 Rorty’s distinction between public and private is personified in the figure of the liberal ironist (CIS, chapter 4). She is a person who recognizes that her final vocabulary can be split into two parts, where the public part of her final vocabulary has to do with her responsibilities to others (justice), and the private part of her final vocabulary has to do with her responsibilities to herself (self-creation). Arguably, the liberal ironist is the type of person Rorty himself aspired to be, as evidenced by his autobiographical essay, “Trotsky and the Wild Orchids” (in PSH). There, he admits that much of his early philosophical career had been an attempt to reconcile public and private, but he “gradually decided that the whole idea of holding reality and justice in a single vision had been a mistake” (PSH, 12).