Commentary The deconstructionist impulse comes in a variety of flavors, from bitter to cloyingly sweet, and it can be made to serve a wide range of philosophical outlooks. That is part of what makes it so dangerous. One of the most beguiling and influential American deconstructionists was the philosopher Richard Rorty (1931–2007). In his early career, Rorty was a serious analytic philosopher. From the late 1970s until his death, however, he increasingly busied himself explaining why philosophy must jettison its concern with outmoded things like truth and human nature. According to Rorty, philosophy should turn itself into a form of literature or—as he sometimes puts it—“fantasizing.” He was set on “blurring the literature-philosophy distinction and promoting the idea of a seamless, undifferentiated ‘general text,’” in which, say, Aristotle’s “Metaphysics,” a television program, and a French novel might coalesce into a fit object of hermeneutical scrutiny. Thus it is that Rorty …