In a 1980 essay, Richard Rorty offers a quick overview of the development of European thought from idealism through romanticism and pragmatism to what he calls textualism. The two ends of this development, idealism and textualism, are similar in various ways: both are antagonistic toward science, both claim that we never have unmediated contact with reality. and both use this point to undermine the mastery of science and to exalt the role of art. Rorty’s goal is to show describe “textualists as spiritual descendants of idealists, the species having adapted to a changed environment.”

The historic link between idealism and textualism is what Rorty labels “romanticism,” whihc he describes as “the thesis that what is most important for human life is not what propositions we believe but what vocabulary we use.” Romanticism in a sense inverts Kant’s conclusions in the third Critique , particularly the relative value of what Kant called “determinate judgment” and “reflective judgment.” Determinate judgment “ticks off instances of concepts by invoking common, public criteria”; for Kant, this process led to “knowledge,” but for romantics this process yields only consensus. Put differently, “Romanticism accepts Kant’s point that objectivity is conformity to rule, but changes the emphasis, so that objectivity becomes mere conformity to rule, merely going along with the crowd, merely consensus.”

Reflective judgment operates without rules, “search for concepts under which to group particular (or, by extension, of constructing new concepts which are ‘transgressive’ in that they do not fit under any of the old rules.” Kant says that aesthetic judgment, which cannot be brought under rules, is reflective, and cannot yield knowledge in the fullest sense. By contrast, romantics see reflective judgment as the kind of judgment that genuinely matters.

Rorty describes Kant’s overall project as an invention of philosophy as a “third alternative” to science on the one hand and religion on the other. Prior to Kant, philosophers made no significant distinction between pursuing philosophy and pursuing science, and science was the only means other than “superstition” to arrive at truth about the ultimate reality of things. Kant proposed that philosophy could play that role; transcendental philosophy was the “superscience” that gave real access to reality, and, looking down from the heights, the philosopher could set the boundaries for religion, morality, art and science.

Kant seemed to have solved the problem of finding a place for art and religion in a world that science seemed to describe so completely. Kant succeeded in part by borrowing some of the aura of scientificity from science. Transcendental philosophy went forward by argument, and thus has a scientific quality to it, yet it did not exclude religion, art, and the human sciences. Unlike the Platonist tradition, idealism after Kant presented itself as a scientific solution to problems that had in part been raised by, but not solved by, science.

With Hegel, idealism begins to fray and collapse, and lurch toward romanticism. Hegel “began treating the vocabulary of Galilean science as simply one among dozens of others in which the Idea chose to describe itself.” Hegel retained the terminology of “science,” but offered nothing like an argument for his conclusions. Pretending to extend the Kantian construction of a philosophical “superscience,” Hegel instead “invented a literary genre which lacked any trace of argumentation.” As metaphysical idealism, and with it philosophy, collapses, romanticism - the notion that the choice of vocabulary is the key question of human life - remained.

Hegel traced the history of philosophy, in Rorty’s telling, as a history of changing styles, vocabularies, and genres, each presenting itself with great confidence. And, overriding it all, each of these vocabularies and genres plays its part in the unfolding of Reason: Hegel “showed how the passion which sweeps through each generation serves the cunning of reason, providing the impulse which drives the generation to self-immolation and transformation.” Hegel’s description of the movement of thought works for literature, but not for science, and varied responses to Hegel are largely responsible for the “two cultures” that CP Snow identified several decades ago. Hegel anticipated, and laid the groundwork, for “modern literary culture,” which now claims mastery over science, philosophy, and religion.

Before this literary culture could be established as autonomous and supreme, a third, pragmatic, stage had to be reached. Nietzsche and William James replaced romanticism with pragmatism. Pragmatism involved a consistent abandonment of the Kantian pretense that philosophy gave access to the “true nature of reality”: “Instead of saying that the discovery of vocabularies could bring hidden secrets to light, they said that new ways of speaking could help get us what we want. Instead of hinting that literature might succeed philosophy as discoverer of ultimate reality, they gave up the notion of truth as correspondence to reality.” Philosophy was exactly what Kant had said science was: “the creation of useful or comforting pictures.” Like Marx, Nietzsche and James reduced metaphysics to psychology, but unlike Marx they offered no alternative superscience in place of transcendental philosophy. Kant had said that knowledge was a product of construction rather than discovery, but somehow exempted his own philosophy; Nietzsche and James admitted that they were constructing not discovering.

Paralleling this shift from romanticism to pragmatism was the rise of modernism in literary culture, a move to “textualism.” Modernists tried to depict a world devoid of what Nietzsche called “metaphysical comfort.” In reading texts, textualists push aside the question of what the author intended to signify, either investigating the text’s own internal workings in isolation (like New Critics) or employing a vocabulary other than the author’s to get more out of the text than the author intended, or his original audience could have understood.

The former, Rorty says, are “weak textualists,” still haunted by the correspondence view of truth and by the pursuit of a “right” interpretation; weak textualists see interpretation as a process of discovery. Strong textualists don’t find the distinction of discovery and making to be useful, and instead impose a vocabulary “on the text which may have nothing to do with any vocabulary used in the text or by its author, and seeing what happens.

Rorty finds little of value in the Derridean claim that “there is nothing outside the text.” In a strictly literal sense, it is just another metaphysical claim, a claim about the nature of ultimate reality. But it can also mean that “texts do not refer to nontexts.” Taken in this sense, however, Rorty sees little but “the old pragmatist chestnut that any specification of a referent is going to be in some vocabulary. Thus one is really comparing two descriptions of a thing rather than a description with the thing-in-itself.” This pragmatist claim, further “is just an expanded form of Kant’s slogan that ‘Intuitions without concepts are blind,” which, in turn, was just a sophisticated restatement of Berkeley’s ingenuous remark that ‘nothing can be like an idea except an idea.’” All are “merely misleading ways of saying that we shall not see reality plain, unmasked, naked to our gaze.” What textualists p rovide is not any fresh insight but “some splendid examples of the fact that the author of a text did not know a vocabulary in which his text can usefully be described.”