Transcendence over Cultural Politics, or Why I Don’t Agree with Rorty

have long fostered a healthy mutual disagreement. Dreyfus reads his favorite thinkers as pre-senting “the way things really are, ” whereas Rorty sees philosophers only as “recontextualizers—people who do not reveal the essential nature of anything, but simply tell you how things look when rearranged.”2 Such contextualizations might prove purposeful or even enlightening, but Rorty insists that we do not need to choose between them. If we choose between two descriptions and elevate one to the status of “the way things really are, ” then we misunderstand what we’re doing when we communicate. This position captures the essence of Rorty’s recent paper “Cultural Politics and the Question of the Existence of God. ” In his paper, Rorty argues for the ultimate conclusion that we should take our practices and beliefs for what they are— manifestations of sociopolitical aims—and quit trying to place them in a larger context that forms the background of all possible practices. Or, to put this thesis another way, cultural politics ought to replace ontology from the foundation up. A project to replace ontology and all of its affiliated areas of study sounds suspiciously like Rudolf Carnap’s Überwindung der Metaphysik—a project that will have Heideggerians and other like-minded philosophers u