In contrast to his earlier work, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979), Rorty mostly abandons attempts to explain his theories in analytical terms and instead creates an alternate conceptual schema to that of the "Platonists" he rejects.

In his utopia, people would never discuss restrictive metaphysical generalities such as good, "moral", or "human nature", but would be allowed to communicate freely with each other on entirely subjective terms.

Rorty introduces a term that he believes effectively describes the status of a person holding the "axioms" set out in the first three chapters.

In Remembrance of Things Past, Proust almost perfectly exemplifies ironism by constantly recontextualizing and redefining the characters he meets along the way, thus preventing any particular final vocabulary from becoming especially salient.

Nietzsche is an ironist because he believes all truths to be contingent, but he tends to slip back into metaphysics, especially when discussing his superman.

Heidegger is an ironist because he has mostly rejected metaphysics and its conception of language as a means to an end, but his discussion of elementary words forces him to propose a "universal litany" (or "universal poem"),[4] that does not exist, because every great ironic "poet-thinker" (such as Nietzsche, Proust and Heidegger) has a very particular, subjective and contingent one.

In his The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, especially, Derrida free-associates about "theorizers" instead of theories, thus preventing him from discussing metaphysics at all.

Rorty furthers his distinction between public and private by classifying books into those "which help us become autonomous" and those "which help us become less cruel", and roughly dividing the latter group into "books which help us see the effects of social practices and institutions on others" and "those which help us see the effects of our private idiosyncrasies on others.

Metaphysicians, having little doubt about their final vocabularies, confuse private projects with the pleasure of relaxation, and hence dismiss, as not serious or merely aesthetic, not only those writers with no relevance to liberal hope, like Nietzsche and Derrida, but also those warning against the potential for cruelty inherent in the quest for autonomy, among which Rorty places Nabokov and Orwell, since "both of them dramatize the tension between private irony and liberal hope.

Rorty brings together their contrasting claims about art by saying that there is no such thing as "the writer" or "the nature of literature" (we can instead ask, "What purposes does this book serve?

As opposed to the non-obsessed and second-rate poet John Shade, they are as artistically gifted as Nabokov, selectively curious and cruel.

Likewise, there are the few subtle hints to the importance of Lolita's brother's death, that the reader is expected to connect, as opposed to Humbert, and that end up being stressed by the author in the Afterword.

In this chapter, Rorty argues that because humans tend to view morals as "we-statements" (e.g., "We Christians do not commit murder"), they find it easier to be cruel to those whom they can define as "them" (meaning, as "we").