Engagement with Continental Philosophy

Heidegger, Derrida, and the Conversation of Mankind

10 min readSep 25, 2026

The Appropriation of Heidegger’s Critique of the Western Metaphysical Tradition

Rorty’s engagement with Heidegger began early in his career and remained one of the most consistent threads across four decades of writing, even as his assessment of Heidegger’s own political and philosophical failures grew sharper. What he took from Heidegger, most explicitly in the essays collected in Essays on Heidegger and Others, was the narrative structure of the history of Being, the account of Western philosophy since Plato as a sequence of successive attempts to specify the ultimate ground of beings, an attempt Heidegger called ontotheology and traced through the Aristotelian unmoved mover, the medieval God as first cause, the Cartesian subject as certain foundation, and finally the modern technological reduction of beings to standing reserve, resources awaiting exploitation. Rorty read this narrative as substantially correct as a piece of intellectual history and as compatible with, indeed as anticipating in its own vocabulary, the conclusions he had reached independently through Sellars, Quine, and Dewey: that the philosophical tradition’s search for a foundational vocabulary answerable to the intrinsic structure of reality was a specific and dispensable episode rather than an permanent feature of thought.

What Rorty refused to take from Heidegger was everything that gave the narrative its distinctively Heideggerian pathos. He rejected the suggestion that the history of metaphysics constitutes a single fated unfolding of Being that grants and withholds itself according to a logic beyond human control, regarding this as merely the mirror-of-nature picture reappearing in a more mystified and quasi-theological register, with Being substituted for the world as the authority to which thought must answer. He rejected equally the accompanying nostalgia for a lost pre-Socratic attunement to Being and the associated contempt for modern technological and democratic culture, arguing that Heidegger’s later writing on releasement and the fourfold amounted to a private, quasi-religious project of self-overcoming inappropriately proposed as a public philosophy. Most seriously, Rorty confronted Heidegger’s Nazism directly rather than treating it as separable from the philosophy, arguing in essays such as “Taking Philosophy Seriously” that Heidegger’s own account of the essential unity of a thinker’s ideas made this separation impossible on Heidegger’s own terms, and that the episode illustrates a genuine hazard in any philosophy, his own included, that takes itself to have access to a truth deep enough to license contempt for liberal democratic institutions. His considered verdict divided Heidegger into a private ironist of extraordinary inventiveness, comparable to Proust or Nietzsche in the vocabulary he found for self-description, and a public thinker whose political judgment should carry no authority whatsoever.

The Reading of Derrida and Deconstruction as Continuous with Pragmatism

Rorty’s reading of Derrida evolved substantially over time and became one of the most contested appropriations in his corpus. In earlier essays such as “Philosophy as a Kind of Writing,” he treated Derrida alongside Heidegger as a philosopher engaged in the essentially textual project of showing that no metaphysical vocabulary can achieve the self-grounding closure it seeks, since every text can be shown, through attention to its own metaphors and margins, to undermine the very oppositions on which its claims to a privileged center depend. This early reading emphasized continuity between deconstruction and the pragmatist critique of foundationalism, treating différance and the trace as further, more technically elaborate ways of making the point that Sellars and Quine had made in analytic idiom: that no term can carry meaning or reference by itself, independent of its differential relations to other terms, and therefore that no vocabulary can be grounded in an unmediated presence.

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By the time of Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity and the essay “Deconstruction and Circumvention,” Rorty had shifted to a more explicitly private reading of the later Derrida, particularly the playful, autobiographical, punning texts such as Glas and The Post Card. He argued that Derrida in this later manner should be read not as offering an argument or a method with public application, contrary to how deconstruction was frequently practiced in American literature departments, but as engaged in a project of self-creation continuous with Nietzsche’s and Bloom’s strong poets, using inherited philosophical vocabulary as raw material for an idiosyncratic and untranslatable private fantasy life. On this reading, texts like Glas, which interweaves readings of Hegel and Genet in parallel columns, are not contributions to argument about presence and absence but literary performances whose interest lies in their inventiveness rather than in any thesis they might be thought to establish, and Rorty explicitly denied that deconstruction supplies, or was intended by Derrida to supply, a method that could be applied to texts in general to yield determinate critical results. This reading provoked strong objections from literary theorists who had built research programs on treating deconstruction as a rigorous critical method, and from philosophers including Derrida’s own translators and closest readers, who argued that Rorty’s privatization ignored the ethical and political stakes Derrida increasingly emphasized in his own later work on justice, hospitality, and the gift.

The Rejection of the Analytic–Continental Divide

Rorty regarded the institutional and stylistic split between analytic and continental philosophy as a sociological artifact of mid-twentieth-century academic life rather than a difference in the seriousness or rigor of the work produced on either side. He argued that the two traditions differ chiefly in canon, in preferred genres of writing, and in the audiences they imagine themselves addressing, with analytic philosophy modeling itself on the natural sciences and continental philosophy modeling itself on literature and cultural criticism, but that neither model licenses a claim to superior access to truth once the correspondence picture underlying both scientistic and hermeneutic self-images has been abandoned. His own writing practice enacted this rejection more than it argued for it, moving within single essays between technical discussion of Davidson’s theory of radical interpretation and readings of Proust or Milan Kundera without marking any change of philosophical register, a practice that drew accusations of dilettantism from specialists on both sides who felt their respective traditions had been simplified for the sake of the comparison. Rorty’s response was that the demand for specialist rigor within a single tradition is itself a symptom of the professionalization he wished to resist, and that a philosophy conceived as cultural criticism has no reason to respect disciplinary boundaries that exist for administrative rather than intellectual reasons.

Philosophy as Edifying Conversation Rather Than Problem-Solving

The concept that ties Rorty’s engagement with continental philosophy back to his central epistemological arguments is the distinction, introduced in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, between systematic and edifying philosophy. Systematic philosophy, whether in its analytic or continental form, aims to solve problems by constructing a theory that will command the assent of all sufficiently careful inquirers, and Rorty treated Husserlian phenomenology’s search for an apodictic foundation in transcendental consciousness as no less systematic in this sense than logical positivism’s search for protocol sentences. Edifying philosophy, by contrast, has no problems to solve and no theory to offer; its aim, borrowed explicitly from Gadamer’s hermeneutics, is to keep a conversation going, to prevent any single vocabulary, scientific, religious, or philosophical, from closing off the possibility of redescription. Rorty explicitly named Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Dewey as his three edifying philosophers, arguing that each began his career attempting a systematic project, the Tractatus, Being and Time, and Dewey’s early Hegelian idealism respectively, and arrived through internal difficulties at an edifying practice that abandoned the ambition of a final theory in favor of therapeutic or genealogical engagement with the tradition. This framework allowed Rorty to read Gadamer’s Truth and Method, and its central concept of the fusion of horizons in genuine conversation, as offering the closest continental analogue to his own conversational conception of justification, an affinity he acknowledged and Gadamer himself later commented on directly.

Critiques from Both Analytic and Continental Sides

The reception of Rorty’s continental engagement was, if anything, more hostile than the reception of his critique of analytic epistemology, since it managed to alienate readers on both sides simultaneously. Analytic critics, prominently including Ernest Gellner and John Searle, dismissed his treatment of Heidegger and Derrida as an indulgence unbecoming a philosopher trained in rigorous argument, and some suggested that Rorty’s later prose style, increasingly essayistic and aphoristic, was itself a symptom of the abandonment of standards his arguments recommended. From the continental side, the objections were more substantive and more damaging to the specific readings Rorty offered. Jürgen Habermas argued at length, in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity and in his direct exchanges with Rorty, that both Heidegger and Derrida retain a normative dimension, a critique of instrumental reason and a concern with justice respectively, that Rorty’s ironist reading systematically flattens into private aestheticism, thereby depoliticizing thinkers who intended their work to have public consequences. Derrida’s own later statements, along with the responses of close readers such as Simon Critchley, pushed back specifically against Rorty’s privatization, arguing that the concepts of justice and the undeconstructible that structure Derrida’s writing from the mid-1980s onward, particularly in Force of Law, make an ethical and political claim that cannot be assimilated to Rorty’s model of self-creation without significant loss. Even philosophers broadly sympathetic to Rorty’s anti-foundationalism, including Charles Taylor, argued that his reading of Heidegger and Gadamer underestimated the extent to which hermeneutic understanding, on their own accounts, remains answerable to something beyond mere conversational utility, namely the disclosure of a subject matter that exceeds any single interpreter’s vocabulary.

Influence on Literary Theory, Cultural Studies, and Postmodern Thought

Despite, or perhaps because of, the controversy it generated, Rorty’s engagement with continental philosophy exercised substantial influence on American literary theory and cultural studies from the 1980s onward, functioning as one of the principal channels through which deconstruction, Foucauldian genealogy, and Gadamerian hermeneutics were naturalized within English-speaking humanities departments already familiar with pragmatist vocabulary. His insistence that literary and philosophical texts be read for the vocabularies they make available rather than for the truths they establish helped legitimate the ethical and rhetorical turn in literary criticism associated with figures such as J. Hillis Miller and Barbara Johnson, even where those critics rejected Rorty’s specific privatization of Derrida. His broader argument that the analytic-continental divide is a matter of institutional history rather than philosophical substance anticipated, and arguably helped enable, the increasing methodological pluralism of philosophy departments in the decades after his death, visible in the willingness of younger philosophers trained analytically to engage seriously with Foucault, Merleau-Ponty, and Gadamer without treating such engagement as a departure from rigor.

Rorty’s Distinctive American Reading of European Philosophy

What unifies Rorty’s treatment of Heidegger, Derrida, and Gadamer, and what most sharply distinguishes it from European scholarship on the same figures, is a consistently pragmatist and often explicitly national inflection. Rorty read European philosophy through the lens of Dewey and James, treating the crisis of foundations that preoccupied Husserl and Heidegger as fundamentally the same crisis that American pragmatism had already diagnosed and, in his view, more successfully resolved by declining to mourn the loss of foundations that European philosophy continued, on his reading, to treat as a tragedy. This produced a characteristically optimistic and domesticating appropriation, in which the most unsettling conclusions of continental thought, the death of the subject, the closure of metaphysics, the withdrawal of Being, were translated into the comparatively cheerful register of pragmatist fallibilism and social hope, an operation European commentators frequently described as a flattening of tragic or radical elements into a complacent liberal optimism foreign to the original texts. Rorty accepted much of this description as accurate rather than as a criticism, maintaining that the American refusal to treat the loss of metaphysical foundations as a catastrophe was precisely the intellectual contribution pragmatism had to offer a European tradition still, in his estimation, working through a mourning process that had never been necessary in the first place.