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.