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.In his Nietzscheanhistory of culture, and in the philosophy of language heembraces, we see language as we now see evolution, as135 0465013678_Neuhaus.qxd:5.5x8.25sam.qxd 1/9/09 1:15 PM Page 136American Babylonnew forms of life constantly killing off old forms notto accomplish a higher purpose, but blindly. Languageis not a mirror of nature, it is not a medium betweenourselves and reality whether reality out there or re-ality deep within ourselves. There are no ahistorical,permanent, highest-level realities that can adjudicatelower-level conflicts.The traditional question is, Howdo you know that? But, says Rorty, about the mostimportant things we can only ask, Why do you talkthat way? If we are ironists, says Rorty, we talk as we do so thatwe, with Nietzsche, will be able to say of our lives, ThusI willed it! The traditional use of language is to expresssomething that was already there, whereas it is our at-tempt to use language so as to make something thatnever had been dreamed of before. The great fear is thefear of not being novel.We fear that our life s projectwill be lost or forgotten, but we fear much more that,even if our works are remembered, nobody will findanything distinctive in them. The tragedy is that onewill not have impressed one s mark on the language but,rather, will have spent one s life shoving about alreadycoined pieces. Our final language, if we live a successful life, provesour liberation from our inherited language.In that case one would have demonstrated that one was not a copy ora replica. Herein lies the superiority of the strong poet to the philosopher, and Rorty extends the title of poet far beyond those who write verse.Proust, Newton, Dar-win, Hegel, Heidegger, Derrida, and others are strongpoets who rebelled against death, death being the failureto be novel.The fear of the strong poets is the fear that136 0465013678_Neuhaus.qxd:5.5x8.25sam.qxd 1/9/09 1:15 PM Page 137An Age of Ironyone might end one s days in.a world one never made,an inherited world. The inherited philosophical world with which Rortyassociates himself began, he suggests, with Hegel. In-stead of constructing philosophical theories and arguingfor them, Rorty writes, he avoided argument by con-stantly shifting vocabularies, thereby changing the sub-ject. The critical contribution of Hegel is this: Inpractice, though not in theory, he dropped the idea ofgetting at the truth in favor of the idea of making thingsnew. (One may well wonder what Hegel would make ofsuch a claim, but my purpose here is to discuss notHegel but Rorty.) We are told that the young Hegel broke out of the philosophical sequence that runs fromPlato through Kant and began a tradition of ironistphilosophy which is continued in Nietzsche, Heideg-ger, and Derrida. The distinctive thing about thesephilosopher-poets is that they define their achievementby their relation to their predecessors rather than bytheir relation to the truth. It is nonsense, we are given to understand, to askabout the truth of this theory of ironism. The last thingthe ironist theorist wants or needs, says Rorty, is a the-ory of ironism. Indeed, the implication is that he can-not abide such a theory because such theories inevitablymake the ironist vulnerable to the traditional questionsabout truth. Ironist theory, Rorty writes, is thus a lad-der which is to be thrown away as soon as one has fig-ured out what it was that drove one s predecessors totheorize. If the ironist is to be able to say, Thus Iwilled it! he has to be able to sum up his life in his ownterms. He is trying to get out from under inherited137 0465013678_Neuhaus.qxd:5.5x8.25sam.qxd 1/9/09 1:15 PM Page 138American Babyloncontingencies and make his own contingencies, get outfrom under an old final vocabulary and fashion onewhich will be all his own. He refuses to be judged by history or even by the standards that he has created.Rather, says Rorty, the judge the ironist has in mindis himself. As strong poetry succeeds philosophy, so literarycriticism, broadly understood, is the most potent form ofstrong poetry.The ironist, of course, learns from and in-teracts with the canon of inherited vocabularies.Butthat, too, is a ladder to be kicked away. What [the iro-nist] is looking for is a redescription of that canon whichwill cause it to lose the power it has over him to breakthe spell cast by reading the books which make up thatcanon. It seems that even the memory of how he cameto his final vocabulary is intolerable.Rorty cites Heideg-ger s observation that a regard to metaphysics still pre-vails even in the intention to overcome metaphysics.Therefore our task is to cease all overcoming, and leavemetaphysics to itself
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