…This is why Rorty championed the American Pragmatic tradition so heartily after having written Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. He understood Pragmatism to express a wholesale rejection of the belief that human beings are answerable to an authority higher than themselves. The Pragmatists echo Emerson's Romantic plea for "self-reliance," for a special kind of self-respect and self-responsibility that refuses to humble oneself before God, sacred customs, and self-proclaimed unimpeachable and indefeasible authorities.
In this, Pragmatism echoes Nietzsche, that great admirer of Emerson, who exhorted noble souls to "become who you already are" and, in bowing down to no one, transcend the merely human. While Rorty thought Nietzsche helpful and instructive regarding one's private aspirations, he was horrified by Nietzsche's anti-Liberal and anti-Democratic sentiments. Rorty insisted on the separation of the private and the public, between advancing your idiosyncratic loves and hopes and working to foster happiness and eliminate cruelty in the political community. Like Dewey, and unlike Nietzsche, Rorty accepted the Enlightenment value of using one's freedom responsibly, as oriented to improving the prospects for human happiness...
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