Metaphysics wants to know what, ultimately, exists. What is true. What is good. For metaphysics, philosophy’s ultimate aim is a complete account of reality, as it is in itself.  Richard Rorty made a name for himself by claiming that this metaphysical impulse of mirroring the world is a philosophical delusion that’s best left behind. Revisiting the Platonic dispute between poetry and philosophy, Rorty suggested philosophers take a leaf out of the poets’ book, seeing their work as radically unconstrained, except by each other. This move would give philosophers more agency and at the same time more democratic accountability, writes Elin Danielsen Huckerby.

This is the fifth instalment in our series The Return of Metaphysics, in partnership with the Essentia Foundation. Read the series' previous articles The Return of Metaphysics: Hegel vs Kant, The Return of Idealism: Hegel vs Russell,  Derrida and the trouble with metaphysics, and The Return of Metaphysics: Russell and Realism.

Richard Rorty, one of the most influential and debated philosophers of the twentieth century, wanted us to leave metaphysics behind. Metaphysics asks questions about the Nature of Things, of how things ultimately hang together. It proceeds from the presumption that there are first-order, philosophical problems, such as ‘what is true?’, or ‘what is right?’, ‘what is good?’. And thus, it hinges on the belief that we can answer such underlying questions – it posits that reason, or rationality, or the right understanding of language will let us develop descriptions that converge on reality itself, that will mirror it in language. Rorty does not think we can do this. Not because we cannot properly capture such fundamentals in language, but because there are, on his view, no essences to discover – there is nothing to converge on, at least not in the essentialist sense metaphysics supposes.