
For Rorty, much of contemporary philosophy has become an esoteric, scholastic
enterprise with little social relevance. He aims to challenge its paradigm in the hope that
it can become a force – a source of new metaphors – for challenging old social para-
digms to push culture in a pragmatically liberal direction. As he puts it, “Interesting
philosophy is rarely an examination of the pros and cons of a thesis. Usually it is, implic-
itly or explicitly, a contest between an entrenched vocabulary which has become a
nuisance and a half‐formed new vocabulary which vaguely promises great things”
(Rorty 1989, 9). Since the new vocabulary does not fit the criteria for literal truth pos-
sessed by the old one, it will be challenged initially as being “merely” metaphorical
(literary or poetic). But, Rorty insists, “Important, revolutionary physics, and meta-
physics, has always been ‘literary’ in the sense that it has faced the problem of intro-
ducing new jargon and nudging aside the language‐games currently in place” (1991b,
99). Indeed, this is why Rorty’s believes that literary efforts will often be more effective
in creating progressive liberal political consensus than theoretical arguments adhering
to established forensic canons.

This process of coming to see other human beings as “one of us” rather than as “them” is
a matter of detailed description of what unfamiliar people are like and of redescription of
what we ourselves are like. This is a task not for theory but for genres such as ethnography,
the journalist’s report, the comic book, the docudrama, and, especially, the novel. Fiction
like that of Dickens, Olive Schreiner, or Richard Wright gives us details about the kinds of
suffering being endured by people to whom we had previously not attended. Fiction like
that of Choderlos de Laclos, Henry James, or Nabokov gives us the details about what sorts
of cruelty we ourselves are capable of, and thereby lets us redescribe ourselves. That is why
the novel, the movie, and the TV program have, gradually but steadily, replaced the sermon
and the treatise as the principal vehicles of moral change and progress. (Rorty 1989, xvi)

Although Rorty follows the Romantics in his insistence that it is the imaginative,
literary, and artistic that move the world, Áine Kelly questions whether Rorty’s writing

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lives up to his own prescriptions. She writes, “Although it transcends the scientism of
the analytic school, it is unclear whether one could describe Rorty’s writing as ‘poetic’
or ‘literary’ in any strict sense” (Kelly 2008, 88). In her view, Rorty’s writing has a low
“metaphorical density” with the result that “There is a major discrepancy, it seems, bet-
ween Rorty’s claims for the literary and the ‘non‐literariness’ of his own enterprise”
(p. 89). Kelly, however, resolves this “discrepancy” correctly, recognizing that the
answer lies in his public – as opposed to private – rhetorical goal of practical cultural
change. “On this view, the eminently readable nature of his prose is illustrative not of
the ‘non‐literariness’ of an avowed literary enterprise (or an insoluble tension between
theory and practice) but of Rorty’s desire to keep his strong poet conversant with the
members of his liberal utopia” (p. 90).
Kelly’s initial criticism misses its mark because it misunderstands Rorty’s self‐designation:
he does not aspire to be a novelist but rather a literary critic who specializes in the genre
of philosophical writing.1 He is the Lionel Trilling of philosophy, and, indeed, he shares
much with Trilling, including his commitment to liberalism, his literary erudition, and
his oft‐noted rhetorical use of the second‐person plural: “we liberals.” Literary critics do
not argue with the novelists whose work they engage; they do not attempt to refute the
validity of clear propositions that they locate in novels. Rather, the literary critic dis-
cusses a novel’s aspects and meanings, and makes aesthetic and even moral judgments
about it, by placing it in the context of other works of literature. To be able to do this
skillfully and creatively make connections between different works, the critic must be
steeped in lots literature. And, I need hardly add, literary critics use the essay form.
This is Rorty’s approach, and it is one of the reasons his fellow philosophers get irate
with him (much like, I suppose, novelists get irate with their critics). Instead of method-
ically refuting the details of their arguments, he uses philosophical works and their
authors to stand as representatives of broad, influential positions in philosophy that he
then compares and contrasts. Soaring above the philosophical landscape like one of his
beloved kestrels, Rorty appears to miss the trees which, his critics allege, leads him to
misrepresent the forest (though it is usually quite clear, often through almost causal,
off‐hand remarks, that he knows the trees pretty well, which is what makes him espe-
cially challenging). Given his pragmatic liberal project, however, this meta‐approach is
justified; the important question concerns what ultimate effects prominent strands of
the philosophical genre might have on liberal culture, and these effects will be normally
a matter general intellectual trends (the forest), not a matter of the specific details of
individual works (the trees). Although society does not currently pay any attention to
the debates of contemporary philosophers, it is important to track them because history
has shown, as Keynes famously observed, that today’s politics are often deeply influ-
enced by yesterday’s “academic scribblers,” their ideas having percolated from the ivory
tower into the broader culture. While perhaps not as manifestly influential as novelists,
screenplay writers, and journalists, philosophers have this important “literary critic”
role to play in ushering in liberal utopia.
(4) Pragmatism entails a practical skepticism about means and ends, a willingness to
be open to questioning both in order to solve or at least cope with problems. Because
“skepticism,” since Descartes, has become associated with the radical philosophical
position that we face a deep problem because we cannot prove that we know anything
about the world, Hilary Putnam wants to distance pragmatic skepticism from this by

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using the term “fallibilism.” He writes that pragmatists are anti‐Cartesian skepticism in
the sense that they hold “that doubt requires justification just as much as belief,” and
“that there are no metaphysical guarantees to be had that even our most firmly held
beliefs will never need revision. That one can be both fallibilistic and antisceptical is per-
haps the basic insight of American Pragmatism” (Putnam 1994, 20–1).
The essay, too, has long been associated with practical skepticism. Montaigne, with
his famous motto “Que sais‐je?” (“What do I know?”), draws on ancient skepticism to
cultivate an open, more tolerant mind in order to live a better, richer, more humane life.
As he confesses in “On Repentance,” “If my mind could gain a firm footing, I would not
make essays, I would make decisions; but it is always in apprenticeship and on trial”
(Montaigne 1957, 611). We can contrast this with the Cartesian project – which set the
agenda for modern philosophy – that reacts to skepticism with a determination to defeat
it by discovering a systematic, foolproof method for identifying apodictic truth. But
what about our other inventor of the essay, Bacon, who, as a father of the scientific
method, might seem closer to Descartes than to Montaigne? True, Bacon’s skepticism
has a very different feel than Montaigne’s; he is much more confident and hopeful about
the potential of human knowledge, and thus his essays tend to be more, as Hardison
noted above, assertive and exhortatory. Yet, in another way, Bacon’s project is indubi-
tably pragmatic: armed with an attitude of practical skepticism, he aimed to undermine
the reigning epistemological paradigm based on scholasticism and superstition (the
“idols of the mind”) and replace it with a cooperative, systematic, experimental study of
nature for the wholly pragmatic end of bettering mankind’s material lot. While one can
perhaps trace modern scientism back to Bacon’s work and its aspirations for what would
become modern science, he is still far too much the renaissance humanist to be accu-
rately labeled a logical positivist avant la lettre.
From these roots, a pragmatic skepticism that challenges conventional wisdom for
purposes of edification and “growth” (Dewey’s term for “progress”) has become virtu-
ally a sine qua non of the essay genre. The essayist is a sacred cow kicker and deflator of
absolute truths; she points out the ever‐present lacunae in our understanding of
things; she produces and creatively wrestles with doubt. Klaus and Stuckey‐French
observe that Emerson turns again and again to Montaigne, “who was for him a ‘repre-
sentative man,’ representative of the skepticism that lay at the center of essay writing”
(2012, 23).
Along these lines, these two prominent Frankfurt Schoolers discuss the essay form in
terms that are strikingly simpatico with Rorty’s pragmatism. Georg Lukács writes,

The essayist dismisses his own proud hopes which sometimes lead him to believe that he
has come close to the ultimate: he has, after all, no more to offer than explanations of the
poems of others, or at best his own ideas. But he ironically adapts himself to this small-
ness – the eternal smallness of the most profound work of the intellect in the face of
life – and even emphasizes it with ironic modesty. (2010, 25)

Irony is, of course, a master concept for Rorty, his term for the disposition of creative
fallibilism that liberal intellectuals and, in a different sense, even liberal citizens should
ideally possess (Rorty 1989 and Curtis 2015, 93–100). Also, like Lukács, Rorty exhorts
us to embrace our finitude and forgo efforts to achieve a spiritual or epistemological

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union with the Eternal. This “would give new resonance to Blake’s dictum that ‘All
deities reside within the human breast.’” Yeats alluded to, and improved upon, Blake
when he wrote, “Whatever flames upon the night / Man’s own resinous heart had fed’”
(Rorty 2007, 119).
Theodor Adorno’s brilliant meditation, “The Essay as Form,” simply abounds with
Rortian themes. Adorno argues that the essay form is opposed to metaphysics, essen-
tialism, scientism, and the modern rationalist‐empiricist concept of “method.” Rather,
it embraces and gives us hope in the face of historical contingency, uncertainty, open‐
endedness, and pluralism. Indeed, Adorno emphasizes the antiauthoritarianism of
the essay, concluding his piece with the assertion that “the law of the innermost form
of the essay is heresy” that transgresses “the orthodoxy of thought” (Adorno 1984,
171). If we tone down the Frankfurt School jargon and add some American idiom
and references to Dewey, Davidson, and Sellars, one could be forgiven for thinking
that Adorno’s essay is one of Rorty’s. Adorno writes, “[The essay] revolts above all
against the doctrine – deeply rooted since Plato – that the changing and ephemeral is
unworthy of philosophy … The essay shies away from the violence of dogma” (1984,
158). “In the emphatic essay, thought gets rid of the traditional idea of truth. The
essay simultaneously suspends the traditional concept of method … [T]he essay denies
any primeval givens” (p. 159). This latter clause brings to mind Sellars’s attack on the
empiricist “Myth of the Given” that Rorty champions. Adorno continues, “The essay
gently defies the ideals of clara et distinctia perceptio and of absolute certainty. On the
whole it could be interpreted as a protest against the four rules that Descartes’s
Discourse on Method sets up at the beginning of modern Western science and its
theory” (p. 161). “Just as such learning remains exposed to error, so does the essay form;
it must pay for its affinity with open intellectual experience by the lack of security, a
lack which the norm of established thought fears like death” (p. 161, emphasis
added).
This final quotation is felicitous not only because it is reminiscent of the famous
Nietzschean sentiment that Rorty connects to pragmatism: that we must learn to live
without “metaphysical comfort” (Rorty 1982, 166). The “learning” that Adorno refers
to in the italicized clause is that “of a man who is obliged, in a foreign country, to speak
that country’s language instead of patching it together from its elements, as he did in
school. He will read without a dictionary” (p. 161). Through trial and error, the man
muddles through and eventually acquires the practical skill of speaking the foreign lan-
guage. This scenario is, of course, the same as Quine’s famous “field linguist” example,
which he uses to suggest the indeterminacy of translation (Quine 1960, 26–79). Rorty
uses Quine’s field linguist to assimilate Davidson’s work to pragmatism because the field
linguist illustrates Davidson’s contention that language is not a medium of representa-
tion but is rather (relatively sophisticated) behavior that, with luck, helps us coordinate
our activities (Rorty 1991a, 132–43). This pragmatic naturalization of language is
important for Rorty because it enables us to dismiss the philosophical impulse to iden-
tify a theory of truth that gives us criteria for when language is properly representing
(“mirroring”) reality; it is anti‐Cartesian and anti‐representationalist. This saves us
from much philosophical mischief by undermining both dogmatic assertions that one is
in possession of the true representation of reality, and the unpragmatic skeptical worry

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that one’s concepts might utterly fail to represent reality (as would be the case if, for in-
stance, one were the proverbial brain in a vat).
(5) Another German‐speaking writer, this time of Austrian extraction, novelist
Robert Musil, introduces a Lebensphilosophie based on the essay genre in his unfinished
masterpiece, A Man Without Qualities. He calls it Essayismus, or “essayism,” which Alan
Wall describes as:

the necessary mode of modern thought. Essayism is characterized by an aversion to the

axiomatic, a deliberated provisionality, an acceptance of uncertainty, an openness to the
possibilities of intellectual adventure and discovery which Musil liked to call “possibilitar-
ian.” In the face of ruin or ossification of so many axiomatic schemata, so many ideologies,
Musil asks, what is there left to us but provisionality, that testing of theory and practice
which is conveyed by the word “essay”? (2014)

Essayism thus involves a playful experimentalist disposition, a willingness to explore,

to try something new. This point is bolstered by the etymology of the word “essay”
which, of course, hails from the French verb “essayer,” “to try.” Musil writes:

Whoever has [a sense of possibility] does not say, for instance: Here this or that has hap-
pened, will happen, must happen; but he invents: Here this or that might, could, or ought
to happen. If he is told that something is the way it is, he will think: Well, it could probably
just as well be otherwise. So the sense of possibility could be defined outright as the ability
to conceive of everything there might be just as well, and to attach no more importance to
what is than to what is not. The consequences of so creative a disposition can be remark-
able, and may, regrettably, often make what people admire seem wrong, and what is taboo
permissible, or, also, make both a matter of indifference. Such possibilists are said to inhabit
a more delicate medium, a hazy medium of mist, fantasy, daydreams, and the subjunctive
mood. Children who show this tendency are dealt with firmly and warned that such per-
sons are cranks, dreamers, weaklings, know‐it‐alls, or troublemakers. (1996, 10)

While Musil’s possibilitarian man without qualities has more of the air of German
existentialism about him than does Rorty’s liberal pragmatist, Musil’s discussion of
“possibilitarianism” bears a striking resemblance to the pragmatist’s acceptance of his-
torical contingency.
We see a similar emphasis on the exploration of the possible in Spanish philosopher
José Ortega y Gasset’s musings about the essay. Essays are “science minus the explicit
proof ” in which the essayist should “eliminate from his work all apodictic appearance”
(Ortega y Gasset 2012 [1914], 38). Ortega y Gasset writes, “I only offer modi res conside-
randi, possible new ways of looking at things. I invite the reader to test them for himself,
to see if, in fact, they provide fertile visions” (p. 39). Rorty’s philosopher is Ortega y
Gasset’s essayist: “I think that ‘philosopher’ is the most appropriate description for
somebody who remaps culture – who suggests a new and promising way for us to think
about the relation among various large areas of human activity” (Rorty 1999, 175). In
Rorty’s poeticized liberal culture, “There would be less talk about rigor and more about
originality” (2007, 125). Indeed, in his merging of Kuhn’s conception of the successful
revolutionary scientist with Bloom’s conception of the “strong poet” who causes us to
change the way we view the world, even “The image of the great scientist would not be

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of somebody who got it right but somebody who made it new” (Rorty 1991a, 44).
Revolutionary science, like progress in moral and politics, requires Musil’s essayism.
Rorty’s adoption of the essay form is itself, of course, an exercise in “essayism,” of
trying something new that runs against the grain of contemporary philosophy. It is not
a facile act of rebellion against established opinion but rather a deeply informed and
articulate rhetorical challenge to status quo thinking, aimed at getting us to be more
pragmatically liberal. His essays are, as Christopher Voparil suggests, a type of
Bildungsroman that both recommend and exemplify Rorty’s ethical ideal (2005). He
wants us (“we liberals”) to join him in adopting the pragmatic, essayistic disposition
that avoids dogmatism and accepts contingency, hopeful experimentalism, and the
commitment to perpetual conversation to find solutions to our problems. Becoming
more essayistic will bring us another step closer to liberal utopia.

Note

1 Isaiah Berlin comes to mind as another liberal philosopher who takes a similar approach to
the history of political thought and is both a renowned essayist and ignored by analytic phi-
losophers. It is no surprise that Rorty is a fan who cites Berlin’s work frequently. For a
discussion of Berlin as an essayist, see Ferrell (2012).

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