Philosophy Americana: Making Philosophy at Home in American Culture (American Philosophy)

philosophy americana ................. 15741$ $$FM 02-13-06 14:42:06 PS PAGE i ................. 15741$ $$FM 0...

Author: Douglas Anderson

36 downloads 1057 Views 1MB Size Report

This content was uploaded by our users and we assume good faith they have the permission to share this book. If you own the copyright to this book and it is wrongfully on our website, we offer a simple DMCA procedure to remove your content from our site. Start by pressing the button below!
Report copyright / DMCA form

DOWNLOAD PDF

philosophy americana

................. 15741$

$$FM

02-13-06 14:42:06

PS

PAGE i

................. 15741$

$$FM

02-13-06 14:42:06

PS

PAGE ii

philosophy americana Making Philosophy at Home in American Culture

douglas r. anderson

fordham u niversity press

................. 15741$

$$FM

new y ork

02-13-06 14:42:06

PS

2006

PAGE iii

Copyright 䉷 2006 Fordham University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means— electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. American Philosophy Series, No. 18 ISSN 1073-2764 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Anderson, Douglas R. Philosophy Americana : making philosophy at home in American culture / Douglas R. Anderson. — 1st ed. p. cm. — (American philosophy series ; no. 18) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8232-2550-X (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 0-8232-2551-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Philosophy, American—20th century. 2. Unites States— Civilization—20th century. I. Title. II. Series B936.A53 2006 191—dc22 Printed in the United States of America 07 06 5 4 3 2 1 First edition

................. 15741$

$$FM

02-13-06 14:42:06

PS

PAGE iv

Contents

Acknowledgments vii Preface ix Introduction: Inheritance, Teaching, and the Insane Angels of American Culture: Our Cultural Invisibility 1

1

Some Preliminary Remarks on the Origins of Pragmatism

19

2

Royce, Philosophy, and Wandering: A Job Description

33

3

Wilderness as Philosophical Home

50

4

Working Certainty and Deweyan Wisdom

65

5

Wildness as Political Act

85

6

‘‘After All, He’s Just a Man’’: The Wild Side of Life in Country Music

94

William James and the Wild Beasts of the Philosophical Desert

112

8

John Dewey’s Sensible Mysticism

129

9

‘‘Born to Run’’: Male Mysticism on the Road

142

Philosophy as Teaching: James’s ‘‘Knight Errant,’’ Thomas Davidson

155

Learning and Teaching: Gambling, Love, and Growth (with Michael Ventimiglia)

167

Emerson’s Platonizing of American Thought

188

7

10 11 12

{ v }

................. 15741$

CNTS

02-13-06 14:42:09

PS

PAGE v

c ontents

vi

13

American Loss in Cavell’s Emerson

206

14

Emerson and Kerouac: Grievous Angels of Hope and Loss

221

Pragmatic Intellectuals: Facing Loss in the Spirit of American Philosophy

234

15

Notes 255 Bibliography 281 Index 289

................. 15741$

CNTS

02-13-06 14:42:09

PS

PAGE vi

Acknowledgments

I

would like to thank the following journals for permission to reprint here, in whole or in part, articles that were previously published. ‘‘Philosophy as Teaching: James’s ‘Knight Errant’ ’’ appeared in The Journal of Speculative Philosophy in fall 2004. ‘‘Unrespectability and the Wild Beasts of the Philosophical Desert’’ appeared in the same journal in winter 2003. ‘‘Creative Teachers: Risk, Responsibility, and Love’’ was published in Journal of Education in 2002. An essay on Thoreau, entitled ‘‘Wildness as Political Act,’’ appeared in Personalist Forum in spring 2000. Finally, ‘‘American Loss in Cavell’s Emerson’’ was published by the Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society in winter 1993. I would like also to thank David O’Hara for the cover photography and Gary Green for the generous use of his College Heights Exxon station.

{ vi i }

................. 15741$

$ACK

02-13-06 14:42:11

PS

PAGE vii

................. 15741$

$ACK

02-13-06 14:42:12

PS

PAGE viii

Preface

A

lthough the classical American philosophers published books, the great majority of these were collections of essays. Indeed, with the exception of Royce, who worked in a variety of ways, the American philosophical tradition is a tradition of essays, talks, and lectures collected into single volumes. Philosophy Americana is written with this tradition in mind. Nevertheless, a book of essays has its own kind of economy. Though I hope that each essay can stand alone, I also hope that they work together to provide a landscape or at least a horizon of my own philosophical outlook. The one generic theme I might venture as unifying the essays is the relationship between American philosophy and other features of American culture. I am interested in how philosophers work in this culture. I employ the term ‘‘Americana’’ to draw a rough analogy to the musical genre of the same name. Americana music is twice ‘‘American.’’ It is rooted in the traditional musical practices of the immigrants to the United States: blues, gospel, Celtic, folk, country, Tex-Mex, swing, bluegrass, old-time, rock and roll, reggae, and, I would add, more recently, rap and hip-hop. No doubt there are some category mistakes in this list, but part of the import of ‘‘Americana music’’ is precisely its indeterminateness, and thus its openness to new and innovative musical styles. At the same time, Americana music, especially in its lyrical content, tells us much about our American culture—about ourselves. In Philosophy Americana I aim at doing something similar, drawing on the philosophical practices of American thinkers and addressing issues that arise in popular culture. { ix }

................. 15741$

PREF

02-13-06 14:42:15

PS

PAGE ix

prefac e

x

My overall concern is what it means to think philosophically in the United States and under the influence of its particular history. To get at this, I have aligned my essays somewhat thematically. The first and last essays consider features of pragmatism in its origin and in its future import. Between these bookends, the chapters focus on several issues in serial order: the impact of our experiences of itinerancy and wilderness on philosophical practice; the question of practical wisdom in our political actions; the retrieval of religiosity from outside the bounds of religions; the question of the relationship between philosophy and teaching; and finally, in a reflexive way, the question of how philosophy, given the long-standing quarrel between the poets and the philosophers, might find itself entangled with American poetic and literary practices. Throughout the work, I am also interested in our experiences of risk, loss, possibility, failure, and hope. I am well aware that I have let some tensions stand instead of bringing the whole to a consummatory unity. Attentive readers will surely note the ambivalence in my reading of the work of John Dewey. I have not made up my mind on all the issues at hand, and I actually find myself confronting myself on various interpretations of history and philosophy. Believing in Emerson’s claim that a foolish consistency is a ‘‘hobgoblin,’’ I have opted simply to say what I think and to allow the tensions their own transitory existence. Though I am perhaps coining the phrase ‘‘philosophy Americana,’’ I certainly do not lay claim to creating this way of philosophizing. Emerson, Fuller, and Thoreau stand out as early exemplars of the kind of philosophical writing and attitude I have in mind. William James, Thomas Davidson, and John Dewey occasionally wrote in a similar vein. More recently, a number of writers have worked this field and influenced my own way of doing things. Among these are two thinkers who are not so well known outside of a small circle: Henry Bugbee and my former teacher and colleague, John Anderson. Both openly worked against the grain of Anglo-American analytic thought from the 1950s through the 1970s. In the present generation, a variety of well-known thinkers who are, strictly speaking, not within the fold of American philosophy, have made a difference to my work.

................. 15741$

PREF

02-13-06 14:42:15

PS

PAGE x

prefac e

xi

Among these I would include Gloria Anzalduá, Stanley Cavell, Annie Dillard, bell hooks, Norman Maclean, and Robert Pirsig. Each brings a unique voice and literary approach to the kinds of questions that lovers of wisdom have always asked. From within the American tradition I am indebted to John E. Smith’s writings on experience and religion; to Bruce Wilshire’s discussions of education, addiction, and theater; and to my good friend Crispin Sartwell’s various works on popular music, race, and aesthetics. Finally, in both style and content, my deepest debt is to the essay writing of John J. McDermott. McDermott brings passion to philosophical inquiry with no loss of intellectual integrity and with the finest attention to what William James called the thickness of experience. All of the above—and many whom I have not mentioned—I include in what I take to be the natural history of philosophy Americana. Before turning to the project at hand, two important caveats are in order. First, I am well aware that ‘‘America’’ means more than the United States. Nevertheless, because I focus on what has come to be called ‘‘American philosophy,’’ I employ the terms ‘‘America’’ and ‘‘American’’ in these essays in their narrower sense. Second, I recognize that the essays at hand focus closely on the male, white version of American philosophy—in part this is done simply to make a presentation of my own history and angle of vision. However, I take this approach also because I have in mind a second volume that will deal with philosophical voices and traditions in the Americas that have been marginalized or simply neglected—in short, I have in mind a much broader scope for philosophy Americana. It is my hope that the present book will define a place from which I can enter into conversations with those whose histories, affinities, and commitments will ask questions of my own philosophical take on things. I am aware that much has been and is being done to bring visibility to these other perspectives and histories, and I anticipate drawing on that work when the time comes.

................. 15741$

PREF

02-13-06 14:42:15

PS

PAGE xi

................. 15741$

PREF

02-13-06 14:42:15

PS

PAGE xii

introduction

inheritance, t e a c h i n g, a n d t h e i n s a n e angels of american culture Our Cultural Invisibility

A

merica does not think much of its philosophers. Philosophy lives a ghostly life or, often, one of mistaken identity. We do not teach philosophy in our high schools. A majority in America have no idea what philosophy is about or why it might be interesting, if not important. Folks commonly think philosophers are psychological counselors. This may seem strange or simply false to those whose lives have been rooted in academic or professional settings, but it is a commonplace in rural, laboring, underclass, and unschooled settings. This should not be surprising, since our bookstore chains usually fill their ‘‘Philosophy’’ sections with a smattering of Hegel and Locke and a large dose of California Zen, self-help, and spirituality books. We professional philosophers joke about this phenomenon but don’t take seriously enough what it says about our own invisibility. Most philosophers in America, for better or worse, are also teachers. It is important, therefore, to notice also that teachers, like philosophers, have been shifted toward the edge of our culture. In the { 1 }

................. 15741$

INTR

02-13-06 14:42:17

PS

PAGE 1

2

philosophy americ ana

schools and universities, teachers have ‘‘achieved’’ the status of day laborers whose routines are administered more often than not by those who cannot teach well and who have no experiential sense of the art of or the importance of teaching. We have established a hierarchical structure that buries teachers beneath principals, department chairpersons, superintendents, local school boards, state school boards, college vice presidents, and state and federal mandates. We have completely lost sight of John Dewey’s warning: ‘‘Too rarely is the individual teacher so free from the dictation of authoritative supervisor, textbook on methods, prescribed course of study, etc., that he can let his mind come to close quarters with the pupil’s mind and the subject matter’’ (MW, 9:116).1 Whatever lip service administrators give to teaching is systematically and routinely withdrawn by our institutional structures. Except for the moments when, despite the bureaucratic constraints, it ‘‘works’’ in the classroom, the life of teaching in America is becoming a life of ‘‘quiet desperation.’’ Even within the culture of university intellectuals, philosophers and teachers have no great standing. Philosophers have been all but excommunicated from fields in which they have historically made a significant difference: economics, politics, and education. This has been accomplished on the assumption that all the basic questions in these disciplines have been settled once and for all. All that is left to do in these fields is to conduct quantitative analyses of behavior; their humanistic features have for the most part been eliminated. Moreover, in higher education, teaching is steadily becoming the necessary evil tied to the life of research and scholarship. One gets release time from teaching as a reward for research production, but one does not get release time from research for excellence in teaching. Indeed, some teaching awards come with release time from teaching. Teaching, furthermore, is presently used in universities as a ‘‘punishment’’ for a drop in research production. Excellence in teaching is a bonus for the university, but is no longer the essence of its work despite the fact that it is nominally what the university’s ‘‘consumers’’—that is, its undergraduate students—are paying for.

................. 15741$

INTR

02-13-06 14:42:17

PS

PAGE 2

introduc tion

3

When I think about the fact of philosophy’s invisibility, I wonder where philosophers in America come from. We do hire extensively from other regions of the world (Europe, England, Canada, and Australia), but the rest come from the United States—from the East, South, Midwest; from cities, towns, and even farms. In one sense, philosophers in the United States come from everywhere—from all geographical areas and from a variety of backgrounds, though white, male, and upper-middle-class remain dominant traits. What brings us to philosophy seems to be largely accidental. We have religious, political, or social interests that find a voice in philosophical history and discourse. And so we take it up, some of us because the agonistic argumentation is exciting, some because of the mathematical pleasures of analysis, some because philosophy helps us make cases for our beliefs, some for the pursuit of truth or persuasion, and some because philosophy seems to have some bearing on the conduct of life. And some encounter philosophy purely by accident, as did one student at Texas A & M University. He and a friend signed up for a course labeled INTELHIST, thinking it was a course dealing with the history of intelligence agencies such as the CIA and KGB. When they found out the course was a philosophically oriented course in intellectual history, the friend dropped out and the student was on his way to a life of philosophy. I suspect the tychistic element in this story is familiar to many of us.2 Philosophy draws innately intelligent people—those with high SAT and GRE scores, skilled writers and mathematicians, and many who are artistically inclined. Philosophers in America are thus peculiar creatures: bright, strong-willed, occasionally arrogant, often insecure, often well-intentioned, and quite often extremely productive as writers and teachers. Yet, because they produce little or nothing that speaks directly to the souls or material needs of ordinary Americans, they are almost always unrecognized and underappreciated. As Emerson put it in his essay ‘‘History,’’ ‘‘It seems as if heaven had sent its insane angels into our world as to an asylum and here they will break out in their native music and utter at intervals the words they have heard in heaven; then the mad fit returns and they mope and wallow like dogs’’ (CW, 1:273).3 We phi-

................. 15741$

INTR

02-13-06 14:42:18

PS

PAGE 3

4


losophers do say a great deal, and we are passionate in our beliefs; occasionally we speak with insight and a musical freedom. But ultimately we, too, mope and wallow simply because we have no audience. We blame the audience for their inattention, and we are partially justified in this. But it is a two-way street. We have to worry when, as John McDermott notes, we are considered unphilosophical by our colleagues if we happen to be understood by our own culture.4 But, as McDermott then points out, being understood doesn’t entail being intellectually shallow. Instead, it is precisely the quest for human depth and breadth that we philosophers hope to communicate and to inspire. ‘‘Philosophy in America,’’ as most philosophers know, is not the same as ‘‘American philosophy.’’ And, though I am ultimately interested in both, it is the latter with which I am primarily concerned in this book. American philosophy is a history—perhaps a natural history—of ideas, persons, and actions that begins, roughly speaking, with the writings of the Mathers and Jonathan Edwards and runs through to the present. It is ‘‘American’’ not for jingoistic reasons, but because it is autochthonous—it grows out of the New World environment and experience. It is ‘‘American’’ in part because it is not native. As Scott Pratt and others are now showing, American Indian thought is both complex and philosophical, but in origin it is pre– Vespucci and thus pre–American.5 Such native philosophy plays no overt role in this text, but it should be kept in mind as an important indigenous forerunner of and influence on what I am calling ‘‘American philosophy.’’ The various thinkers in the tradition marked as American philosophy do not agree on everything, but there is nevertheless, as McDermott puts it, a ‘‘take’’ that they share—a general outlook regarding the importance of looking forward, the significance of the aesthetic dimensions of experience, the dialectical yet spontaneous interplay of individual and community, the possibility of perceiving meaning and relations and not just discrete atoms of experience, and the fundamental importance of finding and creating the extraordinary in the ordinary. Many philosophers in America nei-

................. 15741$

INTR

02-13-06 14:42:18

PS

PAGE 4

introduc tion

5

ther share nor appreciate this ‘‘take’’; for better or worse, they are not American philosophers in the sense I propose. Part of the outlook of American philosophy is the belief that philosophy can be democratic in a rough-and-ready sense. That is, American culture can be brought to philosophy if we philosophers will meet it halfway. Jefferson and Franklin both spoke philosophically while remaining fully engaged politically and practically. Emerson wrote ‘‘American Scholar’’ not only to emancipate our thought from Continental dominance but also to show that the scholar can be both more and less than a scholar. He worried about the scholar in ‘‘the degenerate state, when the victim of society; he tends to become a mere thinker, or still worse, the parrot of other men’s thinking.’’6 Under this rough sense of democracy, philosophical practice is not limited to white males. Margaret Fuller, a founder of New England Transcendentalism and long neglected as a philosopher, gave articulate voice to the already experienced philosophical abilities of women. At the same time, she indicated that these same abilities were resident in Native American and African American cultures. Later the pragmatists—especially James and Dewey—took the Emersonian democratic directive seriously and sought to have American philosophy deal with the everyday experiences from which its questions emerged. They tried to keep philosophy alive beyond its academic setting. James openly proclaimed essays in ‘‘popular philosophy,’’ adopting a rubric that he knew would provoke a negative response from other philosophers. And Dewey, whose democratic outlook led him to seek the possibilities in each person through education, both early and late in his career described democracy not as an abstract political discourse but as a personal attitude and way of life. Despite the successes of this democratic take on things, American philosophy has lived with residual and recalcitrant blindnesses. As Fuller noted, it is men—even when they try to help—who have left feminism with a much too long gestation period in American culture. The same must be said for all the other neglected intellectual and artistic cultures that flourish within and around the United States.

................. 15741$

INTR

02-13-06 14:42:18

PS

PAGE 5

6


Because of its basic democratic outlook—now extended to include thinkers from all cultural backgrounds—American philosophy is implicitly interested in where we, all of us, come from. As American feminist and critic bell hooks makes abundantly clear in Yearning, we all arrive at philosophy or intellectual life with a history, some sort of on-the-way identity, together with interests, aims, hopes, aversions, and resentments. Her essays impress us with their autobiographical self-awareness in the absence of self-engrossment or narcissism. For her, philosophy does not mean leaving experience behind to enter a mathematical or linguistic world, nor does it mean donning the clothing, style, and accoutrements of a European intellectual. Philosophy must develop through one’s experiences. It is therefore refreshing when, in ‘‘Representing Whiteness,’’ hooks proclaims that her initial response to Wim Wenders’s ‘‘Wings of Desire’’ was to want to laugh.7 She is an intellectual at home in her world—even when that world is most threatening, unsettling, and recalcitrant. To accomplish this, she attends to her experiential origins as closely as she does to her sources of scholarship. As hooks both suggests and illustrates, within the trajectory of thinking in the United States, American philosophers all have their own takes, their idiosyncratic insane angelness, as they make their accidental and fated encounters with philosophy. In Emersonian language, each of us has an angle of vision. My own take within the broader outlook of American philosophy is that we should not abandon our angles of vision and our histories as we apprentice to the philosophical trade. This is certainly not a novel idea within the American tradition. Interestingly, within the pragmatic tradition, it was Charles Peirce, whose work is most traditionally oriented, who explicitly defended the claim that philosophers should describe themselves to their readers. ‘‘The reader,’’ he said, ‘‘has a right to know how the author’s opinions were formed’’ (CP, 1:3).8 For Peirce, philosophy is a historical conversation, and a key piece of this semiotic process is understanding the place from which one speaks (see MS 842). Thus, if one has grown up with Beethoven and Aaron Copland, one should maintain their acquaintance. So, too, if one has grown up

................. 15741$

INTR

02-13-06 14:42:18

PS

PAGE 6

introduc tion

7

on the Ramones and Blondie, on the Temptations and the Shirelles, on R.E.M. and Matchbox 20, or on Thelonius Monk and Charlie Parker. These are not to be abandoned at the doorstep of philosophy. We need to keep them with us to inform, instruct, and be transformed by our philosophical lives. All of these features of our experiences help constitute the very language of outlooks on the world. As Gloria Anzalduá drives home to us time and again in Borderlands, our experiential language, which both transforms and is transformed, is a kind of home for each of us. This is more apparent to her than to those of us in the dominant culture precisely because of her other ‘‘homelessness’’ as ‘‘mestiza chicana’’: I remember being caught speaking Spanish at recess—that was good for three licks on the knuckles with a sharp ruler. I remember being sent to the corner of the classroom for ‘‘talking back’’ to the Anglo teacher when all I was trying to do was tell her how to pronounce my name. If you want to be American, speak ‘‘American.’’ If you don’t like it, go back to Mexico where you belong.9

This maintenance of our experiential home, it seems to me, is a sort of baseline for what I am calling philosophy Americana. For those of us in dominant sectors of this culture, such maintenance is reasonably easy but needs to be undertaken precisely because we often forget that ours is only one dimension of ‘‘America.’’ For those like Anzalduá who are not in the dominant sectors, such maintenance is always a difficult and politically oppositional task, but a task the rest of us, through listening, can come to make easier: I will no longer be made to feel ashamed of existing. I will have my voice: Indian, Spanish, white. I will have my serpent’s tongue—my woman’s voice, my sexual voice, my poet’s voice. I will overcome the tradition of silence.10

Philosophy Americana will thrive only insofar as there is a genuine conversation among our philosophical outlooks, a conversation in which we listen closely not only to each other’s arguments, but also to the stories we tell about and from the perspectives of our experiential homes.

................. 15741$

INTR

02-13-06 14:42:19

PS

PAGE 7

8


Acknowledging Inheritance In the opening paragraph of ‘‘Nominalist and Realist,’’ Emerson spoke an experiential truth: ‘‘I cannot often enough say, that a man is only a relative and representative nature. Each is a hint of the truth, but far enough from being that truth, which he [or she] yet quite newly and inevitably suggests to us’’ (CW, 3:133). If we embrace our inheritances individually, American philosophy will continue to reawaken itself. It will both imbibe and express, from our representative angles of vision, the richness of our own history and culture, the depth of our despairs and the wealth of our expectations. Margaret Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century met with ridicule and resistance in professional philosophical circles. But it was spoken directly from her experience and it spoke honestly of her own possibilities. As Donna Dickenson points out, Emerson’s ‘‘Nature (1836) took seven years to clear an edition of 500 copies. Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century sold out an edition twice that size in one week.’’11 It was popular philosophy because it captured and expressed experiences lived by many women of the nineteenth century, and for the same reasons it has become important philosophy. We now take Fuller’s awakening call seriously across the culture, even if we do not yet read her work as often as we should, or meet her demands. As noted earlier, American philosophers and philosophers in America, just as the culture at large, have been blind to a variety of representative perspectives and have left a number of needs unattended. Only recently have we really begun to believe that American philosophy north of Mexico speaks Spanish. In 1980 Spanish was not recognized in most graduate programs in philosophy in the United States as a legitimate philosophical language. Only Greek, Latin, German, and French were acceptable. Fond as I am of these languages and their philosophical importance, the exclusion of Spanish, especially in our culture, was more sin than mistake. Not only did we overlook the significant work of Unamuno and Ortega y Gasset, but we completely ignored and, for the most part, continue to ignore a wealth of aesthetic and political writings from Central and South

................. 15741$

INTR

02-13-06 14:42:19

PS

PAGE 8

introduc tion

9

America. Moreover, a large part of Hispanic thought and experience in the United States was rendered invisible to philosophy in America. For philosophy Americana, Spanish must become a required subject. We need to learn Spanish just as we need to learn rural and urban vernacular speech to grasp more of the breadth and depth of our cultural outlooks—our various autochthonous responses to this land. We learn these languages, again, because someone lives in them and is at home in them—they are the bearers of experience even if language itself is not fully adequate to experience. ‘‘By the end of this [the twentieth] century, Spanish speakers will comprise the biggest minority group in the U.S.,’’ says Anzalduá, ‘‘a country whose students in high schools and colleges are encouraged to take French classes because French is considered more ‘cultured.’ ’’12 The force of Anzalduá’s argument is grounded in the experiences she has suffered. Bringing one’s own experience into philosophical reflection nevertheless bears several dangers. It can easily become self-engrossed, self-serving, or even maudlin. It can distract our focus from argumentation and structure in such a way as to become merely descriptive, to be uninstructive. Moreover, as we know, it can become exclusionary, suggesting that the personal version of experience has a corner on the market of ideal experiences. Such were common complaints against pragmatism at the outset of the twentieth century. What those who complained failed to recognize was the cultural embeddedness of and their personal commitment to their own versions of philosophy. As Dewey notes, ‘‘It is an old story that philosophers, in common with theologians and social theorists, are as sure that personal habits and interests shape their opponents’ doctrines as they are that their own beliefs are ‘absolutely’ universal and objective in quality’’ (MW, 4:113). Personal experience does not validate or invalidate beliefs, but it is the place from which they arise and the place to which they return. Though I hope to avoid these failures of hubris and reductionism, I remain fallible and fallibilistic. My hope is to build out from experience; to be inclusive, not exclusive. But inclusion itself must be launched from somewhere—to try to be neutral or to try to repress one’s experiential origins strikes me as an exercise in bad

................. 15741$

INTR

02-13-06 14:42:19

PS

PAGE 9

10


faith, the very thing that will undermine any philosophical outlook. No particular experience can include all other experiences, but in establishing one’s angle of vision, one establishes the premises for reaching out toward others’ experiences, for creating communication. Not a casual conversation but a thick exchange of thought and feeling. Again, it seems to me that it is precisely bell hooks’s forwardness in establishing both her take and her cultural place that makes her work accessible to such a wide range of readers. Her reader cannot help but engage in a conversation with the text. I begin, then, with a sketch of my own inheritance as a way of opening a conversation. My particular angle of vision might best be described as that of a Northern ‘‘good ole boy.’’ Mine is a white ‘‘masculine’’ or ‘‘male’’ outlook, though I have for a long time been experientially persuaded of the truth of Fuller’s claim that Male and female represent the two sides of the great radical dualism. But, in fact, they are perpetually passing into one another. Fluid hardens to solid, solid rushes to fluid. There is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman.13

This masculine outlook, for me, bears with it what I would call a reasonable guilt that keeps me alive to self-aversive thinking and to the need to listen. My inheritance is a place from which to launch conversations that bring me to the lives and inheritances of others—it is transient and growing, not a fixed locale from which to dictate a world. It is at best representative. Though rooted in the cultural Calvinism of late twentieth-century New England, I find an affinity between my experience and country singer Don Williams’s version of Bob McDill’s paean to Southernboy life, ‘‘Good Ole Boys like Me’’: Nothing makes the sound in the night like the wind does But you ain’t afraid if you’re washed in the blood like I was The smell of cape jasmine through the window screen John R. and the Wolfman kept me company By the light of the radio by my bed With Thomas Wolfe whispering in my head.

................. 15741$

INTR

02-13-06 14:42:19

PS

PAGE 10

introduc tion

11

(Chorus) I can still hear the soft southern winds in the live oak trees And those Williams boys they still mean a lot to me, Hank and Tennessee, I guess we’re all gonna be what we’re gonna be, So what do you do with good ole boys like me? When I was in school I ran with the kid down the street But I watched him burn himself up on bourbon and speed But I was smarter than most and I could choose, Learned to talk like the man on the six o’clock news, When I was eighteen, Lord, I hit the road But it really doesn’t matter how far I go.14

As a child of rural America when country music first began to mix with rock and roll, I find myself well attuned to this story. My smells were firs and spruces, my wind sang through white pines, and I saw more than one friend lost to alcohol and drugs—even some who had learned to talk like the person on the news. The rest of McDill’s story fits pretty much as is. Though I cherish, as many of us do, much of my past, the song serves as a reflection of a kind of fact, not as a romantic assertion of any superiority of any fashion. The song’s central interrogative mood best suits the philosophical outlook toward both past and future; it repeats an ongoing openness, a questioning that has a home, but a home that remains in transition. Radio DJs and the music they send out into the night have always been close companions for me, and this is a widely experienced phenomenon in American cultures. In my experience, alcohol and religion ran together in ways that made sense of the Greek affinities for both Apollo and Dionysius; and it did not strike me as odd when, on my first trip to Florida, I noted the constant companionship of cinder block bars and churches. Moreover, it is a simple demographic fact that those of us in the 1960s and 1970s who could leave our small, economically depressed, laboring towns did so, and we left behind some who died while dying to get out. The fact is that Thomas Wolfe, Jack Kerouac, and Emily Dickinson stood close in my mind to Hank Williams, Emmy Lou Harris, Janis Joplin, and the Flying Burrito Brothers. Like many of the time, I was on the road at seventeen, and I didn’t know

................. 15741$

INTR

02-13-06 14:42:20

PS

PAGE 11

12


what one did with ‘‘good ole boys like me.’’ The answer, eventually, was philosophy—and teaching philosophy—specifically, Greek and American philosophy. These somehow together provided a background within which I could keep trying to make sense of all the other things. Having made my way to ‘‘journeyman’’ plumber working on Ramada Inns in northern New Hampshire, I faced several options: plumbing, logging, law school, or philosophy. The most socially implausible of these, philosophy, also made the most sense to me, if not to others. Philosophy—unlike logging, to which I lost my good friend Paul Loucks in his nineteenth year—posed no risk of mortal danger. But its absence posed the, in some ways, more imposing risk of living in the absence of my own humanity. As William James put it: ‘‘A man with no philosophy in him is the most inauspicious and unprofitable of all social mates.’’15 Unquestionably, choosing philosophy involved a romance—a deep, fascinating romance and one that was wideranging. Studying the Greeks and Romans provided a sense of adventure, what Whitehead called an adventure of ideas. Studying logic was satisfying, a project with purpose, clarity, and some closure. But only American philosophy, or what I will now call philosophy Americana, felt like fresh air and on-the-road living. ‘‘Everything good is on the highway,’’ Emerson wrote in ‘‘Experience’’ (CW, 2:36). And from Thoreau the simple gesture: ‘‘Life consists in wildness. The most alive is the wildest.’’16 I occasionally had trouble distinguishing Thoreau from Warren Zevon or Jerry Garcia.17 In the ordinary sense of vocation in the United States, choosing philosophy was a risky business. No one was hiring philosophers, especially not American philosophers, who, according to most mainstream philosophers in America, were not philosophers—it was not a good bet for getting work. The Transcendentalists are often considered to be merely literary figures. Peirce was mostly forgotten until the 1970s. James, having been dismissed by the British early on, was left behind when Harvard turned to critical realism and then to analysis. Susanne Langer labored away in anonymity. John Dewey lingered into the middle of the twentieth

................. 15741$

INTR

02-13-06 14:42:20

PS

PAGE 12

introduc tion

13

century until he, too, was set aside. Choosing American philosophy risked choosing intellectual isolation and a life of Nietzschean resentment. But central to the take of philosophy Americana was precisely the taking of such risks when they seemed important—this is one Romantic element that never evaded American thinkers, even the most systematic such as Royce and Peirce. Peirce eventually gambled his life away in pursuit of his philosophical thought. His human failures were immense, as the letters from his second wife, Juliette, to Alice James fully reveal, detailing his ineptitude as a spouse. After all, the world as we find it is precarious. Risk was the ground not only of failure but also of the possibility of success—the awakening of T. S. Eliot’s Prufrock to this fact is what makes his ruminations so deeply pathetic: ‘‘Do I dare?’’ he asks. As James put it: Not a victory is gained, not a deed of faithfulness or courage is done, except upon a maybe; not a service, not a sally of generosity, not a scientific exploration or experiment or textbook, that may not be a mistake. It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all. And often enough our faith beforehand in an uncertified result is the only thing that makes the result come true.18

This kind of thinking made sense to me. As in the farming around which I grew up, shit happens and there’s work to be done. If risk isn’t to be avoided, it may as well be embraced as a source of life. Besides, risking obscurity in life as a teacher of philosophy seemed in many ways relatively tame when friends were lost to drugs, cars, wars, business, and depression. Moreover, Dewey’s follow-up to James’s words spoke directly to the environment in which I found myself: We have heaped up riches and means of comfort between ourselves and the risks of the world. We have professionalized amusement as an agency of escape and forgetfulness. But when all is said and done, the fundamentally hazardous character of the world is not seriously modified, much less eliminated. (LW, 1:45)

Vietnam veterans who were ‘‘still in Saigon’’ after 1975 knew this.19 Jimi Hendrix, in touching letters to his father, showed that he knew.20

................. 15741$

INTR

02-13-06 14:42:20

PS

PAGE 13

14


African Americans of all walks of life knew. Indians living on what we oddly call ‘‘reservations’’ knew. Abused women and children knew. The ‘‘means of comfort’’ could indeed be enjoyable, but at the same time they created a surface beneath which the hazards openly resided. Ironically, in some cases, the comforts themselves actually constituted the hazards of life. Again, risking a romance with American philosophy seemed relatively trivial, even if to others it seemed a dead end compared with a law degree from the University of Pennsylvania. Besides, choosing philosophy led directly to a real good, though it initially seemed a secondary issue—that is, the choice led to teaching. Choosing to be a philosopher in America is also choosing, initially at least, to be a teacher. Teaching seemed like more of a good bet than a mortal risk. I had two great-aunts who taught Greek and Latin in Vermont public schools—there was a heritage and at least a baseline of respectability to fall back on. Teaching also seemed to hold some possibility of making a difference, another theme of the American philosophical take. The possibility of ‘‘making a difference’’ was an easy trade-off for risking lostness in American culture. It would be an experiment; it would require a healthful attitude and humor; it promised the possibilities of awakenings—for me and for students. It meant accepting whatever failures and losses crossed my path. And it brought with it a peculiar set of demands—a passionate and confessional love affair with philosophical practice and a vital and abiding concern for students as persons. The payoff on that score has been tremendous. And so, after graduate school, I came to join the ranks of Emerson’s insane angels, teaching ‘‘logic to Lutherans’’ at a small liberal arts college in Ohio. The Humanizing Task of Insane Angels Angels in American culture play some peculiar roles. Kitty Wells sang powerfully of the lives of ‘‘honky-tonk angels’’ who had been led astray by men. Gram Parsons sang of the ‘‘Grievous Angel,’’ a crosscountry ‘‘semi’’ rig questing the myth of the American West and try-

................. 15741$

INTR

02-13-06 14:42:20

PS

PAGE 14

introduc tion

15

ing to come to grips with the demise of Elvis. And Bruce Springsteen sang of the ‘‘hot rod angels’’ looking for the ‘‘promised land’’ of which Chuck Berry had given all rockers a taste in the 1950s. Moreover, it was in the 1950s that Jack Kerouac had begun to describe his own Beat Generation as a host of ‘‘desolation angels.’’ In light of this subsequent history, Emerson’s allusion to American scholars as ‘‘insane angels’’ seems apropos. American scholars and philosophers are strange and culturally estranged. One need only attend a few philosophy conferences to experience this. But I don’t intend this claim pejoratively—our minds run in different grooves and highways, and that is a good thing. My most memorable picture of this estrangement came when a group of American philosophers, in full tweed, met for a conference in the Tropicana Hotel in Las Vegas. The juxtaposition of slot machines and craps tables with staid discussions of Dewey’s virtue ethics was, in an odd and striking way, a kind of American beauty in itself, at once funny and deadly serious. Though it is sometimes overlooked, it is a widespread belief of philosophers working in the American tradition that they are engaged in a project to better their culture. The gambling hope that underwrites our pedagogical practices reaches well beyond the sites of formal education. Following James and Dewey, these American scholars are hard-core meliorists. We are attentive to the ills around us. We think about things; we are committed to goods as ends-in-view. Hence the appropriateness of the tag ‘‘insane angels.’’ We are utopian with our eyes open. That is, as Erin McKenna suggests, we seek to improve things along the way, not to construct some magic, fixed, end-state world.21 We are, one might say, working utopians. Our bringing of ‘‘heaven’’ to Earth is always a finite and fallible project, as Emerson recognizes when he points out that when not in our angelic modes, we easily become ‘‘moping dogs.’’ Both our strangeness—our cultural insanity—and our angelic practices are underwritten by our passion for thinking, writing, and talking. We are practitioners of philosophy. This is not something I think we should deny or dismiss as unimportant. This is where our passions and our abilities lie. I have emphasized the fact that we are

................. 15741$

INTR

02-13-06 14:42:20

PS

PAGE 15

16


teachers because it is a fact often obscured when we describe our profession. But this does not mean that we are not also philosophers and scholars with an angelic passion for some particular strains of literature, history, and reflective thought. We think and write with an eye toward transforming ourselves, each other, and our culture. And though I opened this chapter with a concern for our invisibility, I do not want to underestimate the impact we can have, even when we as individuals remain invisible to our culture. Almost all thinkers in the American tradition have been realists in the same way. This includes James, whom Dewey rightly identifies as a realist in this respect—that our ideas have real effects in the world, they make a difference. The transactions among ideas, actions, and habits constitute a natural process whose powers should not be underestimated. Philosophy understood this way is never ‘‘just talk.’’ Talking turns out to be an important medium of transformation. As countless oppositional thinkers of the late twentieth century have noted, talk is a central factor in identity construction, in communicative practices that can ameliorate difficult situations, and in simply ‘‘being heard,’’ as evidenced in the title of bell hooks’s book Talking Back. It seems important, therefore, that we follow Dewey in avoiding the scholastic either/or traps of some analytic philosophy. We are not either theoreticians or practitioners; we are practicing theoreticians and theoretically oriented practitioners. Pragmatism in particular has always emphasized the continuities, the borderlands and frontiers of life and thought, and the messy dialectical structures of each of our lives. Deductive neatness and intellectual clarity make thought’s work easier, but for the most part miss the point that our thinking must attend to our lives and must therefore to some degree meet those lives on their own terms. When Dewey worried about ‘‘the problems of philosophers,’’ he was not abandoning metaphysical questions and moral theory. He was worried about philosophers who intentionally excommunicate themselves from the flow of ordinary experience and give themselves carte blanche to engage in an intellectually elitist activity that is bent more on keeping unlike minds out than on attending to the reflective needs of a culture. Metaphysics, ethics, and

................. 15741$

INTR

02-13-06 14:42:21

PS

PAGE 16

introduc tion

17

aesthetics are quite natural functions of human experience. Problems do not arise when we engage in these pursuits, but only when thought does not return to primary experience and make a difference in how we envision and confront our own futures. To use our philosophical abilities in other ways is to neglect the responsibilities of intelligence. Empedocles and Anaxagoras asked about the nature of the cosmos and yet were thoroughly and intensely engaged in their social environments. We see the same features in the development of American philosophy. Jonathan Edwards’s concerns with freedom of the will and the nature of religious affections were deeply existential questions. We see in his ‘‘Personal Narrative’’ and elsewhere the ongoing self-trial of one who hopes he knows but measures his knowingness against the backdrop of a genuine belief in original sin. The Transcendentalists were a loose association of young folks in New England who believed that the revolutions wrought by their parents and grandparents had not gone sufficiently far. Emerson’s pointed quest for his own religious life led him to a forced exile from Harvard College for forty years. Margaret Fuller openly sought to create an intellectual and political clearing in which women might think and work. And Josiah Royce, as I will argue in a subsequent chapter, looked for a vocation for his spectacular analytic and synthetic abilities—he not only wrote metaphysics, he asked about its role in our culture and about his own role as a thinker in human community. In short, the American philosophers whom I read and about whom I write are lovers of wisdom both practical and theoretical. They are live-minded and passionate, politically committed, and morally compassionate. Those of us who have apprenticed ourselves to this tradition of Emersonian insane angels will find no role models of dispassion and indifference. Philosophy Americana deals in emotions, feelings, and what Dewey came to call qualitative immediacies. Its ideas are had as well as thought, and these ideas have consequences with which we must live. Purveyors of these traits are likely not to fit well in the entrepreneurial setting of the contemporary academy in the United States. We are already engaged in a deep, though nearly silent, struggle for ownership of our teaching and for the visibility of

................. 15741$

INTR

02-13-06 14:42:21

PS

PAGE 17

18


our practices and ideas. When John McDermott asserts that to be human is to humanize, he well describes the task of the American scholar. In McDermott’s words, we are ‘‘called upon to create meaning, to engender truth. The activity places [us] at the center of the flow of experience.’’22 Considering some of the ways that some American philosophers have approached this humanizing task is the work of philosophy Americana. Exploring the ways, from my own limited angle of vision, that we might fit our own work into this ongoing project is the corollary concern of my writing. There needs to be a transaction between our inheritances and our possibilities and modes of creativity so that we can engage the battles at hand and think of fruitful ways into our own futures. The present volume involves an exploration of a philosophical inheritance in its connections with a wider culture of education, literature, religion, nature, and art. Moreover, as I noted in the Preface, I am attentive to the narrowness of my own perspective, and hope in a subsequent volume to expand these transactions to more directly engage some of the other philosophical voices I have mentioned, including mestiza chicana, Native American, African American, Asian American, and Latin American, among others. Philosophy cannot be effective if it merely tries to oversee culture. At some point it must come to close quarters with the other dimensions of culture if it hopes to become visible and to make any difference at all.

................. 15741$

INTR

02-13-06 14:42:21

PS

PAGE 18

one

some preliminar y remarks on the origins o f p ragmatism

W

hen James named ‘‘pragmatism’’ in 1898, he gave life to a new intellectual phenomenon in American culture. Though Charles Peirce had provided the groundwork for this new phenomenon some twenty years earlier, it was not until James named it that pragmatism became a matter of controversy and interest for a much wider intellectual community.1 Between 1900 and 1916 many rallied behind the new outlook, giving it definition and purchase, while others vehemently opposed its apparent relativistic and subjectivistic traits. For most of the twentieth century, pragmatism remained in a somewhat dormant state, kept alive by Dewey’s longevity and a relatively small philosophical culture that was for the most part overshadowed by the dominance of analytic philosophy. Thinkers such as Herbert Schneider, Joseph Blau, Robert Pollock, John E. Smith, Thelma Lavine, John McDermott, Sidney Ratner, Carl Hausman, Sandra Rosenthal, Richard Bernstein, Beth Singer, and John Lachs kept the pragmatic tradition alive and well, but it became highly visi{ 19 }

................. 15741$

$CH1

02-13-06 14:42:40

PS

PAGE 19

20


ble to the analytic tradition only when, in the 1980s, Richard Rorty, drawing on his own selected readings of James and Dewey, confronted that tradition with its own glaring limitations. This so-called neopragmatic movement brought new readers to the texts of Peirce, Schiller, James, and Dewey, even as those steeped in the history of pragmatism and American thought continued to develop their much richer accounts of the pragmatic tradition. In the chapter at hand, I want to explore briefly the origins of pragmatism between 1898 and 1916. My suspicion is that pragmatism, because James and Dewey took it outside the bounds of professional philosophy, has had a much wider cultural impact in the United States than has most of the rest of philosophy in America. James brought pragmatism to religion, to humanistic psychology, and to the sociology of science. Peirce influenced notions of scientific method, legal interpretation, and linguistic analysis. And Dewey, perhaps most effectively of all, brought pragmatism to mainstream American culture through his work in education, political practice, and even aesthetic practice by way of his work with the Barnes Foundation. In short, much of our cultural inheritance from the twentieth century is shot through with pragmatic features even if they have not been recognized as such. If this is so, taking a quick look at the origins of pragmatism may help us to see where these pragmatic features reside and where pragmatic thought might be helpful in assessing what we do as a human community. Moreover, as I have argued elsewhere, pragmatism did not appear from nowhere; it bears the marks of American Transcendentalism and later nineteenth-century idealism. Thus, exploring its origins may give us some idea of how these traditions have found their way into the fabric of our cultural meaning. What one finds in the origins of pragmatism depends in some measure on how one looks. Those of us who study American philosophy have come to focus on the differences among Peirce, James, Dewey, and Royce as we have become specialists in their respective outlooks. But when we look at the origins, we see that they shared some basic interests and beliefs. Peirce suggested to F. C. S. Schiller that pragmatism be defined around these commonalities but be left

................. 15741$

$CH1

02-13-06 14:42:40

PS

PAGE 20

origins of pragmatism

21

open to develop: ‘‘I would let it grow and then say it is what a certain group of thinkers who seem to understand one another think, and thus make it the name of a natural class in the Natural History fashion’’ (MS L390, p. 3). The emphasis on experimental method appears across the board. So, too, do emphases on consequences, the reconstruction of the idea of truth, and the importance of evolutionary thinking. Other items are shared on a more limited basis. James, Schiller, and Dewey, following the trajectory of the Transcendentalists, focus on the conduct of life. James, Royce, and Peirce retain an interest in the religious dimension of human experience. Peirce, Royce, and Dewey emphatically defend a realism of ideas that sees philosophical ideals as crucial to the development of social and intellectual traditions. We can also look past specific philosophical content to find temperamental affinities among the pragmatists. They went at life and philosophy wholeheartedly and seldom cautiously; however, with the exception of Royce, they were not absolutists. They were deeply committed to transforming the culture in which they found themselves. James and Dewey explicitly described themselves as meliorists. They also thought with abandon, sharing a philosophical attitude that included an element of spontaneity. The philosophical corollary to this attitude was their shared belief in the unbridling of the cosmos; the world was for them no longer a static, steady-state system, but a partially organized, evolving, and spontaneously developing nature. This unbridling of the cosmos appears in Peirce’s tychism, in James’s recurrent appeals to risk, and in Dewey’s attentiveness to the Darwinian fascination with change. The original pragmatic attitude, appropriating the mystery but rejecting the necessity of Hellenic fate, is about the gambling nature of human endeavor. This means it is also about a willingness to countenance the possibility of failure, loss, and losing. In ways different from both stoicism and existentialism, pragmatism asks us to accept the reality of loss. The Stoics called for an acquiescent acceptance of loss, and the existentialists often coupled loss with a sense of disempowerment. Pragmatism aims at what James called ‘‘the strenuous mood’’ even in the face of loss. In this

................. 15741$

$CH1

02-13-06 14:42:41

PS

PAGE 21

22


strenuous mood, pragmatism deals with ways to handle such an unstable environment, looking for ways to stack the cultural deck in favor of social stability. Each of the originators offers us a different avenue, through inquiry, toward such stability. But behind the solutions is the unbridled cosmos itself. James, trying to sober the tender thinkers and awaken the tough ones, makes a plea for the recognition of our gambling ways: I find myself willing to take the universe to be really dangerous and adventurous, without therefore backing out and crying ‘‘no play.’’ I am willing to think that the prodigal-son attitude, open to us as it is in many vicissitudes, is not the right and final attitude towards the whole of life. I am willing that there should be real losses and real losers, and not total preservation of all that is. I can believe in the ideal as an ultimate, not as an origin, and as an extract, not the whole. When the cup is poured off, the dregs are left behind forever, but the possibility of what is poured off is sweet enough to accept.2

Here, as elsewhere, James pushed almost to the point of claiming an aesthetic importance for evil; it conditions the gambler’s interest in the playing of the game. In ‘‘What Makes Life Significant’’ James recalls his summer visit to the upper-middle-class paradise of Chautauqua, New York, only to awaken to its suffocating pleasantness and seek out some ‘‘reality’’ in the lives of steelworkers and ‘‘peasant’’ farmers. For James, a perfect world given to us with no effort on our part, with no strenuous engagement, is not worth having. If this seems an unnecessarily strong prescription, we might think of James as working in a Thoreau-like manner, overstating his prescriptive claim just to awaken us to the description he thinks we may have forgotten or lost sight of—that our world is shot through with risk in all its dimensions. Pluralism is a good, but a good in which there are seams, holes, and cracks where things may fall through unnoticed, unsupported, and, perhaps ultimately, unredeemed. With Peirce and Dewey the acceptance of loss is less clear. Each openly states up front his commitment to the openness of the future of the cosmos. Peirce admits spontaneity as a ‘‘character of the uni-

................. 15741$

$CH1

02-13-06 14:42:42

PS

PAGE 22


23

verse,’’ adding that ‘‘Everywhere the main fact is growth and increasing complexity’’ (EP, 1:308). Likewise Dewey, who also focuses on the stabilities of experience, states, ‘‘The world is precarious and perilous’’ (LW, 1:44). However, their openness to loss is less apparent than is the case with James, perhaps because each is intent, in a different way, on patching the cosmic rents that have been made manifest: Peirce through a developmental teleology that increases order and Dewey through the application of ‘‘intelligence’’ to cultural problems. Peirce’s world is, like Royce’s, made whole again in the infinite long run, and Dewey’s is given the possibility of significant stability in the short run. It seems on occasion almost as if they make a presentation of the problematic situations in order to make room for their elaborate descriptions of a new method of inquiry in which pragmatism plays a featured role. In the most cynical reading, Dewey’s instrumentalism is a social fix-it machine and Peirce’s dynamic idealism is simply a postdated absolutism. Their quick turn to cures, however, may be misleading—if we read more widely, we can capture their recognition of lived instability and the gambling nature of belief. Recall the emphasis each places on the experimental method. Peirce makes his ‘‘scientific’’ method the centerpiece of his early pragmatism in ‘‘The Fixation of Belief.’’ Dewey sees experimentalism as the very key to education in ‘‘Experiment in Education’’: ‘‘For the present, the greatest contribution which any experimental school can make to education is precisely the idea of experiment itself, the ideal of the experimental method as the spirit in which a social problem is to be approached’’ (MW, 10:123). On the one hand, their faith in the success of the method yields a generally hopeful outlook—a pragmatic optimism. On the other hand, the admission of experiment reveals the presence of failure and loss; to experiment is to expect in some instances to fail or to lose—and for someone, perhaps someone other than the experimenter, to learn from losing. ‘‘For fallibilism is the doctrine,’’ Peirce says, ‘‘that our knowledge is never absolute but swims, as it were, in a continuum of uncertainty and of indeterminacy’’ (CP 1:171). If we think back to ‘‘The Fixation of Belief,’’ we can see this pragmatic attitude of gambling with the uncertainties con-

................. 15741$

$CH1

02-13-06 14:42:42

PS

PAGE 23

24


joined directly with philosophical logic. In the essay Peirce, as a philosopher, provides those of us interested in logic and science with a reasonably persuasive transcendental hypothesis in favor of the scientific method: If we desire true belief and the overcoming of doubt, we must accept something like his experimental method of inquiry. But Peirce, perhaps sensing the instability of his own argumentation, closes the essay with a James–like appeal to pragmatic choice: But she [scientific method] is the one that he [Peirce, we suspect] has chosen, and he knows that he was right in making that choice. And having made it, he will work for her, and will not complain that there are blows to take, hoping that there may be as many and as hard to give, and will strive to be the worthy knight and champion of her from the blaze of whose splendours he draws his inspiration and his courage. (EP, 1:123)

Whatever the logic of the situation, there remains an existential uncertainty. Clearly Peirce is not interested in losing; but it is also clear that he sees the possibility of loss to the other methods of inquiry—tenacity, authority, and apriorism—all of which bear marks of being arbitrary and contingent. He may lose in one of two ways. There may be blows to take, first, from within the method. That is, the experimental method expects us to fail some percentage of the time; and however much we learn from failure, its experience is usually disheartening and unsettling, and is never consummatory. There may also be blows to take from outside the method, from those who champion the other methods, whose advantages Peirce was not able simply to dismiss. The philosophical life—the logical, scientific, experimental life—as Socrates well knew, and as Peirce in his own dismal existence was never allowed to forget, lives constantly under threat. There is never a shortage of dogmatic believers from every political corner who will find excuses to close the avenues of inquiry. Dewey stands in an equally puzzling place. Perhaps the most common charge leveled against him is that his thinking is absurdly utopian and optimistic, hinging always on an unforgivable belief in the capacity of human beings to handle their own affairs. These sorts of

................. 15741$

$CH1

02-13-06 14:42:43

PS

PAGE 24


25

complaints are lodged against a philosopher who believed he was overcoming the Romantic visions of the nineteenth century. Where are failure, loss, and losing to be found in such a happy outlook? In his later career, after the complaints had been lodged, Dewey took pains to address this charge of innocence, especially, for example, in the opening chapters of Experience and Nature, where he says, ‘‘We confine ourselves to one outstanding fact: that evidence that the world of empirical things includes the uncertain, unpredictable, uncontrollable, and hazardous’’ (LW, 1:43). Thus, we should not remain blind to the presence of loss in the origins of Dewey’s own pragmatism. In Democracy and Education, taking a cue from his reading of both Peirce and James, Dewey takes education to be the essential weapon in the combat with social risks. Yet, he recognizes the very fragility of the educative process, which is in all its features historically and socially contexted. In an interesting dialogue in 1906, Dewey resists the Augustinian suppression of evil: Drop the presupposition that you read into everything I say, the idea that the reality of things as they are is dependent upon something beyond and behind, and the facts of the case just stare you in the eyes: Goods are, a multitude of them—but, unfortunately, evils also are; and all grades, pretty much, of both. (MW, 4:19)

There is no Jamesian valorization of evil to awaken us, but Dewey reminds us that we feel evils, we feel failures and losses. These are natural and human experiences: ‘‘I don’t need an absolute to enable me to distinguish between, say, the good of kindness and the evil of slander, or the good of health and the evil of valetudinarianism’’ (MW, 4:20). For Dewey, primary experience is shot through with existential lessons in human living. In looking more widely at the early criticisms of pragmatism, we find a variety of takes: it had no doctrine, it was not systematic, it was relativistic, and so forth. But the most widespread—and perhaps the most descriptively accurate—complaint was that pragmatism was too personal, too experiential, too much a function of and too closely aimed at the conduct of life. Indeed, Dewey famously supplies ‘‘a

................. 15741$

$CH1

02-13-06 14:42:43

PS

PAGE 25

26


first-rate test of the value of any philosophy’’: ‘‘Does it end in conclusions which, when they are referred back to ordinary life-experiences and their predicaments, render them more significant, more luminous to us, and make our dealings with them more fruitful?’’ (LW, 1:18). In 1907, referring obliquely to the birth of pragmatism, J. E. Creighton said in a speech to the APA: ‘‘At the present time the danger rather lies in a tendency to adopt an individual and external mode of philosophizing, which may properly enough be described as that of the essayist.’’3 Looking backward, Creighton aimed at excommunicating from ‘‘philosophy proper’’ the literary features of Plato, Augustine’s autobiographical work, and European humanism, as well as the predecessors of pragmatism and existentialism, including Emerson, Fuller, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Thoreau. Looking forward, he foreshadowed the narrowly confining control of ‘‘philosophy proper’’ by the Anglo-American analytic school that excluded existentialism and phenomenology as well as pragmatism. Despite the impact of Richard Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, this controlling attitude is still alive and well in many quarters. Creighton further developed his worry about the pragmatic ‘‘essayist’’: He may say a great many wise and illuminating things, and even point out facts and relations which must be taken account of in any philosophical treatment of the subject. But his results should not be mistaken for philosophy. For the essayist does not attempt to organize his results according to any logical principle or to develop them to a systematic conclusion.4

Creighton marks the dissociation between philosophy and wisdom (both sophia and phronesis) that came to dominate twentieth-century thought as philosophy was scientized. Ironically, for Creighton and the analytic schools, ‘‘logical principle’’ and ‘‘systematic conclusion’’ are code words for deductivism. Instead of making philosophy scientific, the new scientistic philosophers returned to and relied on an almost medieval understanding of philosophical argument. Indeed, the pragmatist ‘‘essayist’s’’ primary goal was to replace deductivism with an experimental method that more generally paral-

................. 15741$

$CH1

02-13-06 14:42:44

PS

PAGE 26


27

leled scientific reasoning. As we just noted, this is specifically addressed in ‘‘The Fixation of Belief,’’ the original publication in the pragmatic tradition. Peirce argued against apriorism not only because it claimed to be intuitive in a strong sense but also because it inevitably led to closed systems of belief that were generated by deduction from a single initial premise. Dewey, too, openly and endlessly brought experimentalism to human inquiry in all fields. It may be that Creighton’s primary target was James, but this, too, is problematic, since James developed and employed his radical empiricism precisely to highlight the unscientific limitations that traditional empirical philosophies placed on inquiry. Peirce actively regarded Creighton’s deductivist understanding of science to be misguided; Peirce saw science as a method of inquiry, not as a body of knowledge. ‘‘Science,’’ he argued, ‘‘is defined as a body of knowledge. But it is not half so much knowledge as inquiry— the active wanting to know which implies we don’t already,—that makes the scientific man’’ (MS 866, p. 4). From Peirce’s perspective, then, Creighton, like many critics of pragmatism, misconceived both science and pragmatism: ‘‘In the first place, philosophy, like all other genuine sciences, has passed beyond the stage of the merely striking or suggestive treatment of problems, and aims not at interesting or picturesque results, but at the systematic organization of the facts with which it deals according to some general principle.’’5 Systematic organization was at best, for Peirce, a small part of a scientist’s practice. Despite the fact that the sciences are still often taught as bodies of knowledge, any close examination of what scientists do will reveal that the pragmatists are much closer to describing a ‘‘scientific’’ philosophy than were Creighton, Reichenbach, Carnap, and Karl Pearson. If the pragmatists defended a method that led to a developmental conception of truth and wisdom, at the practical level they carried out similar projects. All their talk of risk, experiment, hypothesis, and experiential testing could be applied to practice as well as to theory— indeed, from one angle of vision they can be seen as applying their ideas to the practice of theorizing. Following their understanding of

................. 15741$

$CH1

02-13-06 14:42:44

PS

PAGE 27

28


Aristotle, the pragmatists believed good philosophy must have a practical dimension, or what James often called a ‘‘cash value.’’ They were not Enlightenment believers in the inevitability of progress, but across the board the pragmatists were meliorists. They believed that inquiry and experiment could lead to the betterment of human existence. Although James and Dewey were the most explicit in asserting a melioristic outlook, Peirce’s conception of truth is the model on which all the pragmatic meliorisms are based. By 1902 Peirce had arrived at his belief that logic, like aesthetics and ethics, is a normative science whose ultimate aim is truth. Thus, his abductive, or hypothesis-driven, scientific method, which he laid out in a series of lectures in 1903, is a description of the human ability to pursue truth in a way that is self-correcting. In short, truth can get better. Contrary to the notions of some commentators, Peirce never stated that truth will be achieved; rather, as Cheryl Misak points out, truth is an ideal at which inquiry aims. ‘‘True beliefs,’’ she says, ‘‘are those which would, in the end, get along with experience and one explanation of our beliefs achieving more and more fit with experience is that a good number of them are true. . . . The ground upon which inquiry walks is tenuous and it is only the danger of losing our footing that makes us go forward.’’6 Thus, truth may get ‘‘better’’ in human history, but without any anticipation of actually encountering a final ‘‘best’’ truth. Alfred Sidgwick put the point well in a discussion article in Mind in 1908: ‘‘The anti-pragmatist still dreams of an eternal and unassailable truth, while the pragmatist (like the man of science) sees our human need of putting up with truth which has its day and then gets lost in fuller explanations.’’7 As Vincent Potter points out, ‘‘Peirce sees and explicitly says that there are ‘practical sciences of reasoning and investigation, of the conduct of life, and of the production of works of art’ (5:125) which correspond to the normative sciences, ‘and may be probably expected to receive aid from them’ (5:125).’’8 It was within the spirit of this last claim that both James and Dewey worked. Each in his own way applied the developmental conception of inquiry not only to truth but also to moral, practical, and political goods.

................. 15741$

$CH1

02-13-06 14:42:45

PS

PAGE 28


29

As a normative science, ethics seeks the good in conduct. But without an immediate knowledge of the absolute good, we humans are left to find our experiential problems and to try to improve. As James put it in ‘‘The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life’’: ‘‘Every real dilemma is in literal strictness a unique situation: and the exact combination of ideals realized and ideals disappointed which each decision creates is always a universe without precedent, and for which no adequate previous rule exists.’’9 Dewey works this pragmatic casuistry out in more detail, suggesting that we create ‘‘hypotheses’’ of betterness for any given situation, and that we try out these hypotheses both in imaginative dramatic rehearsals and in actual practice. We experiment and return to our actual ‘‘had’’ experiences to find out what ‘‘works’’—what is better—and what does not. This meliorism, whether of truth or the good, is a central— perhaps the central—belief shared by all the pragmatists in the early years of pragmatism’s career. William Mackintire Salter, in his 1908 essay ‘‘Pragmatism: A New Philosophy,’’ saw much more clearly than did Creighton what was afoot in the origins of pragmatism. Of the pragmatists’ ideas of science, religion, and morality, he claimed: ‘‘They are working truths rather than finalities—the best to date, and yet liable to be superseded by something that will work better.’’10 The experimentalism, the emphasis on risk, the belief in being able to ‘‘better’’ our present situations are all indications that, in its origin, pragmatism was a philosophy of hope. Hope was the mood or temperament governing Peirce’s faith in science, Dewey’s faith in education, and James’s faith in the human spirit. This hopefulness was considered by many to be, in James’s language, tender-minded or sentimental. Paul Carus, who published the work of the pragmatists but resisted them relentlessly, wrote disparagingly of them as ‘‘sentimentalists.’’ And sentimentalists, he argued, ‘‘who are incapable of logical reasoning whenever their feelings are engaged are pathological.’’11 Even Peirce, the most mathematically inclined and technically oriented of the pragmatists, included himself among the class of sentimentalists when it comes to the conduct of life: ‘‘Reason, then, appeals to sentiment in the last resort. Sentiment on its side feels itself

................. 15741$

$CH1

02-13-06 14:42:45

PS

PAGE 29

30


to be the man. That is my simple apology for philosophical sentimentalism’’ (CP, 1:632). Carus and the antipragmatists, stuck as they were in a deductivist account of philosophical method and system, could not see the experiential truth of James’s ‘‘Sentiment of Rationality’’: ‘‘As soon . . . as we are enabled from any cause whatever to think with perfect fluency, the thing we think of seems to us pro tanto rational.’’12 Reasoning, insofar as it to some extent hinges on sentiment and feeling, is a gamble—pragmatic hope acknowledges the risks, the sentiment, the faith, and moves forward. It is fallibilistic and accepts the risks involved. Furthermore, as with Peirce, not only science but also the activity of philosophizing itself bears the marks of a gambling way of life. Dewey does not allow philosophers to escape to an unassailable platform from which to snipe at the rest of the community or from which to gloss over the degeneracies of our environment. In the concluding paragraph of ‘‘Does Reality Possess Practical Character?’’ we find another of those peculiarly pragmatic appeals that we have come to associate with James but that in the work of Dewey and Peirce we tend to forget: Under such circumstances there is danger that the philosophy which tries to escape the form of generation by taking refuge under the form of eternity will only come under the form of a bygone generation. To try to escape from the snares and pitfalls of time by recourse to traditional problems and interests—rather than let the dead bury their own dead. Better it is for philosophy to err in active participation in the living struggles and issues of its own age and times than to maintain an immune monastic impeccability, without relevancy and bearing in the generating ideas of its contemporary present. (MW, 4:142)

Dewey here lays out the most important feature of the pragmatic attitude of hope and loss for pragmatism’s own philosophical future, which is now our philosophical present. Pragmatism, as philosophical school, must be willing to lose, perhaps altogether, but assuredly at least strands of whatever cables of belief it develops. The preservation of the origins of pragmatism unchanged would most likely suggest

................. 15741$

$CH1

02-13-06 14:42:46

PS

PAGE 30


31

its completest failure—not its failure in practice but its failure to be practiced. This Emersonian self-aversion and willingness to accept one’s own failure or outmodedness runs deeper in the American philosophical tradition than pragmatism itself, but in the origins of pragmatism, we see it take on systematic and methodological significance. Even Royce’s focus on redemption in The Problem of Christianity is premised on our losses, failures, and sorrows. For Royce our lives are in fact fragmentary and in need of healing. For him, absolute pragmatism can play a cultural role—even if indirectly—in this healing process. These are issues to which we will return in the closing chapter, but not until we have taken a pragmatic, and an Americanly philosophical, attitude into our explorations of some features of our culture. Though not in a fully systematic way, I want to bring this pragmatic attitude to bear on considerations of religious experience, political agency, teaching, literature, and popular culture. In using a varied set of philosophical lenses through which to bring this attitude to bear, I expect that my conclusions will occasionally stand in tension with each other. My hope is more that I can bear witness to a spirit and orientation of the philosophical life in America than that I can achieve a thoroughly consistent set of propositional beliefs. It would have surprised, if not annoyed, Peirce, James, and Dewey to see the twenty-first century espousing their original thoughts as its own except insofar as those thoughts still provide a clear purchase in our world. This would be a philosophy that had forgotten the fallible and that sought refuge ‘‘under the form of a by-gone generation.’’ At the same time, as experimentalists, I believe each would be curious to see which of their thoughts had survived a century’s use. The origins of pragmatism, as I have been intentionally overlooking (or putting on hold), despite their core shared outlook, were plural. Arthur Lovejoy famously described thirteen pragmatisms. There were temperamental as well as intellectual differences. Pragmatists are, for pragmatists, not persons committed to propositions, but live creatures with habituated lives that are, in their best form, always undergoing some sort of creative reconstruction. This was the thread that Rorty noticed in his description of the revisability of the self. The

................. 15741$

$CH1

02-13-06 14:42:47

PS

PAGE 31

32


losses of the origins of pragmatism will therefore likewise be plural and various, and they will be losses having to do with the conduct of life, not merely with the changing of some intellectual ‘‘position.’’ Will we embrace James’s tolerance of the peculiar? Will we be capable of maintaining Dewey’s unflagging faith in education? Will we be able to live with Peirce’s in-house quarrel between theory and practice? Are we fated to continue pragmatism’s relative blindness to the lives of women and to issues of race? In a way, like Jonathan Edwards’s Calvinistic uncertainty concerning the authenticity of his own conversion, the origins of pragmatism call for an awakening to the need for ongoing awakenings—to the fact that we live in risk, in the precarious, and in the instability of fallibility. They seem to demand of one’s character an acknowledgment of the dangers already and always present to us. They also, of course, call forth open responses to the dangers; they demand a melioristic outlook, not on any deductive grounds but on the simple pragmatic claim that only such an outlook offers any possibility of redemption, reconstruction, and recovery. The reality of the possible is perhaps the one ineliminable trace of pragmatism if cultures and philosophies are to move forward even in a halting way. Or, in John McDermott’s more ragged but right version: ‘‘It’s all about possibility.’’

................. 15741$

$CH1

02-13-06 14:42:47

PS

PAGE 32

two

royce , philosophy, and wandering A Job Description

J

osiah Royce is more often than not at the margins of contemporary discussions of American philosophy. His idealism, carefully organized and deductively neat, has not fared well in an age whose foci are plurality, diversity, and novelty. There is no getting around the systematic and, often, deductive nature of Royce’s worldview. Nevertheless, if we look at his life, his historical writings, and his long friendship with William James, we see some existential tempering of the hardheaded Royce we often portray in discussions of American thought. The insularity of the systematic result of much of Royce’s thought is at odds with the attitude he seemed to bring to his philosophical thinking. This is clearly evidenced in a letter Royce wrote to G. Stanley Hall in February 1898, concerning the teaching of philosophy to philosophically minded students: No dogma should to them be taught as dogma. Their sole philosophical problem, while they study philosophy, should be, not: What ought I to believe? (that is often a problem in the practical { 33 }

................. 15741$

$CH2

02-13-06 14:42:40

PS

PAGE 33

34


world of business, of friendship, and of faith, but never in the world of philosophy) but rather: What can I clearly see as to the deepest issues of my life? No philosopher cares, as such, what you say that he merely believes. He cares only to be sure that what he teaches as insight he has seen, and hopes to get others to see. The true born student of philosophy, while he studies philosophy, should act only as philosopher,—freely, fearlessly, unsparingly,— questioning as Job or as Plato, as Hamlet or as Kant questioned,— and questioning solely for the sake of insight. The teacher will guide his properly chosen student in this spirit, and would scorn to tolerate in the philosophical lecture-room and seminary, any but this absolutely tolerant spirit itself.1

Several interesting points present themselves here. First, the ‘‘absolutely tolerant spirit’’ suggests not deductive closure but existential openness. Royce also points out in his emphatic ‘‘whiles’’ that philosophical study is a dimension of life, but it is not life itself. Attitudinally and existentially Royce is a much freer thinker than many who simply endorse freedom propositionally, and it was in part this trait that sustained his long friendships with James and with his own students. The free, fearless, and unsparing questioner is not a salesperson of idealism but one committed to the development of one’s own ideas. Thus, we might characterize a philosophical life as an intellectual wandering of sorts. Such a description seems appropriate to Royce’s own philosophical career. As a philosophical point, however, it took a number of years for the correlation between philosophy and wandering to take full hold in Royce’s work. It is to this that I now turn. The territory I cover in what follows is not new. John Smith and Frank Oppenheim, among others, have closely tracked the development of Royce’s thought and interest. As Smith puts it: Speaking generally, the all-important change in Royce’s conception of the Absolute consists in the shift from the idea that the Infinite thought is an all-embracing consciousness apprehending at a glance all truth and harmonizing at once all conflicts between the multiplicity of finite wills in existence, to the idea that the Infinite is actual as a well-ordered system (or ultimately, commu-

................. 15741$

$CH2

02-13-06 14:42:41

PS

PAGE 34

royc e, philosophy , a n d w a n d e r i n g

35

nity) having a general triadic form and involving a type of cognition called interpretation.2

Nevertheless, what I have to say does, I think, constitute a new passage through the territory—one that offers some different vantage points and enables me to suggest what I think remains significant about Josiah Royce. Royce was an American philosopher—one who mined deeply his own American inheritance and one who tried to establish his own route to the hopes and possibilities that are constitutive of American culture. I begin by noting that Royce took all persons at face value, as living possibilities; his was a frontier attitude. He spoke of philosophy as if we all have some philosophical interest and aptitude. The story of philosophy as wandering that he tells thus serves both as a guide for our own philosophical endeavor and as an allegory for the hope for an American and, ultimately, a human community. On December 29, 1915, after a dinner in his honor, Royce spoke of his life to some friends. In his remarks he noted an important tension. Reviewing his life and work, he said, ‘‘I strongly feel that my deepest motives and problems have centered about the idea of Community, although this idea has only come gradually to my clear consciousness.’’3 He also noted his own isolation from community: So much of the spirit that opposes the community I have and always have had in me, simply, elementally, deeply. Over against this natural ineffectiveness in serving the community, and over against this rebellion, there has always stood the interest which has taught me what I nowadays try to express by teaching that we are saved through community.4

Royce’s emphasis on his individuality and his acknowledgment of the salvific capacity of community are revealed in the trajectory of his thinking in a number of ways, one of which is his curious linking of philosophy and wandering. The trail of this linkage is too thin a strand to wrap up Royce’s whole philosophical outlook, the complexity of which is sometimes overlooked, but it is enough to disclose a sketch of what philosophy is for Royce—a sketch that I think might be useful for our contemporary culture of philosophy.

................. 15741$

$CH2

02-13-06 14:42:41

PS

PAGE 35

36


The Possibility of Error Royce first brought philosophy and wandering together in The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (1885). He did so in the most notable chapter of the book, ‘‘The Possibility of Error.’’ Interestingly, the relevant passage caused Charles Peirce to see himself as the object of Royce’s description and criticism, and elicited a response from him. In the passage, Royce argued that the possibility of error requires an actual absolute judge who can decide for or against the truth of a belief: ‘‘Our thought needs the Infinite Thought in order that it may get, through this Infinite judge, the privilege of being so much as even an error.’’5 He then remarked that some contemporary Thrasymachus might maintain that only a ‘‘possible judge’’ is required for the possibility of error. Peirce had maintained that ‘‘the real is that which any man would believe in, and be ready to act upon, if his investigations were to be pushed sufficiently far’’ (W, 5:222). His adjournment of the judgment of truth to a ‘‘would be’’ future could be construed to mean that a ‘‘would be’’ or possible judge is all that is necessary for a conception of truth and error. Thus, Peirce took himself to be Royce’s Thrasymachus character: Upon the luckless putter-forth of this opinion Dr. Royce is extremely severe. He will not even name him (perhaps to spare the family), but refers to him by various satirical nick-names, especially as ‘‘Thrasymachus,’’—a foolish character introduced into the Republic. . . . But I must with shame confess that if I understand what the opinion of this poor, Royce-forsaken Thrasymachus is, I coincide with it exactly. (W, 5:222)

Royce argued that without the actual certainty of an absolute judge, no heading can be established; he saw no middle ground between an absolute judge and sheer uncertainty. In fact, the separate judgments, waiting for the possible judge to test them, are like a foolish man wandering in a wood, who is asked whether he has lost his way. ‘‘I may have lost it,’’ he answers. ‘‘But whither are you going?’’ ‘‘That I cannot tell.’’ ‘‘Have you no goal?’’ ‘‘I may have, but I have no notion what it is.’’6

................. 15741$

$CH2

02-13-06 14:42:41

PS

PAGE 36


37

The philosopher as wanderer here, for Royce, is thoroughly lost and makes arbitrary assertions in the way of Thrasymachus. There can be no mediation between the absolute judge and the philosopher, nor can there be any place between being at home with the truth and being lost in the wilderness. For Royce, the logical situation controls the existential conditions. And since his emphasis is on deduction, no existential middle ground seems possible; all middles are excluded. The Peirce–like Thrasymachus philosopher is a wanderer in a fully pejorative sense—lost, homeless, aimless, and arbitrary. Peirce, of course, thought otherwise, but his influence on Royce took some years to develop. In 1888 Royce was sent world-wandering by his doctors to cure the exhaustion and depression that had set in as a result of his first years of work at Harvard. As Oppenheim points out, Royce reaffirmed the soul-cleansing effects of nature. But he also began to rethink the relationship between God and finite individuals. ‘‘Royce,’’ says Oppenheim, ‘‘interestingly altered what he then came to view as ‘the dry bones of my Universal Thought’ into an enlivening concrete Personal Self in communion with all finite selves.’’7 The upshot was that, as knowers, finite selves had some direct access to insight through this communion. The ‘‘voyage Down Under’’ thus seems to have provided the initial step in Royce’s movement toward the centrality of community. This step altered his conception of the role that wandering played in philosophy.

The Problem of Job Royce’s second linkage of philosophy and wandering occurred in 1897, in his interpretation of the story of Job. There an inversion in Royce’s thinking emerged. In the concluding lines of the essay, he remarked that wise persons are wanderers of a sort: For the triumph of the wise is no easy thing. Their lives are not light, but sorrowful. Yet they rejoice in their sorrow, not, to be sure, because it is mere experience, but because, for them, it be-

................. 15741$

$CH2

02-13-06 14:42:42

PS

PAGE 37

38


comes part of a strenuous whole of life. They wander and find their home even in wandering.8

Royce used the finite wise person as an analogue for God to try to suggest why God himself would undergo suffering.9 This new wandering wise person—or philosopher—appeared to have some sense of direction, but he/she remained a loner; indeed, wisdom here had a Socratic flavor and seemed to entail the status of social marginality and aloneness. Royce’s conception of wandering appeared to be in transition from a simple and clear pejorative sense to a more complex and, in some ways, honorific sense. The Peirce–Thrasymachus philosopher wandered in an intellectual wilderness with apparently no grounds for belief or judgment. Judgment was, for the early Royce, a deductive endeavor. The wandering wise person of Royce’s reflections on Job is both a social and an intellectual wanderer. That is, this wanderer has already directly and immediately encountered some truth concerning the absolute judge. This was the result of Royce’s new notion of God’s communion with finite selves, and it served as the basis of an individual’s wisdom. However, no mediated way toward this truth is available; in our finitude we are left as frustrated, yearning wanderers. The yawning gap between us and the absolute judge is simply unbridgeable through discourse among finite beings. The wise person can, on his or her own, gain some direct insight into God or the Whole, but it will always be a private, limited vision: ‘‘God’s experience in its wholeness cannot now be yours, for you just as you—this individual—are now but a fragment, and see his truth as through a glass darkly.’’10 The wise person’s status is thus that of one caught between a life among fragments, who cannot discern the whole, and an engagement with the whole that is, at this juncture, incomplete and unconsummated. Even if one achieves insight into the Absolute as a kind of wisdom, philosophical practice amounts to the articulation of our incompleteness. As for Emerson, language is inadequate to experience, so that what we are, as fragments, seems essentially incommunicable to others. This incommunicability estranges the wise person from others

................. 15741$

$CH2

02-13-06 14:42:42

PS

PAGE 38


39

and provides no basis or ground for a community of hope. The philosophical wanderers are left to ‘‘rejoice in their sorrow,’’ and in the absence of community become social wanderers as well as intellectual wanderers. In this instance, the wanderers are loners and mystics, Tiresian outlaws. The rejoicing–sorrow is generated not only by this inability to communicate but also by a second feature of the philosopher’s finitude—her or his fragmented status. The sorrow is disclosed as a function of his or her finitude and incompleteness; the vivid awareness of finitude creates a longing for wholeness: the wise persons ‘‘long, and attain through their very love of longing.’’11 They turn inward and are at home only in wandering. The ineffability of wisdom effects both an internal and an external isolation; no one wants a knower around who seems either unwilling or unable to reveal her secrets. Thus Royce developed a neat parallel between the philosopher’s epistemic inadequacy and her or his social alienation. In The Religious Aspect of Philosophy the necessity of an unmediated access to absolute judgment made the finite inquirer who was not acquainted with this judgment an aimless, intellectual wanderer. Royce there seemed to take for granted that those acquainted with the absolute judgment stand in good stead; those with no insight into the actual absolute judge’s view of things are lost, mere wanderers. Those with insight are redeemed. But Royce did not then focus closely enough on the fact that we are all, in our finitude, at least partly lost. In the reflections on Job, however, his angle of vision was altered. There the ascertainment of an unmediated insight leads not to final salvation but to an acknowledgment of the limitation of our vision and to the status of social exile—the wise person finds a home in wandering, moving to wherever ‘‘welcome’’ has not been worn out. The dilemma Royce established, one that pervaded his work and is paralleled in the tension between his own individuality and his recognition of community’s importance, is that the philosopher either is simply lost or, in establishing a direct though incomplete relation with God or the Absolute, becomes isolated from other individuals in the world.

................. 15741$

$CH2

02-13-06 14:42:43

PS

PAGE 39

40


The World and the Individual The dilemma came to a head for Royce in The World and the Individual (1901), and its presence was keyed by the dyadic relation in the title. In standard idealist terms, if we are not taken up into the World, we remain isolated cosmic flotsam. In his description of the wise wanderer, however, Royce had hinted at, and made a first move toward, a third possibility: a philosopher who is at home in his or her wandering but who is ‘‘in the world’’ and worldly, not merged into the World. However, the only ‘‘at-homeness’’ he could envision in his reflections on Job was that of the romanticized melancholic who somehow enjoyed loneliness. In The World and the Individual the linkage of philosophy and wandering again arose in Royce’s focus on human finitude. The philosopher’s quest was still truth or absolute judgment, and the temporal requirement was still immediacy. The graduated mode of learning offered by the Peirce–Thrasymachus wanderer remained infeasible to Royce’s deductive sensibilities. Thus, the gap between our fragmentariness and the Absolute’s wholeness remained fixed in place. Royce began by picking up on the individual’s isolation in a social wilderness with which he left us in his commentary on Job: ‘‘The wiser religions have always told us that we cannot be saved through the piety of our neighbors, but have to work out our own salvation with fear and trembling.’’12 We are in our own dyadic, unmediated relations to God, and there appears to be no chance of redemption in a lateral commerce with others who are also fragments. As Royce put it, what will make us philosophers and wanderers is an ‘‘intimacy’’ with the issues of life themselves. There is an affective as well as an intellectual dimension to the philosophical life, but the conversation seems always to be directly between the World and the individual. In pursuing the significance of our finitude and individuality, Royce reestablished the grounds that led to his description of the wandering philosopher as a longing and lonesome wise person. In thinking, we are trying to establish our place and reality; we endeavor to find our homes. At the same time, his focus on our action and

................. 15741$

$CH2

02-13-06 14:42:44

PS

PAGE 40


41

development gave this ‘‘thinking toward the truth’’ more dynamism than was present in The Religious Aspect of Philosophy. For Royce, ‘‘to be real is to dwell; or again the real is the results of principles, it is what has grown. It is the outcome and goal of processes.’’13 Royce, having read and digested Peirce’s cosmological essays of the early 1890s, here clearly evidenced the growing influence of Peirce on his work inasmuch as the real is the outcome and goal of a process. However, he had not yet developed the nature and import of these processes. In local cases, we can feel the at-homeness produced by inquiry’s success. Sometimes ‘‘we may succeed in recognizing and interpreting the immediate data in terms of our own ideas. In such cases we feel at home in our world.’’14 The more prevalent case, however, is that in which our ideals and ideas do not fit with the brute actualities of life. For Peirce, this unfittingness of our ideas bred doubt and, consequently, initiated inquiry. For Royce, it primarily reestablished the fact of our finitude. When the ideal and the actual resist one another, we ‘‘then know our finitude, and we are inwardly disquieted thereby. Such disquietude is our almost natural experience as finite wanderers.’’15 Apart from the insertion of a Peircean outlook on the nature of the real, not much had changed for Royce. But the Peircean moment is crucial precisely because in identifying the Real as the outcome of a process of inquiry and in establishing the resistance of the actual to the Ideal as the human condition, Royce had, from the perspective of Peirce’s ‘‘The Fixation of Belief,’’ placed us at the initiation of inquiry. Instead of this being merely the end of the road for the sorrowful wanderer, it now could be claimed as the beginning of the road for the hopeful wanderer. This small dose of Peirce stands as a watershed in Royce’s conception of the philosopher as wanderer; he opened himself to the possibility of reconsidering the lostness of the modern Thrasymachus. To do so, however, he needed to find his way beyond the dyad of World and individual; he needed to find a community among finite creatures. One avenue of hope Royce acknowledged for overcoming our disquietude is that of the mystic. The mystic attempts to overcome our status not by reasoning but by direct and immediate submission to

................. 15741$

$CH2

02-13-06 14:42:44

PS

PAGE 41

42


the Absolute. Here one reaches an incommunicable melding of World and individual that moves a step beyond the dim vision of the wandering wise person; the dyad resolves into a monad. But Royce, perhaps sensing some sleight of hand in thus joining the fragment to the Whole while it is still a fragment, ultimately rejected this avenue of hope. The mystic must reject the value of the finitude of our individuality altogether. He or she is not merely socially isolated, but must stand beyond any community because his or her worldedness is thoroughly incommunicable: For the mystic abode of being is the silent land. They come not back who wander thither. For they, as mere finite thinkers, as seekers, are not at all, when once they have awakened to the truth. How should they return?16

As Royce saw it, mystics are not philosophers—they neither seek nor inquire. They achieve completeness only through absolute rejection of finitude. Royce, bred of the bruteness of California frontier life, was not ready to relinquish the significance of our finite existence. His own route of resistance to the disquietude needed to be one that honored, for example, his mother’s work and action in establishing and cultivating a family in the wilderness. In rejecting the mystic’s route, however, Royce implicitly committed himself to finding a mediation between the individual and the World. The process of inquiry of finite seekers emerged for Royce as the locus of this mediation; it stood between the mystic’s loss of self to the World and the mere intellectual and social lostness of his earlier philosophical wanderers. ‘‘Primarily,’’ Royce said, ‘‘in seeking Being, we seek what is to end our disquietude.’’17 In The World and the Individual, the philosopher, as inquirer, began to take on a crucial role in establishing a community of finite beings. Within this mediation between mysticism and lostness, moreover, Royce began to see another point of transition. That is, strictly speaking, his sorrowful, lonesome wise person stood somewhere between the mystic and the intellectually lost wanderer. However, this figure

................. 15741$

$CH2

02-13-06 14:42:45

PS

PAGE 42


43

was characterized by stasis; the wise person was not completely intellectually lost, but had nowhere to go. One place was, pragmatically speaking, as good as another, because all relations were with the Absolute, not with finite, situated beings. Too, like the mystic, the sorrowful wise person was a stranger to community, not fully assimilated to the World but nevertheless relatively alone among his or her peers. Royce’s shift to a focus on inquiry suggested the need for something more than this. It suggested a heading for movement, if only away from the source of doubt. The philosopher–wanderer, as seeker of being, had somewhere to go. Perhaps more important, the question of social alienation was directly addressed by the focus on inquiry as an experientially public, communal process in which we as fragments are not merely isolated but are able to work in concert. Royce, struggling with the Cartesian–Faustian (and perhaps Californian) image of the lone wise person, finally arrived at the Peircean community of inquirers. Hampered, I think, by his commitment to the dyad of World and individual, Royce struggled in the rest of his Gifford Lectures to make a transition from the sorrowful wise person to the philosopher as hopeful inquirer. The latter was still a wanderer, a revised and resituated version of the Thrasymachus character. This figure was not like the sad, roving singular sage, but was a kind of traveling experimenter, an almost Whitmanesque character. Traces of hope and community are scattered throughout the later portions of The World and the Individual. First, Royce reasserts his fundamental pragmatism: beliefs constitute, affect, and are convertible into action. ‘‘That all beliefs about truth of any grade,’’ he says, ‘‘and that all theories have a practical meaning, I do explicitly teach. That, in fact, as my reader will see, is my whole philosophy.’’18 In short, the inquirer’s actions will make a difference; this is more than acquiescence to longing. The inquirer has become an active agent in creation and is no longer a bystander. One of the differences inquiring can make is to provide our wandering with a direction. It may not bring us directly to the absolute judge, as does the mystic’s relinquishing of self, but it may bring a heading to our finitude. This, of course, is the hope found in Peirce’s

................. 15741$

$CH2

02-13-06 14:42:45

PS

PAGE 43

44


notion of the self-correction of scientific inquiry. Under this Peircean influence, Royce began his final redemption of the philosopher as wanderer: The way of reflection is long. The forest of our human ignorance is dark and tangled. Happy indeed are those who are content to live and to work only in regions where the practical labors of civilization have cleared the land, and where the task of life is to till the fertile fields and to walk in the established ways. The philosopher, in the world of thought, is by destiny forever a frontiersman [or woman]. To others he must often seem a wanderer. He knows best himself how far he wanders, and how often he seems to be discovering only new barrenness in the lonely wilderness.19

The philosopher here plays a role for the community at large, opening avenues of thought in the search for Being. The humility of the fragmentariness of human fallibility is not lost, but neither is it converted into a rejection of philosophy of the sort that positivism developed. In The World and the Individual, the philosopher as wanderer finds a social use in the maintenance of this humility: ‘‘We must obey in order to triumph. And such obedience for the student of philosophy, takes the form of cool reflection and a patient wandering in the wilderness of ignorance until he sees the road home.’’20 The shift in Royce’s rhetoric reveals a direct and important shift in attitude. No longer does the philosopher take joy in the sorrow of acknowledging finitude. Instead, ‘‘Part of the business of life, and no small part of it, is to learn to live with our inevitable defects, and to make the best of them.’’21 As wandering ‘‘frontiersman,’’ Royce’s philosopher has moved from social isolation to an integral role in the community. The philosopher is at work for his or her community, and not merely for his or her own ultimate merger with the Absolute or for some set of local, personal interests. For Royce, ‘‘The justification of the pursuit of philosophy as one of the tasks to which a man’s life may honestly be devoted, requires a recognition of the common interests of all men. The frontiersman may wander; but he must some day win what shall belong to the united empire of human thought.’’22 Just as in Tho-

................. 15741$

$CH2

02-13-06 14:42:46

PS

PAGE 44


45

reau’s essay ‘‘Walking,’’ where wilderness is that which allows us to recivilize ourselves, so the ‘‘living truth’’ Royce’s frontier philosopher apprehends in the wilderness must come back to the community: ‘‘The God of the wilderness, if he indeed be the true God, shall show himself also as the keeper of the city.’’23 Thus, unlike the sorrowful wise person, the philosopher–wanderer is not merely at home in wandering; the wandering is simply a way of finding a road home: ‘‘None prize the home-coming more than those who wander farthest.’’24 In The World and the Individual Royce also began to break down the central dyad. Whereas earlier the World or the Absolute simply enclosed and dominated its fragmentary individuals, now a reciprocity develops in which we can make something of our own finitude. We, in effect, as does Royce in rejecting mysticism, choose our active status as wanderers. As Royce put it: Our rational purpose in living as we human beings now do, is essentially and always the wanderer’s purpose. We seek our home, our city out of sight, our lost truth. But in the very search itself lies the partial embodiment of what we ourselves will. . . . It is we ourselves who demand our object as Beyond. . . . The very attitude of any questioner illustrates this truth. To question is to be active, to express an interest; and it is so to seek, as the relative fulfillment of one present purpose, a state of mind which also involves the dissatisfaction and instability of viewing something as still unknown and foreign.25

The individual here is certainly more than either one who accepts fate in ignorance or one who takes joy in the sorrow of her or his impotence. But the mediation of World and individual is not completed in The World and the Individual. Especially in the ‘‘Supplementary Essay,’’ Royce’s ‘‘well-ordered’’ system calls back its wanderers. We, as finite wanderers, of necessity ‘‘freely’’ come home: ‘‘We, too, however we wander, come in eternity freely to our home.’’26 The risk, the autonomy, the work of our wandering—as philosophers and seekers—seem ultimately to be withdrawn; the reciprocity established above appears to dissolve into the old domination. Our task still seems to be merely to fit ourselves, as puzzle pieces, into the Whole.

................. 15741$

$CH2

02-13-06 14:42:46

PS

PAGE 45

46


The Problem of Christianity The fuller mediation of the dyad required, for Royce, another book, The Problem of Christianity. The nascent sense of community found in The World and the Individual took hold of Royce, though he was not able to develop it there. As many commentators have noted, it was his dialogue with Peirce, together with his own conception of ‘‘loyalty,’’ that set Royce in the direction of The Problem of Christianity. Peirce’s conception of a community of inquirers who were also interpreters became the framework within which Royce’s philosopher could work. Loyalty was his way of describing the nature of the philosopher’s relation to this community. As John Smith puts it, loyalty ‘‘sustains the community of those who seek knowledge, since the pursuit of truth demands that every inquirer put aside his personal interests and predilections and devote himself to the discovery of an objective truth that is the creation of no man and no nation.’’27 It is community, then, that finally dissolves the dyad; the community, itself triadic, stands between the individual and the Absolute. The philosopher as wanderer is able now to commit herself not directly to an immediate grasp of the Absolute, but to the process of inquiry constituted by the community of interpreters. Instead of being isolated or assimilated, the philosopher finds a home in the developing career of the community. ‘‘Loyalty,’’ Royce says, ‘‘in the individual, is his love for an united community, expressed in a life of devotion to that community.’’28 Roycean philosophers thus come to constitute a community of wanderers. There is risk, autonomy, and experiment in the wilderness. But these are underwritten not by the absolute judge’s immediate decree, but by the philosopher’s chosen commitment to the community. Thus, the Thrasymachus wanderer is rehabilitated not by the redemption or romanticization of mere lostness, but by seeing that he takes his bearings within a history and community of inquiry and interpretation. As philosophers we wander together and, in virtue of our commitment to this community, we find ourselves also committed to the larger community of finite beings. The frontier work of

................. 15741$

$CH2

02-13-06 14:42:47

PS

PAGE 46


47

the wilderness has its own home in the human community. It was here, finally, in the early years of the new century that Royce found himself more at home; he recognized his own work as a wandering quest for a community that gives purpose and purchase to his finitude. His own ideas found their work to do. Even if he did not come to a full existential recognition of the fact, he now described a philosophical job in which the burden to solve or resolve all questions was no longer on Royce alone. He could take his place, in his finitude, within a developing community and history of philosophical thought. Concluding Thoughts In an age whose gaze is riveted on difference, Royce’s focus on community sounds a bit awkward—to some it may simply sound obsolete. But human difficulties seem to have their own insistence. Royce faced a culture on the verge of social fragmentation; the avenue to his philosophical outlook was through a landscape littered with radically isolated and fragmented individuals adrift in a wilderness of finitude. Though we may whistle well in the dark, I don’t see that we are in a much improved state. This is true, I think, of American culture at large and also, more specifically, of philosophers in America. As philosophers we are not so much a ‘‘community’’ as an aggregate of folks collected under the title of a profession. In some ways, I think, we have created an even more entangling and bewildering wilderness than the American pioneers faced. This is not to say that we live with the same physical stress and precariousness. Our wilderness is one in which we may find our own social and soulful identities seriously adrift. We have a wealth of life options, but little on which to take our bearings. We have, with remarkable success, unsettled our social fabric and displaced and misplaced our ‘‘selves’’; such displacement is not new in philosophy nor, certainly, in the American philosophical tradition, as is evidenced by the emphasis both Emerson and Thoreau placed on the need for a practice of self-aversive thinking. The difference seems to be that we now take the displacement as final, not as instrumental to a better understand-

................. 15741$

$CH2

02-13-06 14:42:47

PS

PAGE 47

48


ing of and acquaintance with our home in the world. The irony is that we seem to have underwritten twentieth-century liberalism and its surface interest in community with a subjectivism that on its moral and political side is little more than a disguised rugged individualism. This, in part at least, is what makes the so-called postmodern turn both interesting and frightening. This irony would not have been lost on Royce. As Smith notes, Royce understood that ‘‘increasing social cultivation’’ and maintaining a simplistic focus on community as social salvation easily ‘‘results in individualism.’’29 Royce’s story of us as cowanderers in a wilderness offers us at least a minimal anchor in the community of interpreters. We can draw on our conversation and experience for direction and for the maintenance of a stability amid the destabilizing surprises of history. However, for Royce, this cowandering has conditions. Central among these is a loyalty to the community and its development. We must again recognize that our ‘‘case’’ is not merely our own. It also concerns the social orders and traditions to which we belong. From a Roycean perspective, the ease with which we try, from an individualistic stance, to compartmentalize our being into private and public spheres seems naı¨ve. In more concrete terms, despite a strong dogma of ‘‘liberalism’’ in the contemporary liberal arts academy, what we seem to have achieved for ourselves is a professionalism rooted in the entrepreneurship of writing and speaking. We live very well for critics; unlike Socrates and Margaret Fuller, we are marginalized by lack of interest, not because we make a difference. Too often deans no longer try to build communities; they collect individuals to enhance the outward appearances of their programs. In many ways, philosophers, like the rest of American professionals, have achieved the very status of capitalist–aristocrat they so often claim to detest and reject; in reflecting on our present condition, it is difficult not to think of Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man. But cynicism is bought too cheaply and has no payoff. Royce fought his way from a philosophy of totality and immediacy to one of community, temporality, and interpretation. In the present setting,

................. 15741$

$CH2

02-13-06 14:42:48

PS

PAGE 48


49

where most philosophical work can without too much difficulty be construed as mercenary, self-engrossed, entrepreneurial, or self-negating, Royce’s struggle offers a refreshing outlook as to what our work might be about. He openly rejected ‘‘the view that estimates the value of life as an accountant estimates a man’s assets, viz., by summation and balancing’’; for him, the ‘‘only useful speculations on the worth of life are those that regard life with reference to some accepted goal, itself a state of consciousness in some animate being.’’30 Royce’s wandering philosophers share an attitude and orientation; they are committed to the possibility of community itself and to the ameliorative possibilities for humanity that such community projects. It is a job description worth considering.

................. 15741$

$CH2

02-13-06 14:42:49

PS

PAGE 49

three

wilderness as philosophical home

R

oyce offered us work as philosophical wanderers in a wilderness, but he gave little articulation to the nature of that wilderness.1 I turn now to Henry Bugbee’s thoughts on such a wilderness, and I begin by noting that Bugbee was deeply influenced by Gabriel Marcel, who, in turn, was much indebted to the work of Royce.2 Thus, there is a natural continuity that underlies the discussion at hand. In his essays ‘‘Walking’’ and ‘‘Wild Apples,’’ Henry Thoreau spoke of wilderness as a metaphorical expression of the inner wildness necessary for us to overcome the deadening effects of overcivilization. He also took time to show that actual wilderness worked as an important condition or catalyst for setting this wildness free. Bugbee takes up both of these themes of wilderness and moves a step further. Rethinking philosophy from the heavily analytic cast that dominated its practice in the 1950s, he suggests that thinking is about finding our way in a literal wilderness of being; he provides existential purchase to Royce’s conception of philosophy as wandering. George Williams { 50 }

................. 15741$

$CH3

02-13-06 14:42:42

PS

PAGE 50

wilderness as philosophic al home

51

provides a view of the breadth and depth of Bugbee’s conception of wilderness: ‘‘The wilderness for Bugbee is at once the world without and within perceived no longer as wasteland but as reality beheld contemplatively as ‘our true home’; as ‘that world of every day,’ experienced in faith.’’3 In wilderness we are never fully lost nor fully arrived. Wilderness is in fact where we always find ourselves and where we are inevitably in the process of finding ourselves. Put another way, we find ourselves—our meanings—through localized expression and orientation but always against a backdrop of wilderness unexplored, indeterminate, and untamed. Bugbee sees human philosophical activity as an ongoing experiment to make ourselves at home in this wilderness. This requires of us an explorer’s attitude, an attitude of finding, creating, and risking—an openness to possibility within our awareness of our precarious human situation. What this explorer’s attitude does, is allow us to reorient our relationship to and understanding of things, to revise our modes of acting in the world, and to find and create meanings in our worlds that otherwise might escape us. In his The Inward Morning, which he subtitles A Philosophical Exploration, Bugbee notes a recurrent experience that faces all philosophical inquirers: ‘‘The world as I take it reflectively and the world as I muddle through it then seem excruciatingly worlds apart. Does one write such philosophy out of compensation for his inadequacy?’’4 This existential disorientation reveals that forms of alienation and lostness pervade our wilderness experience and demand our patience. Simply willing ourselves forward does not suffice to make us feel at home in the world. ‘‘In our discursive thought,’’ Bugbee observed, ‘‘we are imbued with the condition of exile, which involves some measure of sensitivity to our homelessness.’’5 For Bugbee, to note our exile and homelessness is to make an explicit claim about the wilderness of being he believes we inhabit. But it is also, in the very inadequacy of our speaking, to disclose wilderness in its immediacy. This is important just to the extent that we are able to find our meaning here in our homelessness. For Bugbee this is a performable task, but one that, as John Anderson notes, requires a particular outlook, atti-

................. 15741$

$CH3

02-13-06 14:42:43

PS

PAGE 51

52


tude, or orientation: ‘‘Only the hunters and trappers on the long hunt,’’ Anderson says, ‘‘could penetrate the wilderness and dare the unknown, for only they could discover and hold to a human meaning on the frontier.’’6 As philosophers, we can try to dominate being, whip the world into shape, and come out with a clean version of just how things are. Or we can, in the manner of contemporary skeptics of all varieties, simply abandon our concern for how things are. Or we may live with Bugbee between these particular extremes: ‘‘We may open ourselves to the meaning of a life in the wilderness and await with patience the founding of that assurance which may overtake us in the course of our wanderings and make us at home in this condition.’’7 Bugbee’s own thought in The Inward Morning exhibits a version of the explorer’s attitude as it moves back and forth between rooted, everyday places in which we are settled and the philosophical and existential thickets where things are less clear. Scanning coffee shops, school yards, Western rivers, and ships’ cabins, and explicating the insights of Meister Eckhardt and Spinoza and the blindnesses of Sartre and John Dewey, Bugbee has a knack for keeping us attentive to experience regardless of where we wander philosophically. He asks how we can give expression to our life in the wilderness—how we can express our feelings of exile without abandoning purpose and hope. Where is it, he asks, that our reflection finds a path or highway on which to work—a path or highway not so entirely remote from our actual experiences that it becomes merely our profession: ‘‘The life we lead and the philosophy we believe in our hearts,’’ Bugbee says, ‘‘cannot be independent of one another.’’8 Bugbee does not build a philosophical system or world on the ground of some specific determinate belief such that we are bound to feel secure. But he also does not abandon philosophy’s power for establishing a feeling of being at home. He builds the themes of his reflections as if he were building a campsite in a wild setting—from what is at hand, what is responsive, and what is useful in a philosophical way. As his journal progresses, his themes get roughed out not as if by blueprint, but as if by artful discovery of where they belong. Bugbee explores the possibilities of

................. 15741$

$CH3

02-13-06 14:42:43

PS

PAGE 52


53

three features of experience for enabling us to adapt to our ongoing present and to find a way in our wilderness condition: things, action, and meaning. In so doing, he suggests ways in which a philosophical life might proceed. Things Bugbee begins with a radical and realistic empiricism of the ordinary that is Jamesian in flavor. As philosophers, as professionals, as consumers and constructors, we have become so used to reducing ‘‘things’’ to some common feature—matter, mind, utility—that we tend to forget the things themselves. James suggests that things are ‘‘gifts’’ of our experience; this seems an apt expression for Bugbee’s aims. Through our reductive behaviors we make things as we wish them to be, we give them our perspective and our purpose. This is indeed a powerful and seductive way of treating things, a way of bringing them under our control. Through the powers of language and imagination, we make our ‘‘worlds’’ of things. This method of manipulating experience is not lost on contemporary thinkers such as Richard Rorty and Donald Davidson, who see language as the constructor and the material of this world and all worlds. But Bugbee notes that such dominance on our part ignores the residual resistance and independence of things, what Charles Peirce called their ‘‘secondness’’ or, borrowing from medieval thought, their ‘‘haecceity.’’ For Bugbee, however much we succeed in controlling things through reductive strategies, if we remain blind to their haecceity, we will fail to be fully at home with them. In Thoreau’s way of putting it, we will ‘‘own’’ them, but they won’t be our own. For things to become our own in Thoreau’s sense of communal interaction, we require another sort of orientation toward things. The explorer’s or adventurer’s attitude remains alert to the otherness of things; it demands what Dan Conway aptly calls ‘‘patiency.’’9 As Anderson notes, it was an incapacity for this attitude that made Columbus a poor explorer and fostered his ultimate failure in the midst of his apparent success: ‘‘For his inability to see anything except what his hopes and aspirations sug-

................. 15741$

$CH3

02-13-06 14:42:44

PS

PAGE 53

54


gested to him, in his inability to see the West Indies while he searched for the East Indies, Columbus typifies Western man.’’10 Columbus missed the ‘‘secondness,’’ the otherness, of the ‘‘new world.’’ Avoiding the blindness of subjective reduction does not, however, translate into a calculative objectivism. Bugbee resisted both idealism and naturalism: idealism because it leaves ‘‘things’’ out of account and naturalism because it leaves us in a world devoid of meaning. ‘‘If either theory were true,’’ he suggests, ‘‘the upshot would be the same: Man is left to himself, sovereign over a world of things vacuous in themselves. Neither theory seems to do justice to things as radically unknown; in neither is the dense presence of things preserved in thought.’’11 For Bugbee, things both share and constitute our wilderness, and they are among the conditions of our feeling at home. For him, things are at once immediate and meaningful, as well as dense and elusive. We know them in only a limited way when we use them; we must also let them begin to speak for themselves. And even then there is a residual mystery that will call us back for further encounters; no finite experience will exhaust the possible, transactional meanings of things. Ce´zanne did not merely repeat paintings of Mont Sainte Victoire; the mountain itself called forth new and different paintings. Certain things in experience demand our attention and call for naming or poetic accounts: mountains, artworks, storms, and sunsets. Bugbee would have us become more democratic in attending to things; he reminds us to notice and appreciate the feel of a diner, the quiet of a local swamp, or the smell of coffee at sea. We must come to accept things as they are for themselves and for us: ‘‘Things exist in their own right; it is a lesson that escapes us except as they hold us in awe. Except we stand on the threshold of the wilderness, knowingly, how can our position be true, how can essential truth be enacted in our hearts?’’12 This acceptance underwrites Bugbee’s ongoing sense that we are to be in league with things—that we ‘‘receive the gift of all existent things: coexistence in communion.’’13 We live in wilderness with things, and their residual wildness both demands our respect and attention and resists any complete ‘‘knowing’’ on our part.

................. 15741$

$CH3

02-13-06 14:42:44

PS

PAGE 54


55

Bugbee’s own experience tells him that the adventurer’s attitude, and not the attitude of the reductive idealist or naturalist, will lead us in the direction of the meanings of things. And, as do William James and Thoreau, he tries to awaken us to this attitude directly through descriptions and dramatizations of experiences that bear its mark. On various occasions he points to our transactions with nature and the powers of natural phenomena: ‘‘One may,’’ he says, ‘‘be struck clean by sunlight over a patch of lawn, by clouds running free before the wind, by the massive presence of rock.’’14 But such an encounter is not merely passive. We must involve ourselves with the things we encounter—we must act. As David Strong puts it: ‘‘Things, existents stand forth. But they do not stand forth except as we ourselves stand forth with them, both independently and in union with them.’’15 Action We, like Columbus, may be exiled from things; this may be a result of arrogance, ignorance, or indifference, though most often it is a result merely of our habitual taking of things for granted. To the extent that we are not exiled, things may begin to describe a home for us—a place in which we might act. But it is ‘‘action’’ not merely as ‘‘doing things’’ or the pragmatic ‘‘fixing things’’ or ‘‘solving problems,’’ but as the site of meaning’s acquisition and expression. As Conway points out, Bugbee wishes to avoid the ‘‘voluntaristic conceit of so much contemporary philosophy.’’16 For Bugbee, action is marked more by one’s attitude than by any surface appearance of hurry and flurry. As Strong suggests, The Inward Morning ‘‘concerns the basic attitude and standpoint from which we act in our situation and from which we approach things, an attitude to which we are recalled by certain texts and by the things of the natural world itself.’’17 This is especially important to Bugbee’s discussions of our acquiring meaning from things, for then we must learn to ‘‘be still,’’ to ‘‘leave things be,’’ to attend to the instruction of things. ‘‘By ‘leaving things be’ I do not mean inaction,’’ Bugbee says. ‘‘I mean respecting things, being still in the presence of things, letting them speak.’’18 Anyone—hunter, an-

................. 15741$

$CH3

02-13-06 14:42:45

PS

PAGE 55

56


gler, or photographer—who has waited for something to put in an appearance knows the experiential force of Bugbee’s remark. He captures it cleanly in his description of swamping: ‘‘I can remember the shivering cold. But there was no mistake about the gladness of being in the swamp or the immanence of the wilderness there.’’19 This act of ‘‘awaiting’’ and attending is an important feature of the explorer’s attitude in the wilderness. Moreover, it is something we tend to learn well in a wilderness setting. Speaking of both Thoreau and Bugbee, Conway puts it this way: ‘‘Whereas the guiding aims of civil society require us to act, to form, to impress our stamp onto things, Nature teaches us to wait, to observe, to receive things as they present themselves to us in their reclusive reality.’’20 Such reception is an important, perhaps the most important, mode of action for an explorer. It is the action that underwrites the authenticity of other actions and allows us to experience the otherness of things. Repeatedly in The Inward Morning Bugbee seeks ways to awaken his reader to this explorer’s attitude as it involves action. One of the most memorable is his description of his rowing coach, John Schultz. Schultz understood—experientially knew—the community of rowers, boats, oars, and water. He felt the integrity of a well-rowed boat; he sensed the absence of community of a poorly rowed boat. And he found ways to bring his rowers to this same appreciation: ‘‘He was the awakener. John Schultz, he was—rigger of shells and coach of sculling.’’21 What Schultz awakened his rowers to was their complicity with things in the world—the absence of essential separation between themselves, the tools of rowing, and the water. Only when the rowers were acting in concert with the things around them would the full meaning of rowing appear, only then would Schultz acknowledge that they were ‘‘rowing.’’ They were moments of neither domination nor mere passivity, but moments of integral action. ‘‘It was as if rowing had a kind of ground–bass [down-to-earth] meaning for him which underlay the constancy of his concern and seemed to him to demand relevance from the oarsmen in each and every stroke.—And so he momently expected each one of us to wake up on the end of an oar. This infinite expectation of dawn often made him seem very

................. 15741$

$CH3

02-13-06 14:42:46

PS

PAGE 56


57

unreasonable.’’22 We think of Thoreau, from whom ‘‘the infinite expectation of dawn’’ is borrowed, as likewise being unreasonably demanding. They both ask that we do something in the world as if we were alive and interested, and not as a matter of the course of things. Put another way, only insofar as our act is alive and interested can it truly become a matter of the course of things. Thus John Schultz exemplifies for Henry Bugbee the importance of our community with things and the attitude required to find this community and be at home as we act in it. Schultz, like Thoreau, presents us with a demand for action. In ‘‘Civil Disobedience’’ and elsewhere, Thoreau calls on us to commit to a possible future and to act on it immediately. Schultz demands that his rowers learn to act with their immediate world. These are very difficult demands. Note how short-lived are our commitments to and energies for essential human development. It is always too easy to fall back into a life of passivity or of apparent action, where we ‘‘act,’’ but more like automata than persons. We are in the habit of finding ways to dismiss, ridicule, or ignore the call to action. We tend to live neither resolutely nor deliberately; we tend to skate through life on paths that yield the least resistance to our personal comfort. What Bugbee does is to show us, again and again in simple examples, the importance for our lives of this demand for action. He shows us the transfixed state of two youths building a dam in a small stream; he shows us the silent, efficient concert of men at work on a ship in war; he provides a close-up of a brush with death in white water. He has seen commitment in action and patiently writes so that we might share his vision or recognize our own: ‘‘I think of men whom I have watched while they were lost in a scrupulous endeavor, as in holding a small ship to a course in a difficult sea.’’23 As readers, we develop an awareness of his own developing sense of the meaning of things in action, and we may become convinced of his judgment both through our own related experiences and through the power of his examples. His remembrance of a trip down the Rogue River in the hands of a Native American boatman is exemplary of this power:

................. 15741$

$CH3

02-13-06 14:42:46

PS

PAGE 57

58


Even though he steered standing, there were quite a few drops which precluded a perspective of what lay below until you were over and into the run. In general, you might say, he had to be steeped in the river, constantly alive to it in its ever unfolding. . . . As the Indian boatman stood there in steady communion with the flowing river over mile and mile of deeply remembered bottom, as the full-throated engines sang along the river bars and through the pine-forested valley, as we labored up in the teeth of the constantly opposing current and then turned back down with it into the accelerated decisions of descent, the lasting impression was built into me that without a reasonableness instant with faith, this thing could not be done. I can feel that Indian standing there handling the boat aright. And to this day, from some fifteen years ago, this man has seemed to define the condition of man as it should be, and as it should be understood.24

We see Bugbee’s adventurer’s attitude shift our focus from the specific outcomes of agency to its very enactment. Action, however useful, is not merely a pragmatic tool in Bugbee’s hands. Rather, action—alive, awakened endeavor—engenders meaning. It both discloses the meanings of things and expresses and publicizes our human meaning. Life in an awakened state in the wilderness is an ongoing experiment in meanings. Bugbee’s is the sort of ‘‘mysticism’’ written of earlier in the twentieth century by W. E. Hocking, and underwritten by his reading of Meister Eckhardt, which is completely engaged and committed. It is not an accident of the universe but an achievement of being in the world: ‘‘If there is satisfaction involved in these experiences,’’ he says, ‘‘it is satisfaction of the demand to be and act consonantly with the felt universe.’’25 Yet it is not an achievement in the sense that a completion of something finite occurs; it is not a mechanical activity measured by a formula of life. It is simply an awakening to our community with things and the meanings to be found on the highway in our engagements with them. ‘‘No man arrives,’’ says Bugbee, ‘‘decision cannot be boiled down to informed choice. The frontier on which each one of us commits himself in action, is an incorrigible feature of the situation of a man who acts.’’26 One’s active learning from, with, and through things changes one’s

................. 15741$

$CH3

02-13-06 14:42:47

PS

PAGE 58


59

life—our actions then reveal the touch of our instruction. These are actions in whole—body, soul, being. When John Schultz says, ‘‘Boy, you was rowing!’’ he has seen a difference in an action, a moment in which ‘‘co-existent community’’ is awakened in the world. He has seen meaning disclosed and created in an action through community. So, too, of the boys building a dam, of young men steering a ship at night, of the Native American boatman, and of Bugbee’s own walking. In our actions with things, meanings appear, as they do in poetry, that cannot be precipitated into a complete, discursive account. ‘‘That which illuminates our labors,’’ Bugbee says, ‘‘in reflection as in other channels of endeavor, that which decisively empowers us in the deed, comes as an unanticipated precipitation of meaning.’’27 Meaning To act with things is, for Bugbee, the most basic—that is, the most down-to-earth—human endeavor; it is a fundamentally philosophical endeavor to find meaning in our lives and world. But it is neither the acquisition of an aggregate of facts nor the adoption of a calculative, self-correcting method. ‘‘Philosophy,’’ Bugbee intimates, ‘‘is not a making of a home for the mind out of reality. It is more like learning to leave things be: restoration in the wilderness, here and now.’’28 Bugbee thus thinks of Dewey’s concern over the quest for certainty as something like an interesting mistake. For him, philosophical query has in only a few instances been a quest for deductive certainty or scientific verification. But it has always been, in all its guises, a quest for meaning in our worlds. ‘‘I freely admit, ‘‘he says, ‘‘to reading the history of philosophy philosophically, and differently from those who think of philosophy either as a forerunner or as a construction of systematic knowledge about reality on a footing with the yield of scientific investigation.’’29 He agrees with Dewey that we must seek out meaning. But he does not share Dewey’s confidence in the scientific attitude; he does not believe meaning is generated merely through technical solutions and logical and genealogical analyses. That is, the important clarity of meaning is ‘‘felt’’ and is not produced by the

................. 15741$

$CH3

02-13-06 14:42:47

PS

PAGE 59

60


sieve-like clarifying activity of analysis or scientistic reduction. For Bugbee, as for Thoreau, to live as awake is to philosophize; it is to act with an attitude that allows for the ‘‘appreciation of the possibilities of meaning’’ as we listen to ‘‘things saying themselves.’’30 The meaning we seek and create is not analytical clarity, but rather a felt clarity that dawns on us as we act in the world. The futility written across the entire history of analytic philosophy is found in this confusion of austerity with clarity. It is as if an army of engineers had been sent to, in William James’s phrase, ‘‘clean up the litter’’ in philosophical meaning, and in so doing left us with nothing—no meaning, no philosophy. ‘‘Clarity’’ of this sort is a barrenness, a ‘‘false clarity’’ whose ‘‘tough-mindedness and hardheadedness conceal a refusal . . . to accommodate reflectively the gift of the world in the experience of things.’’31 The felt clarity we seek is found only in our active openness to this ‘‘gift of the world.’’ It is disclosed to us in and with things, in our communal actions. Meaning is what gives us bearings in each level of wilderness we face: our inner wildness, the natural wilderness, and the wilderness of being. It provides a working stability for the adventurer’s attitude. Though it avoids the sterility of analytical clarity and closure, it does not bequeath to us a mere lostness. Acknowledging our lostness brings us to the brink of recognizing our wilderness condition, but accepting lostness as the fundamental human condition—the cynic’s conclusion—prevents us from seeing what stares us in the face. ‘‘We may speak poignantly,’’ Bugbee says, ‘‘of the experience of being lost while we are lost; but we cannot be clear about ourselves and our situation insofar as our thinking is dominated by that experience. Disillusionment with the world knows nothing of the sacrament of coexistence.’’32 Here is the locus of Bugbee’s dissent from the existentialists. They came to recognize our wilderness condition, but in doing so mistook it, on many occasions, for absolute alienation. Bugbee suggested that his approach be dubbed ‘‘experientialism’’ to distinguish it from the existentialists’ version of the cynical outlook. ‘‘The question,’’ he maintains, ‘‘is whether we can rejoice with things, or whether we find

................. 15741$

$CH3

02-13-06 14:42:47

PS

PAGE 60


61

them simply inane. Sartre finds them inane, absurd.’’33 From such an outlook, action itself becomes rudderless and must always be traced to inane and arbitrary origins and ends. Bugbee did not find himself or humanity so completely lost and adrift. Bugbee’s turn sees our wilderness condition not as a dead end but as an opening; it calls us out of our mechanical existence and draws us toward our possibilities. It offers another sort of instruction than does absolute and unredeemable alienation. Reality encountered ‘‘as a wilderness,’’ as Thoreau suggested repeatedly in Walden and ‘‘Walking,’’ provides opportunity for us to find meaning in acting with things: ‘‘Through it I find my vocation, for the wilderness is reality experienced as call and explained in responding to it absolutely.’’34 Nor is such learning narrowly instrumental or intellectual—it is an instruction of a whole life. ‘‘Not merely in verbal response,’’ Bugbee believes, ‘‘but in all our doing there seems to be this aspect of learning to make answer and of groping for articulation which may thread us on a central strand of meaning capable of bearing the weight of all the disparate moments of our lives.’’35 For this we must pack along our humor, our caring, our interest, our commitment, and our patience. Still, we are actors; we will not experience the gift of things in a stupor, but only when we are awake and alive, only when in an adventurer’s attitude. Conclusion It is just here, where things, action, and meaning stand together, that Bugbee attends to the possible importance of our actual wildernesses. In our wandering after meaning, wilderness stands forth for us and instructs those with an attitude of ‘‘unconditional concern.’’36 In his essay ‘‘Wilderness in America,’’ Bugbee approaches something like a political statement concerning the importance of American wilderness: ‘‘If wilderness may yet speak to us and place us as respondents in the ambience of respect for the order of Nature as primordial, it must be liberated from ultimate subsumption to human enterprise.’’37 This is not merely an appeal to an aesthetic interest. Rather,

................. 15741$

$CH3

02-13-06 14:42:48

PS

PAGE 61

62


Bugbee raises the question of the essentiality of actual wilderness as a catalyst to wonder, as a reminder of our lostness, and as a place of encounter with our possibilities. Wilderness is a condition of maintaining our humanity. Bugbee’s claim derives first from his own experience of learning from the wilderness of British Columbia—for him a sacred if not a religious experience. ‘‘And it was there,’’ he recalls, ‘‘in attending to this wilderness, with unremitting alertness and attentiveness, yes, even as I slept, that I knew myself to have been instructed for life, though I was at a loss to say what instruction I had received.’’38 Like Thoreau, Bugbee does not think of his experience as mystical, ineffable, and special in the sense that it is ‘‘discontinuous with daily life’’; rather, it is a steadfast and simple experience of the everyday that we have a tendency to hide from ourselves. We tend to neglect and ignore the meaning of our being. We seem to fear and to turn our backs on attending, acting, and being. Other things seem more important than learning to be at home in the wilderness—we aim to get our eighty years in, but we aren’t sure if we are living or doing time. For Bugbee, ours is a philosophical problem of denial and unreceptiveness, not of fundamental inability: ‘‘When we proclaim things as naught, do we not utter the word of a stricken soul, do we not bespeak our own incapacity to receive the ultimate gift from things, of themselves, in their infinite meaning?’’39 Wilderness—the actual wilderness of forests and deserts—then, is an exemplary site for the finding and creating of meaning; it is where things are most easily left to themselves; it encourages our listening and being still in community with things: ‘‘If its instruction goes deep its implications are lifelong.’’40 When wilderness is supplanted by and overcome with technical apparatus, when we ‘‘garden’’ it, we tend to seek meaning in technical fashion as well—we revert to the ‘‘processing’’ of meaning. This ‘‘processing of meaning has tended to supplant responsibility for meaning, and human communication has become a problem to which techniques of solution are sought.’’41 If oil is expensive, we’ll either draw on our reserves or open the land to exploration. Even such human endeavors as teaching, learning, and thinking

................. 15741$

$CH3

02-13-06 14:42:48

PS

PAGE 62


63

become problems seeking technical solutions—we no longer stop to consider the actual being of good teachers and learners. We try— mostly ineffectively—to produce teaching and learning. But these are not the sorts of things one produces—teaching and learning are found in life’s transitions, in the agency of a fundamental alertness, awareness, and attentiveness. We need only ask the good teachers; like good chefs, they carry no cookbooks and follow no recipes. We become caricatures of ‘‘men,’’ who, as many traditional women’s magazines attest, when asked to consider any feature of experience, treat it thoughtlessly as something to ‘‘be fixed.’’ Bugbee, however, does not leave wilderness as he finds it in this political space of the early twenty-first century. He is not merely an environmentalist. In a way he slips beyond even the cry of deep ecology. The importance of wilderness is an everyday affair. As he notes of American Indian life: ‘‘The dialectical interplay between such wilderness placement and the mainstream placement of everyday life was implicitly appreciated as something fundamental and not to be intruded upon by other members of the community.’’42 Like John Anderson, he thinks of wilderness more generally as our ‘‘unknown land.’’ The very wilderness that instructs us through our communion with things leads us to consider this world of things and thinking—all of it—a wilderness. Thus, to abandon our actual wilderness may be to commit a suicide of meaning: ‘‘That would seem to depend on each one, who must determine in his heart whether he will be party to claiming ownership of life, thus to remain the slave of consumption, rigidified in the conflicts of control, anxiously demanding, stultified in imagination, and ungenerous toward life itself.’’43 Bugbee’s task, like Thoreau’s, is to bring us to our senses—to awaken us to the possibilities of our own clarity of meaning, our own fitness for death and the appreciation of things. ‘‘And,’’ Bugbee asks, ‘‘may it be that even the wilderness left to us is itself our vestigial hope of being instructed in such a vein?’’44 Our lives are not about closure and analytic clarity of meaning, about finding out ‘‘just how things are.’’45 For us, meaning has to do with learning ‘‘to take things in their darkness, their utter density and

................. 15741$

$CH3

02-13-06 14:42:49

PS

PAGE 63

64


darkness,’’ so that we might ‘‘stand upon the threshold of receiving the ultimate gift of things.’’46 We come to recognize our home as an unknown place, and this defines our homelessness; we wander, though not aimlessly; we achieve meaning, though we find no adequate, final knowledge; we live, for Bugbee, in the service of truth, not merely in its acquisition. We will find our meaning in the genuine awe inspired by wilderness. We may arrive at the consideration that our world is itself a more fundamental wilderness. Wilderness, he says, will not ‘‘permit one to take one’s surroundings for granted’’47; it inspires in us something like what James called an ‘‘ontological wonder-sickness’’—a kind of true homesickness. In this everyday awakening to our humanity, we are put in a position ‘‘to understand that ours is a holy place, a universe of things, a wilderness.’’48

................. 15741$

$CH3

02-13-06 14:42:49

PS

PAGE 64

four

working cer tainty and d eweyan wisdom

H

ow are we, then, to get around in an everyday sort of wilderness? My aim in this chapter is to work toward a middle ground where American idealism and pragmatism share an answer to this question. The first part is not exactly about W. E. Hocking or Gabriel Marcel or Henry Bugbee, but it is an attempt to work within the philosophical spirit that they have bequeathed to us. I think of this spirit in part as having grown out of the philosophical space Hocking cultivated for himself between the range and vision of Royce’s idealism and the attention to the local and the ordinary in James’s pragmatism. Marcel subsequently drew on Hocking’s thought and conversation to keep the meaning of faith and God alive in the Continental philosophical tradition that emerged in midcentury. Bugbee, whose The Inward Morning, as we noted earlier, was inspired by Marcel’s Being and Having, explored with an American temper the ground cleared by Hocking and Marcel. All three were among those who carried forward into the twentieth century non{ 65 }

................. 15741$

$CH4

02-13-06 14:42:55

PS

PAGE 65

66


absolutist versions of idealism; other contributors to this somewhat hidden strand of idealism include Benedetto Croce, R. G. Collingwood, Jose´ Ortega y Gasset, and John William Miller. I also choose these three specifically because each points to a moment of direct encounter in the creating of ‘‘working certainty’’: a ‘‘disclosed a priori,’’ a ‘‘faith,’’ or an ‘‘animating base.’’ The spirit of this neoidealist lineage found Dewey’s pragmatism at once both akin and estranged. Dewey brought philosophy down to earth through his instrumentalism, but in doing so, he appeared to abandon much of the importance philosophy holds for human lives. The first half of the chapter speaks to one dimension of this apparent abandonment; the second half explores the ways in which Dewey’s sense of wisdom resists such abandonment. The upshot is that an ambiguity runs through Dewey’s thought and is in need of attention. This ambiguity leads to the very different readings of Dewey expressed in the work of Victor Kestenbaum and Larry Hickman. Whereas Kestenbaum, who argues that Dewey never fully abandoned idealism, sees in Dewey’s work an attention to our self-transcendence in experience, Hickman sees something more like a tool kit for social reconstruction. Though I lean toward Kestenbaum’s emphasis, the ambiguity remains, and marks an important temperamental divide within the history of pragmatism. Even so, there is sufficient content in Dewey’s account of practical wisdom for it to meet the idealists halfway in working out a way to live in an experiential wilderness— such a wilderness as I encountered in youth. Roaring Brook runs down from the hills behind Richmond, New Hampshire, toward the town of Winchester and the Ashuelot River. For a stretch it parallels state route 119, hidden down behind the hemlocks and maples. Just above where it turns to run beside the road is an old mill whose crumbling remnants have created pools both upand downriver. Here I used to spend time snagging small native trout with little spinners. But I seldom stayed there. Up- and downstream I walked the smoothed, rounded, occasionally moss-covered pieces of granite left there by glaciers, time, and history. In the midst of fishing, almost without knowing it, I learned to walk the brook; sometimes

................. 15741$

$CH4

02-13-06 14:42:56

PS

PAGE 66

working c ertainty and d eweyan widsom

67

the walking itself moved from the fringe to the focus of my experience. I practiced the art of walking in the instabilities of the brook. Walking the rocks—a little bit of risk and a dose of bodily intuition. What began as fun, later developed into a practice, an act of self-control. Over the years I built an assuredness, a kind of certainty in my walking. It came to be something I could rely on. Philosophers—especially those of us who tend to pro-fess more than we con-fess—however liberally minded, have in my experience tended toward dogmatism. Not that professional philosophers won’t argue; they will. But the argumentation often veils a granitelike foundation to which they seem almost organically attached, like lichen. When John Dewey wrote The Quest for Certainty, it was to this dogmatic tendency that he addressed his arguments. His primary targets were philosophies based on religious dogma and philosophies derived deductively from some single set of axioms. Dewey’s worry was that these types of systematic thought had come to dominate the history of philosophy and had led philosophers away from thinking that might assist in the conduct of life. In Dewey’s language, philosophy had come to deal only with the ‘‘problems of philosophers’’ and not with the ‘‘problems of men.’’ After Dewey’s book, many came to argue that any quest for certainty had to be outlawed because such quests were the bases of all totalitarian activity. Certainty was not to be sought. The most radical extension of Dewey’s thought involved the rejection of philosophy itself in favor of the thinly lived, aesthetic existence offered by various thinkers of the postmodern turn. My sense is that this is an overreaction based on a somewhat narrow consideration of what the history of philosophy has been about. I think also that Hocking, Marcel, and Bugbee are agreed on this. For them, philosophy does involve the need for at least a working certainty, and I believe their work provides a basis for understanding philosophy as a quest for certainty once the notion of certainty itself is revised and reoriented. But theirs is a philosophy without dogma. I begin my revision by turning to the relationship between certainty and action. After all, my experience of walking the instabilities

................. 15741$

$CH4

02-13-06 14:42:56

PS

PAGE 67

68


in Roaring Brook can be only poorly described without some appeal to a working certainty. My walking seems first to require some sort of certainty to initiate it. My instinctive or abductive guesses about where and how to plant my feet seem guided, even if only in a minimal way. Moreover, as a practice, the walking of the rocks seems to generate another kind of certainty in the confidence it produces. I come to rely on my ability to negotiate the trip down the brook. If any quest for certainty makes sense, these experiences seem to offer a reasonable place to look. In his essay ‘‘Action and Certainty,’’ W. E. Hocking brings together Dewey’s focus on human action and his questioning of the quest for certainty, and he notes a tension that arises. Hocking asks that we reflect on our experiences of acting in the world and ask ourselves to what extent we can be autonomous agents without some sense of certainty in our lives. It is important to note that his argument begins with a reflection on experience; he is not engaged in the sort of abstract, transcendental deduction that is central to Dewey’s concern. Hocking’s method is much more akin to James’s radical empiricism. Hocking brings to our attention two examples that highlight the presence of certainty as the basis for human action. In the first, he reminds us that ‘‘children cut corners long before they can announce that the straight line is the shortest distance.’’1 In the second instance he suggests that at least some of our feelings of guilt or remorse rest on an initial awareness of a distinction between right and wrong. The aim of these examples is more general: ‘‘It is not the scorn of action, it is the love of it, which prompts the quest for certainty, such as one can have before action begins.’’2 The irony of Dewey’s rejection of certainty, as Hocking sees it, is that Dewey turns to scientific method and experimentalism to replace the deductivist claims of earlier philosophers. Hocking does not quarrel with the shift, but asks that we examine what happens in the act of experimenting—a human action. Can all claims for certainty be abandoned if we turn to rely on science? Hocking thinks not, since when we examine our actions, we see that there is something in them that we can ‘‘count on.’’ The need for this stability or working cer-

................. 15741$

$CH4

02-13-06 14:42:56

PS

PAGE 68


69

tainty ‘‘lies in the nature of all action. For all action intends to change something in particular: and in order to effect just this alteration in the world, the frame of the action must hold still.’’3 Scientific inquiry—experimentation—is one particular kind of action. And despite the deductive sense of the Quine–Duhem thesis— that when hypothesis and background knowledge come into conflict, we may reject one or the other—it is not a guide to the practice of scientific inquiry. Experiments in science always rely both on some instinctive commitments and on some established beliefs. We may grant the revisability of both the instinctive or intuitive judgments and the established beliefs, and yet not give up the notion that working certainties provide the possibility of experimentation. This is precisely the point of Charles Peirce’s emphasis on strands of belief in his theory of inquiry: philosophy’s ‘‘reasoning should not form a chain which is no stronger than its weakest link, but a cable whose fibres may be ever so slender, provided they are sufficiently numerous and intimately connected’’ (W, 2:213). Particular strands may break, but the cable remains. Hocking responds to Dewey’s shift in this manner: ‘‘For unless experiment can establish something and unless something of what we suppose ‘established’ stays established, endures, accumulates, the whole experimental business becomes a fool’s paradise.’’4 The simple force of Hocking’s comments on what Dewey does retain in terms of human action, including experimentation, is that it does require elements of stability or working certainty. For Hocking, these elements are of two sorts: what he calls the ‘‘disclosed a priori’’ and that which is ‘‘established’’ in inquiry. I prefer to think of these disclosed a prioris as intuitive or instinctive beliefs that are already at work in our human practices.5 The ‘‘established’’ certainties I think of as our inheritance—the features of a world frame in which we operate. Now, the difficulty Hocking, or anyone else, faces in trying to introduce these working certainties is that the deductivist will immediately reply that none of them is ‘‘absolutely certain.’’ For deduction the case is always either/or—the absolute certainty of a god’s knowledge or the thorough relativism of the failure to be certain. But

................. 15741$

$CH4

02-13-06 14:42:57

PS

PAGE 69

70


Plato—and even Parmenides—made it abundantly clear that this is not where we live. We live in a precarious world in an adventurous attitude, seeking stability amid risk. Dewey noted this in The Quest for Certainty and later made it central in the early chapters of Experience and Nature. Still, I have to think that his reading of the history of philosophy is much too strong when he says: The quest for certainty is a quest for a peace which is assured, an object which is unqualified by risk and the shadow of fear which action casts. For it is not uncertainty per se which men dislike, but the fact that uncertainty involves us in a peril of evils. (LW, 4:7)

Plato has never struck me as a coward of this sort; his description of human life is much too nuanced for such a reductive reading. We might grant that some philosophers have quested for certainty in this way—for example, the late-nineteenth-century British idealists such as Green, Taylor, and Bradley, with whom Dewey was familiar. But it doesn’t follow that Hocking’s midworld view is guilty of the same. Hocking does not search for a fully preconceived dogmatic order with which to box up the universe, but for those working stabilities which are the precipitates of human history and which sustain ‘‘a laboring philosophy, arising out of and pertinent to existing crises, not to ancient ones.’’6 Philosophy may seek to disclose the intuitions and inheritances embedded in human experience. Intuitions and inheritances appear in a world of risk. And, philosophically speaking, the greatest risk for them is that they may turn out to be false, nonworking, inadequate, or simply incomplete. As Hocking repeatedly notes, it may take an eternity to explore the variety of ways in which an idea is adequate or inadequate. Gabriel Marcel addresses the possibility of the deepest risk for any working certainty—what Peirce called ‘‘throwing over the whole cartload of our beliefs.’’ In a long discussion of the faith one might maintain in persons or in God, Marcel notes that faith bears its own fragility: ‘‘It emerges that I can myself be cut off from my own faith and no longer see it; it can even happen that I may come to look on it as an opinion which I have picked up blindly and adopted.’’7 This truth forces us to

................. 15741$

$CH4

02-13-06 14:42:57

PS

PAGE 70


71

focus on the humanness of both faith and working certainty—they are living conditions of human action. A god’s certainty, were it available to us, would not require faith; a god could afford to be dogmatic, because he or she would be right. But the situation of a finite person is quite different. It is precisely because of the precariousness of our situation that we require faith and working certainties to act, to live— faith is an act of commitment and hope, not of dogma. To ‘‘count on,’’ to ‘‘rely on,’’ to ‘‘be certain about,’’ are quite distinct from ‘‘knowing,’’ especially if one means by knowing ‘‘deductive necessity.’’ But they are nevertheless meaningful and provide a purchase for our acting. If I had a final assurance about walking the river, intuitions of how to step and inheritances about the stabilities of the physical environment wouldn’t be necessary—like a god, I could live dogmatically. If I had no intuitions or inheritances—and no dogma—I couldn’t walk the river at all; I would be an actual skeptic, not merely a professed one. What Hocking and Marcel lead me to think is that dogmatism and skepticism are philosophies of the dead, of the impersonal—they are not the philosophies of living agents who act. If intuition and inheritance, as Hocking and Marcel suggest, can function as the bases—what Bugbee calls the ‘‘animating bases’’—of action, they lead directly to another quest for certainty: the quest to create it. Hocking’s allusion to what is ‘‘established’’ in scientific inquiry and experiment points to one instance of such creation. Moreover, if my walking of the river rocks involves an abductive, intuitive bodily grasp of my movement as well as an inherited understanding of some stabilities in my environment, I also begin to develop a confidence in my ability to walk. The practice of walking establishes something I can count on in my own experiences—a general feature of my own being. But I think the quest for the creation of certainty is much more pervasive in human experience. Responding to Dewey’s conception of certainty as the aim of inquiry, Henry Bugbee makes a similar claim: But I don’t recall that it occurred to him [Dewey] to consider certainty, not as something to be quested for, like a pot of gold for

................. 15741$

$CH4

02-13-06 14:42:57

PS

PAGE 71

72


which longing search is undertaken, and not as something that hangs on the fate of isolated truth-claims or of structures of hypotheses, and not as a very strong conviction, but rather as pertaining to that animating base on which human enterprise becomes sound. I would like to say that certainty lies at the root of action that makes sense. It is connected with the ultimate purport of our lives.8

Bugbee sees this sort of certainty as akin to Marcel’s descriptions of hope and faith, and it seems reasonable to extend this kinship to trust and reliance as well. Created certainties that are the results of our actions and practices themselves become conditions for further action. The quest to establish such working certainties not only pervades our experience but also is a trait that marks our experience as human. It is a human practice of the sort Thoreau identified in Walden: Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and the slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe, through Paris and London, through New York and Boston and Concord, through church and state, through poetry and philosophy and religion, till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality.9

We seek some purchase from which to live our lives. What Bugbee suggests, following both Marcel and Thoreau, is that creating certainties is not only pervasive but also integrated in our experience. Our working certainties establish an outlook and a world in the wilderness through and in which we can act and dwell. This outlook and world become the basis of my action, my hope, my self-maintenance, and my self-revision. Hocking marked Dewey’s own unarticulated version of Bugbee’s point when he identified Dewey’s faith in the value of ‘‘trying to realize value.’’10 Two human practices come to mind as illustrating what Bugbee has in mind: the development of friendship and the cultivation of love. Friendship and love are not merely had relationships; they are created, nurtured, and developed. Both involve the establish-

................. 15741$

$CH4

02-13-06 14:42:58

PS

PAGE 72


73

ment of working certainties very much like what Marcel calls faith. As friends develop a relationship, they come to be able to ‘‘count on’’ one another, to trust and have faith in one another. We often measure the depth of a friendship not as a social scientist would, but simply by our felt willingness to count on another and our own felt willingness to be counted on. The unspoken affinity between Jim and Huck Finn comes to mind. And the bond between boy and dog in Where the Red Fern Grows. The friendship is worked for, but it is not a simple teleological process. The certainty of the friendship is not a clear and concretely marked goal; it certainly is not a goal of ‘‘inquiry’’ in a narrow sense. Rather, it is revealed to and clarified for the friends as they live through it, not unlike Hocking’s ‘‘disclosed a priori.’’ For love to flourish, nothing short of fidelity will suffice. What is compelling about Romeo and Juliet is that each, in the end, demonstrates a willingness to die for the other. No existential doubts linger. But I think also of my own grandmother who, at age ninety-five, died just a few weeks after her husband, with no clear presence of ill health. The certainties of love are neither deductively attained nor susceptible of articulate definition. Rather, they are created in the transaction between persons; they are felt; and they are disclosed—to the extent they may be—in the ways a life is lived. This is not to overlook the precarious nature of such relationships and the demonic features of persons that may undermine their possibility. It is, in part, their difficulty that makes the certainties we create in and through friendship and love so precious. They are neither self-creating nor self-sustaining; they are certainties worked for that in turn work for us. A similar proposal for the creation of a working certainty can be found in Dewey’s essay ‘‘Creative Democracy.’’ There he declares that democracy is neither a formal institution nor an articulate doctrine, but a way of life whose establishment creates an environment in which we can act freely and with the hope of ameliorating our existence. ‘‘For what is the faith of democracy in the role of consultation, of conference, of persuasion, of discussion, in formation of public opinion, which in the long run is self-corrective,’’ Dewey asked, ‘‘ex-

................. 15741$

$CH4

02-13-06 14:42:58

PS

PAGE 73

74


cept faith in the capacity of the intelligence of the common man to respond with common sense to the free play of facts and ideas which are secured by effective guarantees of free inquiry, free assembly, and free communication?’’ (LW, 14:227). This is precisely the sort of thinking that led Hocking to see irony in Dewey’s rejection of any quest for certainty. For democracy to achieve the sort of instrumental success Dewey envisions, it must arise out of a faith that persons have in it; thus, John E. Smith’s suggestion that Dewey’s common faith was his faith in democracy seems apt. To speak more generally, Hocking and Bugbee openly challenge Dewey’s apparent divorce of philosophy from certainty. They agree with Dewey that we should take philosophy back from the deductivists, the ‘‘lovers of clarity’’ who in ‘‘working within premises and procedural rules that are explicit and not in question’’ can be sure of what they are saying.11 But both argue that we must also retrieve certainty from the same realm. Philosophy does deal with certainty, at least in the ways I have suggested: intuition, inheritance, and creation. If philosophy, as Dewey wishes, is to be more than an intellectual game or mental exercise, it must pursue the bases of human action. Philosophy is a quest for the ongoing development of working certainties, the quest for a meaning we can count on, although, as Marcel and Bugbee remind us, not a final, finished, and fully articulate meaning. Just as such certainties guide our attempt to walk the instabilities of a river, so philosophy as a quest for meaning we can count on seeks to guide our attempts to negotiate the precariousness of our existence. Let us revisit Bugbee’s account of philosophy: ‘‘Such a philosophy will not be set up like the solution of a puzzle, worked out with all the pieces lying there before the eye. It will be more like the clarification of what we know in our bones.’’12 Moreover, such a philosophy has concrete aims: We sometimes run into questions about the practical importance of art and philosophy. I want to set down one possible answer to this kind of question, and it seems to me an answer to be confirmed again and again from experience. In so far as art and philosophy are consummated in contemplation, they are kindred

................. 15741$

$CH4

02-13-06 14:42:59

PS

PAGE 74


75

ways in which reality nurtures in us the soul of generosity; and it is from this that we are enabled to act truly.13

Bugbee’s description of philosophy here seems grounded in Hocking’s image of the disclosed a priori, but pushes a bit farther. ‘‘Clarification’’ has, as we noted in chapter 2, at least two senses: that of conceptually straightening out what one means (linguistic analysis) and that of purifying, as in the clarifying of a liquid. Both Hocking and Bugbee grant the import of the first sense in a limited fashion— philosophy may use linguistic analysis as an edge tool in its speech. But both also see philosophy as more importantly tied to the second sense. The working certainties for which philosophy quests are not to be gained simply by an analysis divorced from experience; as Bugbee suggests, the ‘‘conclusive meaning immanent in experience . . . does not seem necessarily connected with discursive articulateness.’’14 Dewey was right to point out that such an approach leaves us perpetually skating on the surfaces. Philosophy must also clarify experience as it is lived, disclosing our working certainties to us—those we find and those we create. Philosophy is thus an act of purifying, a quest for certainty that is fully engaged with the conduct of life and not merely with the problems of philosophers. Such purification is not an unusual or esoteric task; it is an exploration of the bases of ordinary action—the discovery we each make of the workings of geometry, the establishment and maintenance of friendships, the practice of walking a river, molding a piece of clay, or teaching a child. ‘‘Certainty,’’ says Bugbee, ‘‘is profoundly resolute, but I would mark it out in diametrical contrast with complacency or being of a closed mind. It bespeaks a basis for action rather than arrival at a terminus of endeavor’’ (IM, p. 37). Dewey’s Phronesis As I said at the outset, an ambivalence appears in Dewey’s writings regarding his attitude toward certainty and action. His instrumentalism seeks to effect stability but at the same time rejects any claims to theoretical certainty. It is an ambivalence—or ambiguity—that occa-

................. 15741$

$CH4

02-13-06 14:42:59

PS

PAGE 75

76


sionally leads his interpreters in different directions. Thus, his instrumentalism, his specific concern with certainty, and his occasional tendency to describe philosophy as broker for the social sciences open the door to the sorts of experiential worries that are raised by Hocking and Bugbee. However, as we have noted, Dewey often wrote to specific audiences, and to capture the fullness of his thought, we must move beyond reading him in one direction only. Making the quest for stability and security, as Dewey often does, an aim of inquiry has the effect, for better or worse, of scientizing this aim, and leads away from the sort of existential ‘‘animating base’’ to which Hocking, Marcel, and Bugbee allude. What Dewey has to say about ‘‘wisdom,’’ however, seems to align much more closely with this idealistic strand in twentieth-century thought. Therefore, I turn here to a consideration of his sense of wisdom, for in this consideration we find another dimension of John Dewey, one I think more attuned to the work of Hocking, Marcel, and Bugbee. If Dewey did not offer the experiential depth of Bugbee, he had a much clearer sense of the practical needs of a functioning democracy. Dewey did not blink when he said that philosophy and science were instrumental to art. He had something quite reasonable in mind. What this world wants is people acting as wisely as possible in whatever historical situations they find themselves. Achieving this effective wisdom requires the best thinking human beings can achieve: the best thinking is to be found in science and philosophy. Thus, as Dewey saw it, science and philosophy must be instrumental to artful living; and artful living is wisdom brought to life. This is Dewey’s Americanized version of phronesis. In 1932, in a work written with James Hayden Tufts, Dewey identified wisdom with prudence; more specifically, in discussing the aim of moral education, Tufts and Dewey suggested ‘‘wisdom or prudence’’ could be understood ‘‘as judgment of ends which are expedient or that mark ‘good policy’ ’’ (LW, 7:209). Earlier, in Experience and Nature, Dewey had suggested the equation of wisdom with artful living: ‘‘Upon the side of wisdom, as human beings interested in good and bad things in their connection with human conduct, thinkers are

................. 15741$

$CH4

02-13-06 14:43:00

PS

PAGE 76


77

concerned to mitigate the instability of life, to introduce moderation, temper, and economy, and when worst comes to worst to suggest consolations and compensations’’ (LW, 1:51). Such characterizations of wisdom in Dewey’s work have led to repeated questions about his thinking, for as Emerson pointed out in his essay ‘‘Prudence,’’ there are two kinds of prudence: a ‘‘spurious prudence’’ that ‘‘makes the senses final’’ and that is exemplified by egoistic expedience in bringing about what one desires, and a virtuous prudence that works toward higher and broader ends. The specific question, then, is where does Dewey’s wisdom as prudence reside? In being identified as a successor to William James, Dewey was, and is, often accused of defending expediency. However, despite ambiguities in his thought, there can be little doubt that he intended to equate wisdom with virtuous prudence. ‘‘It is folly rather than wisdom,’’ he said, ‘‘to include in the concept of success only tangible material goods and to exclude those of culture, art, science, sympathetic relations with others’’ (LW, 2:209). Moreover, for Dewey, wisdom meant judgment about what was good not only for oneself but also for the community at large. As Aristotle said of Pericles and others who manifested practical wisdom, ‘‘They can see what is good for themselves and what is good for men in general’’ (Nichomachean Ethics, 1140b, 8–10). Thus, while Dewey seemed occasionally on the verge of reducing wisdom and philosophy to self-interested practice, it was his intent to make practice itself wise and philosophical. It remains true, however, that for Dewey wisdom was a matter of practice. As we have already noted, there was no room for a detached and final sophia in Dewey’s thinking, because sophia required fixed and final truths as objects of contemplation, and Dewey argued that there were no such independent realities; the objects of sophia were, as Dewey saw it, at most historical, humanly projected ideals. Thus, Dewey’s principal quarrel with the working idealism of Hocking and Bugbee was not about whether ideals were real, but about whether they had any independence. Throughout his career he distinguished wisdom from knowledge and associated wisdom with action: ‘‘For wisdom differs from knowledge in being the application of what is

................. 15741$

$CH4

02-13-06 14:43:00

PS

PAGE 77

78


known to intelligent conduct of the affairs of human life’’ (LW, 15:157). Wisdom, then, amounts to good judgment in action, an idea that closely links Dewey to Bugbee’s and Hocking’s conception of working certainty. As a pragmatist, Dewey took wisdom’s action to be important insofar as any belief that yields no effect is not a belief proper. In other words, to claim to be wise but fail to act on the judgment of wisdom would be to display a lack of wisdom. But this pragmatic emphasis also made it essential for Dewey to say how one comes by such practical wisdom. Indeed, one might say that insofar as Dewey made artful action and practice the goal of his thinking, his entire philosophy is a discussion of the nature and possibility of practical wisdom. It is clear that Dewey took both science and philosophy to be instrumental to the exercise of wisdom. It is important to show generally how this is so. More specifically, however, we need to ask whether philosophy’s way to wisdom is sufficient to the task Dewey set for it. Science, according to Dewey, was not a static body of eternal truths. Rather, as did Peirce, he considered it an ongoing process of inquiry that effected an ever-changing set of interrelated hypotheses or ‘‘truths.’’ As such, Dewey argued, science was instrumental to wisdom in two ways. First, as a model of method of inquiry, it suggested that in other human practices, including moral practice, we must look to consequences to understand the meaning of present ideas and actions; we must proceed experimentally. Second, science provided a body of ‘‘knowledge’’ or ‘‘truths’’ that could be employed in any practical decision to keep us informed. Again, the notion of working certainties as inheritances comes to mind. ‘‘Science,’’ Dewey maintained in Experience and Nature, ‘‘is an instrumentality of and for art because it is the intelligent factor in art’’ (LW, 1:276). Thus, science provided an understanding of means and the meanings of some ends in human practices; it was a source of ‘‘information’’ for philosophy and its move to wisdom. As Dewey put it in the Ethics: ‘‘Probably the great need of the present time is that traditional barriers between scientific and moral knowledge be broken down, so that there will

................. 15741$

$CH4

02-13-06 14:43:01

PS

PAGE 78


79

be organized and consecutive endeavor to use all available scientific knowledge for humane and social ends’’ (LW, 7:283; see also LW, 1:3). Dewey’s conception of philosophy is Socratic at heart. It is the criticism of human values, ends, and goods. As such, it is intellectual though never merely so; criticism of values is instrumental to practice and, therefore, to the possibility of wisdom. As is science, philosophy is for Dewey an art: ‘‘Criticism is not a matter of formal treatises, or taking up important matters for consideration in a serious way. It occurs whenever a moment is devoted to looking to see what sort of value is present; whenever instead of accepting a value-object wholeheartedly, being rapt by it, we raise even a shadow of a question about its worth, or modify our sense of it by even a passing estimate of its probable future’’ (LW, 1:299). Philosophy’s task is to assess the likelihood of a way of thinking’s ability to bring about stability or to engender a precarious and unstable future. Taken together, then, science and philosophy work together to bring us to the point of wisdom. In 1946, in his introduction to The Problems of Men, Dewey put it as follows: The purpose and business of philosophy is wholly with that part of the historic tradition called a search for wisdom:—Namely, search for ends and values that give direction to our collective human activities. It holds that not grasp of eternal and universal Reality but use of methods and conclusions of our best knowledge, that called scientific, provides the means for conducting this search. (LW, 15:161)

As I read Dewey, most of his philosophy is a discussion of how philosophy carries on its critical task. As we look broadly over his writings, we find a kind of experiential categoriology of Socratic examination—of the ways philosophy leads toward wisdom in criticizing, evaluating, and perhaps creating ends and goods in particular historical situations. For this much alone, I believe Dewey’s work is worth reading. However, a question remains concerning whether this categoriology is adequate to the goal of wisdom. Let me in what follows outline some important features of Dewey’s categoriology,

................. 15741$

$CH4

02-13-06 14:43:01

PS

PAGE 79

80


drawing from a variety of his later writings, and then try to mark off where I believe he moves closest to Hocking and Bugbee. Insofar as wisdom is good judgment about ends and ‘‘policies’’ to achieve ends, some measure of ends must be provided by Dewey’s philosophy. But even before we have a measure, we must have some understanding of the meanings of the ends-in-view with which we must deal in any given situation. Therefore, philosophy must first critically assess meaning. One condition of such assessment, Dewey suggests, is funded or lived experience. Dewey wants to resurrect ‘‘primary’’ experience from its depreciated status in much modern and Enlightenment thinking. Insofar as philosophy is to criticize values, it must have acquaintance with how values have worked in the richness and complexity of lived experience. I think it is important to point out here that Dewey emphasizes acquaintance or livedness; both the veiled ‘‘experience’’ of traditional British empiricism and the mathematized ‘‘experience’’ of sociological studies are insufficient to uncover the lived meaning of human valuations. Rather, our judgments become more balanced—more critical—to the extent that they are ‘‘the result of past experience funded into direct outlook upon the scene of life’’ (LW, 7:266). In this much, Dewey’s thought on wisdom moves into the vicinity of the ‘‘animating base’’ of living expressed by Bugbee, Marcel, and Hocking. However important Dewey’s resurrection of experience is, it provides little account of the measuring of values or goods; it is only an entry into their meanings. The second category of examination that Dewey provides is the pragmatic requirement of examining consequences. This requirement addresses not only means but also the ends-in-view with which wisdom is concerned, for any ends achieved will have further consequences, and these constitute a part of what the ends in question mean. The extent to which ends engender the possibility of further goods is a trademark of a Deweyan ‘‘good end’’ under his concept of growth. Indeed, at one point in the Ethics Dewey describes wisdom in these terms: ‘‘Wisdom, or as it is called on the ordinary plane, prudence, sound judgment, is the ability to foresee

................. 15741$

$CH4

02-13-06 14:43:02

PS

PAGE 80


81

consequences in such a way that we form ends which grow into one another and reenforce one another’’ (LW, 7:210). The efficacy of the investigation of consequences to discover the wider meaning of ends-in-view, for Dewey, hinges on one’s capacity for imagination. We need to be able to project the consequences of ends creatively and imaginatively, if we are to understand their scope. Such an emphasis on imagination is of course not original with Dewey, but the integration of imagination with the other categories of examination and the appeal to a rich, not formal, imagination perhaps are. As Thomas Alexander puts it: ‘‘As projected completion of action, imagination seeks to understand the actual in light of the possible in a dramatic or experiential way.’’15 Funded experience and imaginative projection of consequences do not, however, exhaust the categories of examination. Dewey also believed that criticizing the meaning of ends-in-view involved felt constraints. In the Ethics he maintained that the judgment of ends requires a sensitivity to the situation at hand. To know the environment of a given situation, one must be sensitive to it. ‘‘Nothing,’’ says Dewey, ‘‘can make up for the absence of immediate sensitiveness’’ (LW, 7:268). At first glance, this sensitiveness appears to represent a possible measure of the value of ends. However, its role is once again instrumental. What Dewey has in mind is that the sensitiveness provides us with a ‘‘sense’’ of how things might go under the direction of certain ends. It is a requirement for wisdom, but cannot alone generate wisdom. The same is true for a second emotive element in criticism, sympathy. Sympathy plays a role comparable to that of sensitiveness with respect to an end’s consequences for other persons. But again sympathy does not play the straightforward role of a conscience that itself measures goods and values. Rather, it is instrumental to the communitarian element Dewey believes to be a part of wisdom. The employment of sympathy is for Dewey a way of effectively objectifying ends in imagination: Sympathy is the animating mold of moral judgment not because its dictates take precedence in action over those other impulses

................. 15741$

$CH4

02-13-06 14:43:03

PS

PAGE 81

82


(which they do not do), but because it furnishes the most efficacious intellectual standpoint. (LW, 7:270)

In sensitiveness and sympathy Dewey further qualifies the requirements for examining ends and goods that can put us in a position to act wisely. Yet, neither stands as a measure of ends; they are, rather, more instruments to get at the meaning of ends so that measurement and judgment can occur. It seems to me, then, that Dewey’s philosophy provides the way to wisdom, but pulls up just short of asserting any mode of measuring the ends whose meanings it is philosophy’s critical task to uncover. We might look to Dewey’s Art as Experience for a remedy. His description of the felt unity of aesthetic experience might provide a lived measure that would enable judgments about ends-in-view, such that one might appeal to the aesthetic rightness of an end or ends. This would seem to be consistent with Dewey’s linking of art and philosophy in Experience and Nature. However, in his well-known quarrel with Benedetto Croce, he denies any cognitive function to his notion of aesthetic experience, despite the fact that his description appears to describe, as Croce puts it, ‘‘precisely what is called . . . aesthetic or intuitive or pre-logical knowledge’’ (LW, 15:442). This is critical because a judgment concerning ends would seem to require, if not a conception of an end’s value, at least an acquaintance with or recognition of its felt value. The judgment requires some cognitive element—especially on Dewey’s own terms, where ‘‘intelligent’’ action is what is at stake. Dewey’s way to wisdom seems to falter at the very moment of judgment. Ultimately, as I will try to show in chapter 8, I do not believe this is an adequate reading of Dewey’s thought. Nevertheless, the variety of related criticisms he drew on this score seems to indicate that it is a plausible reading. Brand Blanshard, for example, reduces Dewey’s process of judgment to an infinite regress of clarification of ends.16 Unlike his predecessors Emerson and Peirce, Dewey leaves little room for a moment of receptive knowing even though he talks of undergoing and reception in aesthetic experiences. It is al-

................. 15741$

$CH4

02-13-06 14:43:04

PS

PAGE 82


83

most as if his fear of claims to absolute wisdom paralyzes his attempt to articulate the possibility of practical wisdom. We have already laid out Bugbee’s concern over this apparent omission in Dewey’s thought. Emerson, too, had a notion of ‘‘intellect receptive,’’ in which an agent was attuned to the items of value in human experience. This no doubt smacked too much of traditional intuition and revelation to suit Dewey’s taste. Peirce, on the other hand, described a moment of ‘‘musement’’ in which one could let ideas ‘‘play’’ to suggest their own settlement; he claimed to follow Galileo’s sense of the naturalness and simplicity of an idea. This is akin to Bugbee’s suggestion that meaning emerges in the synthetic processes of acting and letting things speak. Emerson, Peirce, and Bugbee encouraged the kind of prefatory examination of ends and goods that Dewey’s philosophy provides. Moreover, the judgments yielded were neither absolute nor infallibly correct. This would appear at least to address Dewey’s fear of absolutes entering the realm of finite human existence. It is just at this juncture that we can return to the ‘‘working certainty’’ of Hocking, Marcel, and Bugbee—to faith, insight, and acquaintance with the ways of things. In his recent book, Kestenbaum has focused on what he calls Dewey’s sense of ‘‘vigilance,’’ of an attentiveness to the ways things go in the world. If we couple this with Dewey’s insistence on the importance of undergoing, of sympathy and sensitivity, and of what he calls ‘‘qualitative immediacy,’’ we can begin to see Dewey’s pragmatism as making the transition from philosophy’s criticism to wisdom’s action. However much ‘‘growth’’ and ‘‘the opening of further human possibilities’’ serve as vague ends for judgment, they are insufficient. We need a sense of faith in, a working certainty of, which growth and what opening of possibility we ought to pursue. Not only do I think the logic of Dewey’s own philosophy requires such a measure, I believe its adoption is more experientially accurate. Philosophy must eventually come to disclose—or ‘‘clarify,’’ in Bugbee’s sense—as well as ‘‘create’’ our working certainties. Kestenbaum maintains that Dewey never outgrew his idealism, he transformed it. Insofar as this is true, bringing his pragmatic outlook on wisdom together with the working certainty of some twentieth-

................. 15741$

$CH4

02-13-06 14:43:04

PS

PAGE 83

84


century friends of idealism helps us understand both better. This is a synthesis I will explore in chapters 8 and 13. At the same time, this synthesis provides a powerful working account of how it is that we should proceed in practically wise ways: with good criticism and intelligence, but also with a strong receptivity that yields a faith in some working certainties. Only thus might we not only be wise, but act wisely.

................. 15741$

$CH4

02-13-06 14:43:05

PS

PAGE 84

five

wildness as political act

W

ilderness living requires both working certainties and practical wisdom. Stories of both are legion and legendary in American pioneer living—and, indeed, in Native American living. But the stabilizing and enabling capacities of these two live in concert not only with their wilderness setting but also with a wilder dimension of human experience. In the past hundred years there has been an extensive harvest from the intellectual fields in which Henry Thoreau worked. Interpretations are occasionally so diverse that I am tempted to think of Thoreau as chameleon. I lay aside this temptation, however, in recalling a steadiness and surety that run through his writing from ‘‘A Winter Walk’’ to ‘‘Life Without Principle’’: a steadiness of gaze at the always receding virtues of nature, wildness, discipline, and awakening. The essay ‘‘Walking,’’ with its emphasis on wildness, offers a number of paths along which this steadiness might be pursued, and I choose one of them, the condition of political action, as an avenue for the present discussion. I use ‘‘political’’ in its { 85 }

................. 15741$

$CH5

02-13-06 14:42:57

PS

PAGE 85

86


broad, original sense of dealing with issues of the polis in practically wise ways. The political dimensions of ‘‘Walking’’ are established in its opening lines: ‘‘I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil.’’1 Thoreau, clearly as a partisan, seizes the most American theme, freedom, and challenges our complacency in accepting a limited form of it. In ‘‘Life Without Principle’’ Thoreau put the question as follows: ‘‘Is it a freedom to be slaves, or a freedom to be free, of which we boast? We are a nation of politicians, concerned about the outmost defenses only of freedom.’’2 He then proclaims that he will make ‘‘an extreme statement’’ in order to make ‘‘an emphatic one.’’3 As in the opening of Walden, Thoreau is political but impolitic; he does not mean to be polite. Yet we should note that the extremity of his claim is instrumental to his emphasis on the wild; the extremity is not its own end, and likely is not Thoreau’s aim either. His aim seems rather to be to move us—the polis perhaps, if not the cosmos—in a certain direction: from the civil toward the natural. We see the makings of a political aim, a provocation establishing opposition to the ‘‘champions of civilization.’’4 Thoreau, it seems to me, has a habit, which because of his abrasive voice is sometimes overlooked, of staking out a borderland or midworld he wishes to work. Walden, for example, is occasionally read as an antisocial, back-to-nature story, despite the fact that Thoreau found himself not in an extreme, primitive existence but in a mediating place: ‘‘Mine was, as it were, the connecting link between wild and cultivated fields; as some states are civilized, and others halfcivilized, and others savage or barbarous, so my field was, though not in a bad sense, a half-cultivated field.’’5 In ‘‘Walking,’’ he establishes a ‘‘border existence’’ and again moves from the decadence of overcivilization toward the sheer spontaneity of a wild existence, in order, I think, to emphasize the dialectical needs of each. He enacts his own sort of political engagement and he attempts to establish his own sort of compromise in which he does not feel compromised.

................. 15741$

$CH5

02-13-06 14:42:58

PS

PAGE 86

wildness as politic al ac t

87

‘‘Walking,’’ I think, marks out the kind of political action or engagement to which Thoreau was always committed: action that, pragmatically speaking, has an effect or makes a difference in some ameliorative direction.6 As he put it in Walden: ‘‘To affect the day, that is the highest of arts.’’7 The ‘‘art of Walking,’’ however wild, is not aimless for Thoreau; he neither describes nor defends a purposeless anarchy nor an institution of self-gratification. He never advances beyond his claim in ‘‘Civil Disobedience’’ that we are not yet ready for no government at all. Rather, the aim of the walking art, or one of its aims, is to carry out a resistance to the compromised, civilized, and tamed (cowed) status in which we so often find ourselves— benumbed, asleep, and inattentive to our private and social conditions. Thoreau’s resistance is to be carried out by a ‘‘fourth estate’’: those who practice the art of walking; specifically, the ‘‘Walker, Errant’’ who stands ‘‘outside of Church and State and People.’’8 It is in examining the traits of this fourth estate that I look for the Thoreauvian conditions of acting politically. ‘‘It is remarkable,’’ Thoreau says, ‘‘how few events or crises there are in our histories, how little exercised we have been in our minds, how few experiences we have had.’’9 Our tame status derives both from the absence of experience and the consequent, enslaving security that tells us not to seek experience. These are the conditions of politic behavior, but not of political action. Thoreau turns to a romance with the Walker Errant—the rover, saunterer, gypsy, outlaw—to recover what Dewey later called the having of ‘‘an experience.’’ Whatever else walkers and saunterers do, they seek experience ‘‘in the spirit of undying adventure.’’10 And they do so, necessarily, through a kind of wildness. The fourth estate works at the margins of culture; it is not only outside the church and state, but also outside the people—in Emerson’s terms, nonconformist. The Walker thus works the borderland as did the ‘‘Robyn’’ of Locksley whom Thoreau cites, recalling his outlaw existence.11 The Walker Errant thus initially exhibits the seeking of experience; in a lengthy overture, Thoreau brings this seeking into relation with the American frontier experience. Like Frederick Jackson Turner, he

................. 15741$

$CH5

02-13-06 14:42:58

PS

PAGE 87

88


sees in this frontier experience the ‘‘wilding’’ of American democracy. Just after this, he pauses, and begins again, calling himself back to his initial intention: ‘‘The West of which I speak is but another name for the Wild; and what I have been preparing to say is, that in Wildness is the preservation of the World.’’12 This second beginning also asserts a political aim, a call to action in the interest of the preservation of the world. Maintaining his poet’s privilege, and perhaps fearful of narrowing the possibilities of our lived wildness, Thoreau seems intent to offer no connotative account of the wild. Like Emerson, he defines only provocatively, through metaphor and example. Leo Stoller, however, offers a reasonably sober heading in defining Thoreau’s wildness: The Wild is whatever lies beyond the law already formulated, the institution already established, the pursued already overtaken. Its purpose is to be negated, to free man for the still wilder reach beyond it, and thus furnish its part toward his soul.13

From the Walker, then, we are first to draw both the seeking of experience and the wildness that governs the fourth estate. Again, the Walker stands not only outside the church and the state, but also outside the people. In following the Walker’s discipline, we each may awaken to our own fourth estate; we may outlaw ourselves from ourselves. As Stoller puts it: ‘‘Each man’s mind, moreover, encloses a potential bit of this revolutionizing genius, his own ‘wild savage’ . . . which is the germ to be strengthened and liberated.’’14 Encounter with our own dimensions of wildness is the central condition for our being able to act, and thus to act politically. The Walkers and saunterers to whom Thoreau introduces us exhibit still a third trait that attends the condition of political acts; they live in an attitude of commitment. In coming to this trait, Thoreau works an important distinction in passing: ‘‘They who never go to the Holy Land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds; but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean.’’15 There are, then, two sorts of non-Walkers: those who have been ‘‘committed’’ to civilization (those institutional-

................. 15741$

$CH5

02-13-06 14:42:59

PS

PAGE 88


89

ized) and walk not at all, and those who walk in an uncommitted and directionless fashion.16 The Walker Errant, however, is a crusader: ‘‘Every walk is a sort of crusade, preached by some Peter the Hermit in us, to go forth and reconquer this Holy Land from the hands of the Infidels.’’17 This seems to me the sort of commitment that we, in our relatively safe culture, presently wish to avoid for fear it may require us to do something or may in fact lead us to a political act. In an age of mass communication, we have become ever more complacent, more driven by our conventional mores, even as we proclaim ourselves to be freer. Thoreau’s crusader, as he sees it, is not a mad person, but one disciplined to attend to her wildness and willing to face the consequences this attention may entail. Witness his attempt to defend John Brown’s sanity against those who, then and now, believed Brown’s violent abolitionist undertakings were too extreme. This is the Walker’s commitment. What sound to us like hard words are indicative of the post–Socratic strand in Thoreau’s thinking: If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again—if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man—then you are ready for a walk.18

This committedness of Thoreau’s Walker reminds us not only that Thoreau himself, with his tuberculosis, was living in the face of death, but also of the experiential truth, for many of my ‘‘baby boomer’’ generation, of the words we heard earlier: ‘‘How few experiences we have had.’’19 Thoreau’s romance with Walkers and saunterers has, as have Walden and ‘‘Civil Disobedience,’’ led more cynical readers to see Thoreau as an advocate of irresponsibility. Heinz Eulau, for example, portrays Thoreau as a kind of unphilosophically inclined anarchist: ‘‘Thoreau’s whole political philosophy was based on the theoretical premise of individual conscience as the only true criterion of what is politically right and just.’’20 There is a truth in this, and the romance Thoreau fosters, however compelling, seems to move in the direction of authorizing an irresponsibility toward a culture’s conventions.

................. 15741$

$CH5

02-13-06 14:43:00

PS

PAGE 89

90


‘‘There is something servile,’’ says Thoreau, ‘‘in the habit of seeking after a law which we may obey. . . . a successful life knows no law.’’21 This, however, seems to me to be the central irony of the text, beginning with the opening distinction between a ‘‘civil’’ and an ‘‘absolute’’ freedom. On the one hand, we are not ‘‘responsible’’ in the eyes of conventional ‘‘laws.’’ On the other hand, it is precisely our ability to be ‘‘superior to all laws’’ that, for Thoreau, establishes the conditions of our freedom and, consequently, our responsibility. We are responsible when we act, not when we merely behave. The upshot, then, of the example of the Walker Errant is to take us in the direction of our freedom and responsibility. An apprenticeship to Thoreau’s walking and ‘‘wilding’’ places several demands on us. He suggests an initial step in the right direction in describing his townsmen who could recall walks ‘‘in which they were so blessed as to lose themselves for half an hour in the woods.’’22 Getting lost, I take it, suggests at least a necessary independence, a semi-chosen solitude. Those of us who have been lost perhaps recall the initial fear and excitement, the rush of an awakening to our own senses and condition, and, in time, an awareness of the novelty of the place in which we find ourselves. This experience of lostness seems to me to be one requirement en route to finding one’s own wild dimension; as Thoreau remarks in his search for wild apples, ‘‘You must lose yourself before you can find the way.’’23 Getting lost also indicates, I think, the necessary loss of one’s social self; to lose oneself is to cast off, at least in part, the civilized being one has become. Leaving behind this routinized, stabilizing, but compromised self is akin to Thoreau’s later comment about our names of convenience—our given names. In losing ourselves, we put ourselves in a better position to earn or to own our names; it is in this sense that ‘‘our only true names are nicknames.’’24 This is a truth that other cultures, including many Native American cultures, have long acted upon. The initiating lostness, thus, has important positive meaning for our moving in the direction of wildness and freedom. At the same time, it suggests something about the environment in which we might find ourselves. ‘‘Politics,’’ Thoreau says, ‘‘is but a narrow field’’: one,

................. 15741$

$CH5

02-13-06 14:43:00

PS

PAGE 90


91

we imagine, that constrains not so much by actual legislation (the state)—though that, too, occurs—but by its social habits, its practical demands (the people). What is required for us to find ourselves is, at the least, a wider field. ‘‘To preserve wild animals,’’ says Thoreau, ‘‘implies generally the creation of a forest for them to dwell in or resort to. So it is with man.’’25 The disjunction between ‘‘dwelling in’’ and ‘‘resorting to’’ keeps open Thoreau’s own compromise within the context of his extreme statement. The ‘‘forest’’ here seems to be the wider field and suggests three sorts of wild spaces that might preserve our freedom and agency as persons: a space in the soul to house the ‘‘wild savage in us,’’ a social space where one’s ‘‘friends and neighbors’’ can be ‘‘wild men,’’ and a natural space, a wilderness. Thoreau indicates, in his own indirect ways, an order of reciprocal dependence. The natural space enables the social space that encourages the soul space; and it is the soul space alone—the finding of which seems to me to be the task at hand in ‘‘Walking’’—that is able to generate a wilder social space and a commitment to wilderness. If this seems too structured a reading of Thoreau, it is at least clear that he fears the loss of both our individual wildness and the natural environment that might inspire it: But possibly the day will come when it [the landscape] will be partitioned off into so-called pleasure-grounds, in which a few will take a narrow and exclusive pleasure only—when fences shall be multiplied, and man-traps and other engines invented to confine men to the public road, and walking over the surface of God’s earth shall be construed to mean trespassing on some gentleman’s grounds.26

Perhaps Thoreau had in mind something like Jack Kerouac’s 1956 experience retold in ‘‘The Vanishing American Hobo’’: I was surrounded by three squad cars in Tuscon Arizona at 2 am as I was walking pack-on-back for a night’s sweet sleep in the red moon desert: ‘‘Where you goin’?’’ ‘‘Sleep.’’

................. 15741$

$CH5

02-13-06 14:43:01

PS

PAGE 91

92

philosophy americ ana ‘‘Sleep where?’’ ‘‘On the sand.’’ ‘‘Why?’’ ‘‘Got my sleeping bag.’’ ‘‘Why?’’ ‘‘Studyin’ the great outdoors.’’ ‘‘. . . why dont you go to a hotel?’’ ‘‘I like it better outdoors and its free.’’ ‘‘Why?’’ ‘‘Because I’m studying hobo.’’27

The Walker Errant, like the vanishing American hobo, seems to have lost something of the wider field and its possibility so long as sheriffs ‘‘having nothing to do in the middle of the night with everybody gone to sleep . . . pick on the first human being they see walking.’’28 The wider field, the wilderness, that Thoreau calls for in an apprenticeship to walking, and so to political agency, has the task of presenting us with possibilities. There is no agency without possibility. As Thoreau says in ‘‘The Old Marlborough Road:’’ What is it, what is it, But a direction out there, And the bare possibility of going somewhere?29

It is in the achievement of actual possibilities that we can arrive at the threshold of political action. Here, in sustaining an attendance to our own wildness—in maintaining an attitude of wildness—is the difference Thoreau finds between civil and absolute freedom. Civil freedom is the liberal’s negative freedom in which, if we behave, we can live an undisturbed life. However, as Thoreau saw it, the need to behave meant another sort of slavery and loss of freedom: ‘‘Even if we grant that the American has freed himself from a political tyrant, he is still the slave of an economical and moral tyrant.’’30 The movement toward the wilderness that Thoreau speaks for initiates two freedoms. First, it provides an enhanced negative freedom by removing some of the social constraints placed on the tamed, social self. More important, it condi-

................. 15741$

$CH5

02-13-06 14:43:01

PS

PAGE 92


93

tions the possibility of an empowerment to act on one’s own: ‘‘The man who takes the liberty to live is superior to all the laws, by virtue of his relation to the lawmaker.’’31 Only at this juncture does one become responsible and able to act politically. ‘‘Action from principle,’’ Thoreau maintained, ‘‘the perception of right, changes things and relations; it is essentially revolutionary, and does not consist wholly with anything that was.’’32 Much has been written of the inconsistency Thoreau generated through his dual allegiance to his own civil disobedience and to John Brown’s act at Harper’s Ferry. My guess is that he was more interested in the agency and responsibility exemplified in both instances. His aim, I think, was not to defend a generic political stance, but to seek the possibility of amelioration of human culture through responsible political agency. In part, then, I take ‘‘Walking’’ as an attempt to establish the wilder borderland that could underwrite this agency. To put it another way, one might say that the essay is, from one angle of vision, the poetic suggestion of a discipline prefatory to political action. In conditioning political action with wildness, however, Thoreau reveals the risks of commitment. In ‘‘Civil Disobedience’’ he was confident in his moral commitment to the rejection of a government that condoned slavery. But life inevitably entertains more ambiguous cases. How, then, does one mark off one’s borderland? When does wildness need to be recalled or constrained by civilization? Dewey is in step with Thoreau in suggesting that the answers are ‘‘had’’ experientially—we develop a feel for or a sensitivity to excess if we live well in the borderland. In the next chapter, I want to explore a moment in American cultural history that reveals both the efficacy of wildness and its attendant dangers.

................. 15741$

$CH5

02-13-06 14:43:02

PS

PAGE 93

six

‘ ‘after all, h e’ s j ust a man ’’ The Wild Side of Life in Country Music

We will not speak of the innumerable instances in which profligate and idle men live upon the earnings of industrious wives; or if the wives leave them, and take with them the children, to perform the double duty of mother and father, follow from place to place, and threaten to rob them of the children, if deprived of the rights of a husband, as they call them, planting themselves in their poor lodgings, frightening them into paying tribute by taking from them the children, running into debt at the expense of these otherwise so overtasked helots.1 Margaret Fuller, Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845)

I

n his appeal to a wildness that might temper our over-civilization, Thoreau acknowledged that there is wildness afoot in our culture. Some of this wildness does underwrite or enable political agency, as it did for Thoreau himself in his small efforts at civil disobedience. But some of the wildness also produces collateral damage; it was just such damage that caused many to worry over the aims of John Brown’s abolitionist activism even as Thoreau gave him his highest praise. Hank Williams, whose life I will consider in this chapter, understood experientially what Thoreau meant by ‘‘wilding’’ and ‘‘acting,’’ but he failed to see the responsibility and the demands placed on him by his political action. In what follows, I will take a look at a particular social setting—that of popular country music—in which wildness performs some of its important work but delivers with it a set of traits that create ongoing forms of social damage. In describing this setting, I hope merely to sketch some actualities that attend Thoreau’s call for wildness, and to open a conversation about what the { 94 }

................. 15741$

$CH6

02-13-06 14:42:58

PS

PAGE 94

‘ ‘a f t e r a l l, he’s jus t a m a n’’

95

generic features of Thoreau’s border existence might require to temper the more detrimental aspects of social wildness. Country music has in the past suffered, and continues to suffer, criticism driven by classist takes on the world. ‘‘Hicks’’ and ‘‘rednecks’’ remain pejorative terms, and the country music associated with them, despite its tremendous popularity, is still resisted adamantly by urban and suburban middle- and upper-middle-class folk. It is routinely criticized for being too ‘‘twangy’’ and for ‘‘sounding all alike.’’ Even though various genres of rock and roll also ‘‘sound all alike’’ to the inexperienced ear, they less often suffer this sort of complaint. This drives what I will call hillbilly politics. Just as rap and hiphop are politicized because they are avenues of popular communication for marginalized communities, so country music has, since its inception, been engaged in hillbilly politics—in defending and defining rural, middle- and lower-class living in America. Although, as I will suggest, the women in country music have in many ways been more politically effective than the men of country music, it is the men who have held center stage, at least until recently.2 These men took up Thoreau’s call of the wild to inform their political resistance, but, as Waylon Jennings sings, things ‘‘done got out of hand.’’ In briefly looking at the life of Hank Williams, the most visible male performer in the history of country music, we can get a sense of both the political usefulness of wildness and its potential excesses. Women in country music asserted themselves well before women in rock and roll, and they did so in an environment entirely hostile to the independence of women. As early as the 1930s Aunt Molly Jackson was singing country protest songs against the coal mining industry. She was successful enough that in 1931 she ‘‘was forced to leave the coal fields by Kentucky authorities.’’3 Despite such success, in the realm of popular country music, women such as Jackson had difficulty breaking into the ranks. Nevertheless, some made it a point to do so. Between 1945 and 1955 fewer than 10 percent of the top country recordings ‘‘featured women’s voices.’’4 But, when Kitty Wells recorded ‘‘It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky-Tonk Angels’’ in 1952, in

................. 15741$

$CH6

02-13-06 14:42:59

PS

PAGE 95

96


pointed response to Hank Thompson’s hit ‘‘The Wild Side of Life,’’ she combined protest and popularity, and openly established a feminist tradition in country music. Thompson’s song proclaimed that men were led astray by ‘‘honky-tonk angels.’’ Thus, as Wells put it, ‘‘Honky-Tonk Angels’’ was ‘‘kind of the womenfolk getting back at the men.’’5 This tradition, until recently usually overlooked by academics, developed in the subsequent two decades. Patsy Cline fought her way into prominence in the male-dominated culture of Nashville. Then, in the early 1960s, Loretta Lynn began her long career of singing songs on behalf of poor, rural, and working-class women across America, including ‘‘Don’t Come Home a-Drinkin’ (with Lovin’ on Your Mind),’’ ‘‘One’s on the Way,’’ and ‘‘Coal Miner’s Daughter.’’ When later, in 1975, she recorded ‘‘The Pill,’’ she sent shock waves through the country music establishment. As she put it: ‘‘I mean the women loved it. But the men who run the radio stations were scared to death. It’s like a challenge to the man’s way of thinking.’’6 Though she denied being a ‘‘woman’s libber,’’ she was clearly and effectively engaged in feminist and class politics. Through the 1960s and 1970s the feminist tradition grew in strength and presence. Songs such as Jeannie C. Riley’s ‘‘Harper Valley P.T.A.,’’ Jody Miller’s ‘‘Queen of the House,’’ and Norma Jean’s ‘‘Heaven Help the Working Girl (in a World That’s Run by Men)’’ set up a strong line of resistance to the masculinized world of country music and opened the doors for a next generation of female country singers who were openly independent and every bit as successful as men. This generation included Emmylou Harris, Kathy Mattea, The Judds, Barbara Mandrell, Lucinda Williams, Mary Chapin Carpenter, and Iris DeMent, among others. In the midst of this revolution stood one singer and one song whose complexities have provoked ongoing examination: Tammy Wynette and her signature song, ‘‘Stand by Your Man.’’7 Like other women in country music, Wynette came from Southern poverty, having worked picking cotton as a teenager and later moving on to a ‘‘beautician’s’’ life. Following the lessons of Patsy Cline, Wynette learned to be hard-edged in dealing with the men and the business of Nashville. Her story was further complicated by the fact that she was

................. 15741$

$CH6

02-13-06 14:42:59

PS

PAGE 96


97

married to George Jones, one of the outstanding male singers of her time who also, as we will see, happened to be one of the most difficult of country men to deal with. When she recorded ‘‘Stand by Your Man,’’ the largest-selling single by any female country artist, Wynette was immediately marked as exemplary of the submissive, conservative, lower-class, country woman—a throwback to the 1950s and earlier times. This image has dogged her, and she has suffered unreflective ridicule at the hands of women, such as Hillary Clinton, whose own lives seem relatively easy compared with Wynette’s. Yet, as later live performances of the song indicate, as do many of her other songs, Wynette saw herself within the country feminist tradition in many ways. ‘‘They took it the wrong way,’’ Wynette said. ‘‘I didn’t sing the song to say, ‘You women stay home and stay pregnant and don’t do anything to help yourselves.’ ’’8 This misrepresentation of Wynette is not accidental. We academics in particular have systematically assumed the weakness and submissiveness of women in country music even when the evidence to the contrary stares us in the face. This is in part due to the sexism that pervaded country music culture in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. But it is also in part due to our sexist and classist assumptions that poor, working-class country women could be nothing other than submissive, weak, and illiterate. But Wynette’s version of ‘‘Stand by Your Man’’ is filled with the ironies of the life of a woman in her Southern culture. The song indeed points us to the central character flaws of the country music male singers who created, unwittingly at times, the very culture in which Wynette and the others worked so aggressively to survive. The ideal of this male singer became an important model and idol for the lower-middle-class American white male in the 1950s and 1960s. Hearing the irony, and thus the traces of feminism, in Wynette’s renditions of ‘‘Stand by Your Man’’ in the setting of this cultural environment is what led me to the considerations in what follows. In the opening line of the song, Wynette sings in a restrained and understated voice, ‘‘Sometimes it’s hard to be a woman; giving all your love to just one man.’’ The emphatic truth of being ‘‘hard to be

................. 15741$

$CH6

02-13-06 14:43:00

PS

PAGE 97

98


a woman’’ is usually overlooked when we hear the song and we wait for the powerful punch line: ‘‘Stand by your man.’’ But more irony presents itself before the punch line arrives: ‘‘And if you love him, be proud of him, ’Cause after all, he’s just a man.’’ When Wynette says of George Jones and, presumably, of American men in general, ‘‘after all, he’s just a man,’’ I take her to mean at least two things. First, she is asserting the fallibility that attends us all in the human condition. Second, and more emphatically, she is addressing the weaknesses of country music men and those who live under their influence—the very weaknesses that have been drawn from Southern post–World War II culture and that were then returned to that culture through the radio airplay of the music of Southern country men. The irony is that this man is pitiable and pathetic more than he is lovable or respectable. One reason country music draws listeners is its direct appeal to the most basic features of our cultural experience, and Wynette seems to have identified a significant one in ‘‘Stand by Your Man.’’ Both meanings of ‘‘after all, he’s just a man,’’ point to and highlight the hubris—a tragic and comic hubris—that our greatest male country stars have exhibited since their mass appeal took hold in the 1950s. From Hank Williams to George Jones to Waylon Jennings, it is almost as if wildness, social stupidity, and self-destructive living have become necessary conditions of country authenticity and excellence. As Curtis Ellison suggests, ‘‘It appears that, for some artists and fans, the notion of a male tragic troubadour experiencing the hard times of domestic turmoil is virtually synonymous with country music authenticity.’’9 No behavior is without consequences. And, though one consequence of this behavior has been a history of powerful and liberating music, another has been the creation of a culture of self-conflict, violence, and substance abuse in which it is, without question, ‘‘hard to be a woman.’’ Ironically, it may also be a culture in which it is hard to be a man, though in very different ways. In recalling the previous chapter, we can see that Thoreau’s call of the wild never left the American scene. His rover, wanderer, Walker, outlaw who sets up shop outside the state, the church, and the people

................. 15741$

$CH6

02-13-06 14:43:01

PS

PAGE 98


99

is neatly matched by what Bill Malone calls the metaphor of the ‘‘rambler’’ in the country music tradition. ‘‘Ramblin,’ ’’ Malone says, is ‘‘a metaphor for the man who defies or otherwise tries to live apart from the conventions of society.’’10 If we trace the traits of Thoreau’s Walker Errant, we see that the country men about whom Wynette sings and about whom I wish to speak exemplify them well. They are lost within their culture. Their truest names are usually nicknames: ‘‘Luke the Drifter,’’ ‘‘No Show Jones,’’ the ‘‘Outlaws,’’ among others. They are also strongly politically minded; they understand their cultural oppression, and they mean to make a place for themselves despite it. There is no doubt that these singers ‘‘affected the day.’’ The three about whom I wish to speak—Hank Williams, George Jones, and Waylon Jennings—were bright, creative, charismatic, and strongwilled; each seemed to take up Thoreau’s call to take a walk on the wild side to try to awaken those around them. In some ways, as was John Brown, they were immensely successful; they brought widespread notoriety to the lives of the rural underclass. They created a cultural space for their music and the experiences of rural America about which their music spoke. In the absence of Thoreau’s constraining cultural stoicism, however, the artistic harvest they reaped was complemented by tremendous human failure. They are representative of the dangers involved in pursuing Thoreau’s call of the wild without having an aptitude for finding and living in the border world Thoreau himself sought. In being ‘‘just men,’’ Williams, Jones, and Jennings had difficulty establishing or finding boundaries once they wandered away from the civilized and toward the wild side. Self-aversive thought and self-recovery eluded Williams altogether, and the others found doses of it only in their later years. Their story is at once a lesson in living toward the wild and a basis for rethinking the lives of women and men in country culture as we move into another century. Moreover, their story should inspire us to listen again to the country music of women in the postwar United States; theirs is a story that still remains, for the most part, unheard and untold. In many ways, country music feminists seem to exhibit a better grasp of living in the border world Thoreau described than did their male

................. 15741$

$CH6

02-13-06 14:43:01

PS

PAGE 99

1 00


counterparts; they could see both the effectiveness of the ‘‘wild’’ side and the damage that wildness could bring when not subjected to some sort of self-control. Hank Williams played the initial role of the wild and uncontrollable country star; in his case especially this meant that he was genuinely ‘‘country’’ or ‘‘hillbilly’’—a foreigner to upper/middle class, urban/suburban America and a barbarian who already had one foot on the less civilized side of the border. Born into the working class in Mount Olive, Alabama, Williams began his country career at age fourteen, singing in bars and aiming at an ersatz cowboy life. His songs often reflected the rambler’s quest and the wildness that was the mark of freedom; ‘‘Honky-Tonk Blues,’’ ‘‘Honky-Tonkin’,’’ and ‘‘Ramblin’ Man’’ set the tone of the hillbilly musician–outlaw. But eventually Williams, simply by his actions, created a model for himself and for those who would follow. He began to act out the lyrics of ‘‘Lost Highway’’: ‘‘Just a rollin’ stone, all alone and lost; and for this life of sin I have paid the cost.’’ Addicted to performing, to alcohol, to morphine, and to women, Williams routinely alienated family and friends, as well as the business that sustained him, including the Grand Ole Opry. His friend and publisher Fred Rose wrote to Williams on March 19, 1948, challenging this way of being: Wesley tells me you called this morning for more money, after me wiring you four hundred dollars just the day before yesterday. . . . We have gone as far as we can go at this time and cannot send you any more. Hank, I have tried to be a friend of yours but you refuse to let me be one, and I feel that you are just using me for a good thing and this is where I quit. You have been very unfair, calling my house in the middle of the night and I hope that you will not let it happen again as it isn’t fair to Lorene.11

Roses’s experience was not unique. Band members tried futilely to keep Williams away from alcohol so that he could perform. On more than one occasion Williams was found drunk in the streets of some small town, firing a pistol in the middle of the night. His family life was marked by argument and violence, with occasional, though tem-

................. 15741$

$CH6

02-13-06 14:43:02

PS

PAGE 100


1 01

porary, sedative moments of religiosity. As Malone points out, Williams, like other hillbilly musicians, ‘‘inherited from their regional culture a cluster of presumptions that extolled the idea of aggressive masculine independence, and a body of songs that chronicled the exploits of manly men.’’12 These presumptions of manliness stood in marked contrast to the actualities of the inheritors, who were young, inexperienced, sensitive, and, often, fundamentally insecure. This insecurity underwrites the pathos present when we hear the irony in Wynette’s voice. Williams nevertheless adopted this inheritance and, using the concert hall, the radio, and the sale of records, he returned these presumptions with a vengeance to the young males of the American hillbilly life; he was the central figure in hillbilly politics. Williams died en route to a concert in Canton, Ohio, in the backseat of his blue Cadillac on New Year’s Day 1953, at the age of twentynine. His death at the height of his popularity sealed the fate of the image of the authentic male country singer—being wild and crazy became the country star’s badge of authenticity. The fact that Williams’s death was the result of alcoholism and his abuses of morphine and chloral hydrate was largely left unspoken. Despite all the trouble he had caused friends and relations, Williams was given a hero’s send-off at his memorial service in Nashville by Roy Acuff, leader of the same Grand Ole Opry that had earlier excommunicated Williams. The image of the wild side of life in country music was more important than any version of the truth. Indeed, this repackaging of the truth was itself a phenomenon characteristic of the manly country male. The message was not lost on those who followed in Williams’s footsteps. Male country performers, more than ever, began to describe themselves as wild and crazy and to live lives that authenticated the descriptions. And, as George ‘‘No Show’’ Jones learned early on, the wilder, the better. Jones came out of the rural poverty of East Texas with a stunningly supple and evocative country voice, and in his early recordings there is no mistaking his imitation of the sound of Hank Williams. But his imitation of Williams’s lifestyle was even more essential. After missing an important show at the Bitter End in

................. 15741$

$CH6

02-13-06 14:43:03

PS

PAGE 101

1 02


New York City, Jones was hailed by the New York Times as the greatest country singer of all time without having sung a note. Waylon Jennings, also from Texas, was not far behind, putting together a string of songs that traded on his wilder side: ‘‘I’ve Always Been Crazy,’’ ‘‘Lonesome,’’ ‘‘Orn’ry and Mean,’’ and Rodney Crowell’s ‘‘I Ain’t Livin’ Long like This,’’ to name just a few. Like Jones, he lived in Williamsesque style, though he upgraded from a Cadillac to a Silver Eagle touring bus. It is important to note that this ‘‘hillbilly’’ difference displayed by Williams and his descendants took a part in the recivilizing of American culture. Even when unintended, their music was consistently political, calling issues of class and economic practices into question and making visible a large segment of American culture that for many folks went unnoticed. They began to infuse our lives with yet another picture of American reality and experience. Their music reached out to those who shared their experiences and rippled beyond, to a wider middle America. Williams’s songs were even performed by the likes of Jerry Vale, Mitch Miller, and Tony Bennett. Moreover, in terms of sheer influence, it is impossible to overlook the culture-transforming work of rockabilly, and especially the impact of Elvis Presley.13 Though country was not yet ‘‘cool,’’ it began to reshape the contours of middle American life in ways that we now take for granted. As Thoreau wrote: ‘‘In literature it is only the wild that attracts us. Dullness is but another name for tameness.’’14 The same seemed to be true in country music. As the writer of the liner notes for a recent alternative-country compilation titled Boone County (Bloodshot Records) writes: ‘‘More than anything perhaps, country music embodies the fact that a two-week drinking binge, getting used up and tossed away in the game of love, and longing for the ‘better days’ of some misremembered past are simply equal parts in a well balanced life.’’15 So it was that Hank Williams brought his own brand of wildness to American life. He moved from the country in 1942, to work at the Alabama Dry Dock and Shipbuilding Company in Montgomery, Alabama. And, as Colin Escott notes, he found a ready-made audience for his music not only there in Montgomery but also in ‘‘Cleveland, Wash-

................. 15741$

$CH6

02-13-06 14:43:03

PS

PAGE 102


1 03

ington, and even Oakland’’; his hillbilly music was ‘‘like a letter from home,’’ a phenomenon that has lingered and spawned what Jennings later called the ‘‘Hank Williams Syndrome.’’16 Jennings himself first sang a song titled ‘‘Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way?’’ Later, we find a slew of Hank songs, including Paul Craft’s ‘‘Hank Williams You Wrote My Life,’’ that manifest the wide appeal Williams’s music and message held for the ‘‘middle’’ and lower ranges of white, male American culture. The breadth and staying power of Williams’s influence is revealed in, for instance, Neil Young’s ‘‘From Hank to Hendrix’’ and Bob Dylan’s impromptu performances of ‘‘Lost Highway.’’ In the chorus to ‘‘The Hank Williams Syndrome’’ Jennings, not long before his own death, reflected on this influence in both its positive and negative dimensions: Hank, you were my inspiration And I was obsessed with your ways, But to tell you the truth, it’s no thanks to you That I’m still living today. Hank, I still love your music And in spite of the things I’ve just said You’ll always be a hero to me, But the Hank Williams syndrome is dead.17

Williams’s wildness was thus, at one level, genuine in virtue of his place in American culture. ‘‘Hillbilly’’ meant uncivilized, ‘‘hick,’’ uneducated, naı¨ve, poor, dirty, and unimportant, and performers like Hank Williams were routinely portrayed as ‘‘hillbillies from the shallow end of the gene pool, holes in their britches and a bottle of hooch among them.’’18 As Fred Rose put it in an open letter to Billboard in August 1946: We pride ourselves in being a very intelligent people and good Americans . . . but we say of ‘‘our own good ol’ American folklore’’ that it is ‘‘hillbilly music and sometimes we’re ashamed to call it music.’’19

Such regional resentment and classism, despite the crossover of much contemporary country music, is still with us. In Williams’s day it was

................. 15741$

$CH6

02-13-06 14:43:04

PS

PAGE 103

1 04


a deep and dangerous habit of the culture. Williams, like those who followed, took on the battle for social acceptance, ironically, by way of the very wildness with which he was already branded; he was creating a border world between his roots in Alabama poverty and ‘‘mainstream,’’ white, middle-class America. If ‘‘hillbilly’’ meant ‘‘wild,’’ Hank Williams intended to represent it well. He was not about to kowtow to this mainstream American civilization or even to the tamed and civilized Hee Haw–like country-western culture of Nashville. It was precisely this conservative and economically powerful tameness that sent Waylon and Willie Nelson back to Austin, Texas, in the early 1970s, wearing the label ‘‘Outlaws’’; in Austin they took country music back to its hard-core, wilder ways.20 Williams was creating his own standard that would be impossible to ignore or overlook. In Thoreau’s terms, his wildness clearly had a political edge and effect. The two particular avenues of wildness the country male used to revise the American experience are not new to the history of human cultures: they are wandering and outlawry. Both inhabited the groundwork of the new standard that Williams created. Through his alias, Luke the Drifter, Williams created the role of the hillbilly wanderer in the automobile age. He generated a myth or a legend by which others would have to measure their authenticity. Road life was straightforwardly uncivilized and uncivilizing. It rejected day jobs— the routinized labor to which Southern poor males seemed destined—and, despite its grueling nature, appeared as a radical freedom from the dominant drudgery of daily life. In this much it met Thoreau’s negative criteria for being awake and alive; it sought to outflank ‘‘quiet desperation’’ and aimed to keep the wanderer intensely alive to the possibilities of life. The road life is so well documented in country song that it is difficult to find a place to begin. But where the music life alone is considered, the legacy of Hank Williams is most clearly articulated in Willie Nelson’s ‘‘Me and Paul’’ and ‘‘On the Road Again,’’ in Danny O’Keefe’s ‘‘The Road,’’ in the Grateful Dead’s ‘‘Truckin,’’ and in Jackson Browne’s ‘‘Running on Empty.’’21 The same themes are given presentation in a wide range of ‘‘trucking’’

................. 15741$

$CH6

02-13-06 14:43:04

PS

PAGE 104


1 05

songs from Dave Dudley’s ‘‘Six Days on the Road’’ to Little Feat’s ‘‘Willin’ ’’ and, more recently, Son Volt’s ‘‘Windfall.’’ The country male musician must have a road mentality. The freedom of the wanderer bears its own traits and excesses. Perhaps the central feature is displacement—a chosen homelessness of which Thoreau was well aware. Waylon Jennings, a master of the road art, put it this way: For any migrating performer, travel takes on a life all its own. The shows become stopovers; the highway is where you spend most of your time. In transit. In transition. You enter a strange space when you get on the bus. You’re not home, and you’re not there yet. You’re on the way.22

In this much the country traveler again embodies some Thoreauvian virtues—life is in the transitions; it is on the way. The living death of our daily desperation is highlighted in contrast to the wanderer’s life that booms out across the night air of America on WSM, WWVA, KWKH, WLW, and now from thousands of cloned stations nationwide. The country male became emblematic of hillbilly freedom from the world of work, poverty, and social and geographical immobility. For many, he became not only a transient but also a transcendent figure: transcending class and region, transcending the constraints of deadened American existence. His transcendence emerged also in his attention to the inner wildness necessary to carry out the ongoing resistance to civilization’s dictates, to become an outlaw. Together with wandering, alcohol, drugs, and attitude became the standard props that opened the door to this wildness, and they each had the Hank Williams stamp of approval. Songs and performances seemingly were spawned and enhanced when the country male was wildest. The wildness, at least in legend, became a necessary condition for the music. Jennings, who, as we noted, by the 1970s was being labeled an ‘‘outlaw’’ in a now-civilized Nashville (together with Willie Nelson, David Alan Coe, and others), points to Williams’s influence once again: If I had an Outlaw hero, someone to set my standard and measure my progress, it was Hank Williams. . . . You’d hear all these sto-

................. 15741$

$CH6

02-13-06 14:43:05

PS

PAGE 105

1 06


ries, how he pulled a jukebox that didn’t have his records on it out to the street and shot it full of holes, or ran around all night dead drunk and pilled out and still gave the greatest show you ever saw. We thought that was the way to do it.23

Embracing the darker sides of their own characters, these country boys transcended the ordinary and stood above the civilized world. In keeping with their country raising, they resisted external (and especially Northern) authority—the law—and a radical, antisocial attitude became their normal way of living. David Alan Coe expressed this attitude well in his cult anthems ‘‘Long-Haired Redneck’’ and ‘‘If That Ain’t Country (I’ll Kiss Your Ass).’’ ‘‘Oh, the country DJs all know that I’m an outlaw,’’ he sings in describing his own live performance, and then confirms it when he sings, ‘‘The loudmouth in the corner’s getting to me, / talking about my earrings and my hair; / I guess he ain’t read the signs that say I’ve been to prison; / someone ought to warn him ’fore I knock him off his chair.’’24 The attitude of internal wildness is the catalyst to the freedom of the country male performer, a freedom that marks him as an outlaw. The journey away from the overcivilizing world through wandering and wildness took Hank Williams and the others in the direction of Thoreau’s redemptive wilderness. They intentionally exercised no self-constraint, and they outflanked external constraint in virtue of and empowered by their popularity, their money, and their genuine fame. At one point, Jennings recalls, he was spending up to fifteen hundred dollars a day on his drug habits, revealing the fact that in America money is one mode of freedom. But their journeys led them into a standard vice—a weakness and perhaps mortal sin—of country culture; they began to ‘‘get above their raisin’.’’ To themselves and to others, in legend at least, they seemed to be a bit more than human. They, so the legend went, could handle the alcohol, the cocaine, and the sleep deprivation. By his own account, Jennings had never acknowledged or understood that cocaine was illegal until he was arrested for possession. George Jones seemed to think it was acceptable for him to fire a revolver at his friend’s car when the friend turned to Christianity to try to free Jones from his addictions. The country male

................. 15741$

$CH6

02-13-06 14:43:05

PS

PAGE 106


1 07

learned that he was ‘‘just a man,’’ if at all, the hard way. In each case, in trying to overcome the pervasive classism in American culture, he moved aggressively past the recivilizing prescription of Thoreau and into a debilitating wilderness of excess—a wilderness whose reach extended to family and friends and whose effects were felt most strikingly by the women in the lives of these male country stars. They crossed the border from recivilizing to dehumanizing. This all became part of the legend; Hank Williams not only lived in transition, he died in transition. The homelessness of his existence was complemented by an inner loneliness noted by all those who knew him; it was a loneliness often disclosed in his music, most effectively in songs such as ‘‘Lost Highway’’ and ‘‘I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry.’’ His wandering eventually translated into lostness and loss; he had no place where he could settle, and his addictions gradually made him unrecognizable not only to those close to him but also to himself. He lost himself to the road and to his wildness; he died socially before he died physically. On the one side, his wildness created a new and vital community in American culture; on the other side, it alienated him from this and all other communities. Jones and Jennings each finally attempted recovery when they came face-to-face with similar deaths. Their awakening to their lostness and loneliness was a slow road, and in both cases their recovery was enabled—not demanded—by a woman. Jessi Colter, country artist and wife of Jennings, and Nancy Jones, wife of George Jones, lived lives that are exemplary cases of Wynette’s opening understatement, ‘‘Sometimes it’s hard to be a woman.’’ Jennings began to admit his lostness to himself when he wrote ‘‘Don’t You Think This Outlaw Bit’s Done Got Out of Hand?’’ shortly after he was busted for possession of cocaine. In retrospect, George Jones recognized that it was precisely and ironically country culture’s acceptance of his proclaimed heroic wildness and outlaw status that enabled him to prolong his addictions in the wilderness. The police would call his friends to tell him to disappear when a warrant for his arrest was issued:

................. 15741$

$CH6

02-13-06 14:43:06

PS

PAGE 107

1 08


Did they think they were doing me a favor? I needed to be arrested. I needed treatment. But it all goes back to the special rules by which show-business people are sadly allowed to live.25

The unchecked transcendence of the country male star thus bore a twin fruit: music that entranced and transformed the culture that engendered it and the lostness and self-loss of the men who made the music. Interestingly, neither Jones nor Jennings lived with a great deal of regret. They regretted primarily the injuries and pain they caused others simply by being themselves. They seemed to acknowledge and accept the fatality of their rise and fall as paradigmatic characters of country music. Hank Williams remained at the core of their being. Jones said, ‘‘In the mid-1970s people wanted their country singers to be drunk and rowdy, as Hank Williams had been. In that respect, I gave the fans all they wanted and more.’’26 In the absence of regret there lingers a trace of their unwillingness to recognize that, after all, they’re just men. Their pride may have been hurt, but it was not eliminated. Ironically, if not sadly, their contemporary and equally wild performer Merle Haggard, in one of his final albums, sings longingly of the days of partying and addiction: ‘‘Watching while some old friends do a line; / holding back the want to in my mind.’’27 If there was no regret, however, there was warning to the next generation. Jones titled his autobiography I Lived to Tell It All, and in the last chapters he discusses the ways one can come to grips with addiction. Jennings, in concert with the ethos of country life, refused to tell others how to live their lives. But candid revelations of the depth of his own despair bear the mark of overt warning. One of his most difficult tasks was telling his youngest son of his addictions. Despite such warnings by Jennings, Jones, and others, the myth, romance, and legend of the Williams syndrome is still with us. Country-influenced rock artists Gram Parsons (The Byrds and Flying Burrito Brothers) and Lowell George (Little Feat) both died in the 1970s while pursuing the Hank Williams formula. In the 1990s country singer/songwriter Keith Whitley recorded an interview several months before his death from alcoholism; in it he admitted to his addictions and his need for

................. 15741$

$CH6

02-13-06 14:43:06

PS

PAGE 108


1 09

recovery, and at the same time acknowledged his debt to the George Jones lifestyle that he believed gave him genuine country credentials. Perhaps more important, the effects of the legend were never limited to the stars themselves. The effects became a part of the American social landscape from Lubbock, Texas, to Portland, Maine. Men were expected to drink, hang out in bars, be inattentive to family life, endorse and employ violence—in short, to do all those things that, as Wynette’s song says, women were not supposed ‘‘to understand.’’ But again there is irony. Women surely understood what country men did—that is only too evident in the songs they wrote in response to male behavior. Many of them also seemed to see the weakness in country men that engendered such self-destructive and culturally blind behavior. It is not clear to me, however, that country men understood this; to many of them it seemed merely one form of excess accompanying the necessary wildness of the political transformation of culture. The legend and the myth suggest that the men were somehow special in their freedom to act in such ways. They were above the world of daily life. Bill Malone sees the story somewhat differently and, I think, more accurately. ‘‘But not surprisingly,’’ he says, ‘‘the yearning for the open road in country music nevertheless springs as often from a sense of failure and insecurity as it does from the façade of swaggering sense of confidence that seems to envelop many songs.’’28 The future of the myth and legend is hard to assess. But the sooner we see the experiential truth of Malone’s claim, the sooner we might be on the road to transforming the country culture of American males— and, perhaps more important, its impact on what it means to be male in America. Jennings saw at least a glimmer of hope in the new generation: ‘‘The new hats are here, / and it’s interestingly clear / our day is slipping on by; / They’re not like me and you, / but that’s alright too, / they could keep the music alive.’’29 Hank Williams was a creative genius who took hillbilly life and inserted it into the consciousness of American society. But he also perpetuated and generated a culture of self-engrossment and self-destruction whose negative consequences for women and children, as well as for men, have extended

................. 15741$

$CH6

02-13-06 14:43:06

PS

PAGE 109

1 10


through several generations. Given the irony of Wynette’s words, the only way to stand by these men will be to transform them and the culture that has enabled them to be destructive. The difficulty is to accomplish this transformation without losing the powers of Thoreauvian wildness and the possibility of a borderland existence. A wildness born of insecurity seems bound for an unhappy ending. For Malone, ‘‘In reality, Hank Williams seemed more lost than rebellious, more confused than hedonistic, and perhaps more pathetic than tragic.’’30 Thoreau suggested one avenue to finding a border existence when he suggested that the wildness must be deliberate and the aim of recivilizing must be kept in mind. The move to wildness must be experimental, with an eye toward the appearance of damaging consequences and with a felt awareness of the extent to which its cultural effects might reach. Country males will have to begin by recognizing that they are not alone in their worlds. This will be a difficult existential shift, but the most important one. It is perhaps the point that country women have most emphatically projected in their responses to the male dominance of their worlds. Indeed, it seems reasonable that country men should turn to country women to learn how to handle the wild life. Moreover, insofar as they are not alone, country men will also have to recognize that transforming their world is not something they can or should do alone. Country women, whose music shows that they in many ways understand men better than the men understand themselves, must have a role in the transformation. In part this will involve telling the men their own stories about their lives in a world dominated by the Hank Williams syndrome. This is precisely the project undertaken by Loretta Lynn, Jeannie C. Riley, and Kitty Wells, and more recently by Lucinda Williams, Iris DeMent, Tish Hinojosa, and the Dixie Chicks. It is not a story that I can or should write, but it is one that I, and others who have been raised under the influence of Williams, Jones, and Jennings, need to listen to carefully. The first step in a genuine recovery and revision of the world of country music will be a genuine conversation concerning the past damage and the future possibilities. But it must be a genuine conversation in which

................. 15741$

$CH6

02-13-06 14:43:07

PS

PAGE 110


1 11

the men listen and hear far better than they have in the past. And at the same time, if Thoreau is right about the importance of an element of wildness and a borderland existence, we can hope, as does Malone, that this conversation will acknowledge ‘‘both the perils that lie outside the prescribed boundaries of our culture and the possibilities of renewed strength and excitement that lie hidden in those forbidden zones.’’31 In the alternative-country music we presently hear outside the Top 40 of country radio, this conversation seems already to have begun; we can only hope that there will be voices strong enough, as strong as those of Lynn and Wynette, to bring this conversation back to the center stage of country music culture.

................. 15741$

$CH6

02-13-06 14:43:08

PS

PAGE 111

seven

william james and the wild beasts o f the p hilosophical deser t

O

ne of the themes of rural life, of country music, and, emphatically, of Hank Williams’s music that I paid little attention to in my description of hillbilly politics is that of religious experience. Williams sang ‘‘I Saw the Light’’ just as truly as he sang ‘‘Lovesick Blues.’’ Like country music, religion and religious experience have become outcast topics in many academic settings. Yet it seems to me experientially unsound, as William James suggested, to try to assess American—or human—culture without some account of the religious dimension of experience. In this and the subsequent two chapters I aim to explore religiosity in American culture and thought without focusing on religions. Perhaps this avenue of approach will present an opportunity for further discussion among those who deem themselves religious and those who do not. The commentary at hand was suggested to me in part by a colleague’s remark that it would be nice if we could make William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience ‘‘respectable.’’ The impli{ 11 2 }

................. 15741$

$CH7

02-13-06 14:43:10

PS

PAGE 112

william james a nd the w ild b easts

1 13

cation was that there was something redeemable about the book, but that somehow it wasn’t philosophically or scientifically proper. The remark awakened me to—or at least reminded me of—the fact that this has been a traditional take on James’s text. As Julius Bixler pointed out, ridicule began soon after the book was published: ‘‘The Varieties of Religious Experience, appearing at about the same time as Ernest Thompson Seton’s book of animal stories, was soon nicknamed ‘‘Wild Religions I Have Known.’’1 The awakening to this attitude—a prevalent if not a pervasive one among contemporary intellectuals—led me to consider that it would be better, and crucially important to James himself, to keep James ‘‘unrespectable.’’ James may have been a renegade and antiprofessional philosopher, but he knew what he was doing. I begin my assessment of the Varieties by identifying myself with one of James’s self-referential remarks: ‘‘I have no real mystical experience of my own, but just enough of the germ of mysticism to recognize the region from which their voice comes when I hear it.’’2 I also have had no mystical experiences; thus, like James, I write as an inquiring but sympathetic outsider. But James knew that being a sympathizer was hardly more respectable than admitting to having a religious experience. Indeed, he was well aware that many who had not had religious experiences were not sympathetic, and he worried about the effects of their blindness to religious experience: The first thing to keep in mind (especially if we ourselves belong to the clerico-academic-scientific type, the officially and conventionally ‘‘correct’’ type, ‘‘the deadly respectable’’ type, for which to ignore others is a besetting temptation) is that nothing can be more stupid than to bar out phenomena from our notice, merely because we are incapable of taking part in anything like them ourselves.3

James was well attuned to the dismissive attitude of ‘‘the deadly respectable’’ academics who then found, and now find, more comfort in denying the possibilities of religious experience than in investigating its actuality. His aim was to write, in a nondismissive way, concerning the human significance of religious experience.

................. 15741$

$CH7

02-13-06 14:43:11

PS

PAGE 113

1 14


The heart of James’s unrespectablility is located in his radically empirical attitude, the attitude that he first identified in ‘‘The Will to Believe’’ and that he considered the groundwork of his own pragmatism. James’s empirical attitude was doubly radical. First, it was willing to examine and take seriously all aspects of human experiences. Most notably, James pointed to the fact that relations are experienced no less than particular things or relata. Moreover, a radical empiricism investigates all experiences, the marginal and extreme as well as the ordinary. In Varieties he suggested that religious experiences are as common as many other experiences we consider ‘‘normal,’’ and therefore should be given a fair hearing. The second side of the radical attitude involved the method of inquiry. James was willing to use any form of inquiry that yielded insight or knowledge concerning experience. He did not limit himself to (though he certainly did not exclude) the tools of traditional positivistic science—the measurement of nominalistic, and often arbitrarily designated, things and events. James’s scientific method included a wide range of investigatory means: standard verification, sympathetic apprehension, biographical description, valuation, and direct description (what we might now call, somewhat loosely, phenomenology).4 He believed the scope of traditional science was far too limited to capture the range of human experience. In the conclusion to A Pluralistic Universe, in addressing the central questions of human existence, James argued for his inclusive method: It is high time for the basic discussion in these questions to be broadened and thickened up. It is for that that I have brought in Fechner [speculative cosmology] and Bergson [intuition], and descriptive psychology and religious experiences, and have ventured even to hint at psychical research and other wild beasts of the philosophical desert.5

In short, then, James’s epistemology was as pluralistic as his ontology, at least until he might have good reasons not to think so. In Varieties he drew heavily on these wild beasts, especially descriptive psychology, biography, and psychical research.

................. 15741$

$CH7

02-13-06 14:43:11

PS

PAGE 114


1 15

This pluralism of radical empiricism, James’s aversion to intellectual thinness, brought his thinking directly into conflict with two dominant intellectual outlooks of the turn of the twentieth century: absolute idealism and the normal science of the time. These outlooks were the contemporary measures of intellectual correctness. They established the various standards and constraints of respectability with which James had to contend. The rationalism of the idealist tradition and its related theologies established conceptual clarity and deductive consistency as conditions of philosophical respectability. James responded by claiming that this meant that respectability was purchased at too high a price. Conceptual clarity, he argued, brings with it a thinness that is unable to do justice to our actual religious experiences. Moreover, since for James the world and human experience are shot through with contingency, deduction is at best a tool for inquiry, as fellow pragmatist Charles Peirce described. Thus, though James recognized important fruits of the idealist tradition, he denied its claim to be the sole model for philosophical respectability: ‘‘Nevertheless,’’ he maintained, ‘‘if we look on man’s whole mental life as it exists . . . we have to confess that the part of it of which rationalism can give an account is relatively superficial.’’6 Not only does its thinness fail to do justice to religious experience, but rational idealism more generally fails to originate or sustain religious belief. James argued that philosophy has deceived itself when it has tried to lay claim to religious belief. Of philosophical reason he said, ‘‘It amplifies and defines our faith, and dignifies it and lends it words and plausibility. It hardly ever engenders it; it cannot now secure it.’’7 In short, reasoning about and idealizing religious faith in the deductivist manner of idealisms such as that of Josiah Royce or A. E. Taylor is primarily a backfilling operation. Religiosity is found in the thickness of individual experience, where feelings, vague articulations, and chosen virtues reign: ‘‘We are dealing with a field of experience where there is not a single conception that can be sharply drawn. The pretension, under such conditions, to be rigorously ‘scientific’ or ‘exact’ in our terms would only stamp us as lacking an understanding of our task.’’8 Thus James eschewed philosophical

................. 15741$

$CH7

02-13-06 14:43:11

PS

PAGE 115

1 16


respectability and looked for avenues of inquiry and understanding that begin to address the thickness of human experience. Such avenues, at least in 1902, seemed to run only in the wilder and stranger places of philosophical activity. The second primary antagonist to the respectability of James’s radical empiricism was mainstream science. It was then, and is now to an even greater degree, a more difficult foe. It was more difficult not only because it became tremendously successful and popular as a mode of inquiry, but also because, in being at heart empirical, it shared a fundamental outlook with James’s philosophical method. From the point of view of this mainstream, and practically positivistic, science, James’s approach in the Varieties seems like a naı¨ve imitation: much too loose, too subjective, too unmethodical, and too unmathematical. The science that James encountered operated with three central assumptions, assumptions that have since been disputed within the scientific community, but that nevertheless have not gone away in the everyday practices of science and, more generally, of American culture.9 The first assumption, James indicated, is a monism that is ‘‘something with which all experience has got to square.’’10 Science, ironically, borrows a steady-state conception of the universe from the rationalists. The practice of science thus becomes a jigsaw puzzle activity in which inductive inquiry moves steadily toward the closure of a block universe—no loose ends, no real possibilities. Induction, pragmatically speaking, is simply deduction without a God’s-eye view. In this way, science’s monism is coupled with a straightforward causal determinism. This determinism is consistent with the other two assumptions that concerned James: (1) that the world is essentially matter and (2) that things are best understood through a reduction to their causal origins. James persistently rejected these assumptions of conventional science, and as a result he was (and is) considered by many to have been a naı¨ve thinker whose scientific work in psychology was merely at a primitive stage. But his resistance to such ‘‘respectable’’ science was the result of a considered philosophical outlook, and his aim was to

................. 15741$

$CH7

02-13-06 14:43:12

PS

PAGE 116


1 17

revise contemporary conceptions of science. His central claim was that reduction was not itself a scientific or empirical activity. Rather, he considered it a speculative or philosophical act of closure resulting from the long-standing British habit of identifying empiricism with a materialistic, deterministic monism. James’s response to this sort of thinking appeared early in his 1878 Lowell Lectures, ‘‘The Brain and the Mind.’’ ‘‘I know of nothing more deplorable,’’ he argued, ‘‘than this undiscriminating gulping down of every thing materialistic as peculiarly scientific.’’11 In the Varieties his resistance to positivistic science appeared in both the opening and the conclusion. At the outset he attacked the ‘‘medical materialism’’ that reduces all human beliefs and faiths to some physical condition. ‘‘Medical materialism,’’ he said, ‘‘finishes up Saint Paul by calling his vision on the road to Damascus a discharging lesion of the occipital cortex, he being an epileptic.’’12 He questioned the reduction not only because it is a speculative move, and therefore not thoroughly empirical, but also because we, as persons, experientially reject it: ‘‘When other people criticize our own more exalted soulflights by calling them ‘nothing but’ expressions of our organic disposition, we feel outraged and hurt, for we know that, whatever be our organism’s peculiarities, our mental states have their substantial value as revelations of the living truth.’’13 Consider, for example, a setting in which several academics are enjoying an exceptional gourmet meal and we assess their taste for such food to be ‘‘nothing but’’ a function of their genetic makeup, upbringing, or social aspirations. Toward the end of the book James staked his claim more pointedly, stating that the ‘‘scientist, so-called, is, during his scientific hours at least, so materialistic that one may well say that on the whole the influence of science goes against the notion that religion should be recognized at all.’’14 The force of James’s claim is still easily felt today. Indeed, this is precisely the reason, especially among intellectuals and academics, that the Varieties seems to many to be unscientific and consequently unrespectable; James doesn’t use science to dismiss religion. To those who hold a standard conception of science as a

................. 15741$

$CH7

02-13-06 14:43:12

PS

PAGE 117

1 18


‘‘body of knowledge’’ underwritten by a materialist ontology, James will continue to seem naı¨ve. Again, James was clear that his aim was to revise science and to radicalize empiricism, to preserve the integrity and openness of inquiry within the limits of human reason and experience. As Charlene Seigfried points out, ‘‘James incisively undercuts the naı¨vete´ of the presumption that the scientific method alone discloses the real world by situating science along a continuum of selective, creative activity.’’15 His radical empiricism is conjoined with his pragmatism in such a way that instead of seeking understanding of an experience simply in its causal origin, we also look for meaning in its possible and actual consequences. ‘‘In other words,’’ he said, ‘‘not in its origins, but the way in which it works on the whole, is Dr. Maudsley’s final test of belief. This is our own empiricist criterion.’’16 In the subsequent line, James aligns his method with that of Jonathan Edwards, a claim no doubt intended to ensure his lack of respectability among medical materialists and positivists: ‘‘In the end it had to come to our own empiricist criterion: By their fruits ye shall know them, not by their roots. Jonathan Edwards’ Treatise on Religious Affections is an elaborate working out of this thesis.’’17 Thus, James’s work in the Varieties is not just an uninformed attempt at a science of religion. It is an attempt to revise what a science of religion might be; it is an open inquiry into religious experience from a philosophical outlook that embraces pluralism, the possibility of immaterial reals, a pragmatic notion of meaning, human freedom, and the precariousness of the cosmos. Radical empiricism demands a careful look at the thickness of religious experiences as they occur for individuals. Pluralism precludes us from preemptively reducing all such experiences to a single niche in the universe. Pragmatism demands that we examine the actual effects these experiences have for individual lives—this is the task of James’s discussion of saintliness. What, then, is the cash value of the Varieties? What does James accomplish by confronting the standards of philosophic and scientific respectability?

................. 15741$

$CH7

02-13-06 14:43:13

PS

PAGE 118


1 19

Two Moods of a Saintly Temperament: Some Consequences of James’s Unrespectability James believed that the upshot of the narrow, positivistic version of science would be to dry up the importance of religious and other human experiences in the manner of sawdust tossed on an oil spill. It would leave us at the mercy of dogmatic and overbearing technical ‘‘knowers,’’ who would wrap up the universe through reductions to causal origins. ‘‘There are,’’ he said, ‘‘plenty of persons today, ‘scientists’ or ‘positivists,’ they are fond of calling themselves—who will tell you that religious thought is a mere survival, an atavistic reversion to a type of consciousness which humanity in its more enlightened examples has long since left behind and out-grown.’’18 If anything, this view is more widely accepted among American academics today than it was in 1900. For James, this outlook was little removed from nihilism because it either distrusted or rejected human creativity. Pragmatically understood, positivists claim that science ‘‘has proved that personality, so far from being an elementary force in nature, is but a passive resultant of the really elementary forces, physical, chemical, physiological, and psycho-physical.’’19 The consequence of this scientistic account of human experience is an ultimate barrenness in our existence, the very sort of Brave New World barrenness that has been the core concern of a variety of social movements in the late twentieth century—movements as various as existentialism, the Beat Generation, hippiedom, and the consequent deadheads, punk culture, postmodernism in its various guises, and, more recently, the ‘‘green’’ movement. Thinking pragmatically, James noted a sadness that ‘‘lies at the heart of every merely positivistic, agnostic, or naturalistic scheme of philosophy.’’20 This sadness seems rooted in the implicit loss of the ‘‘tender’’ features of human experience. For James, speaking a word for the varieties of religious experience is a performative resistance to this positivistic barrenness. ‘‘If any one phrase could gather its [religion’s] universal message,’’ says James, ‘‘that phrase would be, ‘All is not vanity in the Universe, whatever the appearances may suggest.’ ’’21 Thus, the upshot of James’s radically

................. 15741$

$CH7

02-13-06 14:43:13

PS

PAGE 119

1 20


empirical, pragmatic, and pluralistic engagement with religious experiences is a description and pragmatic defense of their human importance. They bring unity to the experiencers and, in different ways, make the experiencers at home in the universe. Religious experiences bear weight through their consequences: ‘‘The best fruits of religious experience are the best things that history has to show.’’22 It is through a steady stream of autobiographical descriptions that James tries to bring this home to his readers. In a letter to Frances R. Morse, James laid out the difficulties he faced in resisting respectability: The problem I have set myself is a hard one: first, to defend . . . ‘‘experience’’ against ‘‘philosophy’’ as being the real backbone of the world’s religious life . . . and second, to make the hearer or reader believe, what I myself believe, that, although all the special manifestations of religion may have been absurd (I mean its creeds and theories), yet the life of it as a whole is mankind’s most important function.23

This ‘‘most important function’’ is cashed out in human endeavor. Religious experience is the widest and deepest experience of humanity. In underwriting the importance of aesthetic value and moral commitments, religious experience keeps us alive to the meaning and significance of the humanities in general. It awakens us to the living realities of goodness, beauty, strength of character, and justice— ideals that, should we lose them, would strike us helpless ‘‘in handling the real world.’’24 James works out the consequences of religious experience through the categorial structure of two sorts of souls: the healthy-minded souls, who step into divinity almost innocently, and the sick souls, whose internal division requires conversion and rebirth. Each type, through religious experience, reaches the condition of saintliness where the consequences of the experience are made manifest in actual, individual lives. Bixler has given clear articulation to what many have noted in James’s descriptive accounts of religious experiences. There appears,

................. 15741$

$CH7

02-13-06 14:43:14

PS

PAGE 120


1 21

he says, to be a direct tension, if not a flat-out contradiction, between the two types of soul, one exemplifying freedom and the other, submission.25 To resolve the conflict, Bixler argues that ultimately James opted for the priority of the healthy-minded soul: James was attracted by two different kinds of religious value whose claims were at variance with each other. When his powers were at their height and the active impulses were dominant, he believed that the only religion worth having was that which encouraged human achievement. When, on the other hand, he felt the need of outward support and assurance, the religion which appealed to him was that which brought comfort. We have seen in detail that in his writings now one mood and now the other gives evidence of being dominant. His final decision was in favor of the more aggressive attitude toward life, and the pluralistic religion which it implied.26

Bixler’s reading of the Varieties is insightful, but his attempt to make James ultimately choose between the two types of soul seems somewhat hasty. James did opt for pluralism simply by describing the two types, but a more experientially pluralistic reading is that James did not choose between the two types of soul. Rather, he lived with the tension of the two, seeing them as different moods of a religious temperament. As with his rejection of positivistic science, what is important lies in the consequences. For James, both types of religious experience could lead to ameliorative effects, both individual and social. If there is to be a unifying moment of the two souls, it will be in their effects as religious moods and as reciprocal conditions of human creative endeavor. And these effects are something we can see and feel in the world we inhabit. As we noted in earlier chapters, in Pragmatism and elsewhere in his writings, James marked out his fundamental empirical assessment of our world as a precarious place: ‘‘I find myself willing to take the universe to be really dangerous and adventurous, without therefore backing out and crying ‘no play.’ ’’27 This fact, as James saw it, existentially conditions religious experiences. ‘‘I offer you the chance,’’ he said, ‘‘of taking part in such a world. Its safety, you see, is unwar-

................. 15741$

$CH7

02-13-06 14:43:14

PS

PAGE 121

1 22


ranted. It is a real adventure, with real danger, yet it may win through.’’28 In such a world, there is human work to be done. This is James’s meliorism; we have a chance to improve our world though we have no guarantees of the outcome. In such a world, both religious moods may have roles to play. The healthy-minded exemplify free human action toward fulfilling human possibilities; the twice-born reveal the importance of submission to what is higher. Here are to be found the specific fruits of religious experience as they are found in the saintly life. James follows Leuba in giving import to the human consequences of divine activity: ‘‘Not God, but life, more life, a larger, richer, more satisfying life, is, in the last analysis the end of religion.’’29 For James, religious experience, even if it should lead to immortality and another life of some sort, must first earn its keep in this life. If it is to earn respect, over and against the conventional respectability of philosophy and science, it must do so through its effects on our lives. In a note to himself concerning the Varieties, James wrote: ‘‘Yet I must shape things and argue to the conclusion that a man’s religion is the deepest and wisest thing in his life.’’30 The two routes to saintliness, taken as complementary religious moods, reveal both independent and conjoint avenues to ameliorating life. Taken separately, healthy-mindedness discloses the power of a free will at work, and the reborn sick soul emphasizes the guidance available through submission to ideals. Taken together, they provide a fuller picture of the powers of human creativity. The healthy-minded mood is Whitmanesque, marked by its attention to personal empowerment and freedom. It is an active mood, engendering a creative meliorism. The healthy-minded soul enjoys a romance with the world, in which she sees herself as making a difference, as contributing to the world’s well-being. This mood’s sense of empowerment was precisely what was, as we saw earlier, rejected by traditional science in denying that ‘‘personality’’ is ‘‘an elementary force in nature.’’31 James’s own experiential resistance to this denial came, under the influence of Renouvier, when he asserted his freedom as an initial act of freedom. Science’s block universe offered no more hope than those of Hegel and Royce. And James believed that

................. 15741$

$CH7

02-13-06 14:43:15

PS

PAGE 122


1 23

most of us sense this free power at some juncture in our lives. He gives expression to the importance of the healthy-minded mood in his assessment of the mind-cure movement: That the controlling energies of nature are personal, that your own personal thoughts are force, that the powers of the universe will directly respond to your individual appeals and needs, are propositions which your whole body and mental experience will verify.32

Under the influence of this religious mood, we see ourselves as contributors, as empowered to make a difference—our individual acts and human creativity are directly important to and for the universe. We see the aesthetic powers of Michelangelo and the moral efficacy of Martin Luther King, Gandhi, and Mother Teresa; we experience our own possibilities for making a difference, say, in the life of a child, in the comfort of a dying friend, or in the beauty of a local environment. The ‘‘saintly methods’’ are, James says, ‘‘creative energies’’; and the saints themselves ‘‘are impregnators of the world, vivifiers and animaters of potentialities of goodness which but for them would lie forever dormant.’’33 The mood of the converted soul is somewhat different—less innocent, more reflective, and culminating in an active passivity. It discloses a second, complementary and crucial dimension of our creative endeavors. At the heart of the sick soul’s religiosity is a moment of submission to something higher—to a living ideal. James applauds Starbuck’s claim that the experiencer must fall back on the larger Power that makes for righteousness, which has been welling up in his own being, and let it finish in its own way the work it has begun. . . . The act of yielding, in this point of view, is giving one’s self over to the new life, making it the centre of the new personality.34

The self-surrender or submission, ironically, leads to a rebirth, not a death, of the self. The converted soul feels empowered in ways that she or he had not previously experienced.35 The difference from the free power and agency felt by the healthy-minded is that the personal

................. 15741$

$CH7

02-13-06 14:43:15

PS

PAGE 123

1 24


power now has a clearly self-transcendent source—a living ideal or power. The converted soul finds herself living in a wider life where things can be seen more clearly. The final result is that the Tolstoy– like, converted believer gains ownership of an ideal, experiences selfrevision, and sees the possibilities for further self-revision and social revision. In submitting to an ideal, the sick soul identifies with it and not only gains, as it were, an aesthetic insight to an ideal, but also acquires a strength of commitment that it had not previously known. Stories of this sort abound among those who have participated in Alcoholics Anonymous, one of several movements inspired by James’s thinking.36 As Starbuck puts it: ‘‘The effect of conversion is to bring with it ‘a changed attitude towards life, which is fairly constant and permanent. . . .’ The persons who have passed through conversion, having once taken a stand for the religious life, tend to feel themselves identified with it, no matter how much their religious enthusiasm declines.’’37 Such a deep and steady commitment is a potent tool for the melioristic outlook and action James saw as the fruit of the saintly life. Through equanimity, fortitude, and patience, converted souls have found the strength, for example, to care for lepers and, more recently, AIDS patients. As William Clebsch suggests, ‘‘Ultimately we act with the gods to reshape humanity’s social reality.’’38 Thus, both moods lead to the possible bettering of a risk-filled world. Moreover, both have disclosed their effects in biography and history: the healthy-minded by direct engagement with human possibility, and the reborn soul through self-revision and the empowerment of an ideal. The tension between the routes of the two moods is not ultimately paradoxical because it reflects a lived tension that many experience in basic creative acts. Consider, for example, the creation of a painting. The artist is free in choosing her medium, an originary mark on the canvas, generic content, and so forth. The artist is to some degree healthy-minded. However, that artist must also submit to an ideal as it develops itself on the canvas. The artist must give over something of her will and allow the painting to become what it can be; there is a moment of submission to a developing ideal.

................. 15741$

$CH7

02-13-06 14:43:16

PS

PAGE 124


1 25

This is not a new phenomenon in human experience, but a perennial one to which James’s focus on the two moods draws our attention. Insofar as the saints’ methods are ‘‘creative energies,’’ they should reveal both features to us, and James used the Varieties to show us that they do so in exemplary fashion. The ‘‘genuine saints,’’ he says, ‘‘find in the elevated excitement with which their faith endows them an authority and impressiveness which makes them irresistible in situations where men of shallower nature cannot get on at all without the use of worldly prudence.’’39 This irresistibility—personal creative energy—is, for James, what keeps religious experience alive and well even in the face of political and cultural oppression. If we push James’s description of the saintly life a bit, we might say that for him the creators and discoverers of human meaning are all, at some level, religious characters. They are champions, heroes, and preservers of the varieties of goodness. Again, for James, religious experience plays a central role in ameliorating the world: From this point of view we may admit the human charity which we find in all saints, and the great excess of it which we find in some saints, to be a genuinely creative social force, tending to make a real degree of virtue which it alone is ready to assume as possible. The saints are authors, auctores, increasers, of goodness.40

If the saints, of both moods, are denied their efficacy—if they are denied a place in the world—the world might quickly become a different place. A good place for cynics and manipulators, who both, in different ways, reject the possibility of betterness. In these various consequences of idealism, positivistic science, and James’s pluralism, we see the definitely practical and political edge of James’s work. Rationalism and scientism both fail to comprehend a wide range of human experiences, including, most importantly, religious experiences. At best, they provide a generic, conceptual shorthand for actual experience. Rationalism reduces us to puppets of some absolute power, and medical materialism, to physical, chemical, and biological causes. Especially in the latter world, experiences of

................. 15741$

$CH7

02-13-06 14:43:16

PS

PAGE 125

1 26


love, sacrifice, honesty, and the like are reduced to their causes, and religiosity is at best a kind of disease or medical impairment. As James noted, ‘‘One disciple of the school [of medical materialism], indeed, has striven to impugn the value of works of genius in a wholesale way (such works of contemporary art, namely, as he himself is unable to enjoy, and they are many) by using medical argument.’’41 The consequences of this initial failure to understand human experiences, James believed, held even more dire consequences when acted upon. In the absence of religious, artistic, and moral experiences, the human problems of the world must be addressed only by the conventional notion of science. While many scientists then and now claim not to associate with the assumptions of medical materialism, I believe James is correct in suggesting that in their scientific moments they do in practice succumb to them. Indeed, I believe that as a culture we are living with many of the consequences James predicted. Take, for example, our educational practices. How do we understand good teaching and learning? Our present answers are almost universally given in terms of cognitive psychology and by way of trivial sociological and psychological studies. A long-standing example is our measurement of good teaching in colleges and universities by way of student ‘‘evaluations.’’ James’s point is that as we stare directly into the face of experience, we know that cognitive psychology does not in and of itself make better teachers. In the opening chapter of Talks to Teachers, he made this point directly: ‘‘The best teacher may be the poorest contributor of child-study material, and the best contributor may be the poorest teacher.’’42 Yet instead of looking out for and paying attention to the humanistic features of good teaching—caring, sympathetic apprehension of others’ outlooks, and so on—we persist in measuring our teachers and in preparing them by way of studies in educational psychology. A similar phenomenon pervaded the medical profession of the twentieth century. James recognized the tremendous value of the scientific and technical advances in medicine—he was, after all, a pluralist. But he also believed that good medical treatment involved human dimensions such as care, trust, honesty, and hope. Moreover, he did

................. 15741$

$CH7

02-13-06 14:43:17

PS

PAGE 126


1 27

not discount the possibilities of other kinds of healing practices, including some that are related to religious experience: Science gives to all of us telegraphy, electric lighting, and diagnosis, and succeeds in preventing and curing a certain amount of disease. Religion in the shape of mind-cure gives to some of us serenity, moral poise, and happiness, and prevents certain forms of disease as well as science does, or even better in a certain class of persons.43

In the world of scientism, the problems of education and medicine are left without alternatives—there is only respectable science to answer our questions and address our concerns. This is the cost of intellectual respectability—a world that is morally, aesthetically, and religiously challenged. An academic world in which one must hide or apologize for being religious, for even having an interest—other than a respectable academic interest—in spiritualism or mysticism. A world in which we have come to persistently deny or overlook the beneficial effects of religious experience for some lives and cultures. The consequence of James’s work is not antiscience, but a more inclusive science, a more radical empiricism: ‘‘The science and the religion are both of them genuine keys for unlocking the world’s treasure-house to him who can use either of them practically.’’44 Living in such a barren world—even a world as barren as ours, where we have in practice given our lives over to respectable experts—seemed to James an unfortunate and ultimately unlivable consequence of the dominance of conventional science. The experiential fact is that calculative, rational thinking does not on its own produce good moral practices any more than it produces great art. For that, we need to take all human experiences seriously and to examine their effects on our lives. Conclusion As James noted in commenting on his task in the Varieties: ‘‘The struggle seems to be that of a less articulate and more profound part of our nature to hold out, and keep itself standing, against the at-

................. 15741$

$CH7

02-13-06 14:43:18

PS

PAGE 127

1 28


tempts of a more superficial and explicit or loquacious part to suppress it.’’45 James’s own courage in resisting not only the popular intellectualism of closed idealisms, but also the dominance of a narrowly construed and implicitly deterministic science, is something of which we are at present desperately in need. Though present-day humanists who themselves have acquired an antireligious dogma may overlook it, James’s work in the Varieties creates space not only for religion and religious experience, but for all of the humanities—for our romances with poetry, art, and music; for our interests in history; for our own philosophical engagement. His openly unrespectable ‘‘science of religion’’ underwrites the importance of the creative human endeavors that, as he saw it, allow us to ameliorate our existence, to pursue breadth and depth in the meaning of life. Meliorism in this world requires that we occasionally call on the wild beasts of the philosophical desert. Instead of making James respectable, we should focus on why he insisted on remaining unrespectable. James wants to give us a fighting chance to avoid the inevitable resignation that besets a world driven by positivism and rationalism. This is the fruit he hoped his work might bear: ‘‘For practical life at any rate, the chance of salvation is enough. No fact in human nature is more characteristic than its willingness to live on a chance.’’46

................. 15741$

$CH7

02-13-06 14:43:18

PS

PAGE 128

eight

john dewey ’s sensible m ysticism

I

n discussing Dewey’s consideration of practical wisdom, I noted the critiques of his work that suggested he did not pay enough attention to the receptive side of the intellect. Yet I believe he did attend to receptivity, even to the point of defining a religious dimension of human experience. Dewey notoriously rejected religions and their dogmatic attachment to the supernatural. Nevertheless, like James, he notably defended the religious as an important feature of our natural, human condition. Furthermore, as Kestenbaum convincingly argues, Dewey retained a naturalized view of transcendence in which our ideals and meanings stand beyond us: The transcendent for Dewey is no metaphysical sedative; neither is it a metaphysical justification to keep things moving and growing. What the transcendental ideal is—specifically, what he called ‘‘the grace and the severity of the ideal’’—was the most consistent background and stimulus for Dewey’s philosophical work.1

{ 12 9 }

................. 15741$

$CH8

02-13-06 14:43:12

PS

PAGE 129

1 30


Operating in the spirit of James’s radical empiricism, Dewey found a place for religiosity in human experience. Here I hope to mark out his description of what I call Dewey’s ‘‘sensible mysticism’’ in what I might call a ‘‘reconstructed’’ way. What I have to say in this connection about Dewey’s work is not radically new. I simply want to bring attention to what for Dewey was commonplace in his own work. Henry James, Sr., said of Emerson that he had two silhouettes—one, that of a mystic; the other, that of a down-to-earth and practical Yankee. Dewey, who was fonder of Emerson than is sometimes acknowledged, displays a similar complexity of character. He is often portrayed as a quiet, dry, and functional New Englander whose aims are practical in a narrow sense; but Dewey’s work discloses another dimension of Dewey: a wilder, richer, quasi–Emersonian figure. In his book The Horizons of Feeling, Tom Alexander provides insight into this side of Dewey. Nevertheless, Dewey’s wilder side is still often ignored, marginalized, or misread, leading to two related, problematic interpretations of Deweyan pragmatism: (1) that it is a mechanical instrumentalism whose disciples are intended to tinker with the pragmatic ideas from a Deweyan toolbox, and (2) that it is uninteresting at best and reductionist at worst. These are issues we raised earlier in discussing working certainty and wisdom. In response, I want to suggest a locus for the ‘‘immediacy’’ and receptivity that seem absent when we study Dewey too narrowly through his instrumentalism. Because Dewey’s influence has already been extensive in American culture and because his work continues to inform current debates, it is important to remind ourselves of this other dimension of Dewey’s thought. The last thing we need is another generation of educational theorists who misread and misemploy Dewey’s thought. To speak in old-fashioned terms, the ‘‘real’’ John Dewey was a thoroughgoing renegade, who in A Common Faith used the word ‘‘God’’ when he knew it would offend believers and nonbelievers alike. To provoke our remembrance of this Dewey, I would like to say a few words about Dewey’s sensible mysticism. In light of Dewey’s overt resistance to traditional mysticism as an access to knowledge, it seems out of place to identify Dewey with any

................. 15741$

$CH8

02-13-06 14:43:12

PS

PAGE 130

john dewey ’ s se n s i b l e my s t i c i s m

1 31

sort of mysticism. But I have in mind William Ernest Hocking’s pragmatically revised conception of mysticism expressed in his seminal work The Meaning of God in Human Experience. Hocking focused on two elements that lend themselves to my naming Dewey a mystic. The first is the fallibility of mystical experiences: ‘‘The mystic himself knows that his insight is unfinished and unsatisfactory, even while he declares his experience to be one of perfect satisfaction.’’2 The second is that this ‘‘unfinishedness’’ requires that the mystic develop her or his insight in thought. As Hocking put it, ‘‘the art of the mystic is closely allied with the art of thinking’’ and ‘‘we may yet find that thinking is definable as a partial worship.’’3 The upshot is that mysticism, as understood by Hocking, is an experience that is at once immediately satisfying and open to reflective thinking in its wake. Mysticism is defined ‘‘not by its doctrine but by its deed, the deed of worship in its fully developed form’’—that is, the deed of thinking.4 In Dewey’s world, the qualitative immediacy of an experience provides the initial satisfying experience, and ‘‘thinking’’ that grows out of this experience plays the role of worship. The theme of qualitative immediacy ranges across the whole of Dewey’s corpus, making featured appearances in Psychology, The Reconstruction of Philosophy, Experience and Nature, Ethics, and Art as Experience, among other texts. His biographer Dykhuizen tells us that Dewey was initially taken with what he called ‘‘intuitionalism.’’ Gradually, Dewey gave up intuitionalism as a mode of cognition in favor of the more pragmatic belief that all cognition—and all experience—is mediated. Another way to look at this transition is that Dewey, like Peirce, transformed what ‘‘intuition’’ might mean. For Dewey, intuition came to mean a specific feature of the transaction between a living organism and its environment. All experiences, he maintained, involve ‘‘the interaction of the live creature and environing conditions,’’ but some experiences set themselves apart because of their qualitative unity or integrity (LW, 10:42). Such experiences might be called ‘‘intuitive’’ under Dewey’s revised conception of intuition or ‘‘mystical’’ under Hocking’s revised notion of mysticism.

................. 15741$

$CH8

02-13-06 14:43:13

PS

PAGE 131

1 32


To concretize Dewey’s meaning, we can begin with his notion of a ‘‘situation’’ as a complex affair that is qualitatively integrated: ‘‘By the term situation in this connection is signified the fact that the subject matter ultimately referred to in existential propositions is a complex existence that is held together, in spite of its internal complexity, by the fact that it is dominated and characterized throughout by a single quality’’ (LW, 5:246). A few years later, Dewey characterized ‘‘an experience’’ in similar fashion: ‘‘an experience . . . has its own esthetic quality’’ (LW, 10:45). The point is that some of our experience identifies itself in this qualitative fashion and thus attains a greater significance in our memory and reflection. It is sensibly heightened experience. Dewey, however, is careful to distinguish our role in a situation or an experience from that of an absolute knower. In his terms, this is experience ‘‘had,’’ not experience ‘‘known.’’ In terms of descriptive psychology we might accurately say that it is ‘‘felt.’’ The distinction is a bit subtle, because these experiences do constitute what Dewey calls ‘‘qualitative thought.’’ But qualitative thought is not marked by direct, propositional, and unconditional knowledge, as are traditional intuition and mystical experience. What is had in this case is more like what Peirce calls a perceptual judgment, in which the various modes of nature’s being are brought to our attention; we experience qualities, relations, and facts. It is more like a naturalized mysticism. Moreover, the qualitative immediacy of these situations or experiences does not belong either to the live creature or to the environment by itself—it emerges in the transaction between the two. Dewey’s synechistic understanding of experience and nature entails that a had quality pervades or saturates a situation, one feature of which is the experiencer.5 With these distinctions in hand, Dewey, in his essay ‘‘Qualitative Thought,’’ rehabilitates ‘‘intuition’’ in a transformed condition to describe how the experiencer experiences this qualitative immediacy. And in Art as Experience he identifies aesthetic experience as akin to intuitive experience. In describing one’s immediate response to a work of art, he says, ‘‘The experience itself has a satisfying emotional

................. 15741$

$CH8

02-13-06 14:43:13

PS

PAGE 132


1 33

quality because it possesses internal integration and fulfillment reached through ordered and organized movement. This artistic structure may be immediately felt’’ (LW, 10:45). Art becomes exemplary for Dewey, as religiosity did for James. In both artistic creativity and aesthetic appreciation we find ourselves immersed in a situation reminiscent of Thoreau’s descriptions of his own immersion in swamps to get acquainted with their way of being. We indeed ‘‘lose’’ ourselves in the experiences. Ironically, such loss of self, as more traditional mystics have wanted to assert, is a finding or realizing of the self at the same time. What’s lost is a self located by constraints; what’s realized is a self growing and transforming itself and its environment. Thus, ‘‘losing’’ ourselves in artistic or aesthetic experience is not an exercise in passivity. As Dewey repeatedly notes, receptivity is active—it is something ‘‘done’’ as well as undergone. What’s important is that we can make a difference in our own acts of sensing, perceiving, or experiencing. At one level, all experience is ‘‘had.’’ But what Dewey offers us is a level of ‘‘hadness’’ that approaches the intuitive and the mystical. Its possibility depends on our actively bearing an attitude toward our experience; we must bring a heightened attentiveness with us. ‘‘Perception,’’ Dewey says, ‘‘is an act of the going-out of energy in order to receive. . . . There is an act of reconstructive doing, and consciousness becomes fresh and alive. This act of seeing involves the co-operation of motor elements even though they remain implicit and do not become overt, as well as co-operation of all funded ideas that may serve to complete the new picture that is forming’’ (LW, 10:59). At the same time, we cannot be overbearing; if we dominate our perception with cognitive or practical interests, or if we are simply uninterested and inattentive, we may lose receptivity. Thus, not unlike traditional mystical experiences from Orphic practices to Lakota vision quests, Dewey’s aesthetic perception or rehabilitated intuition requires an initiation or preparation of sorts. To be clear again, Dewey does not believe that these experiences are mystical in the sense of being supernatural or transcendent of nature; for him, they certainly do not ‘‘yield consciousness of the pres-

................. 15741$

$CH8

02-13-06 14:43:13

PS

PAGE 133

1 34


ence of God’’ (LW, 9:28). They are functionally mystical and intuitive in being ‘‘immediate’’ and ‘‘transformative,’’ but unlike their traditional counterparts they don’t draw on supernatural powers. As Kestenbaum suggests, they literally grow out of experience. This is why, so long as the meanings are clear, Dewey himself does not shy completely from using ‘‘intuitive’’ or ‘‘mystical’’ as descriptors of these seminal experiences. The traits that mark such experiences as intuitive or mystical are several. We have already mentioned the lostness of the person in the experience and the fact that one can attitudinally prepare for such experiences. Moreover, we have noted—and will return to—the transformative powers of Dewey’s an experience. Together with noting these traits, we need to pay attention to the fact that there is an immediate satisfaction or consummation in the receptivity of an experience, and that these kinds of experiences maintain their downto-earthness by being ‘‘sensible’’ in two distinct but related ways. It is not accidental that throughout his career Dewey comes at his descriptions of these experiences with an array of related terms: felt, aesthetic, sensed, sensitivity, intuition, and sympathy. Our experiences of qualitative immediacy are, as Dewey sees it, a function of our immersion in nature. They are instances of sense perception. However, Dewey, like Peirce, James, and Bergson before him, must fend off the barrenness of the ‘‘sense perception’’ of British empiricism, in which the impressions that cause our senses to react are atomized, fragmented, and deadened. Dewey’s empiricism is nearly as radical as the empiricisms of James and Peirce. He notes his debt to the earlier pragmatists in general and to Peirce in particular: ‘‘I am quite sure that he [Peirce], above all modern philosophers, has opened the road which permits a truly experiential philosophy to be developed which does not, like traditional empirical philosophies, cut experience off from nature’’ (LW, 11:94). As organisms in nature, we engage the full range of reality in perception and sensation: disjunctive and conjunctive relations, meanings, and qualitative richness. Dewey is especially keen to move beyond the materialism of nineteenth-century empiricism: ‘‘If experience actu-

................. 15741$

$CH8

02-13-06 14:43:14

PS

PAGE 134


1 35

ally presents esthetic and moral traits, then these traits may also be supposed to reach down into nature’’ (LW, 1:13). Dewey’s conception of ‘‘an experience’’ lays out this richness of the transaction between perceiver and perceived: ‘‘In such experiences, every successive part flows freely, without seam and without unfilled blanks, into what ensues. At the same time there is no sacrifice of the self-identity of the parts. . . . The enduring whole is diversified by successive phases that are emphases of its varied colors’’ (LW, 10:43). This whole is experienced immediately: ‘‘An experience has a unity that gives it its name, that meal, that storm, that rupture of friendship. The existence of this unity is constituted by a single quality that pervades the entire experience’’ (LW, 10:44). The grasp or apprehension of the unifying quality was not a feature of traditional empiricisms, and it is here that Dewey suggests the mysticlike cast of the heightened sensibility of the perceiver in and the aesthetic richness of an experience. As in traditional mystical experiences, this sensing, perceptual moment can be described as ‘‘immediate’’ and as being ‘‘immediately satisfying.’’ ‘‘Immediacy,’’ like ‘‘intuition’’ and ‘‘mysticism,’’ seems at best ironically employed in Dewey’s vocabulary. However, Dewey is intent on retaining the felt quality and power of such experiences, and the language of immediacy is helpful in this endeavor. As does Peirce, Dewey employs ‘‘immediacy’’ in a transformed way. Alexander points out that for Dewey ‘‘There is no such thing as brute, hard, unmediated experience or sense data, though there is a qualitative ‘had’ or ‘undergone’ aspect which can also be described as immediate.’’6 We sense or experience the world through a continuous moment whose ‘‘immediacy’’ is marked by a felt or sensed unity and continuity, a ‘‘had’’ qualitativeness. It is thoroughly mediated, but its characterizing of the ongoing present moment metaphorically suggests the power of immediacy. Such immediacies pervade our lives— listening to music, engaging in an intense discussion, losing ourselves in a film or a novel. They are extraordinary experiences but occur in the context of ordinary lives. This sort of sensible immediacy is the focus of any number of artists and thinkers from Wordsworth to Faulkner, from John Muir to Annie Dillard.

................. 15741$

$CH8

02-13-06 14:43:14

PS

PAGE 135

1 36


In the heightened sense experiences to which Dewey refers there is not only qualitative immediacy but also a felt satisfaction. We sense a consummatory quality in them, and the consummation satisfies the entire perceptual situation—perceiver and perceived: ‘‘The experience itself has a satisfying emotional quality because it possesses internal integration and fulfillment reached through ordered and organized movement’’ (LW, 10:45). However, Dewey is quick to point out that such satisfaction is not final—it is not an experiential cul-desac, but a transitional moment in the ebb and flow of an ongoing life. Its consummatory nature makes us wary of reductive analyses, but it does not preclude reflective development of the qualitative immediacy. As in Hocking’s account of mysticism, the felt satisfaction is accompanied by an awareness of the ‘‘unfinishedness’’ of the experience in the wider scope of experience and history. It is at this juncture that we meet the traditional bind of aesthetic judgment—either we stand pat with our immediate experience or we accept that the satisfying experience in all its richness can be reduced to a set of articulate propositions. Dewey seems not to buy into the dilemma. Rather, the sensible/perceptual immediate satisfaction leads to the second ‘‘sensible’’ feature of these experiences: their meanings. In attributing to these experiences an intuitive or mystical dimension, Dewey says that they ‘‘may be relatively dumb and inarticulate and yet penetrating; unexpressed in definite ideas which form reasons and justifications and yet profoundly right. To my mind,’’ he adds, ‘‘Bergson’s contention that intuition precedes conception and goes deeper is correct’’ (LW, 5:249). It is just such ‘‘dumbness’’ and ‘‘inarticulateness,’’ combined with ‘‘depth’’ and perceptual penetratingness, that leads Dewey to the remarkable claim that our ‘‘ejaculatory judgments’’ of such situations or experiences may ‘‘supply perhaps the simplest example of qualitative thought in its purity. While they are primitive,’’ he says, ‘‘it does not follow that they are always superficial and immature’’ (LW, 5:250). What could be more appropriate to finding the extraordinary in the ordinary? We can listen to the range of our own cultural responses: ‘‘Ahhh!,’’ ‘‘Good,’’ ‘‘Wow,’’ ‘‘Awesome,’’ ‘‘Cool,’’ ‘‘Far Out,’’ ‘‘Phat,’’ ‘‘Sweet.’’ The simplicity of

................. 15741$

$CH8

02-13-06 14:43:15

PS

PAGE 136


1 37

these responses is initial in the sense of opening things up and directs us to the second dimension of sensibility. Our experiences of qualitative immediacy, though not dominated by cognitive interests, do bear and have meaning and significance—they ‘‘make sense’’ to us. Indeed, Dewey says, ‘‘There is no limit to the capacity of immediate sensuous experience to absorb into itself meanings and values that in and of themselves—that is, in the abstract—would be designated ‘ideal’ and ‘spiritual’ ’’ (LW, 10:36). Dewey uses phrases such as ‘‘qualitative thought’’ and ‘‘the immediate perception of meaning’’ to disclose this dimension. Again, this is not surprising for a radical empiricism, but it is perplexing to a traditional empiricist to say that one perceives meaning. In short, then, for Dewey these experiences, like traditional intuitive and mystical experiences, in a general and vernacular way ‘‘make sense’’ or are ‘‘sensible.’’ To recall Hocking’s version of mystical experience, a meaning emerges, but it is neither an absolute, final, or freestanding truth nor even fully articulate. It is a meaning whose qualitative richness is in some way ‘‘ineffable’’ or, as Dewey puts it, ‘‘irrecoverable in distinct and intellectual consciousness’’ (LW, 10:35). But at the same time, it is a meaning that develops as it enters into other modes of inquiry, communication, and conduct. Dewey is suspicious—rightly, I believe—of the thorough ineffability that is often claimed for mystical, intuitive, and aesthetic experiences. If ineffability were the case, we should have a lot less talk of such experiences than we do—we would require only silent indexical signs in the presence of such experiences. For Dewey, the sensed meaning demands some interpretive, public, experimental, and reflective response. The ineffability is functional, not absolute. That is, the felt meaning of such experiences is too rich to be reduced to conventional verbal symbols: ‘‘Language fails not because thought fails, but because no verbal symbols can do justice to the fullness and richness of [qualitative] thought’’ (LW, 5:250). Just as for Peirce the inherent fallibility of perceptual judgment calls forth inquiry, so for Dewey the sensed meaning of an experience calls forth reflective consideration—consummation does not entail closure. This is the sort of re-

................. 15741$

$CH8

02-13-06 14:43:15

PS

PAGE 137

1 38


sponse Hocking has in mind when saying that mysticism in human experience is fulfilled only when a practice of thinking grows from it. Because of the inadequacy of verbal symbols, the aim of our reflection on qualitative thought cannot be reductive analysis. We aren’t trying to kill off the qualitative immediacy. Rather, the aim, from a Deweyan perspective, is to bring the felt meaning into a community of inquiry, to test its tensile strength, to see what it might bear in the rest of our cultural interactions and life. ‘‘The value of any such translation in esthetic criticism,’’ says Dewey, ‘‘is measured . . . by the extent to which the propositional statements return to effect a heightening and deepening of a qualitative apprehension’’ (LW, 5:251). Or, as he puts it in Experience and Nature, the test of our experiences and our reflections on them will be whether they lead to conclusions ‘‘which, when they are referred back to ordinary lifeexperiences and their predicaments, render them more significant, more luminous to us, and make our dealings with them more fruitful’’ (LW, 1: 18). Does listening to Robert Johnson, for example, make my listening to Eric Clapton more luminous and fruitful? In my terms, does a sensibly mystical experience of a Monet painting deepen and broaden my later encounter with Ce´zanne’s work? These do not seem to me to be radical claims: Dewey is simply attentive to what is commonsensical to experience itself. For Dewey, a sensible mystical experience sustains its significance by illuminating and transforming future experience. Experience, he suggests, is elastic: ‘‘It stretches. That stretch constitutes inference’’ (LW, 1:13). Qualitative thought is both means and end. This is the very same demand James places on mysticism proper in the Varieties, and it is this transformative power that leads Hocking to reconsider the meaning of mysticism in human experience. The leading out of sensible mystical experience into a community of inquiry, experiment, and shared experience indicates its primordial importance in Dewey’s thought. In Art as Experience he carefully works out the centrality of this sort of aesthetic experience for artistic creativity and for aesthetic appreciation. ‘‘An artist,’’ Dewey says, ‘‘in comparison with his fellows, is one who is not only especially gifted

................. 15741$

$CH8

02-13-06 14:43:16

PS

PAGE 138


1 39

in powers of execution but in unusual sensitivity to the qualities of things’’ (LW, 10:56). But as Alexander and others point out, the story does not end here. Every feature of human existence is pervaded by the importance of qualitative thought. As Bernstein suggests, ‘‘Esthetic quality can and ought to be characteristic of all experience.’’7 If we pay close attention, we see the importance of qualitative thought in Dewey’s discussions of morality, politics, teaching, learning, and science. Our moral life begins, he argues, with our attentiveness to the perception of the moral situations in which we find ourselves. As we noted earlier, it requires a sensitivity to the whole situation and a sympathetic apprehension of others’ feelings and perspectives in the situation. ‘‘Nothing,’’ Dewey says, ‘‘can make up for the absence of immediate sensitiveness’’ (LW, 7:268). Moral intuition or moral sense, for Dewey, is not a cognition of abstract moral truths or laws, but a felt qualitative immediacy of a moral situation. Such intuitions then lead out to the reflective sympathy that Dewey believes enables moral behavior: ‘‘Sympathy is the animating mold of moral judgment not because its dictates take precedence in action over those other impulses . . . but because it furnishes the most efficacious intellectual standpoint’’ (LW, 7:270). In simple fashion, he argued in Art as Experience that ‘‘our great defect in what passes as morality is its anesthetic quality’’ (LW, 10:46). In his defense of democracy, Dewey turns to the community and social dimensions of experience. He looks at public consequences and at institutional reform. But in doing so he does not reduce democracy or politics to a mechanical program of institutional revision. Rather, he points to the democratic ‘‘attitudes, forming personal character and determining desire and purpose in all the relations of life’’ that should inform our experiences and help us attend perceptually to our political situations: ‘‘Democracy is a way of life controlled by a working faith in the possibilities of human nature. Belief in the Common Man is a familiar article in the democratic creed’’ (LW, 14: 226). Again, in various discussions of education, Dewey invariably returns us to the qualitative immediacies of good teaching and learning. His resistance to the ‘‘progressivism’’ that followed his own early

................. 15741$

$CH8

02-13-06 14:43:17

PS

PAGE 139

1 40


writings in education arose from its programmatic and dogmatic nature; it theorized experience but forgot to attend to its sensual immediacy for teachers and learners. Not only does teaching begin in a sensitivity to students, materials, and meanings, but its aim remains the illumination and enhancement of future experience. For Dewey, it is those teachers who try ‘‘to use the unspiritualized agencies of today as a means of effecting the perception of a human meaning yet to be realized’’ who are ‘‘sharing in the act of creation’’ of our culture (MW, 10:200–201). Finally, even in scientific inquiry, which is an ongoing historical process of teaching and learning, aesthetic or qualitative thought plays a leading role: ‘‘Scientific thought is, in its turn, a specialized form of art, with its own qualitative control’’ (LW, 5: 252). The aesthetic and the scientific do not constitute a fundamental opposition. Science, too, must launch its inquiries from had experiences, and, as the idea of experiment suggests, return to some form of primary experience in its conclusions. Science is not only a form of understanding, it illuminates and enriches. Thus it, too, may benefit from Dewey’s sensible mysticism: ‘‘When there is genuine artistry in scientific inquiry and philosophical speculation, a thinker proceeds neither by rule nor yet blindly, but by means of meanings that exist immediately as feelings having qualitative color’’ (LW, 10: 126). The upshot is that if we read Dewey’s work in neglect of this pervasive feature, we see only one side of his character—the mechanical, tinkering, quasi-scientistic Dewey of whom Stanley Cavell paints a deadened portrait: ‘‘Dewey’s picture of thinking as moving in action from a problematic situation to its solution, as by the removal of an obstacle, more or less difficult to recognize as such, by the least costly means, is, of course, one picture of intelligence.’’8 This is the Dewey about whom Hocking and Bugbee, in a more nuanced way, worried. That he might be overlooking something doesn’t seem to occur to Cavell. This portrait is an unbalanced and, I think, largely unfruitful image of Dewey and his pragmatism, but one Dewey himself occasionally helped foster. We need, therefore, to attend to Dewey’s plea:

................. 15741$

$CH8

02-13-06 14:43:17

PS

PAGE 140


1 41

The neglect of qualitative objects and consideration leaves thought in certain subjects without any logical status and control. In esthetic matters, in morals and politics, the effect of this neglect is either to deny (implicitly at least) that they have logical foundations or else, in order to bring them under received logical categories, to evacuate them of their distinctive meanings—a procedure which produces the myth of ‘‘economic man’’ and the reduction of esthetics and morals, as far as they can receive any intellectual treatment at all, to quasi-mathematical subjects. [LW, 5:245]

For Dewey, our contemporary scientization of economics, political science, and education is not accidental, but a direct result of a logic and science left uninformed by qualitative thought and sensible mysticism. In dealing with the work of Dewey, it feels fitting to end with neither a bang nor a whimper but to round out my tale of his sensible mysticism in sermonesque fashion. In 1879 Dewey moved from Burlington, Vermont, to teach high school for three years in the wilds of Oil City, Pennsylvania. He later recalled to his friend Max Eastman a transitional experience he had while there: ‘‘There was no vision,’’ Eastman reported, ‘‘not even a definable emotion—just a supremely blissful feeling that his worries were over.’’ Dewey described a ‘‘oneness with the universe’’ and a feeling that ‘‘everything that’s here is here, and you can just lie back on it.’’9 Consequently Dewey claimed, ‘‘I’ve never had any doubts since then, nor any beliefs. To me faith means not worrying.’’10 It is not merely coincidental that Dewey’s philosophical career was launched during his stay in Oil City. He moved directly to a life of thinking—with emphasis on the gerund— and of ongoing experiential engagement in the world through teaching, art, and politics. Indeed, his actions well meet Hocking’s criteria for the worship of the pragmatic mystic: a mystic’s worship ‘‘takes on the aspect of a more deliberate, intense, and thorough thinking.’’11 Dewey, the Clark Kentish figure of our didactic histories, was living on the edge, though we may fail to see it. It is important to the pragmatic meaning of Dewey’s thought that we not forget it.

................. 15741$

$CH8

02-13-06 14:43:18

PS

PAGE 141

nine

‘ ‘born to run’’ Male Mysticism on the Road

Beauty will not come at the call of a legislature. . . . It will come, as always, unannounced, and spring up between the feet of brave and earnest men. It is in vain that we look for genius to reiterate its miracles in the old arts; it is its instinct to find beauty and holiness in new and necessary facts, in the field and road-side, in the shop and mill. Proceeding from the religious heart it will raise to a divine use, the railroad, the insurance office, the joint stock company, our law, our primary assemblies, our commerce, the galvanic battery, the electric jar, the prism, and the chemist’s retort, in which we seek now only an economical use. (Emerson, ‘‘Art,’’ CW, 2:218)

M

ystical experience is an American quest. And because of our habitual attention to place and land, this quest, I think, is more closely oriented toward a Deweyan ‘‘sensible mysticism’’ than toward a traditional otherworldly mysticism. From the Puritans to the Lakota, it is part of the fabric of American cultures. The Buffalo Rose Tavern in Golden, Colorado, is one site of such a quest. An oldtime saloon, wood all around, carved, burned, and worn, and tractortrailer running board chrome metal on the walls of the men’s room. Two old white men playing blues and playing it well in one corner of the room. From the next room one hears the explosion of a motorcycle being brought to life. The smell of burned fuel wafts into the bar, and through the back door roars a metallic royal blue Harley Sportster, chromed to the hilt with a beautiful teardrop fuel tank front and center. On it is a youngish man wearing jeans and a shirt with the sleeves rolled up; an American Beauty tattoo rests on a well-kept left bicep. He parks the Harley in the middle of the floor and shuts it { 14 2 }

................. 15741$

$CH9

02-13-06 14:43:16

PS

PAGE 142

‘‘ born to run’ ’

1 43

down. All eyes stay on the bike even as he walks to the bar for a beer—it is a holy moment. The man is the owner of the Buffalo Rose. He is one of many shamans of the ordinary, of a kind of Americana mysticism. We strangers in the bar have been thoroughly reminded of our quest as we gaze on and trail light fingers over the metallic luster. Our attachment to the aesthetic of our roads and road machines runs deeper than a question of art; it runs to the religious, for better or worse. Easy Rider, for example, is an exemplary, if failed, white-boy vision quest with sin, conversion, and ultimate loss. One difference between this male Americana mysticism and more traditional brands may be its lack of closure. Ours is a mysticism of growth and possibility, not of enclosure and silence. Our road experiences are not meant to be final, to end questing or questioning; they are meant to lead forth and to illuminate new dimensions of our habits of existence. In Thoreau’s way of thinking, they are ways for staying alive and awake. Moreover, as the Harley Sportster in Golden indicates, they are meant to have a communal dimension, they are meant to be shared. They exhibit the generic traits of what Dewey describes as ‘‘religious’’ and as ‘‘qualitatively rich.’’ This is something perhaps humanly aboriginal or something we have learned, perhaps unwittingly, from American Indians and their land. We in the United States engage in an initiation into a life of quiet desperation in our twenties. If we have not already become laborers, the end of college will bring us to the cusp of a world in which we risk falling asleep for the rest of our lives. This is the time of life in which Herbert Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man makes sense to everyone, not just the contemporary leftists. Young folks have a good sense of the impending flatness of life. They gradually begin to see that it’s all around them. Experiences of qualitative immediacy—or mysticism—remind us of the reality of possibility, and thus they become the places of potential conversion. We can accept the ‘‘facts’’ and resign ourselves; we can, as Thoreau suggests, come to die and ‘‘discover that [we] had not lived.’’1 Or we can seek a conversion of spirit that will give us a heading toward experimental lives, lives that ‘‘live deep and suck out all the marrow of life.’’2 We can fulfill the

................. 15741$

$CH9

02-13-06 14:43:17

PS

PAGE 143

1 44


promise of being ‘‘born to run.’’ In ‘‘Racing in the Street,’’ Bruce Springsteen states the contrast starkly: Some guys they just give up living And start dying little by little, piece by piece Some guys come home from work and wash up And go racin’ in the street.3

Springsteen himself ‘‘escapes’’ the streets of Jersey; as Mikal Gilmore says, his ‘‘records lifted him from a life of mundane reality and delivered him to a place of bracing purpose.’’4 But that’s not ultimately what is at stake—or at least it is not all that is at stake. Wherever one is, however one lives, the question is about staying ‘‘alive’’ to the lives we’re already in. The road, the car, the movement are, both rhetorically and literally, modes of keeping ourselves awake. The story is about a life transformation such that, in the words of Lowell George and Little Feat, we are, in spite of being ‘‘worked by the rain’’ and ‘‘kicked by the wind,’’ ‘‘willin’ to be movin’ ’’—or, as Chuck Berry plays it, we engage in an undying quest for the ‘‘promised land.’’5 If Dewey was ‘‘living on the edge’’ while we remained blind to it, it is no less difficult to consider the intellectual and spiritual efficacy of those who in their concreteness have every appearance of really ‘‘living on the edge.’’ We can be doubly blind in a culture where the popular and the practical are always held to be in opposition to the intellectual, the significant, and the meaningful. If the Buffalo Rose is one site of an Americana mysticism, another is to be found in the listening we do. Various of our popular musics involve the thoughtful development of qualitative thought and provide for us the conditions of more qualitative immediacy. The music works at two levels for us. On the one hand, it serves as a vehicle to the other sites of conversion I have already pointed to: the road and our road machines, for example. When it works, it is more than nostalgia, more than reminiscence; when it brings us back to these other sites, it can also be a source of empowerment toward conversion and transformation. On the other hand, the music is itself a site of qualitative immediacy and transformation. The music opens spiritual space in our everyday

................. 15741$

$CH9

02-13-06 14:43:18

PS

PAGE 144


1 45

lives. Our listenings enrich, illuminate, deepen, and broaden our experiences; they convert us and transform us. We prepare ourselves to hear the music, we lose ourselves in its immediacy, and we are brought to reflection in its aftermath. Some of us carry our musical altars with us; some of us make our road machines into inner sanctums of sound; and some of us build listening shrines in bedrooms and living rooms where listening may be undertaken with the attitudes and attentiveness Bugbee suggests are required for full receptivity. And we maintain churches of listening as well, where we congregate for communal experiences of insight. For many of us, the Buffalo Rose might serve as such a church, together with concert halls, clubs, roadhouses, and grassy fields. When the listening and the road come together, we find some of our most powerful catalysts of conversion. Many popular songs take up the double look that I think pervades much of American philosophical thought—the practical and the mystical. Some are directly reflexive, such as Warren Zevon’s ‘‘Mohammed’s Radio,’’ which captures the late-night glow of electronic life as one loses oneself in listening: Don’t it make you want to rock ’n’ roll, all night long, The radio, Mohammed’s radio. I heard somebody singing sweet and soulful, On the radio, Mohammed’s radio.6

Some reveal our made-world and practices in new guises—note the powerfully aesthetic presence of Madonna when she presents herself as ‘‘material girl.’’ What could this be but a very sophisticated and ironic development of the Beach Boys’ romantic presentations of the American automobile? In this vein we might also note Neil Young’s ‘‘Long May You Run,’’ a haunting, poignantly powerful reminiscence of his relationship with a car and of their travels together: We’ve been on this road together, with trunks of memory still to come; we found things to do in rainy weather, long may you run. Long may you run, long may you run,

................. 15741$

$CH9

02-13-06 14:43:19

PS

PAGE 145

1 46


Although these changes have come. With your chrome heart shining in the sun, Long may you run.7

One exemplary and consummatory moment of this living American tension is the presentation of Springsteen’s ‘‘Born to Run.’’ Here we at once hear and experience the experimental at war with the cultural closures that threaten us with the ordinariness of our ordinary lives. As one Springsteen fan noted with reference to the end of the 1960s: ‘‘The peace and love thing is over. We’ve got to take a shot now or settle into the masses.’’8 Springsteen, like Emerson, preaches a gospel of the extraordinary in the ordinary. This gospel is, however, nuanced and multifaceted. In ‘‘Born to Run’’ and elsewhere, the mysticism to which I here attend is accompanied by social and political concerns, personal difficulties, and the ongoing erosion of someone’s version of the ‘‘American dream.’’ This is an old story in American thought. American thinkers are repeatedly cast as naı¨ve optimists and lightweight romantics—Emerson, Margaret Fuller, William James, and so on. Yet none of them overlooked the harshness of experiences in America; their mystical tendencies are born in these experiences, not as a one-time panacea but as an avenue to a way of living in and through the devastations that constitute our human lives. It’s an awakening call, not a lethe for forgetfulness. This seems true of Springsteen as well. When Springsteen first appeared, his sound spread like a rippling rumble out of the summer heat of northern New Jersey. The word had gotten several hundred miles out by the mid-1970s—Boston, Philadelphia, D.C. ‘‘Born to Run,’’ played live for ten straight years, became our lived experience. Calling up our collective images of Chaplin, the depression, Woody Guthrie, the Beats, Dylan as Chaplinesque, and post-hippie working-/lower-/middle class America, Springsteen drove his punch line home: ‘‘tramps like us, Baby, we were born to run.’’ Born to run as the American wanderers, frontier crossers, runners on the Underground Railroad, Whitmans, Wobblies, right up to Kerouac’s ‘‘vanishing American hobo’’ whom we met in chapter 5:

................. 15741$

$CH9

02-13-06 14:43:19

PS

PAGE 146


1 47

The American hobo has a hard time hoboing nowadays due to the increase in police surveillance of highways, railroad yards, sea shores, river bottoms, embankments and the thousand-and-one hiding holes of the industrial night.—In California, the pack rat, the original old type who goes walking from town to town with supplies and bedding on his back, the ‘‘Homeless Brother,’’ has practically vanished, along with the ancient gold-panning desert rat who used to walk with hope in his heart through struggling Western towns that are now so prosperous they don’t want old bums anymore.9

What the Beats learned as they sought a 1950s version of the frontier experience was that there was nowhere left to go. The old Turneresque anarchy of the American West was by this time almost completely fenced in. San Francisco led only back to New York, and vice versa. Having traveled with Kerouac as Cody and Dean in Visions of Cody and On the Road, Neal Cassady went on to drive for Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters and the Grateful Dead. Acid, together with a host of other pharmaceuticals, became gateways to the last American frontier: the internal roads and highways. As Anthony DeCurtis suggests, the decadence of the Eagles’ ‘‘Hotel California’’ marked the consummatory acknowledgment of this end-of-frontier phenomenon: Hotel California is a clear-eyed, wistful examination of California as the last stop on the American journey westward, the country’s destiny manifest then foreclosed. Novelist Joseph Conrad used the term ‘‘fascination of the abomination’’ to describe the hypnotic power that self-destruction can exert on the soul, and that phrase well suits Hotel California’s depiction of a gorgeous paradise—the geographical end point of American aspiration—transformed into a sunny hell of satisfying pleasure.10

Not everyone accepted the ‘‘fascination of the abomination’’ or the tempered lives of the Eagles. Back east, things were earthy and real in a non–Californian way. One was born to run in Jersey like a welltuned Camaro, experienced as machinery perfection and treated like one of the family . . . or better. If the hippies had traded in their Woodies for VW buses, the idea of the American-made car never left

................. 15741$

$CH9

02-13-06 14:43:20

PS

PAGE 147

1 48


north Jersey. As New England bluesman George Gritzbach celebrates in song, not without irony: ‘‘It’s an American car, goes fast, not far.’’11 Born to run from routine, the ruts of school and work that constituted ‘‘the streets of a runaway American dream.’’ Born to run toward some ineffable human perfection hiding in the neon possibilities of strip mall nights. ‘‘Born to Run’’ brings me face to face with a mysticism of the ordinary, white, northern U.S. male of the 1970s—the length of its experiential reach is left up to other listeners. We do not all find our mystical experiences in the same places. But of these Jersey mystics one can say our sweetest experiences are in the streets, where we are free to seek consummations: our music, our cars, our bonds of dress and style, our shared but often hidden longings and yearnings for openness. One can hear the echo of Emerson’s earlier remarks: Nature, as we know her, is no saint. . . . She comes eating and drinking and sinning. Her darlings, the great, the strong, the beautiful, are not children of our law, do not come out of the Sunday School, nor weigh their food, nor punctually keep commandments. . . . We must set up the strong present tense against all rumors of wrath, past or to come. (CW, 3:37)

Springsteen shows us and tells us this presence on the highway and in the streets—he enacts our own mystical experiences: ‘‘At night we ride through mansions of glory in suicide machines.’’ That death is a possibility, a lure, suggests the most radical of freedoms in a world of 7-to-3 jobs. ‘‘Sprung from cages out on highway nine, chrome wheeled, fuel injected and steppin’ out over the line.’’ Distinctions between car and person are blurred. Here are our possibilities—work is done, no families call us home, we find ourselves, a community on the highway. We bring our aesthetic with us. No one who has not seen the intensity of young men and chromed cars can understand the richly attentive aesthetic attitude of our culture. Even as we construct theories for their salvation or elimination, we intellectuals often thoughtlessly dismiss the lower middle classes as ‘‘tramps,’’ as ‘‘trash,’’ white and otherwise, as ‘‘blue-collared’’ and aesthetically de-

................. 15741$

$CH9

02-13-06 14:43:20

PS

PAGE 148


1 49

based. In our liberal colleges and universities we try to cure them of their social habits without first seeing and exploring the depth of their interests and commitments. The chrome, the engines, the interior, the leather, the tires provide an imaginative potentiality for excellence and freedom, sometimes ironically, as in Tracy Chapman’s ‘‘Fast Car,’’ where the ‘‘guy’s’’ fast car promises freedom but leads only to more of the same masculine infancy and degeneracy.12 But stereotyping street mysticism as debased misses the experiential transformations that can and do occur. The fact that John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards character in The Searchers is unredeemed does not tell the story for all whose lives play out in the possibilities available in the immediacy of American life. The city and suburb have come to imprison us more by routine than by lock and key: ‘‘Baby, this town rips the bones from your back / It’s a death trap, it’s a suicide rap / We gotta get out while we’re young. . . .’’ The key is the open possibility of youth, not yet held down, not yet fully co-opted. In the American seventies, Springsteen still sees, though only dimly, the ability to escape Marcuse’s one-dimensional man who is doomed to an Archie Bunker status. But we see the ‘‘death trap’’ encroaching on our existence. We know in an immediate way what pragmatists Dewey and Peirce, quite independently, maintained: that greed for money and security leads to closure, not growth. The ‘‘dreams and visions’’ of ‘‘Wendy’’—at least as they are imagined—become the young man’s most cherished hope. But they appear, as always, attached to sexual impulse and release as the young Jersey boy again becomes his machine: ‘‘Just wrap your legs round these velvet rims and strap your hands ’cross my engines.’’ In the immediacy of the impulse and release, as Springsteen pounds at us, then moderates his voice to a smooth cruising speed, we find ourselves at the edge, in an experience, had experience: ‘‘Together we could break this trap, / we’ll run ’til we drop, baby, but we’ll never go back; / Will you walk with me out on the wire?’’ The hadness of this immediacy against the background of the ‘‘hard’’ American male from James Dean to John Wayne to ‘‘Cool Hand Luke’’ to the ‘‘Boss’’ himself has to be shared—‘‘ ’Cause, Baby,

................. 15741$

$CH9

02-13-06 14:43:20

PS

PAGE 149

1 50


I’m just a scared and lonely rider, / But I gotta find out how it feels.’’ The obvious, what we all know and have known, the façade of the ‘‘lone ranger’’—the American male, machine at hand, able to make, build, construct, and overcome—is vulnerable, lonely, and sensitive. On the negative side of the ledger, this generates an insecurity that leads to perpetual domineering. This is why, or at least one reason why, as we noted earlier, Tammy Wynette in her classic hit ‘‘Stand by Your Man’’ says, ‘‘after all, he’s just a man.’’ On the affirmational side, the American male feels. James Dean, Marlon Brando, and the ‘‘Fonz’’ all have Jonathan Edwards’s ‘‘sense of the heart.’’ There is a part of this boy-soul that still holds out for religious possibility—for redemption and a transformed life. Springsteen closes ‘‘Racing in the Street’’ with just such a hope for redemption: Tonight, tonight the highway’s bright, Out of my way, mister, you best keep For summer’s here and the time is right for racing in the street. For all the shut down strangers and hot rod angels, searchin’ for the promised land Tonight my baby and me we’re gonna ride to the sea, and wash these sins from off our hands.

The male, machine–artist maker is all about qualitative immediacy. He is sensitive; he is caring, in his own twisted ways; and he is aesthetic all the way down: ‘‘I want to know if love is wild, girl, I want to know if love is real.’’ A key in this transactional enterprise is that Wendy ‘‘knows,’’ just as W. E. B. DuBois knows in The Souls of Black Folk. DuBois describes a veil through which the African American can see white culture, but which the eyes of white culture can’t penetrate. Similarly, Wendy knows where the love is wild and real. She knows the insecurity of the man and its dual potencies: for tragic failure or mystical redemption. The Jersey woman, looking through the veil, sees and sees through the American male. But the male cannot see back through, at least not clearly. Feminists as early as Margaret Fuller painted this picture for us, but the residual blindness of the American male is legendary and seems to know few limits. Yet Wendy, too, has

................. 15741$

$CH9

02-13-06 14:43:21

PS

PAGE 150


1 51

dreams and visions, and likewise hopes to circumvent the traps of middle-class life. Perhaps she sees a shared mystical transformation as one avenue of escape, but we men never hear her voice in its fullness; perhaps it is the voice of Joan Jett or some incarnation of Madonna. In a fascinating and illuminating twist, the song reveals a larger picture than even its protagonist can see; Springsteen shows Wendy looking through the veil even as Springsteen himself glorifies the young man’s quest for immediacy. He acknowledges both the potential social damage and the transformative possibilities. He does want to know if love is real, but it’s not clear, at least in 1975, that he’ll live with it even if it is real. Like the America closing in on Kerouac’s hobo, the roles of the Jersey street are fixed in their own way. The questing roads establish another level of routine and entrapment: ‘‘Beyond the Palace hemipowered drones scream down the boulevard.’’ The energy, loud, vibrant, living machinery, bring us to our senses, as Thoreau used to say. We literally awaken and come alive in the thundering streets. But Springsteen hints that this catalytic moment can itself become routine. The ‘‘girls’’—not behind the wheel—‘‘comb their hair in rearview mirrors, / And the boys try to look so hard.’’ They ‘‘try.’’ It seems apparent that things can break in one of two directions. One may take up the street or road life in a habitual way that simply displaces the entrapment from one mode to another. Or one may actually catch the liberating, awakening spirit and engage in the conversion process that presents itself as a possibility. If one finds this avenue open, Springsteen seems to suggest, there is an initiation to the Jersey vision quest, to love on the streets, to the mystical experience to be had in American towns and cities. As he sings elsewhere, one must catch ‘‘the spirit of the night’’ or slide back into deadening routine. As the night presses on, not unlike the slow decrescendo in George Lucas’s American Graffiti, Springsteen shows us the haunting background of our drive toward immediacy. In later hours, the electric charge and heat wave give way to a Meister Eckhardt–like landscape that is still part of the consummatory experience. The immediacy ei-

................. 15741$

$CH9

02-13-06 14:43:22

PS

PAGE 151

1 52


ther edges us toward freedom or we are left with just a taste of consummation as the cool ambiguity of morning dawns on us. ‘‘The amusement park rises bold and stark’’ as a symbol of the limits of an achievement—amusement falls short of qualitative immediacy. The roller coaster is a cheap imitation of the truth on the streets. ‘‘Kids are huddled on the beach in a mist’’ as the fire goes out of the night and out of the loins, and our shaman tries to hang on to his immediacy, to ‘‘die with you Wendy on the streets tonight, in an everlasting kiss.’’ A no less powerful dream has pushed us before: the Puritan’s errand in the wilderness, the mountain man’s search for an absolute freedom, the pioneer’s quest for the extraordinary, the Sooner’s dreams of ownership, the Okie’s hopes of a future in California, and the African American’s dreams of real and lived civil rights and civil existence. The mysteries are in our experiences, as are our conversions and transformations. But Springsteen, like Thoreau, like DuBois, like Jack Kerouac, and like culturally marginal and provocative feminists bell hooks and Gloria Anzalduá, leaves it on the highway, on the road. However important and central are our qualitative immediacies and mystical experiences and moments of disclosure, revelation, revolution, and awakening, they are transitional. As William James aptly put it, ‘‘experience grows by its edges.’’ With Huddie Ledbetter, Robert Johnson, and Woody Guthrie, we’re always ‘‘on the road again.’’ And like Jerry Garcia, we are taught again and again ‘‘what a long strange trip it’s been.’’ As we, in apparent franticness, pass through the possibilities of youth, mysticism seems to lose its force as an option: ‘‘The highway’s jammed with broken heroes on a last chance power drive; / Everybody’s out on the run tonight, but there’s no place left to hide.’’ Ours is not a culture of older and wiser. If, as Thoreau argues in ‘‘Walking,’’ ‘‘in wildness is the salvation of the world,’’ then we must never relinquish all the features of our youth. The music, when it is something more than ‘‘classic’’ or nostalgic, is a lingering trace of wildness. We must achieve a streak of mysticism and wildness in our everyday being—this is an American mysticism. ‘‘Together, Wendy, we’ll live

................. 15741$

$CH9

02-13-06 14:43:22

PS

PAGE 152


1 53

with the sadness, / I’ll love you with all the madness in my soul.’’ We see (and hear) something of this enacted every year on Memorial Day in the ‘‘Rolling Thunder’’ commemoration of Vietnam veterans in Washington, D.C.; Harley riders from across the United States congregate to throttle up a salute to veterans that can be heard well up and down the Potomac. Springsteen sings some truths of the male, American street life in all their confusion, contradiction, and capacity for revelation. This includes a telic ending, the ongoing promise that has driven our culture since its inception. Consummation without closure, but with promise of even richer consummation, is our inheritance and, perhaps, our bequest. Though to bequeath it, we must in some fashion live it. Somehow we must remain in the street and on the road. In Springsteen’s version of a sensible mysticism, however, like that of Kerouac and the Beats and unlike that of Dewey, remaining on the road is inevitably accompanied by the undercurrents of the sadness and madness he mentions. Mystical transformations must live dialectically with brooding and suffering. Various worries about what I propose in thinking of ‘‘Born to Run’’ and mysticism will easily, if not naturally, arise. Complaints and constraints seem inevitable and, to some extent, reasonable— worries of romanticism, of chauvinism, and of appealing to the naı¨vete´ of youth. I think it is possible to acknowledge the truths of such complaints and still see something of vast significance at work—Walt Whitman’s democratic vision is one that I think Springsteen and those for whom he sings might easily and naturally embrace. This is a reason to find and develop the powers of Americana mysticism, not to suppress them because of their accidental attributes. Since what I’ve had to say in these few pages is more like a haiku wandering than an argument, I end with two ‘‘Conclusions,’’ whose unintended coincidence speaks, I hope, for itself: Someday, girl, I don’t know when, we’re gonna go to that place Where we really want to go, And we’ll walk in the sun, But ’til then, tramps like us, Baby, we were born to run. (Springsteen, ‘‘Born to Run’’)

................. 15741$

$CH9

02-13-06 14:43:22

PS

PAGE 153

1 54


So we saunter toward the Holy Land, till one day the sun shall shine more brightly than ever he has done, shall perchance shine into our minds and hearts, and light up our whole lives with a great awakening light, as warm and serene and golden as on a bank side in autumn. (Thoreau, ‘‘Walking’’)13

................. 15741$

$CH9

02-13-06 14:43:23

PS

PAGE 154

ten

philosophy as teaching James’s ‘‘Knight Errant,’’ Thomas Davidson

A

t the outset of this book, I mentioned that philosophers in America are, almost universally, also teachers. Most of this teaching involves American youth from all segments of our culture, those who are openly ‘‘in transition’’ to American adulthood. Many schools are also heavily populated with students from other places and cultures. One of the things that bring them together, regardless of background, is the music they listen to. These are the folks who might understand the mystical features of the musics they hear, even when it’s not Springsteen. The other thing they share is the experience of learning. If musical mysticism is one mode of conversion and transformation, education is another. Indeed, for Dewey—and, I suspect, for James, too—education underwrites all possibilities of amelioration. This being the case, the question often occurs to me, What is the relationship between philosophy and teaching? We tend to treat the relationship as accidental—teaching is merely a necessary nuisance that pays the bills and allows us three months free to philoso{ 15 5 }

................. 15741$

CH10

02-13-06 14:43:25

PS

PAGE 155

1 56


phize. I have come to think this is an inadequate account of what we do. I will try, through some historical and experiential explorations, to build a case that philosophy and teaching are more intimately related. The historical exploration begins with a memorial essay written by William James. The American tradition has ‘‘lost’’ any number of its important philosophers to the idiosyncrasies of scholarship and cultural memory. We have forgotten Samuel Johnson and the St. Louis Hegelians; we have routinely suppressed evidence regarding the intellectual accomplishments of Margaret Fuller and Jane Addams; we have denied the status of ‘‘philosopher’’ to W. E. B. DuBois and Thoreau, among others; and we have narrowly escaped losing the work of pragmatism’s initiator, Charles Peirce. These once lost and now, in some cases, redeemed thinkers have in common that they wrote something of significance. In an essay in the May 5, 1905, issue of McLure’s Magazine, William James attempted to redeem a thinker who had not written work that bore this sort of significance. Not that he had not written extensively, but the writing inclined toward an academic style and often dealt with education, which was not a popular—or perhaps even a legitimate—philosophical topic of the day. In short, as philosophical writing, this person’s work, though interesting, made little impression on the philosophical culture of the late nineteenth century. Despite this, James believed this person’s presence in our philosophical tradition was important enough for him to be commended to our memory as a ‘‘knight errant of the intellectual life.’’1 The idea is intriguing: a philosopher whose writing is unremarkable but whom we should not forget, and who, James said, ‘‘was always essentially a teacher.’’2 The thinker in question is an erudite, itinerant Scot, Thomas Davidson, a member of several of the Cambridge philosophical and metaphysical ‘‘clubs’’ established in the later years of the nineteenth century. Davidson grew up in Aberdeen, Scotland, and became, according to Mildred Bakewell Hooker, a ‘‘wandering scholar,’’ traveling around the world to study in Canada, the United States, Italy, and Greece, among other stops.3 He was, his friend William Knight wrote,

................. 15741$

CH10

02-13-06 14:43:25

PS

PAGE 156

philosophy as teac hing

1 57

‘‘from first to last, a peripatetic, and intellectual free-lance.’’4 Davidson was an exceptional linguist, fluent in French, German, Italian, Greek, Arabic, and Sanskrit. Early in his career he taught in Scotland and London, and in 1882 he, together with a group of young men and women that included Havelock Ellis, Ramsay MacDonald, and George Bernard Shaw, established The Fellowship of the New Life, the aims of which included the cultivation of character through attention to simplicity, education of the young, and manual labor coupled with intellectual pursuits.5 This was, as Joseph Blau put it, Davidson’s ‘‘first attempt to organize a ‘kingdom of heaven upon earth’ that was not a church.’’6 In 1884, a socialistically oriented branch of the Fellowship separated to establish the better-known Fabian Society. In the same year Davidson left for the United States, where he lectured at Bronson Alcott’s Concord Summer School and set out to establish an American version of the Fellowship. Then, in 1889, with money borrowed from his friend Joseph Pulitzer, Davidson purchased 166 acres in Keene, New York, in the eastern Adirondacks. There he built his own rustic summer school, Glenmore, which he ran until his death in 1900. It is notable that James, Royce, John Dewey, and William Torrey Harris were among the regular participants. Just two years prior to his death, Davidson took on perhaps his most interesting educational task—the development of his Breadwinners’ College in New York City, a school established for working-class women and men. In short, Davidson was what boatbuilders call a ‘‘one off.’’ He was irascible, he worked against the grain, and he lived with his own kind of wildness. Davidson’s provocative attitude helped constitute, wherever he went, what James called a ‘‘zone of insecurity in human affairs in which all the dramatic interest lies.’’7 In looking at Davidson’s life tasks, we can see why, descriptively, James would say that he was essentially a teacher. But, for Davidson, the description was a function of a conscious effort; it fit his philosophical outlook. As Hooker suggests, philosophy was never merely academic for him—it ‘‘was not merely a subject for contemplation but a way of life.’’8 And philosophy was not essentially scholarly writing, but was, as for the Greeks he admired, a conversation concerning

................. 15741$

CH10

02-13-06 14:43:25

PS

PAGE 157

1 58


questions of human excellence undertaken with an attitude of openness and a melioristic outlook. In short, philosophy was for Davidson essentially an educative pursuit. This is not surprising if we think of the lives of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle; but it is surprising if we think of contemporary academic philosophy, which was launched in the early U.S. graduate schools, such as Harvard and Johns Hopkins, near the end of the nineteenth century. Though James was a central figure in this academicizing of American philosophy, he was also committed to teaching and resisted some of the professionalizing practices of the discipline. It was this commitment that led him to see Davidson’s life as a philosophical achievement. The teaching that was essential to Davidson’s philosophical practice drew James’s interest. Given this interest, it is worth considering Davidson’s reasons for holding to this essentiality and guiding his own practices according to it. In Education of the Wage-Earners, Davidson argued that ‘‘It is to be hoped that the day is past when philosophy could mean a system built up by a dialectical process and imposed upon fact. Such philosophy was mere disguised theology, which is but another name for mythology.’’9 So far, Davidson is in step with Jamesian and Deweyan pragmatism. Moreover, he regarded both Hegel and Marx as purveyors of despotic socialism—they created systems to locate and manipulate individual lives; both systems, he believed, ‘‘could hardly fail to be fatal to all the higher manifestations of intellect and affection,—to philosophy, science, art, and literature.’’10 Philosophy, he believed, should not enclose individuals, but should free them to pursue their intellectual and affective possibilities. Yet, it should not aim merely at the negative freedom of libertarianism; genuine freedom, Davidson believed, required the enabling structures of humanistic studies. Moreover, he understood this freedom to be effective only in community and to have as its aim the betterment of society. In short, philosophy’s central task is the education of individuals to a freer and more philosophically minded existence, such that they might create and maintain a better world. ‘‘The task of the centuries since the close of the Middle Ages has been,’’ he said, ‘‘gradually to remove this yoke

................. 15741$

CH10

02-13-06 14:43:26

PS

PAGE 158


1 59

of authority, and to raise men to freedom of thought, affection, and will—in a word, to rational self-guidance, or moral life.’’11 Though not in a narrow way, philosophy is instrumental to the development of community. Again, Davidson saw this role of philosophy as standing in the tradition of the Greeks, as developing the love of wisdom in a social context. He was a Dewey-like believer in democracy’s possibilities and took ‘‘the task of the twentieth century’’ to be ‘‘to raise mankind, every member of it, to complete and actual moral freedom, which rests upon insight, just affection, and strong will, realizing themselves in a social order.’’12 This task, as Dewey also believed, is at core an educational task. ‘‘A democracy cannot long be sustained,’’ Davidson argued, ‘‘by an ignorant demos.’’13 Teaching is an essential, not an ancillary, activity. It is not accidental that both William James and Ernest Moore recognized a Socratic dimension in Davidson’s practice. Moore understood that for Davidson, ‘‘learning’’ was not for itself but for ‘‘seeking . . . the welfare of the soul.’’14 And James, when considering the hiring of Davidson, noted the more down-to-earth side of this Socratism: ‘‘Such a man would be invaluable in Harvard University—a kind of Socrates, a devotee of truth and lover of youth, ready to sit up to any hour, and drink beer and to talk with anyone.’’15 The kind of teaching Davidson might provide aimed at community not by professing formulaic beliefs or routinized practices, but by acquainting students, through conversation with the world, of their own possibilities. Though it does appear on occasion, such teaching has not become a habit in American institutions of higher education. Davidson’s Socratic outlook on philosophy as education, as teaching, had the general melioristic aim of freeing individuals and creating community. James called Davidson a ‘‘leveler upwards of men,’’ and this seems an apt description. It is the inverse of what is presently called ‘‘dumbing down.’’ The first move in achieving this aim is to bring persons to the experiences of freedom. Thus, ‘‘While the old education was education for subordination, the new education is education for freedom, or intelligent cooperation.’’16 As we noted above, given this social function of cooperation, it is clear that David-

................. 15741$

CH10

02-13-06 14:43:26

PS

PAGE 159

1 60


son advocated more than negative freedom. Such freedom from is useful only in a context in which discipline, sympathy, and social awareness are also at work. Indeed, Davidson maintained that ‘‘discipline is the nurse of freedom.’’17 His worries concerning fascism, socialism, and anarchism were not that they did not confront cultural modes of manipulation, but that they were reactionary and aimed to establish other forms of manipulative authority in place of the present ones. In contrast, the midwiving of a Socratic outlook meant that freedom, with its attendant discipline and responsibility, should be the aim of philosophical conversation and teaching. In philosophical conversation, one experiences freedom and self-awareness of the sort that enables one to be an individual within a society. Socratic dialectic is not a lockstep procedure with a fixed outcome, but a communal experimentation in the adventure of ideas and in the modes of human living. In Davidson’s terms, persons should be freed to be ‘‘world builders.’’ This should include all persons: any gender, any ethnicity, any class. By ‘‘world building’’ Davidson did not mean the construction of logically impregnable pictures of the world or the creation of abstracted, intellectual homes. He had in mind the humanizing effects of art, science, physical training, and philosophical inquiry. For him such ‘‘worlding’’ required ‘‘culture.’’ Culture enabled one to achieve some positive freedom—to have possibilities in life. For him, culture was distinct from ‘‘erudition and professional training’’; it meant not primarily a canon of known materials but an attitude toward and way of dealing with one’s environment that involved knowledge of some historical human outlooks and practices.18 Knowledge does provide students with a breadth of human achievement and reveals what humanity is actually and ideally capable of, but it needs to be complemented by the freethinking that acquaints students with the depth of their own possibilities. A student needn’t know everything, but should ‘‘know how to interpret the whole in terms of experience, and thus to escape the pitfalls of agnosticism and dogmatism.’’19 Such knowing is not merely intellectual but involves the teaching of the will and affections as well. Again, this is the task of a philosophy un-

................. 15741$

CH10

02-13-06 14:43:27

PS

PAGE 160


1 61

dertaken as teaching. World building engages the whole person; it is ‘‘the construction, in the child’s consciousness, of such a world as shall furnish him with motives to live an enlightened, kindly, helpful, and noble social life, a life not stagnant, but ever advancing.’’20 The humanities are not merely to be tolerated by the sciences; their teaching is essential to the development of any world in which science might be a worthwhile endeavor. As did the pragmatists, Davidson saw life as growth and development, and rejected the idea that life was about achieving fixed and specific end states. The only question was whether such growth, under the guidance of philosophical teaching, might occur with freedom and discipline, or whether it would occur under the closure of authority or the chaos of anarchy. The person with a world would grow through freedom and discipline: ‘‘The man who knows what he is, whence he is, whither he is going, how he is related to the world and his fellows, is the cultured man.’’21 Such self-knowledge, however, is not to be understood as knowledge of one’s Bradleyan station and duties, but as a self-composure that allows one to deal intelligently with one’s environment. Philosophy’s task is to teach the culture that enables such self-composure. To distinguish his own ‘‘individualism’’ from what Charles Peirce called ‘‘the gospel of greed,’’ Davidson consistently identified the individual world-building person as a social being. ‘‘It is only as a social being,’’ he argued, ‘‘that any soul can find the highest satisfaction, or requires education.’’22 Philosophy, as teaching, was thus a communal pursuit in his eyes—an essential feature of any functioning democracy. Philosophy—teaching—is practiced through communication and conversation; it requires ‘‘a desire for ever deeper insight, and a sympathy with those who sincerely hold opinions different from our own.’’23 Philosophy is not, in its historical essence, a ‘‘profession’’; it involves a political mission of self-transformation. As Davidson elaborated: A professionally trained teacher, without a background of culture, is a mere pedant, who can never communicate a love for study, or awake the highest interests in the souls of pupils. . . . The teacher who does not feel himself, or herself, an apostle with an

................. 15741$

CH10

02-13-06 14:43:27

PS

PAGE 161

1 62


important mission, but looks upon the teaching profession as a mere means of making a living, had better seek some other occupation.24

For Davidson this political transformation is appropriate to the development of a democracy and requires special attention on the part of the state so that education is public and extends ‘‘equally to all classes of the population’’ to ensure that there is ‘‘freedom from castes.’’25 Providing the opportunity for learning and for leveling persons upward is a condition for successful democracy. As does Dewey, Davidson begins with the assumption that all persons can learn—that is, that they can, through the development of habits, create ‘‘harmonious worlds’’ for themselves.26 Since individual freedom depends on world building, and world building depends on learning, the primary task of any democracy must be to provide the possibility of learning for all its citizens. ‘‘The nation,’’ Davidson argued, speaking specifically of the United States in the twentieth century, ‘‘owes it to every one of its citizens to see to it that he has time and strength left to be a student.’’27 It is therefore equally apparent that we philosophers and students of the humanities are central to the community’s work. Our task is to provide freedom and culture through teaching. Philosophy, history, and the arts, approached in Socratic fashion, enable lives that are ‘‘rich, full, and lofty.’’28 As James noted, the Davidsonian teacher’s aim was not to create citizens who are ‘‘interchangeable parts’’ in a ‘‘rule-bound organism,’’ but to enable ‘‘flexible’’ lives through ‘‘liberation of the inner interests.’’29 Despite its focus on individuals instead of institutions, Davidson’s take on the relationship of education to democracy is strongly reminiscent of features of Dewey’s Democracy and Education and, more specifically, of Dewey’s later essay ‘‘Creative Democracy: The Task Before Us.’’ Davidson simply focused on aspects of democracy and education that are less prominent, though present, in Dewey’s work.30 One such aspect was the individual’s responsibility to learn. Not only did the state have an obligation to make learning possible, but persons in a democracy have an obligation to be students. But they must

................. 15741$

CH10

02-13-06 14:43:28

PS

PAGE 162


1 63

be students as learning world builders, not as receptacles of information. ‘‘Citizenship,’’ Davidson argued, ‘‘should be a college degree, and the only degree, and all persons who have not taken it should be denied all share in political power.’’31 Davidson did not, however, completely ignore institutional issues. He understood that ‘‘the owners of the instruments of production’’ were ‘‘able to exercise a certain amount of tyranny over the workingmen, while the latter still lead a precarious life, and are, in many cases, subject to dire poverty and suffering.’’32 And he believed that one element of education in a democracy must be to provide the possibilities for stable lives with sufficient material wealth. For him, however, this transformation was insufficient in itself, since material wealth could not overcome an absence of culture or the capacity for free intercourse with persons from all walks of life. He believed, some would say ‘‘idealistically’’ in a pejorative sense, that we should ‘‘transfer the interest which we attribute to material wealth to that for which wealth is merely a means.’’33 The premise underlying Davidson’s outlook is one that he traced to Greek origins: ‘‘It should never be forgotten that it is the difference of culture far more than difference of wealth or position, that separates man from man and class from class.’’34 As Davidson saw it, this premise was found in experience in the ways we try to keep persons ‘‘in their places’’ by controlling who is educated and how they are educated—a fact of experience clearly noted later by both Martin Luther King and Gandhi, among others. Davidson’s remarks on this score do not seem far-fetched a century later. We educate only people of leisure. . . . The great body of people, who have to ‘‘go to work’’ early, and who, as becoming acquainted with ‘‘life’s prime needs and agonies,’’ are by far the most susceptible of true education, are left out in the cold, condemned, for the most part, to toil in a narrow, sordid world, without outlook, and to be the tools of unscrupulous exploiters.35

And if we consider our own habits and attitudes in our colleges and universities, we might feel something of the sting in Davidson’s claim

................. 15741$

CH10

02-13-06 14:43:28

PS

PAGE 163

1 64


that ‘‘We make all the nobler delights of cultured life impossible for them, and then we wonder why they take up vulgar delights.’’36 If teaching is essential to a philosophical life, we humanists in the United States are complicit in this failure. For Davidson, we will continue to fail until we actually ‘‘educate the masses’’ and recognize that ‘‘education is the only thing that can do away with those internal evils that disturb the peace, and threaten the existence, of the nation— labor trouble, saloon politics, haunts of vice, slum-life, and the like.’’37 This education is not merely technical or formal—it is about teaching ‘‘culture’’ that enables and empowers free action. Davidson had a strong resistance to the traditional academy in the United States. He believed that it bred ‘‘schools’’ and ‘‘cults’’ of thinking rather than independent thinking. And, like James, he distrusted the development of the Ph.D. octopus, whereby one’s degree became for the most part a calling card for work. Accordingly, he wrote to a young friend, ‘‘The Academic niche is particularly difficult to escape from. I don’t think you recognize how unfree a man is as a member of a teaching institution.’’38 In his terms, philosophy and teaching in any authentic fashion would be difficult to practice in institutions of higher education, since there education ‘‘stops with knowing and does not go on to living and doing.’’39 Davidson published more than ten books in his lifetime, but we remember him, if at all, for the two schools he started, schools quite unlike traditional American educational institutions. Glenmore, his summer school for the cultural sciences, ran for ten years under his direction, bringing interested young men and women into informed discussions with a number of the best American philosophers of the time. But for Davidson, the conversations were more important than any published proceedings. The effects of such a small program were extensive. As Good notes, Herbert Schneider claimed that ‘‘The more I think of it, the more I am inclined to believe that the Davidson summer schools were much more important than the Concord summer schools in giving American idealism a so-called ‘dynamic’ (biological) orientation.’’40 Still, it was his Breadwinners’ College, begun in 1899, just two years before his untimely death, that best exemplified the spirit of Davidson’s intertwin-

................. 15741$

CH10

02-13-06 14:43:29

PS

PAGE 164


1 65

ing of philosophy and teaching. In 1898, while lecturing in New York City at the Educational Alliance on the importance of schools for wage earners, Davidson was confronted with his own academicism. As Louis Dublin reports: In the course of the question period after the lecture, a young man arose and made this comment: ‘‘It is all very well for you to talk about education for the breadwinners. But how can people like us who work nine or ten or sometimes more hours a day, who come home tired, who have few books and no one to guide or instruct us, obtain a liberal education?’’41

Davidson responded as knight errant, perhaps with a quixotic touch, by agreeing to become their teacher and establishing a syllabus and timetable for his teaching. By the end, Davidson was so ill he could only correspond with his students. Nevertheless, his impact was widely felt in American culture. As Flower and Murphey state: ‘‘Students grew into professionals and teachers, and the list of those associated with the college reads like a Who’s Who of the next generation’s intelligentsia and reformers.’’42 Through his actions, Davidson had made a case for the essentiality of teaching and given credence to his plea that the rest of us do more of it: If the teachers of the nation, with a due sense of their power and importance, would, without hope or desire for material reward, form themselves into an association for the higher education of the bread-winners . . . and each devote a couple of evenings a week to the work, they would soon elevate the culture of the whole people, and remove the worst dangers that threaten society.43

At least one of his students, Morris Raphael Cohen, took up Davidson’s call. As Cohen’s daughter Leonora C. Rosenfield wrote of her father’s first lectures at the Breadwinners’ College: ‘‘Here was a beginning at translating into reality the Davidsonian ideal of dedicating one’s teaching abilities to one’s fellow men.’’44 Cohen’s own list of students includes Lewis Feuer, Sidney Hook, Milton Munitz, Paul Weiss, Morton White, and Herbert Schneider, among others. Never-

................. 15741$

CH10

02-13-06 14:43:30

PS

PAGE 165

1 66


theless, such an example seems difficult to follow so long as philosophy and teaching are understood primarily as professions confined to university campuses and not as life tasks essential to the development of democratic community. William James did not remind us of Thomas Davidson because of the latter’s scholarly work. Rather, he pointed us to the philosophy for which the act and art of teaching ‘‘cultural science’’ is central. Davidson was indeed a renegade; Dewey called him an ‘‘academic outlaw’’—a title Davidson no doubt relished.45 His ideas are radical and suggestive. To be sure, we have established ‘‘continuing education’’ and ‘‘distance learning’’ programs in our high schools and colleges; but one gets the cynical sense that these programs are now oriented toward the production of degrees for students and the generation of money for schools. They fall well short of the Davidsonian ideal. When the majority of our high school students arrive at college with no conception of what we philosophers do or why we do it, it is important for us to take notice. Most of us teach, yet teaching is not, in general, a highly applauded practice in the contemporary academy. Many of us have not thought about how our teaching is related to our philosophical practices—not just our philosophical ‘‘positions.’’ Poor students in our nation still often lack the opportunity to be students of culture. In such a setting, recalling Davidson’s appeal to the essentiality of teaching to philosophy is worthwhile. It was only in Davidson’s absence that James felt the full force of his presence: ‘‘I did not realize until that moment [seeing Davidson’s obituary] how much that free companionship with him every spring and autumn, surrounded by that beautiful nature, had signified to me, or how big a piece would be subtracted from my life by its cessation.’’46 If we are not attentive, it may be the absence of widespread humanities education that will have to awaken us to its importance. James’s attempted redemption of Davidson provokes us to consider our own relations to the art of teaching. If Davidson’s Socratic work had this sort of effect on William James, it is worth considering the pragmatic meaning and value of Davidson’s implicit suggestion that teaching is essential, at least in an existential way, to philosophy.

................. 15741$

CH10

02-13-06 14:43:30

PS

PAGE 166

eleven

learning and teaching Gambling, Love, and Growth With Michael Ventimiglia

I once knew a gamblin’ man He said, ‘‘Gamblin’ seldom pays, But livin’, livin’ day to day, It helps to have some gamblin’ ways. George Gritzbach, ‘‘If By Chance’’1

I

n previous chapters I have turned to the experiential stories of others to deal with the philosophical issues at hand. In this chapter, I join Michael Ventimiglia in drawing on our own experiences as teachers to provide an existential baseline for our discussion of the art of educating. Teaching and learning, when seriously undertaken, are difficult tasks. No simple recipes will yield excellence in teaching. Yet, some attitudinal orientations seem crucial to effective teaching, even as the specifications of teaching styles remain different. Among these we would include the willingness to risk oneself as a teacher. It is this willingness, we believe, that provides the room for students likewise to risk themselves in their attempts to learn and grow. To put it in cruder terms, we believe that those of us who teach from within the tradition of American philosophy must be both gamblers and lovers. Every year in midspring the World Series of Poker is held in Las Vegas at Binion’s Horseshoe. The best players in the world assemble { 16 7 }

................. 15741$

CH11

02-13-06 14:43:26

PS

PAGE 167

1 68


at this legendary casino to play not five-card draw or seven-card stud, but what was until recently a relatively little-known game called NoLimit Texas Hold ’Em. Texas Hold ’Em is a game that allows any player to risk his or her entire fortune on any hand at any time. Fortunes that may have been slowly accumulated by hours of intense calculation are matter-of-factly risked in their entirety until, finally, two or three players remain, waiting patiently for a chance to risk it all for about ten million dollars. To outsiders this may seem arbitrary or extreme, but gamblers understand. Gamblers understand that a game which did not require this sort of risk could not produce, at its conclusion, the world’s greatest poker player. Gamblers understand what we will call the difference between betting and gambling. Buy a book on how to play poker, and it will make you a good bettor. You will learn the odds of drawing a winning card, and you will learn how to compare those odds with the probable payoff of the pot. If you play with average players, you will usually win. But if you play with a good player, you will lose. And this is because you will not have learned how to gamble. A good poker player will see that you have hedged your bets, that you lack the faith in yourself necessary to risk what you have for what you want, and she will exploit your lack of nerve. As Emerson said apropos gambling: ‘‘Higher natures overpower lower ones by affecting them with a certain sleep’’ (CW, 3: 55). To win at Binion’s, you have to be a good bettor, for sure, but you also have to be a good gambler. You may not win if you risk it all, but you will lose if you don’t. This lesson may strike us as vaguely familiar. Gambling requires a commitment in the absence of absolute certainty, and this gambler’s spirit is at the heart of the various American conceptions of experience. For Peirce, the cosmos was shot through with an irreducible element of chance spontaneity. As Dewey said on many occasions, ours is an aleatory and precarious world. And most famously, of course, James offered a word for risk in ‘‘The Will to Believe,’’ exposing W. K. Clifford’s ‘‘ethics of belief’’ as a fear of ‘‘being duped’’ and arguing that ‘‘there are . . . cases where a fact cannot come at all unless a preliminary faith exists in its coming.’’2 There are cases, in other

................. 15741$

CH11

02-13-06 14:43:26

PS

PAGE 168

learning and teac hing

1 69

words, where it is necessary to risk failure for a chance at success. The game at Binion’s is not for the obsessive; it demands a willingness to face loss. In life, as in No-Limit Texas Hold ’Em, we have a stake and we play for keeps. This theme of risk runs far deeper than the explicit treatments of James and Dewey. The broad motif of American optimism is not, after all, the belief that things are good, but the belief that things can be better. This belief, if it is genuine, is a gamble. It is the decision to commit oneself to a possible future rather than to compromise with a certain present. Amelioration, growth, faith—all of these require that we stake ourselves upon possibilities, that we see ourselves not merely in terms of who we are, but in terms of who we may be. Moral, political, religious, and aesthetic ideals are not idle and irrelevant professional choices; they are the conditions of what is at stake for us. We gamble our ideals in our actions, experimenting with their cash values in a world where others also risk ideals or their absence. To fail when one has staked oneself on the future, a future self or a future community, is to lose oneself. It is this risk that lends profundity to American optimism, to a way of being in the world that can easily be confused with a naı¨vete´ resulting from a poverty of experience. Irony, cynicism, skepticism—though these may appear to be signs of the wisdom of accumulated experience—are, we would suggest, in fact fearful compromises with the actual. They are bets. They are bets that what we know now and who we are now is about the best we can do, and they are, we believe, antithetical to what is best about American philosophy. Failure to gamble may be a ‘‘safe bet,’’ but its consequences are readily recognizable—it stunts the possibility of our growth and deadens our everyday lives. As bettors, we are no longer alive to our possibilities—we resign ourselves to the comforts and amusements Dewey described. Our purpose in these remarks is not to provide an adequate phenomenology of existential risk. Rather, we want to note that in American philosophy, gambling and risk underwrite the very possibility of our growth as individuals and communities, and therefore of learning, teaching, and administrating. We want to stress that the risk re-

................. 15741$

CH11

02-13-06 14:43:27

PS

PAGE 169

1 70


quired for human growth can be terrifying. That it is a genuine gamble with real consequences. And our suspicion is that many of our personal flaws—our dogmas, our intolerances, our addictions— are often the consequence of the fear of risk, of our fundamental insecurity. Learning, teaching, and administering, when seriously undertaken, are difficult tasks. No simple recipes will yield excellence. Yet, some attitudinal orientations for these arts seem crucial, even as the specifications of individual styles remain different. Among these we would include the willingness to risk oneself. It is this willingness, we believe, that provides the room for teachers or students likewise to risk themselves in their attempts to learn and grow. To put it in cruder terms, we believe that those of us who teach and lead from within the tradition of American philosophy must be both gamblers and lovers. If this is the case, it seems to us that the practical question becomes how it is that we ever find the courage for such risk. One route to producing such courage is characterized in Charles Peirce’s story of ‘‘agapism,’’ the presence of cherishing love. Let us turn, then, to a brief account of the Peircean claim that ‘‘growth comes only from love’’ as a way of developing the discussion concerning our vocation as educators. We will then discuss why the art of teaching has been endangered by administrative and pedagogical orientations that are unduly risk-aversive. The American Transcendentalists believed that human education was a process of growth. They rejected the Lockean ‘‘sensualism’’ that described persons as surfaces on which an educator might imprint a world. This linking of education and organic growth was taken up by the pragmatic thinkers and was brought to fruition in Dewey’s Democracy and Education. It is not entirely accidental that Dewey had been reading both Peirce’s work, including ‘‘Evolutionary Love,’’ and James’s Psychology in the years preceding the publication of Democracy and Education. Both focused on the importance of growth. Peirce, however, also focused on love (agape) as an agency that could provide the courage to risk that is necessary for growth.

................. 15741$

CH11

02-13-06 14:43:27

PS

PAGE 170


1 71

Agape has been associated with growth at least since its Christian popularization, and probably before. Through the use of the noun in the Greek translation of the Old Testament and eventually the New Testament, especially in the works of John and Paul, agape became nearly synonymous with the love of the Christian God for his creation. While the precise meaning of agape has undergone subtle transformations and is likewise the subject of various interpretations, it is generally summarized as a selfless or nonacquisitive love that seeks to nourish the growth and foster the welfare of its object. There are two distinctive features of agape that are useful for understanding this connection between growth and love. On the one hand, agape takes no account of the merit of its object. Agape is an unconditional love; it does not seek to coerce its object by threatening the withdrawal of its care and support. Agape loves, as Peirce notes, even that which is hostile to it (CP, 6:321). The claim that Christianity is a religion of the sinner rather than the righteous is, when generalized and secularized, a claim about the nature of agape. Agape is a commitment. It does not enforce its will through the threat of its withdrawal. In practice, this provides the beloved with a freedom to choose his or her own ends. On the other hand, while agape does not seek to dominate its object, it is not uninterested in its object, and traditionally agape has been associated with the power to transform the ideals of its object into ideals harmonious with its own. This active aspect of agape has been represented in the Christian tradition as the love of God for each individual, which is experienced as a ‘‘grace’’ or a love that persuades the individual to express this love to himself. God’s love for even that which is hostile is thus transformed into a human love for even that which is hostile, thus establishing the ideal of the love of the enemy. In ‘‘Evolutionary Love’’ Peirce draws on the work of Henry James, Sr., to make the same point: creative love’s ‘‘tenderness ex vi termini must be reserved only for what intrinsically is most bitterly hostile and negative to itself’’ (CP, 6:287). Agape, in short, offers a ‘‘directed freedom.’’ When we apply the theoretical considerations above to our experience, we find support

................. 15741$

CH11

02-13-06 14:43:27

PS

PAGE 171

1 72


for a connection between agape and growth. Specifically, we see that it is in the space of agape that we—as leaders, teachers, or students— are willing to take the risks that are necessary for growth. Anyone who has raised children will recognize, either from success or from failure, the experiential truth of this. Why is this so? Growth is a moment of discontinuity with one’s habits, with one’s everyday way of being in the world. Growth involves moments of selfaversion and requires a revision of the self. These are moments of vulnerability and, consequently, of risk. To be detached from some portion of our habitual being is to be to that degree defenseless. It is this vulnerability that Plato repeatedly alludes to in the allegory of the cave. But agape, insofar as it approaches its ideal of unconditionality, gives us the courage to risk failure. This is because agape provides us with a certainty of its own, the certainty that failure will not result in a loss of its support. Agape is not attracted to its object because of merit, and so it does not withdraw its support because of failure. Agape allows us to risk belief in future possibilities because we are certain that, whatever else, the love will remain. The point is this: When we feel the love of other human beings, we take chances because we know this love will not be withdrawn if we fail. Agape gives us the feeling of certainty that is necessary to risk uncertainty, the feeling that is necessary for an existential gamble. Following Peirce’s lead, let us consider directly how agape operates in the classroom. Consider how our students learn and grow most when they feel secure enough to risk thinking or offering something of their own, even a simple question. When we create a classroom environment that is tolerant of mistakes, we encourage, literally encourage, our students to grow, through their efforts and struggles, beyond these mistakes. Their risk of failure is the condition of their success. When we create the opposite environment, one in which students feel that they may not err, they risk nothing and gain nothing. They leave more or less as they came in, and, in the end, become cynical about the value of education. When the students do not feel themselves being transformed in our classes, they naturally assume that the ends and ideals they possess are final, and they demand from

................. 15741$

CH11

02-13-06 14:43:28

PS

PAGE 172


1 73

us the marketable skills that will help them secure these ends. When we are not concerned for their growth, their integrity, we ourselves become a means to the corporate model of education they bring to the classroom. It is through a caring love for our students that they grow and come to appreciate philosophy and the humanities as truly liberating. In his essay ‘‘The Law of Mind,’’ Peirce noted that the ‘‘breaking up of habit and renewed fortuitous spontaneity will, according to the law of mind, be accompanied by an intensification of feeling’’ (CP, 6:264). It is in our moments of growth, in other words, that we feel the most alive. Thoreau’s metaphors of walking and wildness are intended to capture just this—to be alive is to live in transience, to grow. Such is the life of both teaching and learning in which we American philosophers engage. The intensity of feeling that accompanies the extension of our faculties and our human interrelations is the joy of life. Why, then, are these moments so rare? Because they require that both we and those who have a stake in our performances take a gamble. They require a risk, and we are all too often afraid. It is within a network of agapic orientations that the courage for pedagogical risk can be found. For students to become gamblers, willing to risk themselves, teachers must care enough to take their own risks. For teachers to be willing to risk themselves, their administrators must likewise risk an agapic orientation toward teachers. Let us consider this gambling attitude at length in a somewhat less abstract fashion, looking in turn at each of the features we have emphasized for the art of educating in our contemporary culture. Creative Teaching: Gambling at Work Love engenders both security and openness; this is what underwrites a student’s willingness to risk and to learn. This requires teachers to be creative—to take risks against a background of stability. Consider the Athenian and the Spartan as particular modifiers of one’s teaching style: Athens represents the spirit of risk and spontaneous cultural revision; Sparta, that of stability and conservative cultural mainte-

................. 15741$

CH11

02-13-06 14:43:29

PS

PAGE 173

1 74


nance. Over the course of Western history, assessments of good teaching have tended toward the one or the other as an exemplar. That each side routinely gets a hearing indicates that there is some truth in each. This suggests that instead of residing in either extreme, the best teaching lives within the tension between these two spirits. It is in this tension that creative or experimental teaching—a teaching of love and risk—may arise; it is a teaching that at once requires the teacher’s Athenian autonomy and spontaneity as well as Spartan responsibility and stability. Teaching in America seems presently in the midst of a movement toward mechanical pedagogy. Both in the ways we teach our teachers and in our habits of administering our schools, we are tending toward a Spartan extreme. This mechanistic approach brings to mind a concern Jacques Barzun gave voice to some years ago: ‘‘Teaching is not a lost art but regard for it is a lost tradition.’’3 There is an artfulness, an element of creativity, in good teaching that requires teachers to be more than technicians. This is not an abstract principle but a truth found in the experience of teaching. Simply put, it is premised on the ways in which our best teachers have taught us. Locating Autonomy and Risk One clear way to diminish the artfulness of teaching is to retract teachers’ autonomy so that they cannot exercise any creativity. By ‘‘teacher autonomy’’ we mean some basic things. We have in mind, for example, a teacher’s ability to present materials in ways that she finds significant and effective. She must be able to establish a variety of relations with students. She must be free to create or help create the curriculum that she teaches. Having developed a curriculum, a teacher needs also to be able to bend it, to expand it, or to move spontaneously beyond it. Teacher autonomy means control over course, classroom, and even what have come to be called ‘‘course objectives.’’ Such autonomy is one condition of the possibility of creative teaching. As Gill Helsby puts it, ‘‘Since teaching is such a complex activity which demands creativity and non-routine decision

................. 15741$

CH11

02-13-06 14:43:29

PS

PAGE 174


1 75

making, it will require a greater degree of trust in the capacity of teachers to act as semi-autonomous professionals, rather than as compliant technicians in need of constant direction, monitoring, and inspection.’’4 In college and university settings we have come to take this sort of autonomy for granted, though it is worth noting that even in higher education, the tide is turning toward more centralized and programmatic control of course description and development. In our primary and secondary schools, however, teacher autonomy is no longer an obvious or welcome feature. A managerial or ‘‘corporate’’ style or mood has settled on the education industry.5 Such a mood makes sense in a culture that has become concerned about the ineffectiveness, inefficiency, and lack of accountability of many of its schools. But, however much we sympathize with these concerns, we cannot overlook the damage this managerial, Spartanesque outlook is visiting on the art of teaching and, consequently, on the art of learning. Love and gambling seem to have taken a back seat to law and order. In terms of our earlier distinction, it is a bettor’s attitude, not a gambler’s. The managerial attitude has altered the perception of teachers in the minds of administrators. Teachers are no longer professionals. Teachers are ‘‘labor’’ who, if they display proper credentials, can be treated as interchangeable parts in educational structures. This is reflected, for example, in Ronald Rebore’s assertion that the ‘‘ ‘systems’ approach to management . . . shifted the emphasis [in assessing teachers’ work] from the traditional concept of teacher evaluation to the broader concept of employee appraisal management.’’6 The terminological change is not innocent; being a ‘‘teacher’’ is quite distinct from being an ‘‘employee’’ whose appraisal is to be ‘‘managed.’’ This outlook is becoming pervasive among administrators and, like many other features of contemporary education, it is slowly (and in some places quickly) working its way up into higher education. Teachers are not blameless in this shift of outlook. Though I leave it to the historians to assess which is cause and which is effect, it is clear that the emergence of the managerial outlook in administrative

................. 15741$

CH11

02-13-06 14:43:30

PS

PAGE 175

1 76


circles and the unionization of teachers go hand in hand. Unions, like administrative structures, impose constraints on teachers. Ironically, these constraints develop as part of the collective bargaining process, the process meant to protect and empower teachers. The problem is that unions borrow from industrial settings a very limited notion of the goals of collective bargaining: money, free time, good working conditions, and protection from being fired. The upshot is that teachers are now measured chiefly by their ability to survive (attain seniority) and not rock the boat (adapt to the negotiated union and administration rules). The current situation, in many instances, not only eliminates incentive for creative and excellent teaching, but also is an active incentive not to risk creativity or excellence. The combination of administrative ‘‘managing’’ and unionization deprives teachers of control of the curriculum. Curriculum development for schools is now being turned over to specialists. This practice is not yet universal, but in many places it is already well entrenched. ‘‘Curriculum specialists’’ were first drawn from the ranks of teachers, but are now being trained independently in schools of education. The task of these specialists is to provide teachers with blueprints both for standards and objectives and for classroom management. With the contemporary focus on achieving a set of narrow standards, this means there is emerging a narrowing set of constraints on what and how teachers teach.7 Thus, one school we know housed its fifth-grade curriculum in a three-inch-thick loose-leaf binder. Not only did it lay out the basic units and the objectives for each unit, but in confounding detail it told teachers how to direct discussions of specific readings and just how many minutes should be allotted to each task. It is a teach-by-numbers program; it aims low to achieve a more certain outcome. It is a safe bet with a predictably mediocre outcome. Meeting these formulas does not enable good teaching, nor does it provide an environment in which students are likely to risk real growth. Another source of control for curriculum specialists is the selection of texts and course materials. Such selection is not an innocent task, since it governs much of what takes place in a course.

................. 15741$

CH11

02-13-06 14:43:31

PS

PAGE 176


1 77

The addition of ‘‘curriculum specialists,’’ moreover, lowers teachers on the organizational flowchart. The specialists are given the status of lower-level administrators and inserted above teachers in a school’s hierarchy. This makes it easier—and seemingly more reasonable—to take autonomy away from teachers who are perceived to be interchangeable laborers carrying out instructions from above. The premise seems to be that if we can automate our teachers and develop a smoothly running system, we will have improved education. In reality, the reverse is true. When schools are like industries, good teachers appear despite the system, not because of it.8 With Mercutio, we believe it is time to call for ‘‘a plague on both their houses’’—the house of the administrative managers and the house of those teachers comfortable with their union status. The effect of both has been to reduce teacher autonomy and, consequently, to reduce teacher creativity and responsibility. Teaching is leaving the hands of the teachers, and this, as we see it and experience it, is the primary error of contemporary American education. In light of these developments, it is not surprising that the raft of so-called radical reforms offered since the mid-1950s has been uniformly ineffective: the content of teaching and learning that is constantly being addressed is actually less problematic than the structures and methods we use to effect the reforms. The problem, to recall Barzun’s suggestion, is the loss of regard for the art of teaching. As Gene Maeroff, drawing from an essay by Diane Common, maintains: Reforms fail because the teacher is cast in ‘‘the role of the user rather than creator of curriculum, ideas, and materials. The ensuing power struggle between the reformers who would impose topdown change on the teachers rather than letting it come from teachers ends up producing no change at all.’’9

The question is one of ownership, not merely in the legal sense but in an experiential sense. It is the ownership Thoreau had in mind when in Walden he remarked that a home required more than a deed—it required a thorough attentiveness to the place one would

................. 15741$

CH11

02-13-06 14:43:31

PS

PAGE 177

1 78


call ‘‘home.’’ Teacher autonomy articulates itself best when the teacher owns her class in just this way. The physical space of the classroom often takes on the characteristics of a teacher—neat, rumpled, artsy, natural, and so forth. For good teaching, the ownership needs to extend to the curriculum and the social environment, to the entire fabric of the course and class. The teacher must be essentially at home with her curriculum and environment if she is to achieve her own possibilities as teacher. This will allow a teacher to take the risk of loving the students. It is not that one might not effectively appropriate and to some degree ‘‘own’’ someone else’s curriculum. Good teachers prove able to substitute for other teachers with success, and we have seen good teachers adapt to curricula written and developed by others. Nevertheless, a deeper and more thorough sense of ownership develops when one creates and employs one’s own curriculum. Familiarity is greater, commitment is more genuine, and the sense of responsibility is heightened. The same is true of classroom method and management. A good teacher will be at home in her classroom. Nothing is more obvious and awkward to all involved than a teacher’s discomfort in a classroom. Yet this is inevitable when teacher ownership is lost to a cookie-cutter version of classroom structure and presentation. Teachers must be free to create their own pedagogical atmospheres. The loss of autonomy entails some loss of ownership even among the best teachers; and the loss of ownership will have a gradually eroding effect on teacher authority. And the loss of authority is dreaded by all teachers; it marks the end of any possibility for establishing a learning environment. Autonomy that underwrites the possibility of ownership and athomeness is not simply an intellectual ideal; it is an actual condition of good teaching. Good teachers experience both the need for and the enjoyable fruits of such autonomy. Why, then, in the course of Western history, have we on more than one occasion moved away from it? Why are we as a culture presently eager to diminish such autonomy, and why are we suspicious of the creative teaching it might generate? One dimension of a full answer to these questions returns us

................. 15741$

CH11

02-13-06 14:43:32

PS

PAGE 178


1 79

to the question of a gambling way of life; like Athenian democracy, teacher autonomy is risky business. Teacher autonomy sets education at the feet of the teachers and leaves the outcomes up to them. In short, we risk living with the incoherent and loose-ended consequences of overly spontaneous, ‘‘creative’’ teachers. If artful or creative teaching requires the risk generated by autonomy, and if that risk may turn out badly, we must ask what is the value of the risk and in what directions it might be limited. We can begin to answer this question by noting that none of the creative teachers with whom we have worked considered themselves avantgarde in the extreme sense of being cut off from and independent of all tradition. Thus, by ‘‘creative teaching’’ we do not mean randomly or radically ‘‘different’’ approaches to teaching, as if one would excuse oneself from history and tradition. Rather, we have in mind a genre of teaching that has been exemplified repeatedly, and thus has its own history. Socrates, Aristotle, and St. Augustine, whose styles vary drastically, might all be considered contributors to this history. So, too, the teachers whose experiences ground our present reflections—our own best teachers. The most fundamental risk these teachers accept is found in their willingness to confront both success and failure in the interest of teaching better. They risk themselves in being responsible for their work; they literally are willing to gamble as teachers. In this much they are not so different from creative artists in other arenas. Creativity is not radical novelty in the sense that it is divorced from what precedes it. Nor is it a strictly causal result of antecedent events. John Dewey marks out the middle ground in which creativity may occur. It is the ground between sheer routine and sheer spontaneity. For Dewey the ‘‘enemies of the esthetic,’’ and thus also of the creative, are the extremes of overdetermination and merely subjective arbitrariness: They [the enemies] are the humdrum; slackness of loose ends; submission to convention in practice and intellectual procedure. Rigid abstinence, coerced submission, tightness on the one side

................. 15741$

CH11

02-13-06 14:43:32

PS

PAGE 179

1 80


and dissipation, incoherence and aimless indulgence on the other. (LW, 10:47)

Achieving this middle ground where creativity is possible is not an easy affair. The teacher must face both the instability of the environment and the uncertainty of his own ability to teach. A course or a class in which a teacher is set free to teach, just because it is shot through with human experiences, constitutes a precarious environment, a site of risk, instability, and possibility. In this environment, a teacher encounters the normal contingencies of teaching. No matter how well a curriculum or teaching style has worked in the past, it may not suffice in a present classroom. No matter how effective a mode of delivery is for one group of students, it may fail in whole or in part with the next group. These are experiential truths for any teacher. In these instances, an autonomous teacher is called upon to create, to move spontaneously toward an aim or objective while keeping in mind one’s funded experience. Moreover, students’ moods shift from class to class; the creative teacher must become adept at sensing these moods and working with them to achieve her aims. The kind of autonomy we described earlier generates the second source of risk: the teacher’s freedom. An autonomous teacher is free of conventional constraints on his activities. He is also free from overdetermination by managing administrators of all levels. Furthermore, he is free of state determination such that he is free to explore standards as well as to draw on traditional or conventional standards. When a teacher embraces such autonomy, when it becomes his attitude, then creativity becomes a possibility. So does abject failure. This is the necessity of risk that attends a gambling outlook and creative teaching. The artful teacher faces the instabilities of the environment and of his self, and works to achieve fruitful consequences. For those willing to face it, risk makes teaching an engaging occupation—it is a live form of gambling. The routinized, managerial version of teaching is simply uninteresting to a bright and energetic person—it is a bettor’s endeavor. Discussions with exemplary stu-

................. 15741$

CH11

02-13-06 14:43:32

PS

PAGE 180


1 81

dents since the 1980s concerning the teaching profession lead us to believe that this concern, as much as pay and social status, is what leads students to pursue other careers. A strong teacher confronts the challenges and accepts the possibility of failure. A sense of adventure attends the implementation of small curricular changes; an air of freshness is achieved when we revise, adapt, or in some cases throw out some feature of our teaching practice. Failure is an obstacle only when it is blindly ignored. That is, the teacher who fails lands in trouble if she dogmatically denies that failure has occurred and does not accept the responsibility to adjust. The engaged, experimental teacher understands up front that failure is an integral feature of experimentation and creative work. But she is willing to learn from failure, to scrap or revise a method or a text; she transforms failure into conditions for improvement. The gambling attitude allows one to fail without thinking that one is a failure. The risk created by autonomy thus brings teaching alive. Despite its benefits, risk is often feared both by teachers and by administrators. It means that on some occasions one’s minimal objectives may not be met. This fear is one of the key reasons why people want to return to a more controlled managerial style—why some choose to be bettors rather than gamblers. And in many cases it seems a just reaction to the pseudocreative teaching that is nothing more than personal arbitrariness. If teachers attempt to be creative by adopting the latest educational fad, they should expect severe responses. Such fads are akin to diet programs and gimmicks for curing one’s golf slice. Nevertheless, living in fear of risk is an overreaction. The managerial programs that are suited to interchangeable teachers seek to eliminate risk by establishing mediocrity. They may lower the probability of serious failure in a course or class, but they do so only by eliminating the possibility of truly good teaching. This is the direction in which we have been moving for some time, and it continues to inhibit the recruitment of our very best students into teaching. They do not wish to become technicians—at least not without significantly higher pay and social status. The task is not to eliminate risk, but to attract and develop teachers who are willing and able to

................. 15741$

CH11

02-13-06 14:43:33

PS

PAGE 181

1 82


face the risks of teaching well—we must find and set free those gambling teachers who can make teaching an adventure in learning. Responsibility The resistance to risk, and thus to creative teaching, occurs for several reasons. Occasionally the reasons are political. In conservative settings, for example, ‘‘creativity’’ is often taken to be a synonym for ‘‘liberal left.’’ And in liberal settings, conservatives who defend vouchers or charter schools are actually accused of being unfairly innovative or simply of being elitist. But the creative teaching we have in mind is not politically affiliated; counterexamples abound, and in our own experiences a number of the best teachers with whom we have worked hold radically opposed political outlooks. While this seems a simple experiential truth, we mention it precisely because some find it very difficult to suppose that someone not of their political orientation could be a good, creative teacher. Some administrators fear autonomous teachers because they are less easily ‘‘managed.’’ Administrators are for the most part consummate bettors in the world of education, and a routinized teacher fits the managerial administrator’s world better. This is a reason to fear creative teaching, but not a good reason—unless one values organizational stability more than good teaching and learning, unless one prefers betting to gambling.10 At bottom, resistance to creativity and its attendant risk is rooted in the belief that creative teachers either are or may become irresponsible. Creativity, some worry, leads to wild classrooms, loss of standards, and flimsy curricula. To return to Dewey’s two enemies of the aesthetic and the creative, autonomy and risk help overcome the conventional, the routine, and the overly determinate. This encourages the second enemy, which cashes out as ‘‘dissipation, incoherence, and aimless indulgence.’’ If ‘‘creating’’ is taken to mean ‘‘doing as you please,’’ these features become live possibilities. This second enemy must be met by an acceptance of responsibility on the part of the teacher. It is here that the creative teacher establishes her limits of

................. 15741$

CH11

02-13-06 14:43:33

PS

PAGE 182


1 83

risk. An autonomy that is not complemented and placed in tension by this responsibility will remain arbitrary, incoherent, and reckless. It will inevitably call out a reactionary response of the sort presently afoot in the guise of the social scientific management of teaching and teachers. It is just this responsibility, moreover, that provides the conditions for a loving, agapastic learning environment. As Carl Hausman suggests, creativity occurs in the ongoing tension between risk and responsibility; an autonomous artist works in an environment and with a history.11 Thus, Ce´zanne’s work is not simply an abandonment of impressionism. Ce´zanne’s painting grows out of impressionism; he creatively develops impressionist elements until they transform impressionism itself. Likewise, if one examines experimentation, one sees that creative development of hypotheses always occurs against a set of beliefs that remains relatively stable. Thus, creativity is responsible to a body of working practices and beliefs, and this is no less true for the creative teacher. In teaching, creative classroom performance and creative curriculum development must take place against the background, or funded experience, of successful practices, the history of a discipline, and various intellectual inheritances. Teachers can be more genuinely creative when they know and are familiar with both traditional pedagogical practices and the skills, methods, and histories of their disciplines. To teach mathematics, for example, one must be able to do the math. Teachers must become familiar with the variety of problem-solving skills that math requires. Teachers should also be familiar with the implications and uses of mathematics; and this familiarity is most easily achieved when one has a conceptual grasp of mathematical principles. This conceptual grasp is distinct from the ability to work problems. Finally, mathematics has a history—it employs the Pythagorean theorem and Cartesian coordinates. Erudition is no guarantor of creative teaching, but when these features are studied and appropriated by a math teacher, his confidence and potential for creative teaching increase dramatically. The same can be said for the sciences. In the scientific disciplines there is an added emphasis on method and the know-how of the laboratory. The science teacher

................. 15741$

CH11

02-13-06 14:43:34

PS

PAGE 183

1 84


who commands these and also has a grasp of the history and contemporary import of a particular science has met some of the conditions for excellent teaching. The humanities likewise place demands on a creative teacher. Good reading and writing skills are neither natural nor automatic; they should be part of the humanities teacher’s toolbox. Teachers should also have good familiarity with the history and inherited content of their discipline. In the humanities, however, suspicion of creative teaching runs very deep. People worry that choices in literary or historical texts are too ‘‘creative,’’ especially when some version of a canon is threatened. A narrow agenda is suspected of driving the selection. Sometimes this suspicion is justified. But the response should not be to revert to some conventional canon out of habit or dogmatic tendency. This simply returns us to the opposite extreme; Dewey’s middle ground must still be sought. Creative teaching, again, needs to be clearly distinguished from both automated teaching and sheer difference-mongering. Let us consider the selection of either a Shakespearean text or a Toni Morrison novel for a literature course. Suppose we choose the Shakespeare merely because we would like a traditional agenda to reign and because his work is already listed on someone’s unreflective list of ‘‘good literature.’’ And suppose, on the other side, we choose Morrison’s novel simply because it breaks the traditional canon and it appears on someone’s dogmatic list of ‘‘politically correct’’ literature. In both cases, the selection, from the teacher’s point of view, is arbitrary and uncreative. The selections can become creative only when the choice itself is informed by, and thus is responsible to, the history of literature and literary theory. This places a significant responsibility on anyone who wishes to become a creative teacher: the responsibility for knowing things. Acceptance of this responsibility is necessary for the full ownership of one’s curriculum. Either Shakespeare or Toni Morrison can be a good choice or a poor one—it depends on what enters into the decision. And the quality of that decision will become evident in the classroom. Shakespeare can be taught in a dull, mechanical way, or it can be brought alive

................. 15741$

CH11

02-13-06 14:43:34

PS

PAGE 184


1 85

through attention to textual detail, historical setting, and universal human elements. The teacher who shirks the work and care needed for this attentiveness runs the risk of making Shakespeare seem like a foreign, arbitrary, and conservative selection. Morrison’s work, too, can be taught in a heavy-handed political way or in ways that engage a much wider audience. Those who are students of literature and its theory see in Morrison’s novels something exemplary within this tradition, even as the novels revise the tradition itself.12 In both cases it is incumbent upon the teacher to make decisions based on study and not on cultural habit or trendiness. One element of a teacher’s lovingness enters at this portal. In assessing creativity in art, Dewey says, ‘‘Craftsmanship to be artistic in the final sense must be ‘loving’; it must care deeply for the subject matter upon which skill is exercised’’ (LW, 10:54). This, we suggest, seems no less true in teaching. Passion brings a teacher’s subject matter to life. A teacher’s passion is infectious and easily engenders the student’s interest. When a teacher’s passion for his subject matter is genuine and committed, it shows itself and transforms students; they, too, become believers in its importance. This touch of passionate interest in how and what one teaches transforms the responsibility for knowing things into something more than what we have come to call ‘‘professional development.’’ The teacher’s passion adds a confessional note to which students’ ears are well attuned. The list of teachers who have inspired our own learning in this way is not particularly long, but it is absolutely unforgettable. Thus, the creative teacher’s responsibility begins with the obligation to study and comes to fruition in exercising judgment in practice. As the teacher experiments with texts, modes of presenting ideas, and so forth, she must test these by means of her funded knowledge of teaching and of the discipline. This is not a matter of recipes or formulas; the responsibility has to do with developing a sort of practical judgment through learning, and this judgment is underwritten by a teacher’s passion for the ideas at work. A creative teacher must be able to judge when her creative shifts or hypotheses are failing.

................. 15741$

CH11

02-13-06 14:43:35

PS

PAGE 185

1 86


Just as administrators are apt to shy away from the risks of creative teaching, so teachers are likely to shy away from its demands. Creative teaching implies a heavy responsibility for the teacher. This is as important at the primary and secondary levels as at the level of higher education, though the contemporary educational establishment does not seem to think so. Meeting this responsibility at all levels is the only way for a teacher to establish a nonarbitrary authority. Just asserting authority as a matter of organizational status has never worked. Students and colleagues alike find out very quickly when teachers have not accepted the responsibility of learning their craft and caring for their discipline. We need again only recall our own learning experiences—the hollowness of irresponsible teachers is evident. Creative teaching cannot in this pragmatic fashion be mistaken for flash and cheap novelty. The authority earned by responsible learning is the complement to freedom in establishing a teacher’s ownership of a classroom and a course. Responsible teachers become confident in their abilities to develop a curriculum, to teach a class, and ultimately to judge the successes and failures they encounter. It is these last features, the practical judgment and the willingness to employ it, that prevent creative teachers from becoming arrogant and dogmatic know-it-alls. And this willingness must be coupled with the teacher’s second dimension of lovingness—concern for her students. Risk and responsibility must be undertaken with an outlook that is focused elsewhere than on one’s own self-interest, and this brings us back to our earlier discussion of agape and learning. It is not requisite that teachers show some openly emotive, visible love; rather, the love must simply be part and parcel of all they do in preparing a curriculum, presenting materials, or dealing with students.13 It is precisely this steady undercurrent of concern that attracts us to Mr. Chips; it is this persistent love that disposes students to write, years later, of a teacher’s crucial influence on their growth. Most important, as we noted earlier, the teacher’s agape permits a student freedom to create and to fail, but not so much freedom as to be left alone; it provides constraints within which a student may learn, but it does not dominate the student. Peirce’s description of

................. 15741$

CH11

02-13-06 14:43:35

PS

PAGE 186


1 87

the agapastic development of his own thoughts provides an apt analogy: ‘‘It is not by dealing out cold justice to the circle of my ideas that I can make them grow, but by cherishing and tending them as I would the flowers in my garden’’ (EP, 1:354). The creative, loving teacher aims, in her best moments, to inspire creative learners—not learners who arbitrarily pursue their own interests, but students who understand the responsibility to learn, who develop some passions for inquiry, and who gradually come to grips with the autonomy that will ultimately be demanded of them. Our present trend toward managerial control of teaching and teachers fears the freedom of teachers and distrusts teachers to accept the responsibility that comes with freedom. It also tends to neglect the two kinds of love in our best teachers. But as William James persisted in teaching us, experience is the final test, and it is there we should cast our attention. Theoretical models indeed become empty concepts when they ignore what stares us in the face. The risk, responsibility, and love of creative teaching are precipitates of our experiences in education. Our students can tell us who their best teachers are without recourse to the instruments of the social sciences. We as a culture need to develop a genuine respect for the art of teaching and to develop a demand for the kinds of creative teaching we have enjoyed; we cannot afford to encourage the notion that teachers are interchangeable technicians. In doing so, we might meet some basic standards, but we will not teach or learn much. We will be very good bettors but lousy gamblers—and we will pay a very severe price in the long run. To avoid this consequence, we must take to heart as humanists and as teachers the gambling ways that enable both the art of teaching and the art of learning.

................. 15741$

CH11

02-13-06 14:43:35

PS

PAGE 187

twelve

emerson ’s platonizing of american thought

W

here I grew up, the first question asked when you met someone was ‘‘What do you do?’’ ‘‘I’m a philosopher.’’ ‘‘Yeah, but what do you do?’’ What do philosophers do? When philosophy first got hold of me, I became an argument-riffer. I learned to play arguments like scales on a guitar, and I learned their variations and modifications. I had an outstanding teacher of argument-riffing, Chris Russell. Russell was steeped in ancient and medieval logic, and made me read everything from Aristotle to Peter of Spain and Lewis Carroll. It was only some years later that I realized the importance of the histories Russell put me in touch with. Reading Plato’s dialogues as an argument-riffer is an entirely different experience from reading them as one attentive to time, place, and cultural setting. From Aristotle, Augustine, Hegel, and Peirce, I began to learn that doing philosophy could also mean engaging in a historical conversation. { 18 8 }

................. 15741$

CH12

02-13-06 14:43:33

PS

PAGE 188

emerson’s platonizing of american thought 189

In my ongoing encounters with the history of philosophy, I learned that the philosophers who kept me coming back for more readings provided more than argument and history—in some fashion they were engaged in ‘‘poetry’’ in the broad Greek sense of the term. The rich texture of Plato’s dialogues and the nearly untranslatable multiplicity of meaning in Augustine’s Confessions exemplify this other dimension of philosophy. The American tradition, even prior to Emerson’s ‘‘American Scholar,’’ appropriated this way of doing philosophy, and we see its import in thinkers as diverse as Jonathan Edwards and Richard Rorty. Its strongest and most intentional moment nevertheless appears in Emerson’s writings. This fact, however, brings us to a curious impasse, because for many argument-riffers and intellectual historians Emerson does not appear to be doing philosophy. For most of the twentieth century his work lived only in literature programs, never in philosophy programs. Indeed, this has not changed much even today. Emerson’s insistence on the poetic dimension of philosophy thus makes him a key figure for philosophy Americana, where the borders among ‘‘disciplines’’ are found to be, in a Peircean way, more indefinite and more fluid. In his essay ‘‘Spires of Influence,’’ John McDermott says of James, Royce, and Dewey: ‘‘Despite their differences and disagreements, often extreme in both personal style and doctrine, these powerful and prescient philosophers did have at least one influence in common— the thought of Ralph Waldo Emerson.’’1 Others, such as Robert Pollock, Joseph Blau, and, more recently, Stanley Cavell, George Stack, and Russell Goodman, have described Emerson’s influence on subsequent philosophy both American and Continental. Cavell, for example, reads Emerson as foreshadowing themes and philosophical styles in Moore, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger. Stack shows Nietzsche’s close dependence on Emerson’s early essays. Goodman, following Cavell, places Emerson in the Romantic tradition of Coleridge and Wordsworth, and sees Emerson as foreshadowing a ‘‘romantic’’ side of the pragmatic tradition. Pollock and Blau, like McDermott, place Emerson more squarely in American thinking as an inspiration to classical American philosophy. Most recently, a debate has arisen concerning

................. 15741$

CH12

02-13-06 14:43:33

PS

PAGE 189

1 90


whether Emerson was a protopragmatist. Despite my interest in Emerson’s influence, I am not interested in this particular debate. Rather, I want to explore how Emerson more generally showed American thinkers another way of thinking about philosophical practice, one that reenvisioned philosophy in an American vein outside the trajectory established by rationalism and classical empiricism. In this, I follow the lead of John Dewey, who in 1903 openly defended Emerson’s status as the philosopher of democracy.2 What I want to show is that Emerson drew on the tradition of Platonism and on the ideas of his fellow Transcendentalists to reconstruct philosophical practice. To accomplish this task, I will examine parts of Essays: First and Second Series and Representative Men to suggest the ways in which this reconstruction occurred. In part, the revision has to do with how philosophy is actually defined. But it also has to do with how one goes about defining. Moreover, Emerson’s most persuasive forces are his writings and talks, not his arguments, especially if we mean by ‘‘argument’’ a formally structured set of propositions. Emerson’s attempt to gain ownership of his own version of religious practice is closely paralleled by his attempt to be his own kind of philosopher. He was not naı¨ve, as he is sometimes portrayed by those who conflate logic and philosophy, but he was extremely subtle. Nevertheless, he was by and large excommunicated from the community of philosophy by the early commentators on his work. And despite the recovery of his work within American philosophy and despite Cavell’s important reconsideration of his instrumental value, Emerson still stands well outside the bounds of philosophy proper as conventionally understood. He is seldom read by philosophers in America, and his work is taught even less often than pragmatism. Since his story begins with this initial excommunication, let us turn to his early reception by philosophers in America. The charge of being unphilosophical is of course one familiar to the ears of American philosophers. Doubt has at one time or another been cast on the philosophical authenticity of the work of Jonathan Edwards, Henry Thoreau, William James, and George Santayana.3 In a letter to Borden Bowne in 1908, J. Cook Wilson wrote the following

................. 15741$

CH12

02-13-06 14:43:33

PS

PAGE 190


after hearing James lecture at Oxford: ‘‘I am glad I wasted no more time on the lectures. Indeed, I do not think the speculation of James worthy the valuable time or serious attention of anyone who knows even a moderate amount of philosophy.’’4 Yet with Edwards we can at least, if we like, isolate his discussions of free will as truly philosophical even if we relegate (as I think we should not) his Treatise Concerning Religious Affections to the realm of neo–Calvinist apologetics.5 For Thoreau and Santayana we can find essays that directly address philosophical issues in politics, religion, poetry, and so on. And for James we can adduce any number of his discussions of free will, Hegel, and truth as evidence of his philosophical authenticity if not, as Cook Wilson would have it, of his competence. In Emerson’s case, however, the charge of being unphilosophical seems, by conventional standards, more fitting. Even in those places Emerson chose overtly philosophical titles—for example, ‘‘Politics’’ and ‘‘Nominalist and Realist’’—his approach seems at first glance so oblique as to discredit the labels. Thus, historically Emerson’s work has been considered less than philosophical. As one reads commentaries on Emerson’s thinking from the 1840s to the present, one finds three central and related charges brought against his philosophical qualifications: that Emerson was too poetic to be philosophical; that Emerson was unable to define clearly or well; and that Emerson provided no philosophical system or doctrine. It is precisely Emerson’s Platonistic revision of philosophy that makes such charges seem plausible. But the charges more expressly reveal the narrowness of the accusers than any philosophical inadequacy on Emerson’s part. I In an 1876 essay O. B. Frothingham maintained: ‘‘Mr. Emerson’s place is among poetic, not philosophic minds. He belongs to the order of imaginative men. The imagination is his organ.’’6 A bit later George Edward Woodberry asserted that ‘‘Emerson, as has been said, was fundamentally a poet with an imperfect faculty of expression.’’7 And more recently Charles Feidelson, Jr., while acknowledging Emer-

................. 15741$

CH12

02-13-06 14:43:34

PS

PAGE 191

1 92


son’s attempt at philosophy, argues that Emerson’s ‘‘theory has weight chiefly as a literary program.’’8 Insofar as these merely describe Emerson’s writing, they are of course in part true. Emerson did intend to argue for the role of the poetic in ascertaining and disseminating wisdom and character, as is clearly evidenced in ‘‘The Poet.’’ However, he did not mean that mere poetry would suffice; Emerson shared with Plato a concern for the poet’s ignorance of her own wisdom (see, for example, CW, 4:35). In Ion, as in interviews on MTV and VH1, we can see the inarticulateness of the artist concerning his or her work. Sheer poetic aptitude can appear as the kind of mindless insightfulness that Theodore Parker—wrongly, I believe—attributed to Emerson when he said that ‘‘Emerson proceeds by way of intuition, sensational or spiritual.’’9 This seems more appropriate as a description of Ion or Jim Morrison of The Doors than of Emerson. For Emerson, the poetic must work in concert with other powers, not in independence of them. This distinction and its import can be seen more clearly if we turn to ‘‘Plato; or, The Philosopher’’ in Representative Men. The first thing to note on entering the essay is Emerson’s substitution of ‘‘Plato’’ for the scholastics’ ‘‘Aristotle’’ in conjunction with the nickname ‘‘the Philosopher.’’ Of the two, in all of the writings that have come down to us, Plato is, as we know, the more poetic in both structure and style. Emerson takes up this point explicitly in the essay: Every man, who would do anything well, must come to it from a higher ground. A philosopher must be more than a philosopher. Plato is clothed with the powers of a poet, stands upon the highest place of the poet, and (though I doubt he wanted the decisive gift of lyric expression) mainly is not a poet, because he chose to use the poetic gift to an ulterior purpose. (CW, 4:25)

Emerson also says, ‘‘As a good chimney burns its own smoke, so a philosopher converts the value of all his fortunes into his intellectual performances’’ (CW, 4:25). Thus, philosophy is not an ejaculatory emotiveness for Emerson; but it is likewise not a narrowly analytical endeavor. The poet-not-a-poet moves into the realm of the intellect;

................. 15741$

CH12

02-13-06 14:43:34

PS

PAGE 192


and the philosopher-more-than-a-philosopher extends her reach beyond logical argumentation. This interchange of poetry and logic is foreshadowed in Essays by the proximity and interplay of the essays ‘‘Intellect,’’ ‘‘Art,’’ and ‘‘The Poet.’’ In particular, we find the role of Emerson’s ‘‘intellect constructive’’ and the ‘‘poetic’’ to be the same: the dissemination of what one knows in and through experience. Here we see, on the one hand, that Emerson is working under the influence of Coleridge, Schelling, and Hegel; and, on the other hand, that, as Cavell and McDermott report, he foreshadows features of Nietzsche’s, Heidegger’s, and James’s thought. Woodberry and others read Emerson’s poeticness as ejaculatory and uncontrolled—as ‘‘inspired’’—and therefore see it as running counter to an intellectualist notion of philosophy in which the understanding must guard against the influences of feeling and will. Such a reading is no doubt related to the fact that twentieth-century philosophers of analysis have read Emerson, if at all, mostly for ‘‘pleasure,’’ as if pleasure and truth could not work together.10 However, just as Edwards’s emphasis on the affections did not preclude an important role for the understanding, so Emerson’s use of the poetic must be seen as tempering the intellect, not eliminating it.11 He is simply— and rationally—concerned with having philosophy address and take into account the workings of all human powers, not just that of the understanding alone. In ‘‘Experience’’ and elsewhere, Emerson takes empiricism away from its mechanical concern for impressions and ideas and into the richer realm of lived experience—of attention to moods, temperament, power, and illusion. It is precisely this broadening of the notion of experience that James and Dewey acquire from their encounters with Emerson’s work. Moreover, Emerson is suspicious of the finite understanding’s claims to foundational certainty since, in Kantian fashion, there is in human experience a ‘‘last fact behind which analysis cannot go’’ (CW, 2:37). One role for the poetic in philosophy is thus to deepen and broaden philosophy from its narrowly intellectualistic posture—a posture that often presumes to know more than it does.12 At the same time, he has no intent to slay reason or the understanding—to become an anti-philosopher. It is

................. 15741$

CH12

02-13-06 14:43:35

PS

PAGE 193

1 94


Plato’s balance he admires: ‘‘In him the freest abandonment is united with the precision of the geometer’’ (JMN, 7:57; see also CW, 4:31).13 II Given conventional accounts about the workings of human minds, it is easy to suppose that if one is overly poetic, one is not likely to qualify as a drawer of definitional distinctions. In the idiom of our day, one is either ‘‘right-brained’’ or ‘‘left-brained.’’ George Santayana, in considering Emerson’s work, pursued this line of description. In his 1900 essay ‘‘Emerson,’’ Santayana maintained that Emerson could not [define his own philosophical terms], and the consciousness of that incapacity was so lively within him that he never attempted to give articulation to his philosophy. His finer instinct kept him from doing this violence to his inspiration.14

Though it is clear that Santayana here intends to defend and praise the fineness of Emerson’s inspiration, I think he misses both Emerson’s outlook and his practice. Emerson was more than inspired, and he could be exceptionally ‘‘studied’’ and articulate. Furthermore, Santayana and others coupled this apparent incapacity for definition with an inability to handle serious philosophical themes: They are intricate subjects, obscured by many emotional prejudices, so that the labour, impartiality, and precision which would be needed to elucidate them are to be looked for in scholastic rather than in inspired thinkers, and in Emerson least of all.15

Taken to an extreme, Santayana’s account of Emerson fits Charles Feidelson, Jr.’s, assessment that Emerson ‘‘could proceed at all only by a paradoxical method of self-contradiction.’’16 If we take as our paradigms Aristotle, Locke, Hume, and Russell, we might say Emerson appears to be unable to define. The simplest way to redeem him would thus be to argue that definition is irrelevant to philosophy. But this is an avenue he closes off: At last comes Plato, the distributor, who needs no barbaric paint, or tattoo, or whooping; for he can define. He leaves with Asia the

................. 15741$

CH12

02-13-06 14:43:35

PS

PAGE 194

emerson’s platonizing of american thought 195 vast and superlative; he is the arrival of accuracy and intelligence. ‘‘He shall be as a god to me, who can rightly divide and define.’’ This defining is philosophy. (CW, 4:27)

The quarrel is not, then, about the need for definition and an ability to define; it is about what it means to define rightly. The attempt to read Emerson out of the role of philosophical definer seems to hinge on the assumption that ‘‘definition’’ means, and only means, connotative, lexical renderings of a term’s or an experience’s meaning. In response, Emerson foreshadowed some of Peirce’s more technical semiotic notions, such as the indeterminacy of general ideas and the vagueness of some signs. If nature is vague, we would be wrong to make our definitions of its contents too clear. Noting Plato’s affinity for leaving readers with aporiae to consider at the close of his dialogues is instructive. Emerson, like Plato, could be exceedingly precise and impartial, but he never allowed the desire for precision and clarity to override the had complexities of actual experience. Indeed, what is perhaps most notable about Plato’s dialogues is that while definitions are routinely sought, definitive answers are seldom forthcoming. The critics work with the assumption, roughly stated, that definition must take the form ‘‘A is ’’ or ‘‘A is not ’’ with clarity, distinctness, and sufficient sophistication, as if the cosmos itself has always to live by the law of excluded middle. There is a further assumption here that because Emerson did not work in this fashion, he could not. It seems to me far more likely, given Emerson’s familiarity with intellectual history, that he was unwilling to define in this way because it might mislead us from what he took to be philosophy’s appropriate task in defining. Indeed, in ‘‘Intellect’’ Emerson spoke directly to this issue: When we are young we spend much time in filling our notebooks with all definitions of Religion, Poetry, Politics, Art, in the hope that in the course of a few years we shall have condensed into our own encyclopaedia the net value of all the theories at which the world has yet arrived. But year after year our tables get no completeness and at last we discover that our curve is a parabola whose arcs will never meet. (CW, 2:201)

................. 15741$

CH12

02-13-06 14:43:36

PS

PAGE 195

1 96


Emerson suggests here the futility of a straightforward glossary of his terms. The incapacity, however, is not his, but that of language and the experienced realities themselves—the experienced realities that for Emerson, as later for Dewey, are both the origin and the test of philosophy. These realities have not been, and will not be, fully captured by linguistic measures. Again foreshadowing Peirce, Emerson regularly argued that language, despite its power and ability to grow, routinely and inevitably falls short of experience. In ‘‘The Over-Soul’’ he asked: ‘‘Why do men feel that the natural history of man has never been written, but always he is leaving behind what you have said of him, and it becomes old, and books of metaphysics worthless?’’ (CW, 2:159). Later, he answers: ‘‘Of this pure nature every man is at some time sensible. Language cannot paint it with his colors’’ (CW, 2:161). And: An answer [concerning the nature of revelation] in words is delusive; it is really no answer to the question you ask. Do not require a description of the countries towards which you sail. The description does not describe them to you, and tomorrow you arrive there and know them by inhabiting them. (CW, 2:168)

Emerson takes quite seriously not the rejection of precise thinking, but the recognition that linguistic, and therefore philosophical, precision can be as misleading as imprecision. The ‘‘accuracy and intelligence’’ of the definer are not found in arbitrary confinement but in attention to what experience admits. It is for this reason that Emerson often defines with what Kenneth Marc Harris calls a ‘‘studied ambiguity.’’17 Again, Emerson follows Plato and precedes Peirce in acknowledging that key terms of human experience are often most truly employed when they remain vague and are therefore able to survive inspection by way of a principle of noncontradiction.18 In this way, we can see the sense in Emerson’s claim that ‘‘a foolish consistency,’’ not just any consistency, ‘‘is the hobgoblin of little minds’’ (CW, 2:33). While I do not wish to attribute a logic of vagueness to Emerson, it seems clear that his vision of the philosopher as poet-not-apoet was a direct and calculated response to rationalism and the En-

................. 15741$

CH12

02-13-06 14:43:36

PS

PAGE 196


lightenment that, James Cox has suggested, Emerson ‘‘felt were enslaved to clarity, the mere light of understanding.’’19 Given this, there is of course little mystery concerning Emerson’s absence from conversations in twentieth-century Anglo–American philosophy. It is important here to remember that Emerson did not take this move to be original; rather, in spirit at least, he worked under the influence of Plato. The Sophist and The Symposium come to mind as exemplary dialogues that approach ‘‘definition’’ with the richness (and more) of an Emersonian essay. Nevertheless, Emerson was aware that narrower ‘‘definitions’’ within the fabric of the dialogues had tempted scholars to lift these from the text in analytic fashion and treat them as ‘‘philosophy’’ divorced from the rest of the work. Emerson resisted such readings of Plato. ‘‘The mind of Plato,’’ he maintained, ‘‘is not to be exhibited by a Chinese catalogue, but is to be apprehended by an original mind in the exercise of its original power’’ (CW, 4:32; see also JMN, 9:223). Given this resistance, it seems likely that Emerson, through his inclusion of poetic language, sought to dissuade others from reading his own work in this fragmented, analytic fashion.20 Thus, while Emerson denied the possibility of Cartesian discursive clarity, he did not deny the possibility of definition. Just as Platonic dialogues, as he read them, bring us to consider the meaning of love, justice, piety, and so forth, so Emerson’s Representative Men and Essays are themselves defining: of the poet, of nature, of experience, and so on. For Emerson, that these definitions are denotative, exemplary, ironic, and poetic makes them more philosophical, not less. What some commentators object to is the style of definition that skates through the varieties of a term’s determinations. From Emerson’s angle of vision, much of what occurs under the name of philosophy is willing to pay the price of precision: loss of depth and breadth, or what James later called the thinness of conceptual clarity. Emerson was unwilling. He revered the unifying power of definition, but at the same time acknowledged the constraints that the complexity of experience placed on this power (see, for example, CW, 3:142). Foreshadowing Dewey, Emerson forced logic to follow experience and not

................. 15741$

CH12

02-13-06 14:43:37

PS

PAGE 197

1 98


vice versa. As he saw it, Plato’s power lay in his ability to define without closing the doors on meaning. ‘‘Thought,’’ Emerson said, ‘‘seeks to show unity in unity; poetry to show it by variety; that is, always by an object or symbol. Plato keeps the two vases, one of aether and one of pigment, at his side, and invariably uses both’’ (CW, 4:32). So, while it may be correct to say that Emerson did not define in the way of Locke, Hume, and Russell, it is wrong, I think, to attribute this to ignorance and incapacity. Emerson does define, but with exemplary definitions he deemed appropriate to the vagueness of the terms and the Platonic cast of the philosopher. III If Emerson was too poetic and incapable of defining, it would not surprise us if he had neither the doctrine nor the system of a philosopher. Perhaps the earliest and best-known version of this criticism was that of Theodore Parker: He lacks the power of orderly arrangements to a remarkable degree. Not only is there no obvious logical order, but there is no subtle psychological method by which the several parts of an essay are joined together; his deep sayings are jewels strung wholly at random. This often confuses the reader; this want appears the greatest defect of his mind.21

Matthew Arnold, preparing to praise Emerson, said: ‘‘Emerson cannot, I think, be called with justice a great philosophical writer. He cannot build; his arrangement of philosophical ideas has no progress in it, no evolution; he does not construct philosophy.’’22 ‘‘There is,’’ says S. M. Crothers, ‘‘no Emersonian system of philosophy, only an Emersonian way of looking at things.’’23 And Santayana, again perhaps in praise, argued that ‘‘At bottom he had no doctrine at all.’’24 It seems plausible that we might redeem Emerson here by aligning his work with contemporary suggestions in neopragmatism and some postmodern thought that systematic thinking is a danger, something to be avoided, in philosophy, not an important central feature of it. There are indeed dimensions of Emerson’s writing that lend them-

................. 15741$

CH12

02-13-06 14:43:37

PS

PAGE 198


selves to such an interpretation. Nevertheless, Emerson, in his attention to Plato, Hegel, and others, seems to resist redemption from this quarter: ‘‘We want, in every man, a long logic; we cannot pardon the absence of it, but it must not be spoken’’ (CW, 2:195). Dewey seems right in maintaining that one who cannot see Emerson’s ‘‘logic’’ is blind to ‘‘a logic finely wrought.’’25 As W. T. Harris argued, working under the influence of his own American Hegelianism: ‘‘While it is true that there is no parading of syllogistic reasoning in Emerson’s essays, and no ratiocination, there is quite sufficient unity of a higher kind if one will but once comprehend the thoughts with any degree of clearness.’’26 That Emerson displays something of a dialectical doctrine should be evident in the previous discussions of the role of the poetic and the meaning of definition for philosophy. That is, both by example and by assertion Emerson claims an understanding of what philosophy is and how it ought to proceed. If we do not count this as doctrine, it is difficult to know what we would count. However, it is true that Emerson did not produce a historically dialectical system nor a geometrically whole system of the likes of Hegel’s or Spinoza’s. More important, he was decidedly not doctrinaire, as many ‘‘systematizers’’ are. Such systems seemed to him capable of being suggestive, but not of comprehensively capturing the nature of the universe. As William Barton rightly argues, drawing on a manuscript from 1848: ‘‘He did not think it possible to expect completeness in one’s view of things. The universe is open and changing. ‘I write metaphysics, but my method is purely expectant.’ ’’27 This is a claim that aptly describes the metaphysics of Peirce, James, and Dewey. As Pollock puts it, reminding us of this line of influence, ‘‘In an Emersonian universe, in which the unexpected is always happening, knowledge as a finished product is unthinkable.’’28 Again, it is not an incapacity that determines Emerson’s approach, but a considered account of what philosophy is and what the constraints placed on it by human experience are. This is confirmed, again, by his assessment of Plato as philosopher. He said of Plato, ‘‘he has not a system’’ (CW, 4:43). Moreover, he added that the task that closed philosophical systems often set for

................. 15741$

CH12

02-13-06 14:43:38

PS

PAGE 199

2 00


themselves—the general and full explanation of what is—may be impossible to complete from the vantage of the midworld of experience: No power of genius has ever yet had the smallest measure of success in explaining existence. The perfect enigma remains. But there is an injustice in assuming this ambition for Plato. (CW, 4:44)

In short, Plato never was, as some analytic and idealistic readings might suggest, a ‘‘modern’’ philosopher. However, to deny the efficacy of closed teleological or explanatory systems is not to deny systematic thinking altogether. Rather than having philosophy seek to enclose experience and the world in explanation, Emerson would have it open up experience and the world for our inspection. In ‘‘Plato; New Readings’’ he again draws on Plato’s example. Plato, he argued, ‘‘is more than an expert, or a school-man, or a geometer, or the prophet of a peculiar message. He represents the privilege of the intellect, the power, namely, of carrying up every fact to successive platforms, and so disclosing, in every fact, a germ of expansion’’ (CW, 4: 46). If we look carefully at Essays, we can glimpse a part of Emerson’s ‘‘systematic’’ thinking in this vein. In his insightful dissertation Glen Johnson reminds us that as early as 1824–1825 Emerson had ‘‘meditated a statement of his ‘first philosophy.’ ’’29 Johnson also restates the traditional view that Nature was Emerson’s first full-fledged attempt to articulate this first philosophy, and that by June 1836 it ‘‘had become two extended essays, one on ‘Nature’ and one on ‘Spirit’ later bridged by the chapter on ‘Idealism.’ ’’30 What begins to appear in Nature, then, is Emerson’s meditation on the relationship of the one (spirit) and the many (nature), a problem that, in its various guises and following the Greeks, Emerson took to be central to philosophy. This is clear, given the hindsight of Representative Men: Philosophy is the account which the human mind gives to itself of the constitution of the world. Two cardinal facts lie forever at the base; the one, and the two.—1. Unity, or Identity; and, 2. Variety. It is impossible to speak, or to think, without embracing both. (CW, 4:27–28; see also JMN, 9:303, 332)

................. 15741$

CH12

02-13-06 14:43:38

PS

PAGE 200


Unfortunately, having taken us this far, Johnson, whose interest is in the first series of Essays only, fails to pursue the line of reasoning he presents to its natural upshot in the philosophical structure of the Essays: First and Second Series. Instead, he contends that after Nature, Emerson ‘‘never again attempted a ‘first philosophy.’ ’’31 Let us follow through on the picture Johnson presents. Nature was a failed attempt at ‘‘first philosophy,’’ and it failed for Emerson precisely because he tried, as Johnson and others maintain, to speak his philosophy in the voice of abstract thought. However, suppose Essays is a reconstructed attempt at ‘‘first philosophy,’’ but now in a voice that is capable of handling Emerson’s own doctrine of philosophy. Johnson simply fails to take Emerson’s journal remarks of 1839 and his own paraphrase of these seriously enough. Emerson wrote: The philosopher has a good deal of knowledge which cannot be abstractly imparted . . . as many emotions in the soul of Handel and Mozart are thousand voiced and utterly incapable of being told in a simple air on a lute. . . . As the musician avails himself of the concert, so the philosopher . . . becomes a poet; for . . . complex forms allow of the utterance of his knowledge of life by indirections as well [as] in the didactic way, and therefore express the fluxional quantities and values which the thesis or dissertation could never give. (JMN, 7:190)

Johnson responds: ‘‘The philosopher is no longer in tension with the poet, for he has become the poet.’’32 Yet, it seems important to note again that Emerson does not reduce philosophy to poetry. If we recognize the ‘‘poet’’ here as the poet-not-a-poet who is the philosopher-more-than-a-philosopher, we see that the voice of Essays is, on Emerson’s own terms, philosophical (see JMN, 9:269). Moreover, in recalling Nature’s attempt to hold Spirit and Nature in the same gaze, and Representative Men’s locating of philosophy around the unity– variety question, we can begin to disclose a first philosophy in Essays, but one open to revision as history and experience qualify and constrain our thought and our conduct of life. Essays: First Series addresses and prominently displays the side of unity (one, spirit, ‘‘the gravitation of the soul’’), and Second Series,

................. 15741$

CH12

02-13-06 14:43:38

PS

PAGE 201

2 02


the side of variety (other, nature, and ‘‘the power of nature’’). This duplicity is characterized, for example, by the central essays of each series: ‘‘Self-Reliance’’ and ‘‘The Over-Soul’’ in the First and ‘‘Experience’’ and ‘‘Nature’’ in the Second.33 The former essays are characterized by a movement from direct, finite experience upward toward the unifying soul; the latter attend to the variety of instantiations of the One in human experience. Were it not for Emerson’s early attention to these dual elements and his later confirmation of their importance, we might be tempted to read the two series developmentally, as does Stephen Whicher, arguing that the latter series compensates for the overenthusiasm of the first.34 However, if we take seriously the endurance of this attention through the course of Emerson’s writings, it might make better sense to read Second Series as compensatory only insofar as it is a complement to, and not a rejection of, the First. Emerson’s radically empirical claim here is that we find ourselves in a world that is at once various and unified: ‘‘We are amphibious creatures, weaponed for two elements, having two sets of qualities, the particular and the catholic’’ (CW, 3:135). Philosophical argumentations have often maintained one side of this experience at the expense of the other—as, for example, in the historical caricatures of Parmenides and Heraclitus. Despite the cleverness of such views, Emerson saw them as failing to answer to experience as we live it: ‘‘We must reconcile the contradictions as we can, but their discord and their concord introduce wild absurdities into our thinking and speech. No sentence will hold the whole truth’’ (CW, 3:143; see also ‘‘Circles’’). Philosophy as pure understanding fails by leading us, at best, to a collection of antinomies. Emerson’s response to this fact, as we saw above, was to rein in the understanding and to locate it, again foreshadowing Dewey, in the midst of experience. Instead of argumentation in a narrow sense, philosophy became, for Emerson, a dwelling on and a disclosing of the traits of experience: ‘‘Neither by detachment, neither by aggregation is the integrity of the intellect transmitted to its works, but by a vigilance which brings intellect in its greatness and best state to operate every moment’’ (CW, 2:201). The understanding becomes important

................. 15741$

CH12

02-13-06 14:43:39

PS

PAGE 202


in its proficiency in ‘‘the perception of identity’’ (CW, 2:201). The vigil that is kept on experience, however, must reflect variety as well, and therefore the poet’s role of revealing the variety of experience’s truths, goods, and beauties is equally significant.35 Recall: ‘‘Thought seeks to know unity by unity; poetry to show it by variety’’ (CW, 4:642). Emerson’s call for a vigilance of both elements also reveals his affinity for a dialectic that can find a place for both. However, as we saw earlier, he remained suspicious of systems that attempted to project closure on experience or the world. Emerson’s dialectic, therefore, is not a historical march toward some conclusion, but a vigilance that allows us to move from wherever we find ourselves to ‘‘higher platforms.’’36 As he put it in an 1845 journal entry: ‘‘The philosophy we want is one of fluxions and mobility; not a house, but a ship in these billows we inhabit’’ (JMN, 9:222). If there is order in the cosmos, there is also surprise; if there is fate, there is also power. Philosophy’s task—and I see no reason not to call this a doctrine—is to continuously deepen or perhaps ‘‘heighten’’ (‘‘to cheer, to raise’’) human experience in its various historical settings, not to end it. It is easy at this juncture to think of Emerson’s import for Dewey, who valued a philosophy for its making experience more ‘‘significant . . . luminous,’’ enriched, and empowered (LW, 1:18). Though I offer only a suggestive sketch here, I think it reasonable, by developing the duplicity noted above, to read Essays as having taken up the vigil Emerson proposes. First, we should consider the ‘‘bookends’’ of ‘‘History’’ and ‘‘Nominalist and Realist,’’ whose opening lines are instructive concerning the reflective meditation Emerson calls to our attention. ‘‘History’’ opens up a series of essays that are involved with articulating the presence of unity, of Soul, in the cosmos: ‘‘There is one mind common to all men’’ (CW, 2:3). There is some irony here since we expect from history a description of temporal variety and detail; the irony keeps us in mind of the variety that is to come. ‘‘Nominalist and Realist’’ closes out the Second Series and suggests a reflection back to what ‘‘History’’ might have been: ‘‘I cannot often enough say, that a man is only a relative and representative

................. 15741$

CH12

02-13-06 14:43:39

PS

PAGE 203

2 04


nature’’ (CW, 3:133).37 Emerson never seems willing to sacrifice either unity or variety for its other; his vigil calls for looking for one in the other. We can see this not only in the clear evidence of ‘‘Nominalist and Realist,’’ but also in almost every essay. In ‘‘Nature’’ there is dynamic interaction of natura naturata and natura naturans. In ‘‘SelfReliance’’ and ‘‘Politics,’’ though the emphasis shifts, there is the necessity of both individual and community. Each discovery of unity makes sense of the variety; every discovery of variety yields a new angle of vision on unity. The philosopher’s task, using both of Plato’s ‘‘pallets’’ (palettes), is to move to ‘‘higher platforms’’ through the transactions and encounters of unity and variety. It is difficult, I think, to read the deepening reflection of Essays: First and Second Series as if two mirrors of different tint were set face to face, as merely accidental. A glance at the table of contents of the two sets of essays is revealing. There is an apparent facing of ‘‘The Over-Soul’’ and ‘‘Experience,’’ but neither refutes the other; we see each variously mirrored in the other. Less apparent are the fact that ‘‘Character’’ appears to show the lived surfaces of the internal centeredness of ‘‘Heroism’’ and the fact that ‘‘Gifts’’ and ‘‘Manners’’ do much the same for the spiritual laws of friendship, love, and even lowly prudence. ‘‘The Poet’’ takes up where ‘‘Intellect’’ leaves off, developing the variety of ways in which the influx of soul may be made public; poetry, in its widest sense, is constructive intellect that ‘‘produces thoughts, sentences, poems, plans, designs, systems’’ (CW, 2:198). Yet I do not think it necessary to force the issue here; the relatedness of the differences in tone and emphasis between the two series has been noted by most readers of Emerson, including those, such as Whicher, who see one as in some way dismissing or overcoming the other. My purpose is simply to suggest another way of interpreting this relatedness. In reflecting briefly on the role of the philosopher in Representative Men and the structure of Essays, then, I mean to suggest that we can begin to see something of the dialectical ‘‘system’’ that Emerson has in mind. As Cavell suggests and as Goodman describes, there is a kind of categoriology at work in Emerson’s writing that is perhaps most obvious in the notion of ‘‘representative’’ men, but that appears also

................. 15741$

CH12

02-13-06 14:43:39

PS

PAGE 204


in the structure of Essays as well as within the confines of particular essays.38 There is also a hint of Hegel in the articulation of moments of encounter and awakening by which experience moves us through an ascension to higher platforms: ‘‘Nature has a higher end in the production of new individuals than security,’’ Emerson says, ‘‘namely ascension, or, the passage of the soul into higher forms’’ (CW, 3:14). There is a systematic complexity that is craftily and warily embedded in Emerson’s writing. It would indeed be a travesty to reduce Emerson’s thought—as some of the Platonists did Plato’s—to an underlying schema. At the same time, it is misleading to ignore the systematic dimension, for then we miss one of the ‘‘pallets’’ from which Emerson worked. That there are two ‘‘pallets’’ to which we need to attend suggests that there is much more philosophical work to be done in the reading of Emerson. For Emerson the task of philosophy is, through vigilance, to disclose germs of expansion and further reflection in an open-ended dialectic of experience. He is the philosopher who underwrites the philosophies of experience that follow in the American tradition.

................. 15741$

CH12

02-13-06 14:43:40

PS

PAGE 205

thir teen

american loss in cavell ’s em er so n

[On Emerson] I am not acquainted with any writer, no matter how assured his position in treatises upon the history of philosophy, whose movement of thought is more compact and unified, nor one who combines more adequately diversity of intellectual attack with concentration of form and effect. (John Dewey, MW, 3:184) Against creed and system, convention and institution, Emerson stands for restoring to the common man that which in the name of religion, of philosophy, of art and morality, has been embezzled from the common store and appropriated to sectarian and class use. (Dewey, MW, 3:190)

S

ome years ago, in Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism, Stanley Cavell rekindled an interest in Emerson as a philosopher.1 I have already noted Cavell’s influence on my thought and my belief that his work fits well with my account of philosophy Americana; his redemption of Emerson has created a new audience for American thought. His project of redeeming Emerson was one he began in The Senses of Walden and has been developing since.2 The project is an important one, and Cavell has indeed illuminated much in Emerson that has been otherwise overlooked or misconstrued. Moreover, Cavell’s own work embodies the richness of Emersonian style. Ironically, however, Cavell’s recovery of Emerson seems to me centrally flawed just insofar as it fails to also recover Emerson’s influence on American thought. My concern is that Cavell’s somewhat exclusive focus on language leads him to lose sight of the down-to-earth, experiential side of Emerson’s thought—the practical Yankee side. This in turn leads him to lose { 20 6 }

................. 15741$

CH13

02-13-06 14:43:38

PS

PAGE 206

americ an loss in c avell ’s em erson

2 07

sight of how other American thinkers might take up Emerson’s experiential way of doing philosophy. The flaw is perhaps tied to Emerson’s concern in ‘‘The American Scholar’’ that we beware thinking in a vein not our own, that we avoid resting in an alien tradition. My concern is that Cavell redeems Emerson by invoking the authority of European thinkers alone: Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger. The irony, of course, is that the American scholar should be accounted for and authorized in such a fashion. My complaint, however, is not that Cavell’s reading of Emerson through a set of European lenses is not insightful; rather, I want to claim that his reading is important, but degenerate only insofar as it does not take seriously enough the work of Emerson’s American descendants William James and John Dewey in understanding what Emerson means or might mean. It is not merely that Cavell is impolitic, but that his omission of serious examinations of James and Dewey in Conditions has two important upshots: (1) it misses the ways in which James and Dewey gave power to Emerson’s work in American culture and (2) it reveals Cavell’s project as being something like the kind of ‘‘professional’’ philosophy Emerson himself sought to temper. In short, Cavell’s work, which exemplifies philosophy Americana in many ways, retains an analytic edge that seems to blind him to the significance of other veins of American thought. To get at this tension in his work in the context of a single chapter, I will limit my discussion to examining the implications of the ways Dewey does and does not play a role in the context of Cavell’s Conditions.3 Cavell’s neglect of James and resistance to Dewey seem more peripheral than focal to his purposes. But the neglect and resistance are there, and they stand out to any reader of Emerson who is also schooled in the history of American thought: James simply does not appear, and Dewey is dismissed as inadequate. Cavell does acknowledge the insightfulness of Dewey’s own essay on Emerson, but then seems unable, or unwilling, to square this with his other reading of Dewey (C:16, 40).4 Moreover, Cavell openly states that what interests him about Emerson is not anything to do with American culture. He admits, first, his interest in the connection, an important one, be-

................. 15741$

CH13

02-13-06 14:43:39

PS

PAGE 207

2 08


tween Emerson and Nietzsche. He then addresses the forgetfulness with which this connection has been met by philosophers and intellectual historians: This interests me almost as much as the connection itself does, since the incredibility [of the relation between Emerson and Nietzsche] must be grounded in a fixed conviction that Emerson is not a philosopher, that he cannot be up to the pitch of reason in European philosophy. (C:40–41)

Cavell’s project is thus not to affirm the American scholar as American, but to argue that Emerson is ‘‘up to the pitch of reason in European philosophy.’’ It is this project, perhaps together with Cavell’s philosophical biography, that seems to account for his move beyond Nietzsche to Wittgenstein and Heidegger in his effort to read Emerson seriously.5 The absence here of James and Dewey of course, for Cavell, leaves open the question of whether their work is up to pitch—I will turn to this question in a bit. Cavell’s authorizing of Emerson in such a fashion is reminiscent of what goes on at large in the ‘‘discovery’’ of American thinking. The work of Charles Peirce has, for example, in part been redeemed by virtue of its acceptance by Anglo–American analytic and, more recently, European philosophers. Dewey’s work is now in part authorized by the work of ‘‘recovering’’ analytic thinker Richard Rorty; indeed, Cavell says as much himself but fails to follow Rorty’s lead (C:14).6 What is important here for our purposes, however, is the irony of Cavell’s forgetfulness. What is ‘‘incredible’’ here is that in his concern for the forgetfulness of the Emerson–Nietzsche connection, Cavell institutes his own forgetfulness of Emerson’s relations to Dewey and James. While there are some good reasons for Cavell’s distancing of Dewey from Emerson, the extreme form it takes in Cavell’s work suggests to me that it is wedded to a misreading—or an absence of reading—of Dewey. The claims that Cavell first announces are that Dewey deemphasized Emerson’s concern for remaking the self and that he appears to omit an interest in the poetic or romantic dimensions of

................. 15741$

CH13

02-13-06 14:43:40

PS

PAGE 208


2 09

experience. The first of these was discussed by John E. Smith in 1965 in The Spirit of American Philosophy.7 Smith’s conclusion, despite his criticism of Dewey’s treatment of the self, is that Dewey’s deemphasis should not be understood as a loss of concern for the self’s realization. The second question has been addressed recently in two different but complementary ways. On the one hand, as noted in earlier chapters, Thomas Alexander asserts Dewey’s fundamental concern for the aesthetic insofar as Dewey pointed to ‘‘the artist and the method of artistic thinking as a paradigm for intelligence.’’8 On the other hand, Russell Goodman has unveiled the depth to which Romantic influences reside in Dewey’s work.9 At best, it is an oversight to read Dewey away from Emerson in this direction. A third claim that Cavell brings against Dewey is that Dewey did not, as did Emerson, bring his culture to life in his work: I remember, when first beginning to read what other people called philosophy, my growing feeling about Dewey’s work, as I went through what seemed countless of his books, that Dewey was remembering something philosophy should be, but that the world he was responding to and responding from missed the worlds I seemed mostly to live in, missing the heights of modernism in the arts, the depths of psychoanalytic discovery, the ravages of the century’s politics, the wild intelligence of American popular culture. (C:13)

Cavell rightly points us to Emerson’s interest in and poetic instantiation of the culture he lived with and in; indeed, however elitist Emersonian style appears to the twentieth century, we should not forget that ‘‘The American Scholar’’ is meant to resituate the scholar—the thinker—in her culture. ‘‘Life,’’ Emerson says, ‘‘lies behind us as the quarry from whence we get tiles and copestones for the masonry of to-day. This is the way to learn grammar. Colleges and books only copy the language which the field and the work-yard made.’’10 However, to read Dewey out of this tradition seems a profound mistake. First, Dewey, like Emerson, was a public figure; his work was available in newspapers, magazines, and trade journals as well as in the numerous talks he gave in both academic and nonacademic settings.

................. 15741$

CH13

02-13-06 14:43:40

PS

PAGE 209

2 10


Moreover, the topics he addressed in these, as a quick glance through the Works discloses, had everything to do with the culture in which he found himself: ‘‘View on ‘What the War Means to America’ ’’ (LW, 17:123), ‘‘The Future of Radical Political Action’’ (LW, 9:66–67), ‘‘In Defense of the Mexican Hearings’’ (LW, 13:347–348), and so on. Second, Dewey’s philosophy of experience, following Emerson’s lead, sought to open us to the importance of all corners of experience and culture. This is in part the point of Dewey’s strenuous denunciations of the ‘‘fine’’ and ‘‘useful’’ art distinction in Experience and Nature (LW, 1:282–83 and 290–91) and Art as Experience (LW, 10:33–34, 343– 44). His thinking not only encourages, in an Emersonian vein, seeking artfulness in all aspects of life but also underwrites the very kind of intellectual reading of popular culture that Cavell wants to enable. There are few writings in recent philosophy that engage ‘‘the wild intelligence of American popular culture’’ as do, say, Richard Shusterman’s Dewey-influenced ‘‘Form and Funk: The Aesthetic Challenge of Popular Art’’11 and John McDermott’s ‘‘The Aesthetic Drama of the Ordinary.’’12 Whatever the advantages of appealing to Wittgenstein and Heidegger, the absence of an appeal to Dewey here leaves us with a truncated Emersonianism. Cavell seems to intimate, in his assertion of Dewey’s ‘‘inadequate philosophical and literary means,’’ that whereas Emerson and Emersonians play with the idea of the ordinary, Dewey simply is ordinary. While there is an element of biographical truth in this intimation, careful reading of Dewey (just as careful reading of Emerson) does not bear out the full import of the claim—that Dewey is un-Emersonian. However inadequate his literary means (and I am not sure how far I would want to go even in granting such an inadequacy), Dewey’s philosophical means are neither inadequate nor sub– Emersonian. They are, however, deeply attentive to the culture from which they spring. As McDermott argues: Dewey took Emerson’s task as his own. Although his prose lacked the rhetorical flights so natural to Emerson, he too wrote out of compassion for the common man and confidence in the ‘‘possibility’’ inherent in every situation. By the time of Dewey’s matur-

................. 15741$

CH13

02-13-06 14:43:40

PS

PAGE 210


2 11

ity, the world of New England high culture had passed. Dewey, despite being born in New England, was a child of industrial democracy. He alone of the classic American philosophers was able to convert the genius and language of Emerson to the new setting. John Dewey, proletarian by birth and style, grasped that Emerson’s message was ever relevant.13

Dewey’s persistent articulations and exemplifications of our ability to reach into experience and culture indicate a fundamental commitment to carry on the concern for the ‘‘ordinary’’ and the ‘‘common’’ found in Emersonian thinking. A careful reading thus hints that Cavell’s objection is perhaps not so much to Dewey as to the American ‘‘industrial democracy’’ that Dewey inhabited—the very culture that he charges Dewey with ignoring.14 Such cultural aversion plays out further in Cavell’s misreading of Dewey’s accounts of knowing and intelligence. Cavell begins by saying that Dewey is ‘‘some sort of perfectionist— though surely not an Emersonian one’’ (C:15).15 He then identifies Dewey’s ‘‘perfectionism’’ or account of the best ‘‘state of the soul’’ with a simplistic Americanism: Tocqueville captures the sense of Deweyan perfectionism (in pt. 1, chap. 18 of Democracy in America): ‘‘[The Americans] have all a lively faith in the perfectibility of man, they judge that the diffusion of knowledge must necessarily be advantageous, and the consequences of ignorance fatal; they all consider society as a body in a state of improvement, humanity as a changing scene, in which nothing is, or ought to be permanent; and they admit that what appears to them today to be good, may be superseded by something better tomorrow. (C:15)16

Initially this description sounds appropriate to Dewey’s meliorism. However, the description of superseding—of transformation— forgets Dewey’s insistence on the importance of tradition and funded experience (see, for example, LW, 10:268–71). Cavell goes further. He acknowledges a superficial similarity between Emerson and Dewey vis-a`-vis the Tocquevillean description, but he then argues for their difference:

................. 15741$

CH13

02-13-06 14:43:41

PS

PAGE 211

2 12


To see how close and far they are to and from one another, consider just the difference in what each will call ‘‘knowledge’’ and ‘‘ignorance’’ and how each pictures the ‘‘difference.’’ For Dewey, representing the international view, knowledge is given in science and in the prescientific practices of the everyday, that is, the learning of problem solving. For Emerson, the success of science is as much a problem for thought as, say, the failure of religion is. (C:15)

What Cavell does not tell the reader here is that for Dewey ‘‘science’’ and ‘‘problem solving’’ are not to be understood in some naı¨ve fashion. What science is (as well as its success) is problematic for Dewey. Science involves ‘‘knowing’’ and ‘‘intelligence’’ for Dewey, and Cavell seems to take this as a mark of Dewey’s thinness. But these terms do more work, and more interesting work, than Cavell seems ready to admit. Cavell does not seem to acknowledge, for example, that for Dewey ‘‘knowing’’ is only one dimension of experience. To repeat what has been said in earlier chapters, in Experience and Nature Dewey maintains that a rich and genuine empiricism ‘‘indicates that being and having things in ways other than knowing them, in ways never identical with knowing them, exist, and are preconditions of reflection and knowledge’’ (LW, 1:377). This is the same kind of broadening of empiricism and locating of knowing (in both the technical sense of understanding and the richer sense of intellect) effected by Emerson in ‘‘Experience.’’ Indeed, Emerson said in ‘‘The American Scholar,’’ ‘‘Thinking is a partial act.’’17 For Dewey, knowing is thoroughly environed by ‘‘havings’’ and ‘‘valuings.’’ To suggest, therefore, that Dewey sees scientific knowing, in a straightforward positivistic sense, as by itself a panacea for self and social ills is a misrepresentation. As Dewey himself put it: Without esthetic appreciation we miss the most characteristic as well as the most precious thing in the real world. The same is true of ‘‘practical’’ matters, that is, of activity limited to effecting technical changes, changes which do not affect our enjoyable realizations of things in their individualities. Modern preoccupation

................. 15741$

CH13

02-13-06 14:43:42

PS

PAGE 212


2 13

with science and with industry based on science has been disastrous; our education has followed the model which they have set. It has been concerned with intellectual analysis and formularized information, and with technical training for this or that field of professionalized activity, a statement as true, upon the whole, of the scholar in classics or in literature or in the fine arts themselves as of specialists in other branches. (LW, 2:112)

One cannot read this without recalling Emerson’s talk of ‘‘so many walking monsters,—a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man.’’18 Cavell’s picturing of Dewey’s notion of ‘‘intelligence’’ is equally skewed from its Emersonian ancestry. He says: Dewey’s picture of thinking as moving in action from a problematic situation to its solution, as by the removal of an obstacle, more or less difficult to recognize as such, by the least costly means, is, of course, one picture of intelligence. (C:21)

He again suggests that Dewey’s view is reducible to a kind of technologism—a reduction warranted only if one limits one’s reading in Dewey. There is a kinship between Dewey’s ‘‘intelligence’’ and Emerson’s ‘‘intellect’’ that Cavell does not seem to see. As Cornel West maintains, both Emerson and Dewey see intellect ‘‘as a distinctive function of and inseparable from the doings, sufferings, and strivings of everyday people.’’19 Both terms are meant to underwrite the Deweyan phronesis I alluded to in chapter 4 as well as a genuine human empowerment in the world. Emerson, on the one hand, makes intellect (as intellect receptive) rest on an influx from the Soul and then turns it loose (as intellect constructive) as a producer of experience and ‘‘truth.’’ Dewey, on the other hand, while rejecting any supernatural version of the Over-Soul, identifies intelligence in thinking with the presence of artfulness and aesthetic meaning: ‘‘It would then [when we properly put art and creation first] be seen that science is an art, that art is practice, and that the only distinction is not between practice and theory, but between the modes of practice that are not intelligent, not inherently and immediately enjoyable, and those

................. 15741$

CH13

02-13-06 14:43:43

PS

PAGE 213

2 14


which are full of enjoyed meanings’’ (LW, 1:268–269). The aesthetic control of meaning—intelligence—is a pervasive requirement for Dewey, and it grounds his attacks on the distinction between fine and useful arts.20 More important, it places him directly in Emerson’s wake: ‘‘Beauty,’’ Emerson said, ‘‘must come back to the useful arts, and the distinction between the fine and useful arts be forgotten’’ (CW, 2:218). The technologism Cavell wants to find in Dewey must be read in line with these Emersonian constraints that Dewey has placed on his notions of knowing and intelligence. Moreover, following these constraints we can see Dewey developing Emerson’s thinking in the direction of a science infused with wisdom and a democracy infused with ‘‘character.’’ Dewey’s project is to look for the experiential detail that might move us toward Emerson’s assertion at the close of ‘‘Art’’: ‘‘When science is learned in love, and its powers are wielded by love, they will appear the supplements and continuations of the material creation’’ (CW, 2:218). At the same time, the appeal to intelligence is an appeal to the funded experience and to the aesthetic dimension that can impart character to us as beings in culture. This is why Dewey can so outrightly appreciate Emerson’s identification of Being with Character. When read carefully, Dewey seems to provide both ‘‘the urgency of the need for transformative social change and the resistance to internal change’’ that Cavell applauds in Emerson (C:16). The dismissals of Dewey by Cavell in the early parts of Conditions enable him to effect a striking exclusion of Dewey’s thought from later parts of the text.21 In particular, in a chapter titled ‘‘Aversive Thinking’’ Cavell speaks of Emersonian perfectionism as standing behind the possibility of a democracy worth living. ‘‘I might put it this way,’’ he says, ‘‘the particular disdain for official culture taken in Emerson and in Nietzsche . . . is itself an expression of democracy’’ (C:50; see also 124–25). In noting the disdain (for ‘‘art and culture that disgust’’) and the ‘‘exclusiveness’’ that he thinks it engenders, Cavell seems to be trying to find a place for his sort of intellectual in an American–like democracy. The perfectionism he endorses is presented in distinction from the Rawlsian notion of perfectionism as

................. 15741$

CH13

02-13-06 14:43:43

PS

PAGE 214


2 15

the maximizing of some chosen feature or features of a culture. Dewey is nowhere to be found in this discussion that includes Rawls, Nietzsche, and Emerson, despite the fact that he is the foremost American writer on democracy in the twentieth century. Cavell’s aversion to Dewey here cannot rest on his aversion to Rawls’s maximization principles, for these are not part of Dewey’s thinking. It rather seems to rest on his earlier misconstrual of the ‘‘intelligence’’ that for Dewey should accompany human action. This misreading allows him to suppose Deweyan democracy to be civic problem solving that takes place without awareness of the ‘‘disgusting’’ nature of much of our culture. This reading is wrong on both counts. Dewey not only displays deep misgivings about American culture, but also sees, as does the Emerson of ‘‘Politics,’’ democracy’s responses as at best ameliorative; he recognizes the need for persons to be prepared for the failures of democracy in a precarious world, a need Cavell cites as important to Emerson’s thinking. Cavell sees Emerson’s emphases on education, character, and friendship ‘‘as part of the training for democracy’’ (C:56). But ‘‘Not the part that must internalize the principles of justice and practice the role of the democratic citizen—that is clearly required, so obviously that the Emersonian may take offense at the idea that this aspect of things is even difficult’’ (C:56). Whatever else Cavell has in mind as a target of this aside, he probably has in mind a simplistic interpretation of Dewey’s democracy. It is Dewey, after all, who takes the internalizing of democracy seriously. Unfortunately, for all the truth in Cavell’s appreciation of Emerson’s perfectionism, his failure to read Dewey closely again constitutes a partial failure in reading Emerson. For Dewey, democracy does need to be in some way ‘‘internalized’’ since democracy is ‘‘a personal way of individual life’’ (LW, 14:226). This, however, is not reducible to some formal or mechanical internalization of ‘‘the principles of justice.’’ Dewey’s idea of democracy as a way of life is considerably richer and seems to me to complement, not reject or escape, Emersonian perfectionism understood as an ongoing attentiveness to the state of the soul. The heart of democracy, Dewey says, is ‘‘the possession and continual use of certain attitudes,

................. 15741$

CH13

02-13-06 14:43:44

PS

PAGE 215

2 16


forming personal character and determining desire and purpose in all the relations of life. Instead of thinking of our own dispositions and habits as accommodated to certain institutions we have to learn to think of the latter as expressions, projections and extensions of habitually dominant personal attitudes’’ (LW, 14:226). As with Emerson, the faith is not in what we have done and are doing, but in what we might do—what we can envision ourselves doing. Dewey has no autocratic vision of liberalist leveling in mind; like Emerson he requires individual growth—what Emerson often described as moving to ‘‘higher platforms’’—through creative intelligence, valuing, and imagination. These are the forces that ought to drive democracy and to prepare us to live with the failures that constitute democracy. Democracy is a belief ‘‘in the Common Man,’’ but only insofar as there is faith in the common person’s potential for a ‘‘charactered’’ life. What Dewey does is extend Emersonian perfectionism in a particular direction—the direction of making the renovation of self and community a transactional affair. Cavell’s writing Dewey out of the picture at this point severely limits our reading of the possibilities in Emerson. Emerson says in ‘‘Politics’’: ‘‘But the wise know that foolish legislation is a rope of sand, which perishes in the twisting; that State must follow, and not lead the character and progress of the citizen’’ (CW, 3:117).22 Dewey, in his communitarian fashion, not only echoes Emerson but also leads us to see beyond the caricature of Emerson as Romantic libertarian:23 This faith [in the possibilities of human nature] may be enacted in statutes, but it is only on paper [Emerson’s ‘‘memorandum’’] unless it is put in force in the attitudes which human beings display to one another in all the incidents and relations of daily life. (LW, 14:226)

Dewey takes Emerson’s faith into the realm of practical and community concern, not in a trivial, mechanistic fashion, but as a way of at once empowering Emersonian character in the community and of investing the democratic community with its proper power instead of reducing it to a hollow bureaucratic shell. This seems to me not a

................. 15741$

CH13

02-13-06 14:43:44

PS

PAGE 216


2 17

reduction of Emersonianism to Deweyism, as Cavell might suggest (C:16), but an expansion of Emersonianism along a certain line of thinking—the thinking of self-reliance.24 As West argues: ‘‘The grand breakthrough of Dewey is not only that he considers these larger structures, systems, and institutions, but also that he puts them at the center of his pragmatic thought without surrendering his allegiance to Emersonian and Jamesian concerns with individuality and personality.’’25 As Dewey sees it, the most serious enemies of community are the ‘‘[e]motional habituations and intellectual habitudes on the part of the mass of men’’ (LW, 2:341). This is reminiscent of Emerson’s attacks on conformity not only among ‘‘the masses’’ but also among the self-styled social reformers of his day. What we want, he asserted, are ‘‘men and women who shall renovate life and our social state, but we see that most natures are insolvent’’ (CW, 2:43). Dewey recognizes the promise of self-reliance but also argues that its promise hinges on the self’s transaction with an environment, something Emerson seldom stated but everywhere indicated.26 As Dewey puts it in the concluding lines of The Public and Its Problems: ‘‘We lie, as Emerson said, in the lap of an immense intelligence. But the intelligence is dormant and its communications are broken, inarticulate and faint until it possesses the local community as its medium’’ (LW, 2:372). Thus, to bring Emerson, as Cavell does, to the brink of the possibility of democracy and its disappointments, and then not to call on Dewey, seems to me an important loss in the project of redeeming Emerson. That Cavell misses Dewey’s import for the democracy Emerson’s work underwrites not only effects a kind of closure on the reading of Emerson, but also indicates something more about the nature of Cavell’s own way of doing philosophy. It is this indication that suggests to me that in a certain respect Cavell works in opposition to the Emersonian and American philosophical traditions. Early in Conditions Cavell chastises Dewey for a blindness in his philosophy: ‘‘Above all, [Dewey was] missing the question, and the irony in philosophy’s questioning, whether philosophy, however reconstructed, was any longer possible, and necessary, in this world’’

................. 15741$

CH13

02-13-06 14:43:45

PS

PAGE 217

2 18


(C: 13). It is true that Dewey’s writing, for the most part, lacks Emersonian irony. But, then, as Cavell well knows, many have misread Emerson’s style as trivial romance; to mistake Dewey’s absence of pervasive irony as an indication of his lack of philosophical depth is simply to promote a similar mistake. Moreover, the difference in style should not blind us to the importance of the similarities. As we argued in chapter 12, Emerson, in ‘‘Plato; or the Philosopher,’’ reconceives philosophy in the image of the exemplar case of his Plato. Recall, Plato is a poet-not-a-poet and a philosopher-more-than-aphilosopher (CW, 4:25). It is in the direction of seeing this in Emerson’s essays that Cavell’s writing rings true. Yet, Emerson did not leave the philosopher—or the scholar—in endless conversations on the question (or the question of the question) of philosophy. A central irony of ‘‘The Over-Soul,’’ of ‘‘Self-Reliance,’’ and of ‘‘Nature’’ is that the divine is to be found only in lived experience. Left to conversations, ironic or otherwise, on the question of philosophy—as important and compelling as these conversations are—philosophers will no doubt avoid, be averse to, the problems of persons. Cavell seems, in his beckoning Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger, to lead philosophy again (or still) in the direction of a narrowing intellectualism. This was not Emerson’s aim. As McDermott says in examining Emerson’s ‘‘American Scholar’’: He makes it apparent that he does not accept the traditional superiority of the contemplative over the active life. Emerson tells us further that ‘‘Action is with the scholar subordinate, but it is essential. Without it he is not yet man. Without it thought can never ripen into truth.’’ It is noteworthy that accompanying Emerson’s superb intellectual mastery of the great literature of the past and his commitment to the reflective life is his affirmation that ‘‘Character is higher than intellect.’’27

With Cavell, I acknowledge Emerson’s insistence on thinking as receptive, but deny that Emerson accepts Cavell’s implicit claim that ‘‘receiving’’ and ‘‘acting’’ are exclusive. As we saw, for Emerson the intellect itself is both receptive and constructive; it ‘‘must have the like perfection in its apprehension and in its works’’ (CW, 2:201).

................. 15741$

CH13

02-13-06 14:43:45

PS

PAGE 218


2 19

It is difficult to bring the charge of ‘‘intellectualism’’ against Cavell because he does acknowledge, though he does not develop, the Emersonian role of character—its ironic role of aversion—in constructing community (C:27–29). However, even where he acknowledges this role, Cavell tends to return the discussion to his own program—the program that reads Dewey away from Emerson. This program, and I leave it to other readers to affirm this, focuses on an intellectualist realm of language: words, voice, sign, conversation, reason, sentences, and so on. The program descends from Cavell’s reading of Thoreau’s Walden as essentially about reading and writing. This same focus is revealed in Cavell’s other writings on Emerson that equate Emerson’s quest for the ordinary with ordinary language philosophy.28 Indeed, this equation opens another route for Cavell to dismiss Dewey: ‘‘For Dewey the philosophical appeal of the ordinary,’’ Cavell argues, ‘‘is present but intermittent, as when he relates esteeming to estimating or relates objects to what it is that objects, or mind to minding’’ (C:23). For Cavell, wordplay seems to be the measure of the ordinary. This reduces Emerson’s interest in the ordinary—in gifts, prudence, manners, friendship, love, and politics—to the play of ordinary language. This line of thinking cannot help but miss the fundamental and continuous role the ordinary plays in Dewey’s thinking. It cannot help but miss the fact that Dewey has taken up threads of Emerson’s work: that, as Goodman puts it, Dewey’s determination ‘‘to recover and maintain its [philosophy’s] engagement with contemporary life’’ provides ‘‘the sense in which Dewey comes to embody in his own career the Emersonian thinker’’29 This narrowness of Cavell’s reading of Emerson is even more openly expressed in ‘‘Hope Against Hope,’’ near the close of Conditions: My insistence that Emerson’s achievement is essentially a philosophical one concentrates on a number of claims. (1) His language has that accuracy, that commitment to subject every word of itself to criticism. . . . (2) ‘‘Self-Reliance’’ in particular constitutes a theory of writing and reading whose evidence its own writing fully provides. . . . (3) The relation of Emerson’s writing . . . to his soci-

................. 15741$

CH13

02-13-06 14:43:46

PS

PAGE 219

2 20


ety. . . . (4) His prose not alone takes sides in this aversive conversation, but it also enacts the conversation. (C: 132–138; italics added)

Even (3), which addresses ‘‘society,’’ devolves into the claim ‘‘that Emerson’s writing and his society are in an unending argument with one another’’ (C:138). As true as these claims may be—and I believe they are true—they are incomplete if meant to reveal Emerson fully as an American philosopher. Ironically, this display of linguisticism places Cavell not in the trajectory of Emerson but in the company of, say, Richard Rorty, for whom experience is reducible to language. It is precisely this reduction that Dewey attacks throughout his career. Cavell’s own ‘‘philosophical’’ background thus seems to encircle his reading of Emerson, marking a circumference beyond which lies the importance of Dewey’s own relation to Emerson. I side with McDermott when he says, ‘‘Dewey’s project is Emersonian, for the affairs of time and the activities of nature are the ground of inquiry, rather than the hidden and transcendent meaning of Being.’’30 Cavell says, ‘‘For an Emersonian, the Deweyan is apt to seem an enlightened child, toying with the means of destruction, stinting the means of instruction, of provoking the self to work; for the Deweyan the Emersonian is apt to look, at best, like a Deweyan’’ (C:16). Were Deweyanism marked merely by educational theorists, this claim might stand a chance; but the work of McDermott, Ralph Sleeper, Alexander, Kestenbaum, and numerous others exemplifies its falsity. The claim follows only from a narrow reading of Dewey—the very kind of narrow reading Cavell wants to prevent in readers of Emerson. Cavell’s misreading of Dewey and his absenting of William James seem in the end more like moves of a late twentieth-century professional philosopher than those of an Emersonian American scholar. We cannot begrudge Cavell his own project, which is in so many ways worthy and insightful, and has inspired another generation to rethink philosophy in America; my quarrel, in the end, is something of an in-house quarrel. But we may consider how much stronger a project it might be if it were to include a more thorough reading of the Emersonian inheritance in the work of later American philosophers.

................. 15741$

CH13

02-13-06 14:43:46

PS

PAGE 220

four t een

emerson and kerouac Grievous Angels of Hope and Loss

Dedicated to America, whatever that is. Jack Kerouac1

I

n 1969 Gram Parsons, a young Harvard dropout, had a vision of bringing generations together through music. Parsons was born Cecil Ingram Connors III in the American South in 1946. Having worked his way through a number of bands, Parsons joined the Byrds in 1968 and was a key influence in their recording perhaps the first full-blown country-rock album, Sweetheart of the Rodeo. Later he helped found the Flying Burrito Brothers, hung around Keith Richards and the Rolling Stones while they recorded Exile on Mainstreet, and, just before he died, traveled and played with his band Fallen Angels, which included country-singer-to-be Emmylou Harris.2 Country-rock seemed a likely avenue by which Parsons might pursue his vision of cultural reconciliation since it covered both generational differences and deep cultural differences. In this developing genre Parsons, together with folk-poet Thomas S. Brown, wrote a song titled ‘‘Return of the Grievous Angel,’’ which was at one level a crosscountry trucking story, ‘‘Grievous Angel’’ being the name of the { 22 1 }

................. 15741$

CH14

02-13-06 14:43:45

PS

PAGE 221

2 22


truck. At another level it was about Elvis’s transition from country music to Las Vegas, to ‘‘Sin City’’: The news I could bring, I met up with the King On his head an amphetamine crown, He talked about unbuckling that old Bible belt, And lighted out for some desert town. Out with the truckers, and the kickers, and the cowboy angels, And a good saloon in every single town.3

The song captures a synthesis of hope and loss that I would like to thematize in this chapter. Parsons himself, like Elvis and like Jack Kerouac, lived out the Hank Williams syndrome and died an early death from heroin and alcohol abuse. His was a life on the road, in transition, and always trying to overcome the present situation—in particular trying to bring young and old together at a difficult time in American history. The refrain of ‘‘Grievous Angel’’ reveals the complexity of his story. Having ‘‘headed west to grow up with the country,’’ he finds that every quest ultimately returns him home: Oh, and I remember something you once told me, And I’ll be damned if it did not come true, Twenty thousand roads I’ve been down, down, down, And they all lead me straight back home to you.4

The complexity, the irony, is that the hope that drove the charismatic Parsons to transform American music and pave the way for everyone from the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band to the Eagles to Emmylou Harris was always coupled with a quest for origin and a deep sense of loss. He made this explicit in ‘‘Hickory Wind’’: In South Carolina, there are many tall pines, I remember the oak tree that we used to climb. And now when I’m lonesome, I always pretend That I’m getting the feel of hickory wind.5

Parsons pursued Chuck Berry’s ‘‘The Promised Land’’ and Williams’s ‘‘Lost Highway.’’ It is difficult, as one reads of Parsons’s life and leg-

................. 15741$

CH14

02-13-06 14:43:45

PS

PAGE 222

emerson a nd kerouac

2 23

acy, not to consider his life a quest for transcendence in this world, a transitional synthesis of loss and hope. Parsons’s hope of acquiring a vision of what transcends the routine of ordinary experience, if not a dominant theme, is at least a persistent one in the American philosophical and literary traditions. The evidence leaves a trail from the various conversion experiences of Jonathan Edwards to the quests of Whitman and on to the Beat Generation. Along this trail are two figures compelling for their personal and literary attention to this quest for transcendence within the confines of our ordinary experiences: Ralph Waldo Emerson and Jack Kerouac. In many ways they seem to me prototypical American ‘‘grievous angels.’’ ‘‘Grievous’’ bears an interesting array of meanings. It fits Kerouac best in considering its import of ‘‘bringing trouble’’ or being ‘‘sorrowful.’’ Emerson’s character is perhaps better captured by the sense of being ‘‘excessively strong.’’ But both are grievous in the sense of being provocative awakeners—if we don’t want to see them coming, it’s only because we know they will prod us or challenge us. They will call us out and have us seek our own self-transcendence. Let me begin my description of these angels by trying to show their differences of temperament and emphases amid their commonalities, though my ultimate aim is to suggest that if we, like Parsons, keep company with both of them, we may find a fruitful way of living in an American landscape. We can seek the kind of down-to-earth transcendence that I believe both of them sought in order to bring about the kinds of human transformations that Parsons both envisioned and, in part, carried out. His influence not only on the Byrds, but also on the Eagles, Emmylou Harris, the Rolling Stones, and the very nature of American country music was immense, even if generally unnoticed. We can perhaps live with hope while remaining attentive to the reality and import of loss. New England Transcendentalism and the Beat Generation were both young people’s social movements, movements that grew organically and received their names only after they had achieved a good bit of notoriety. Emerson and Kerouac were their respective spokespersons—or perhaps ‘‘shamans’’ is a better description, insofar as each

................. 15741$

CH14

02-13-06 14:43:46

PS

PAGE 223

2 24


inspired those affiliated with his movement. These movements were dominated by young males. Although there were strong women among both the Transcendentalists and the Beats, they were openly constrained by their male counterparts. Their stories are still in the process of being told.6 In their shamanistic roles, Emerson and Kerouac have a good deal in common. They were both New Englanders; indeed, in common parlance, they lived just down the road from one another in Concord and Lowell, Massachusetts, respectively. Still, this proximity was in large part offset by differences in years and class. Both were also literary innovators: Emerson cut and pasted from his elaborate, poetic journal entries, and Kerouac developed his sketching and ‘‘spontaneous prosody’’ linking his sound to the bebop music that filled city nights in the 1940s and 1950s. Though both became highly visible public figures, they also lived strong internal lives—they exhibited a spirit of individualism even as they were perceived to be the leaders of public movements. They were also oddly charismatic in their quests for transcendence; both sought a vision of America that might transform their present conditions. But they lived in very different Americas. Emerson’s America was fresh off its ‘‘first’’ revolution and seeking its next revolution. It was an America with actual wilderness, a growing nation with one foot in European culture and the other in its unrealized frontier. As Hegel wrote in his Lectures on the History of the World: ‘‘America is therefore the land of the future, where, in the ages that lie before us, the burden of the World’s History shall reveal itself—perhaps in a contest between North and South America. It is a land of desire for all those who are weary of the historical lumberroom of old Europe.’’7 This America set Emerson’s tone. There are, he said, only two parties: the ‘‘party of hope and the party of memory.’’ He established himself as a member of the former; he was forward-looking and hopeful. ‘‘It seems so easy,’’ he claimed in an 1844 lecture, ‘‘for America to inspire and express the most expansive and humane spirit; new-born, free, healthful, strong, the land of the laborer, of the democrat, of the philanthropist, of the believer, of the

................. 15741$

CH14

02-13-06 14:43:46

PS

PAGE 224


2 25

saint, she should speak for the human race. It is the country of the Future.’’8 Thus, too, for Emerson it was a country of hope. In Kerouac’s post–World War II America these last claims about ‘‘speaking for the human race’’ were already becoming questionable in the minds of various counter-culture folks. These questions were to come to a head in the time of the Vietnam War and Watergate, and they have not been well answered to date as the United States asserts itself in other venues in the world. Kerouac’s Beat Generation sought to define, or perhaps to find, their America. No wilderness and no frontier filled their American landscape. In On the Road Kerouac, as Sal Paradise, makes his first mad, exuberant race crosscountry, only to find disappointment. Having alienated his San Francisco friend Reme during a drunken binge, Paradise reflects on his disappointment: How disastrous all this was compared to what I’d written him from Paterson [New Jersey] planning my red line Route 6 across America. Here I was at the end of America—no more land—and now there was nowhere to go but back.9

It was no longer a land of the frontier and the Future. With Proust and Thomas Wolfe, Kerouac was compelled instead to explore his past, seeking origins that might settle his being. Fellow Beat Allen Ginsberg, in his addendum to Kerouac’s Visions of Cody, nicknamed Kerouac ‘‘The Great Rememberer.’’ It is through memory and imagination that Kerouac wrote the Duluoz legend—the legend of his own life—by way of his novels. The absence of the frontier and the future seemed to fill the Beats with a sense of loss and of being lost. They were ‘‘beat’’ both in the sense of being beaten down and worn out, exhausted by life, and in the sense of ‘‘beatific,’’ pure and clean in their poverty—the meek, it had been said in Kerouac’s strongly Catholic world, shall inherit. Kerouac, both as a Catholic and as a child of the working class, took seriously the possibilities he found in the common and the ordinary. Part of his literary power was his ability to show us the strength and the beauty of the ordinary and the less than ordinary.

................. 15741$

CH14

02-13-06 14:43:47

PS

PAGE 225

2 26


For all its energy and enthusiasm, On the Road is not just a happy vision quest of an American youth. At first meeting, Sal’s cowboy counterpart, wild American Dean Moriarty (the same Neal Cassady who later drove Ken Kesey’s bus with the Grateful Dead aboard) is cast as a savior: His ‘‘criminality’’ was not something that sulked and sneered; it was a wild yea-saying overburst of American joy; it was Western, the west wind, an ode from the Plains, something new, long prophesied, long a-coming (he only stole cars for joy rides).10

By the end, the joy and the novelty wear off and the prophecy fails. Sal Paradise leaves Dean on a New York City street corner and rides off in his upscale friend’s Cadillac: ‘‘Dean, ragged in a motheaten overcoat he brought specifically for the freezing temperatures of the East, walked off alone, and the last I saw of him he rounded the corner of Seventh Avenue, eyes on the street ahead, and bent to it again.’’11 Dean’s final beatness and lostness are matched by America’s own beatness in the final paragraph of the book: So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long, skies of New Jersey . . . . nobody, nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty.12

Emerson’s insane angels were heaven sent and future bound: Kerouac proclaimed his friends ‘‘desolation angels’’ with no hope and no future. Kerouac was clearly a member of the ‘‘party of memory’’—if transcendence were to be found, it would have to be by looking backward to our origins. What are we to make of these studies in hope and loss? Let me begin with the caricatures. Emerson is often—still—ridiculed for espousing an egoistic, almost Ayn Rand–like self-reliance that sets one free toward one’s own and the world’s grand destiny. Emerson is also thought to be too optimistic, too Pollyanna–like. Kerouac, on the other hand, is often aligned with the hard, brooding ‘‘loner’’ film lives

................. 15741$

CH14

02-13-06 14:43:47

PS

PAGE 226


2 27

of James Dean and Marlon Brando, whom Kerouac initially believed might play a role in the film version of On the Road. On any close reading of their respective work, however, Emerson and Kerouac are not so easily identifiable in these ways. In earlier chapters we have discussed the dialectic of doing and undergoing, of acting and receiving, as a central theme in American thought. Whether one wants to attribute this to Hegel’s wide influence on American culture in the nineteenth century or to the Calvinist habit of performing good works while accepting salvation as a matter of grace, this dialectic is at the core of the American experience. Emerson and Kerouac seem well aware of this, and they work to make us aware—to awaken us. Whatever transcendence, self-overcoming, and self-revision are to occur, will occur within this dialectic. What they do, each from a historically distinct position, is to bring our attention to the mode of insight they find in their respective American natures. In ‘‘Self-Reliance’’ Emerson sounds his note of independence—this is the great essay of ‘‘acting’’ and ‘‘doing’’ in American thought: There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better or worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till. The power which resides in him is now in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried. (CW, 2:27–28)

But the self-reliance story always appears for Emerson in a much larger context. He was never simply a rugged individualist. ‘‘We judge a man’s wisdom,’’ he said, ‘‘by his hope, knowing that the perception of the inexhaustibleness of nature is an immortal youth’’ (CW, 2:80– 81). But our hope, and our doing, is for Emerson—as for the Calvinists—a function of Nature’s whole. The essay ‘‘Compensation,’’ which follows ‘‘Self-Reliance,’’ is too often overlooked. In it Emerson clearly shows that action and self-reliance are always contexted; they have their place in Nature’s history. ‘‘A little consideration,’’ he

................. 15741$

CH14

02-13-06 14:43:47

PS

PAGE 227

2 28


warned in ‘‘Spiritual Laws,’’ ‘‘of what takes place around us every day would show us that a higher law than that of our will regulates events; that our painful labors are unnecessary and fruitless; that only in our easy, simple, spontaneous action are we strong, and by contenting ourselves with obedience we become divine’’ (CW, 2:81). Ironically, our spontaneous, self-reliant actions are not radically free and contingent; rather, they are those actions which follow our natures that are themselves features of Nature. We find divinity and the possibility of transcendence here in our action that is aware of its obedience—its undergoing or suffering the constraints of the cosmos. Emerson’s Nature of the 1830s is the source of his focus on hope. This is the Nature that generates our natures, that builds hope out of real possibilities in the future. Emerson’s Nature is organic, growing, developmental, evolutionary, and temporally aligned with the future. Nature as natura naturans is the site of our lives and actions; its opportunities are our opportunities. We are not final but transitory, but we can make a difference and we can be more or less divine. Emerson’s hope is thus constrained by the limits with which Nature confronts us and blinds us to her final aims. As he asks in ‘‘Experience’’: ‘‘Where do we find ourselves? In a series of which we do not know the extremes, and believe that it has none’’ (CW, 3:27). Emerson’s emphasis on hope is brought back to earth by this blindness. We may have hope but it is tempered hope, a hope that lives with the possibility of self-doubt and the risk of an uncertain future: There is throughout nature something mocking, something that leads us on and on, but arrives nowhere; keeps no faith with us. All promise outruns the performance. We live in a system of approximations. Every end is prospective of some other end, which is also temporary; a round and final success nowhere. (CW, 3:110)

What we are finally left with in Emerson’s focus on Nature’s hopefulness is not the closure of an idealist’s finished telos, but an exhortation to see the world’s possibilities and to bring ourselves and our actions into league with them. Emerson occasionally saw hope in concrete actions and creations. Consider his account of the railroad: ‘‘An unlooked for consequence

................. 15741$

CH14

02-13-06 14:43:48

PS

PAGE 228


2 29

of the railroad,’’ he said, ‘‘is the increased acquaintance it has given the American people with the boundless resources of their own soil.’’13 Well aware, as was Thoreau, of the human costs of the railroad, he still sees its powers of illumination and inspiration. Indeed, an Amtrak trip today may still have the effect of such an acquaintance. But it is the angle of vision that is crucial. Emerson sees a Nature of energy and possibility and looks for transcending capacities in them, even as he has one eye open for the accompanying dangers of these capacities: ‘‘Railroad iron is a magician’s rod, in its power to evoke the sleeping energies of land and water.’’14 Kerouac’s focus on loss and return to origin is likewise embedded in a wider conception of nature. It seems fair to consider the Beat Generation as engaged in a kind of existentialism Americana. In the postwar era this generation led the way both toward social rebellion and toward a general cultural malaise. Still, Kerouac himself was never a champion of the ultimacy of the absurd—he was also no political revolutionary in a simple sense. Working through the vision of the Catholic/Buddhist being he articulated for himself, he no longer saw nature as evolutionary and growing. His late-twentieth-century nature was static, settled, a kind of Augustinian eternality to which we all must return. Where Emerson began with self-reliance, Kerouac began with the constraint of nature: the facts of death, suffering, and absence of purpose in our world. Where Emerson began with action, Kerouac began with acceptance and undergoing. Reflecting on the experience of two young boys at a simple Catholic funeral in Mexico, Kerouac recalled: I get a vision of myself and the two little boys hung up in a great endless universe with nothing overhead and nothing under but the Infinite Nothingness, the Enormousness of it, the dead without number in all directions of existence whether inward into the atom-worlds of your own body or outward to the universe which may only be one atom in an infinity of atom-worlds and each atom-world only a figure of speech—inward, outward, up and down, nothing but emptiness and divine majesty and silence for the two little boys and me.15

................. 15741$

CH14

02-13-06 14:43:48

PS

PAGE 229

2 30


Thus, Kerouac’s starting point is closely akin to Emerson’s terminus where we ‘‘wake and find ourselves on a stair; there are stairs below us, which we seem to have ascended; there are stairs above us, many a one, which go upward and out of sight’’ (CW, 3:27). Despite his emphasis on patience and receptivity, Kerouac was never shy about recognizing our spontaneous human energies and, indeed, spent a good bit of time revealing their powers: music, sexuality, travel, athletics, and writing, among others. What he sought was a way of understanding our energies and also of giving them purpose—only then could one find transcendence in this life. On a careless reading of the Duluoz legend, one might even think his characters exhibit more self-reliance than Emerson called for. Sal Paradise, for example, feels the intensity of the freedom he experiences on the road. As we noted earlier, however, in Kerouac’s work self-directed energy seems to go nowhere; it’s a contingent Roman candle that inevitably leads us to a ‘‘morning after’’ that is hungover and depressed, and senses its own lostness. The intensity and the energy, though generating moments of ambiguous insight, leave us finally adrift in Kerouac’s sad America. Unlike for Emerson, for Kerouac the railroad is not a liberating magician’s rod but a watcher of the loss and poverty of postwar America—a loss and poverty many seemed bent on keeping hidden in the 1950s. The train always takes us to and through the worst sections of American towns, and Kerouac’s visions from his days as a brakeman on the Southern Pacific remind us of this. The ‘‘whole Coast Division,’’ he described, ‘‘begins at those sad dead end blocks of Third and Townsend where grass grows from soot beds like green hair of old tokay heroes long slanted into the ground like the railroad men of the 19th century whom I saw in the Colorado plains at little train order stations slanted into the ground of the hard dry dustcake, boxed, mawk-lipped, puking grit . . .’’ and moves on past ‘‘horrible Kafka cement factories’’ and the ‘‘rats of South City slaughterhouses.’’16 In On the Road the dialectic of doing and undergoing is alive and well in a series of cross-country journeys that leave us—and the protagonists—weary and confused. But Kerouac, despite the brooding,

................. 15741$

CH14

02-13-06 14:43:48

PS

PAGE 230


2 31

the loss, and the emptiness, sees in his America a source of enlightenment bound simply to the acceptance of what happens. In Jamesian terms, he acknowledges the risk we take in being and acting, and shows a willingness to live with the consequences. This is nowhere more apparent than in Big Sur. Here Kerouac, like Parsons’s Grievous Angel, anticipates with hope a western trip, to ‘‘grow up with the country.’’ Kerouac plans to stay at a friend’s cabin in then undeveloped Big Sur to refresh his life. He will contemplate and write in solitude. Instead, bound by the chains of his alcoholism, he finds himself drunk in San Francisco. At Big Sur he faces delirium tremens and the absolute failure of his purpose. When he invites friends to join him at Big Sur as he fights his demons, nothing is achieved—parties lead to depression, which leads back to drinking and to guilt. The clarity with which Kerouac is able to document his own alcoholism and its attendant paranoia is troubling at one level but redemptive at another. Big Sur recognizes our human lostness, but does not give in to morbidity and ‘‘the problem of evil.’’ It is in seeing clearly, in remembering, that Kerouac finds an avenue of transcendence for his ‘‘golden empty soul’’: I’ll get my ticket and say goodbye on a flower day and leave all San Francisco behind and go back home across autumn America and it’ll all be like it was in the beginning—Simple golden eternity blessing all—Nothing ever happened—Not even this. . . . On soft Spring nights I’ll stand in the yard under the stars—Something good will come out of all things yet—And it will be golden and eternal just like that—There’s no need to say another word.17

Learning patience and acceptance, if it were not for the goldenness and goodness, would seem almost Stoic. But Kerouac’s Catholicism never leaves one without action; good works are still significant in disclosing the presence of grace. The acceptance of loss is but the opening condition for the acts that are selfless. Kerouac was a devotee of St. Francis, and this makes good sense of his understanding of ‘‘beat’’ and ‘‘beatific.’’ He was not only the Great Rememberer, but also the ultimate befriender of the destitute, the underclass, the crimi-

................. 15741$

CH14

02-13-06 14:43:49

PS

PAGE 231

2 32


nal. The list of ‘‘friends’’ in the Duluoz legend, aside from the desolation angels themselves, is filled with drug addicts, hookers, migrant workers, vagrants, and others who have been left behind by American culture. For Kerouac, it is only by remembering the Golden Eternity, by returning to our ultimate origins and accepting the emptiness of nature, that we can become ready to enact a Franciscan way of life—a life of beatific action. To be fully a desolation angel or a grievous angel, one must be both beat and beatific. Hope and loss are not so much contradictories or opposed parties as they are complementary features of a peculiarly American philosophical outlook. Straightforward hope is perhaps more Roman, straight-up loss, perhaps more Russian. Despite their different historical angles of vision, Kerouac and Emerson both tell us about ourselves: our history, our culture, our music, our literature. They are exhortatory writers and they do call us out into the world of our own experiences. These philosophical poets take up Emerson’s call to raise and cheer, to lead us into reflections on hope and loss. Writing and life are never fully separated for Emerson or Kerouac. This is a feature of culture that was inherited by Gram Parsons, Lucinda Williams, Ken Kesey, Annie Dillard, Norman Maclean, Tom Wolfe, Bob Dylan, and the Grateful Dead, among many others. As grievous angels, Emerson and Kerouac take their readers on journeys into their own experiences and into considerations of possibility and the hope and loss that go with them. In a land as wide and diverse as their America, this is no small task. The fact that their respective messages transcend generational differences suggests that we should listen to them as carefully as we can. Parsons was right in believing community was vertical as well as horizontal; community must cross time as well as space. He was also proved right in believing music to be an effective mediator of community, as we now see in American culture—as the eclecticism of the airwaves and Internet shows, we now listen across generational, cultural, and geographic divides. Rural New England boys play basketball to the sounds of hip-hop, young people listen to Jimi Hendrix, and many older folks pay attention to the contemporary scene. My suggestion is that Emerson and Kerouac, if we

................. 15741$

CH14

02-13-06 14:43:50

PS

PAGE 232


2 33

make the effort to listen carefully, can also play such a mediating role in continuing to develop community in our own version of America and its nature. Emerson sings of the hope embedded in Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, and Kerouac reminds us of our necessary openness to the lost and the beat that is engraved on our Statue of Liberty. Living in such a strange dialectic may be both difficult and worthwhile.

................. 15741$

CH14

02-13-06 14:43:51

PS

PAGE 233

fifteen

pragmatic i ntellectuals Facing Loss in the Spirit of American Philosophy

M

y final remarks are not so much a philosophical discourse as an essay or an exhortation from the vicinity of the heart. This stems not from any disdain on my part for philosophical discourses, but from the way I see the question at hand: the question of the future of pragmatism and, perhaps, of American philosophy more widely conceived. It is a question from which I cannot extricate myself. Because I work under the influence of American thinking, any answer I give bears personal consequences. And as was noted in chapter 2, it is precisely this personal dimension that, for some at least, separates pragmatism from philosophy. As Paul Carus put it in response to William James’s work: ‘‘In the philosophy of a man like William James the personal equation is the most important item. . . . This attitude is desirable in a poet, but not in a philosopher.’’1 Thinking about pragmatism’s future engages me in a question of and a quest for vocation, and it is on these that my essay will focus. I proceed in the hope that Dewey is right in maintaining that ‘‘The future as well { 23 4 }

................. 15741$

CH15

02-13-06 14:43:49

PS

PAGE 234

pragmatic intellec tuals

2 35

as the past can be a source of interest and consolation and give meaning to the present’’ (LW, 2:20). As an invocation I borrow some words from the late Rev. Gary Davis, who was among the best twentieth-century American blues guitarists. Reverend Davis was perplexed by the technical, positivistic attitude of those who came to apprentice with him, mostly young, white, middle-class males. I begin with his response to this phenomenon: I’m subject to mistakes. All of us are. Sometimes you’re going East, and you’re actually going West. That’s the way it happens with all of us sometimes. Mistakes is the best start in life. You know too much, you understand, then you done made a mistake already. You be too perfect, then the mistake’s already been made. But you go to try to do a thing and make a mistake to start off with, then that’s the best start in life. It gives somebody a chance to correct you.2

Pragmatic Intellectuals Pragmatism, by some quirk of fate, was granted its own Indian summer at the close of its first century—with renewed interest in both its originators and its revisers, pragmatism’s life has been extended. Yet it has long been a question, especially, perhaps, for pragmatists, what it means to be a ‘‘pragmatic intellectual.’’ As a new century brings November to this Indian summer, the question becomes more pressing. Despite their emphasis on practice, pragmatists are, for ordinary persons, simply parts of the aggregate of intellectuals and academics. C. Wright Mills observed in 1942 that ‘‘Pragmatists have typically been sons of the middle class rising within these strata into rather comfortable academic professions.’’3 On the other side, philosophers and other intellectuals have long assaulted pragmatism for its lack of sophistication. Carus, with his noted candor, put it as follows: ‘‘I go so far as to look upon its [pragmatism’s] wide acceptance as a symptom of the immaturity and naı¨vete´ that obtains sometimes even in the professional circles of our universities.’’4 An even more humor-

................. 15741$

CH15

02-13-06 14:43:49

PS

PAGE 235

2 36


ous, more frightening, and, if true, more damning assault on pragmatism’s professional place was made by Albert Schinz: In our days of democracy, philosophic ideas are no longer discussed among the chosen few, but by everybody, by the masses; the result is that philosophy is no longer free to express truths which might be dangerous for the masses. Philosophy must express only useful, moral, pragmatic truth, even though truth itself lie in an opposite direction. . . . Pragmatism is nothing but this adulterated philosophy; philosophy sold to democracy.5

It is difficult not to have a nagging suspicion that Schinz had somehow come across Richard Rorty’s ‘‘The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy’’ and ‘‘Postmodern Bourgeois Liberalism’’ in 1909. The cultural pressures from both directions continue to effect a sense of doubt concerning their vocation on the part of at least some pragmatic intellectuals. The terms of the phrase ‘‘pragmatic intellectuals’’—much like the terms of Emerson’s phrase ‘‘American scholar’’—generate an internal tension as well; they resist yet at the same time demand one another. Pragmatic intellectuals are thinkers whose pragmatism tempers their intellectualism and whose intellectual dimension both underwrites and undermines their pragmatism. Pragmatic intellectuals of the present generation are not only pragmatists but also thinkers averse to various doctrines and features of various pragmatisms: thinkers who are in some part self-aversive. All of this is perhaps an indirect way of saying that pragmatism, at its heart, is open to its own passing, its own loss. Living into and through this loss is what it means to be a pragmatic intellectual in the early twenty-first century. The belief that one must face the passing of one’s own ideas and, more positively, that one must constantly reawaken to new angles of vision is a persistent one in the tradition of American thinking. Jonathan Edwards’s ‘‘Personal Narrative,’’ for example, reveals a soul never certain that its latest conversion is genuine and final. Having reflected on his soul’s journey through a lifetime of conversions, Ed-

................. 15741$

CH15

02-13-06 14:43:50

PS

PAGE 236


2 37

wards, ever hopeful for signs of his own salvation, still finds himself in the precarious environment of doubt. Emerson, throughout his early essays, harps on the importance of self-aversion, of the ability to draw new circles and move to higher platforms: ‘‘Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day’’ (CW, 2:33). Thoreau identifies himself repeatedly with chanticleer, always on the verge of announcing a new awakening. The pragmatists, each in his way, captured and systematized this transitional, itinerant spirit of American thinking. Peirce’s fallibilism, James’s pragmatism and radical empiricism, and Dewey’s experimentalism all play on the finitude and contingency of our best thinking. The ‘‘scientific spirit,’’ Peirce says, ‘‘requires a man to be at all times ready to dump his whole cartload of beliefs, the moment experience is against them’’ (CP 1:55). We must always think and believe under the possibility of revision—we must always be willing to face the loss of our own thinking and to understand that our failures may, both presently and in some long run, be as instructive as our successes. The pragmatic intellectual emerges from and within this intellectual history—this actual career of thought. To be willing to face this loss, one must understand oneself always to be located in transition. However, one must also be able to be at home in the transition. This transitional status, as each of the pragmatists has noted, means that not only as professional intellectuals without a clear cultural place, but also as human beings, pragmatic philosophers live in a world of risk and precariousness. Pragmatism’s Loss What will it mean for pragmatists to give their attention to pragmatism’s own transitional and precarious status? How shall pragmatism face its own losses and failures in its own future, as, for pragmatists, I think it must? ‘‘Pragmatism,’’ as Carus observed, ‘‘appeared cometlike on our intellectual horizon’’;6 moreover, it came advertised by Peirce, James, Dewey, and Schiller as a method for establishing meaning and conducting inquiry. As James put it:

................. 15741$

CH15

02-13-06 14:43:51

PS

PAGE 237

2 38


It has no dogmas, and no doctrines save its method. As the young Italian pragmatist Papini has well said, it lies in the midst of our theories like a corridor in a hotel. . . . No particular results, then, so far, but only an attitude of orientation, is what the pragmatic method means.7

Two items of note appear in this originary description. First is the description of pragmatism as a ‘‘method’’ that ‘‘means,’’ pragmatically speaking, ‘‘an attitude of orientation.’’ To this I will return below. The second item is that although pragmatism is a method, it does not appear unenvironed: ‘‘It lies in the midst of our theories.’’ Thus, as James well knew, despite the suggestive innocence of this particular passage, pragmatism never appeared without having been inoculated with some constitutive worldview or other: Peirce’s trinitarian realism, James’s articulate pluralism, Schiller’s humanism, or Dewey’s naturalism. These thinkers arrived not as what Royce called ‘‘pure pragmatists’’; they arrived as pragmatic intellectuals. As John McDermott puts it: Despite some surface ambiguity, a careful reading of James will show it to be clear, both textually and thematically, that for him pragmatism is a methodological application of his radical empiricism. In that sense, to call James simply a pragmatist is misleading and, indeed, without radical empiricism as a metaphysical base, pragmatism is subject to the savage philosophical critique it has received.8

The point was made less elegantly in 1909, when Edwin Tausch observed that ‘‘Mr. James still believes in theoretic grubbing and brooding; he is still a philosopher.’’9 This second item of James’s description of pragmatism is especially important to highlight in light of some contemporary readings of the history of pragmatism. The career of pragmatism is and has been dynamic. It is not the career of a method alone, but the career of a method, as attitude, engaged in rethinking and reconstructing particular and idiosyncratic conceptions of experience and nature. Not surprisingly, there is no one, distillable version of pragmatism any more than there was a single mode of idealism at the close of the nineteenth

................. 15741$

CH15

02-13-06 14:43:52

PS

PAGE 238


2 39

century. Philosophical movements, in James’s way of putting it, ‘‘grow,’’ as do our lives, ‘‘by their edges’’; there is no singular channel of progression. In doing so, the passing of philosophical movements is never wholesale; nor do we ever simply ‘‘get over’’ old ways of thinking. We grow into new thoughts and modes of thinking, and we bring something with us despite our protestations and our claims to significant originality. ‘‘The most violent revolutions in an individual’s beliefs,’’ James says, ‘‘leave most of his old order standing.’’10 To think in a pragmatic vein, then, about pragmatism’s transitional status and its encounter with its own failures and losses, is to think about its avenues and modes of transition, about the ways it might extend its present edges; it is not to think about its wholesale rejection. I am not, however, concerned to guess at the substance of particular future transitions; rather, the heart of my exhortation is concerned with the pragmatic intellectual’s resources for dealing with the transitional status, including the future of pragmatism. Beyond Pragmatism The methodological and metaphysical dimensions McDermott notes in James present one exemplary way of articulating the inner tension of pragmatic intellectuals noted earlier. In classical pragmatism it is the tension between the pragmatic dimension as locus of criticism and the intellectual, constitutive dimension as both the order in which criticism occurs and, in part, the object of criticism. James, it appears, could not quite decide whether truth shall be only expedience ‘‘in the way of our thinking’’11 or satisfaction that must lead, however circuitously, to ‘‘reality.’’12 Peirce seemed perplexed by the nature of belief. On the one hand, his theoretical, scientific method is the only acceptable and useful method of fixing belief; on the other hand, ‘‘what is properly and usually called belief . . . has no place in science at all’’ (CP, 1:634). Finally, we seem to find, as Rorty and others suggest, two John Deweys: one, a social critic who tinkered with ideas to solve problems, and one, a metaphysician who wished to describe the generic traits of experience.

................. 15741$

CH15

02-13-06 14:43:52

PS

PAGE 239

2 40


It is from this situation of ambivalent pragmatic intellectuals that the future of American pragmatism must take its bearings. It is from this situation that two very different suggestions concerning pragmatism’s present and future have already developed. My belief is that neither of these more recent suggestions has a chance of taking pragmatism beyond itself, because neither faces pragmatism fully on its own terms. Neither actually faces the loss, the always transitional character, of pragmatism, because neither, as I see it, despite acknowledging the ambivalent situation, comes to grips with the existential condition of pragmatic intellectuals. The general strategy adopted by each of these two visions of pragmatism is to eliminate the pragmatic intellectual’s tension. We are pushed to adopt one James and reject the other, to prefer a little ‘‘d’’ Dewey or a big ‘‘D’’ Dewey, and to choose, as Thomas Goudge did some years ago, between a Peirce who is a solid, analytical philosopher of science and an eccentric Peirce who is a ‘‘transcendentalist’’ inquiring about the practical upshots of religious experience. The best-known of these suggestive responses to eliminate the tension in pragmatism’s condition is the neopragmatism described by Rorty and others. The neopragmatic approach, roughly stated, is to grasp the pragmatic dimension of pragmatic intellectuals and, in an interesting sort of philosophical suicide, to eclipse and belittle the intellectual dimension. In his well-known introduction to The Consequences of Pragmatism, Rorty argued that the neopragmatic pragmatist ‘‘tries to defend himself by saying that one can be a philosopher precisely by being anti-Philosophical, that the best way to make things hang together is to step back from the issues between Platonists and positivists, and thereby give up the presuppositions of Philosophy.’’13 Rorty does seem to agree with James’s suggestion that humans are afflicted with an ‘‘ontological wonder sickness’’ that drives their intellectual dimension, pushing and leading them into the tasks of ‘‘Philosophy’’ or constitutive thinking. However, he takes it to be a cultural contingency that we can cure simply by getting over it; it is, for him, a psychosomatic sickness or a functional hypochondria. In

................. 15741$

CH15

02-13-06 14:43:52

PS

PAGE 240


2 41

this much he works in the vein of the positivists and linguistic analysts who, as Henry Johnstone, Sr., notes, ‘‘have not regarded the urge to philosophize as a built-in feature of human nature. They have thought instead that man might be purified or cured of this urge.’’14 For Rorty, we are ‘‘to understand the metaphysical urge, the urge to theorize, so well that . . . [we become] entirely free of it.’’15 The cure that neopragmatism provides thus involves a thoroughgoing skepticism concerning constitutive thinking.16 It describes what Josiah Royce characterized in his Presidential Address to the American Philosophical Association in 1903 as the experientially impossible perspective of the pure pragmatist. From this skepticism, the neopragmatist exercises her criticism as a pragmatist but lives without threat of being criticized because she has, effectively, undermined all constitutive orders that might authorize criticism. In this created logical space, the neopragmatist is free, as John William Miller put it, to ‘‘snipe at the universe.’’ The neopragmatic response resolves the tension, but leaves pragmatic intellectuals—or American scholars—with no residual vocation; they are asked, in Rorty’s version, to inhabit other vocations: those of artists or poets. The second contemporary suggestion for pragmatism’s present and future is what might be called neo-Peirceanism; it is championed by those, such as C. F. Delaney, who see Peirce’s conception of philosophy almost exclusively as ‘‘a mode of inquiry grounded in and reflective upon mathematics and the experimental sciences.’’17 Given my own affinity for Peirce’s thinking, I use the phrase with some reservation. Nevertheless, the title is appropriate insofar as the thinkers I have in mind have entrenched themselves in what appear to be the least pragmatic moments in the career of pragmatism: in Peirce’s early work on cognition and the history of science or in Peirce’s later pragmaticism, positivistically interpreted. Peirce, in this guise, serves as an exemplary intellectual’s intellectual whose devotion is to a theoretical activity that is fully divorced from practical interests or vitally important topics. This is the Peirce who in 1898 maintained that he was ‘‘a scientific man, condemning with the whole strength of conviction the Hellenic tendency to mingle Philosophy and Practice.’’18 By

................. 15741$

CH15

02-13-06 14:43:53

PS

PAGE 241

2 42


adopting Peirce and reconstructing him along these lines, the neo– Peirceans are able to discharge the pragmatic dimension of pragmatic intellectuals, thus resolving the tension in the opposite direction. They cure the ontological wonder sickness not by getting over it, but by exercising constitutive thinking, by intellectualizing. It is a cure, not a treatment, however, precisely because they divorce constitutive thought from any direct concern for the practical, the experienced. Once adopted, neo-Peirceanism tends to preclude any Jamesian, existential wonder sickness from welling up; it has already been taken up into the purely intellectual sphere to be treated as, at worst, a puzzle. Nevertheless, neo-Peirceanism posits itself as a form of pragmatism because, under the influence of Peirce’s evolutionism, it has incorporated a transitional character in constitutive thinking. It sees the dynamism involved in Peirce’s conception of truth, but holds out a hope for closure and completeness in a finite career of inquiry. The neo–Peirceans do suggest a vocation: that of the academic professional. They are in agreement with James’s colleague Mu¨nsterberg when he states that ‘‘Philosophy is a movement of thought which demands the thoroughness of the expert, and which can be followed only with concentrated attention.’’19 Both/And As a twenty-first-century pragmatic intellectual I find myself standing in aversion to both of these contemporary suggestions. Both are offered as pragmatisms to revise and replace classical pragmatisms. However, their conception of revision is limited to amputation. Neo– Peirceanism tries to treat philosophical thinking as its own order, divorced from the experience that engenders its questions and that might benefit from its illumination. It does its best to settle in a particular conception of the past. Neopragmatism, while dealing with some features of ordinary experience, would prevent me from dealing with the orders and categories in and through which these features make themselves known and meaningful. It establishes a future at the expense of the past.

................. 15741$

CH15

02-13-06 14:43:53

PS

PAGE 242


2 43

Another way to point to the source of my aversion to these new versions of pragmatism is to point to the fact that they have developed, in part at least, from outside the pragmatic tradition. Both draw their inspiration from movements and/or elements of movements within the Anglo-American tradition of philosophical analysis. Whether, as Joseph Margolis suggests, some sort of forced merger between pragmatism and this movement is a good thing is a matter for another essay; however, I do think the future of pragmatism needs to develop more directly through pragmatism, facing its own internal tension. No other angle of vision will offer the same insights into the internal fissures and junctures of pragmatism’s career. This difference in pedigree is concretized in the very way in which the tension of pragmatic intellectuals is approached. Both neopragmatism and neo-Peirceanism feel a need to resolve the logic of the tension. Their attitude is shot through with a strict nominalism that breaks experience into ordered bits and pieces, and that therefore reads the tension as a set of disjuncts: either theory or practice, either private or public, either scientific or poetic, and so on. From the logical point of view, it seems necessary to move to one side or the other of each of these disjuncts; we are persistently faced with an either/or. Ironically, in their attempts to find a pragmatic vocation, neopragmatists and neo-Peirceans share a more general vocation: the avoidance of contradiction.20 This approach to the pragmatic tension operates on the supposition that the pragmatists were unwitting victims of logical contradictions—that they were historically placed such that they could not help themselves. We see this way of thinking exemplified in Rorty’s discussion of Dewey’s metaphysics: Dewey, he argues, ‘‘should not be blamed if he occasionally came down with the disease he was trying to cure.’’21 What has always struck me as central to the pragmatic intellectual’s point of view, however, is precisely the rejection of either/ or thinking. Peirce’s careful employment of his own triadic categorical scheme, for example, is a studied effort to avoid excluded middles. The pragmatists, as I read them, are both/and thinkers. This is not to say that they are always fully aware of where their thinking takes them

................. 15741$

CH15

02-13-06 14:43:53

PS

PAGE 243

2 44


or that they fully understand all the ways in which they are both/anding. Nor does it mean that each of them didn’t have favorite emphases. Rather, I am thinking of the attitudes with which they approached dyads and triads. For them, the both/and-ness of the ‘‘pragmatic’’ and ‘‘intellectual’’ dimensions is an experiential, not a merely logical, operation. Method and Attitude It is down this both/and road that embraces the internal tension of pragmatism that there appears to me to be a way of facing the future of pragmatism and whatever failures and losses that may involve. Facing the retail losses of pragmatic thinking cannot be a merely passive endeavor. To face the loss, as James might have put it, is in part to create the loss. This creative act seems to me to become a real possibility in the both/and condition of the pragmatic intellectual. For the neo–Peirceans it is swallowed up in the inevitability of things; for neopragmatists it is lost to the irresponsibility of sheer spontaneity. Pragmatism has often been marked as a philosophy of method. There is without question a truth in this description. Nevertheless, unless the pragmatic meaning of ‘‘method’’ is addressed, this conception of pragmatism leaves unnoticed some important features of the pragmatic intellectual’s condition. ‘‘Method,’’ in its intellectual guise, suggests epistemological structures whose employment will effect some route to truth or disclosure. Insofar as the pragmatists focus on ‘‘method,’’ it is easy to construe their focus as intending a reconstruction of logic and the formal and social orders of inquiry. In light of Peirce’s methodeutic, which he built around his stages of inquiry— abduction, deduction, and induction—and in light of Dewey’s several inquiries into logic, this is no doubt a good part of what the pragmatists meant (see CP, 6:428). However, I am convinced that Peirce was struggling to, and that James and Dewey in fact did, mean more in their conceptions of ‘‘method.’’ What they developed in an intellectual vein as formal and social orders were meant to be cashed out existentially. The methods they produced were iconic of and indexical

................. 15741$

CH15

02-13-06 14:43:54

PS

PAGE 244


2 45

for a more general attitude or bearing: a way of being that keeps constitutive thought alive but attentive to its human abode. The bearing I have in mind involves traits I identified earlier: both a pragmatic openness to our experiences and an intellectual willingness to risk our own conceptions of the world. Both attitudinal dimensions of pragmatic method are found, in different locations, in each of the classical pragmatists. Their emphases on method thus call us to an apprenticeship to this bearing and attitude of openness in and through which our own questions may emerge. Perhaps the hardest case to make for the confluence of method and attitude is that of Peirce. Peirce’s appeal for neo–Peirceans, after all, is precisely that his work wears the tag of ‘‘pragmatism’’ but, through their amputative vision, also comes across as strictly intellectual. Peirce is relentless in his systematic reconstruction of the logic of inquiry, developing not only his existential graphs and logic of relatives, but also a conception of logic as semiotic. As important and influential as this work is, there lives behind it a concern with the scientific attitude of the inquirer or thinker. This concern is most overt in Peirce’s persistent references to the character requisite for the practice of science. This practice, he says, must be ‘‘moved by an intelligently sincere and effective desire to learn’’ (CP, 1:235): it is ‘‘the active wanting to know which implies we don’t already—that makes the scientific man’’ (MS 866:4). Peirce’s struggle to see the attitude beneath the method appears in his early work in the unusual closing paragraphs of ‘‘The Fixation of Belief,’’ to which we referred earlier. I repeat it here for emphasis. Having spent the entire essay laying out the necessity of the scientific method of fixing belief if one takes the ‘‘logical question’’ seriously, Peirce recognized that a formal, external acknowledgment of the method is insufficient: We must, he said, make ‘‘a choice which is far more than the adoption of any intellectual opinion, which is one of the ruling decisions of [one’s] life’’ (EP, 1:122). This choice bears with it the kind of existential commitments Peirce himself embraced in his euphuistic conclusion:

................. 15741$

CH15

02-13-06 14:43:54

PS

PAGE 245

2 46


The genius of a man’s logical method should be loved and reverenced as his bride, whom he has chosen from all the world. . . . he will work and fight for her, and will not complain that there are blows to take, hoping that there may be as many and as hard to give, and will strive to be the worthy knight and champion of her from the blaze of whose splendors he draws his inspiration and his courage. (EP, 1:123)

These overt references to the scientific attitude are more systematically sustained in Peirce’s conceptions of ‘‘living habits’’ and ‘‘living beliefs.’’ Habits, for Peirce, are embodied generals or thirds; they are living attitudes or headings through which our concrete action is conducted. In his 1902 essay ‘‘Reason’s Rules,’’ Peirce says that habits function such that one ‘‘will behave, or always tend to behave, in a way describable in general terms upon every occasion (or upon a considerable proportion of the occasions) that may present itself of a generally describable character’’ (CP, 5:38). Peirce’s conception of habit applied to all lawlike behavior, human or otherwise, but he usually reserved the term ‘‘belief’’ to designate specifically human habits governing conduct. Beliefs are habits. Thus, to believe in scientific method is not merely to make assertions concerning propositions, but to embody the meanings of such propositions in one’s life: to be prepared to act in a scientific way. Peirce pointedly, for example, rejected a narrow conception of belief in discussing religious belief: It is absurd to say that religion is a mere belief. You might as well call a society a belief, or politics a belief, or civilization a belief. Religion is a life, and can be identified with a belief only provided that belief be a living belief—a thing to be lived rather than said or thought. (CP, 6:439)

Method, for Peirce, is inefficacious if it is not lived. ‘‘All education,’’ he said in describing his own correspondence course on the art of reasoning, ‘‘broad or narrow, is intended to teach the student to do something’’ (W, 6:11). The move from formal orders to existential attitudes seems to me clearer in the work of both James and Dewey. In focusing on our

................. 15741$

CH15

02-13-06 14:43:55

PS

PAGE 246


2 47

personal conduct within communities, Dewey gave ongoing attention to education as a process of developing living habits and attitudinal orientations. Ironically, if not tragically, many of those who followed Dewey’s lead in pedagogy have seemed to understand his conception of method in a much more mechanical sense. Although the importance of this transition from method to attitude is apparent in his work on both logic and education, it is perhaps most strikingly presented in his central concern with democracy. Unlike many democratic theorists, Dewey did not focus on particular, absolute fixtures of either institutions or processes to define democracy. He looked, rather, to our personal habits, attitudes, and ways of being. For Dewey, successful democratic living depends on attitudes of openness and inclusion, and on habits of setting individuals free through education. All social institutions, he believed, have as their purpose ‘‘to set free and to develop the capacities of human individuals without respect to race, sex, class or economic status’’ (MW, 12:186). In James’s work the case for the continuity of method and attitude is similarly clear. James focused on the individual’s affective encounter with the world and tried to exemplify the ‘‘radically empiricist attitude’’ he believed was most suitable to this encounter. Within this attitude, ‘‘the crudity of experience remains an eternal element’’ of the world.22 He then brought the importance of attitude to bear on our intellectual activity. As we noted earlier, James identified the pragmatic method as an attitude. He had already suggested, in an Emersonian vein, that philosophies generally were matters of internal bearing: ‘‘The history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments.’’23 Pragmatism, then, must make its own place in this history: It is a method only. But the general triumph of that method would mean an enormous change in what I called in my last lecture the ‘‘temperament’’ of philosophy.24

I think it fair to suggest that each of the pragmatists exemplified his own method and attitude in his own life: Peirce, the scientific; Dewey, the democratic; and James, the radically empirical. Each de-

................. 15741$

CH15

02-13-06 14:43:55

PS

PAGE 247

2 48


fined a way of believing while being open to failure, to otherness, and to revision. We must apprentice not only to what the pragmatists say, but also to their very conduct of life. The apprenticing task is not merely intellectual, though it clearly has an intellectual dimension. Nor is the task simply to think within the constraints of a formal, logical structure. Rather, the apprenticeship is to an attitude of openness in and through which one’s own questions may emerge, and of willingness to risk failure in answering one’s own questions. It is within this attitude that I see some resources for handling the future of pragmatism.

The Both/And of the Attitude The fallibilistic and experimental heart of the pragmatic attitude points, as we have seen, to the experiencing of risk, precariousness, and instability. This instability, as the pragmatists see it, engages our actions and our thoughts. Peirce focused on the cognitive dimension of experience in defining his fallibilism as ‘‘the doctrine that our knowledge is never absolute but always swims, as it were, in a continuum of uncertainty and of indeterminacy’’ (CP, 1:71). James’s radically empirical attitude focused on our direct encounters of risk in living and thinking. For James, we must be ready to lose if we are to achieve a life worth living; contingency is an essential feature of human experience. From his democratic point of view, Dewey, more dramatically, addressed the whole of our existence: Man finds himself in an aleatory world; his existence involves, to put it boldly, a gamble. The world is a scene of risk; it is uncertain, unstable, uncannily unstable. Its dangers are irregular, inconsistent, not to be counted upon as to their times and seasons. (LW, 1:43)

In our present academic setting, this heart of the attitude, I think, is easy to lose sight of; it has to some degree been lost, I think, by both the neopragmatic and the neo–Peircean schools of pragmatism.

................. 15741$

CH15

02-13-06 14:43:56

PS

PAGE 248


2 49

We seem forgetful of our fragility. In the early twenty-first century, we pragmatic intellectuals, relatively speaking, live in isolation and privilege—a gift of history. Yet, to repeat Dewey’s warning: We have heaped up riches and means of comfort between ourselves and the risks of the world. We have professionalized amusement as an agency of escape and forgetfulness. But when all is said and done, the fundamentally hazardous character of the world is not seriously modified, much less eliminated. (LW, 1:45)

Indeed, it is not just amusement that we have professionalized; in many ways, we have become professional pragmatists. Despite the fact that this professionalization brings with it some ameliorating traits, when it serves a second master and becomes an ‘‘agency of escape and forgetfulness,’’ it leads us out of the pragmatic attitude. An apprenticeship to the attitude requires an acknowledgment of an amateur status and an engagement in the confessional thinking this status occasionally demands. As professional academics, we stand over against ‘‘ordinary’’ persons and philosophical amateurs. The important truth in our professional status is that we can and do speak a language and discuss a history for which there are requisite abilities and modes of expertise: Moreover, when driven through the pragmatic attitude at hand, the professionally informed thinking can bear significant consequences for our culture. The failure in our professionalization is the rejection or denial of the amateur status. As Mills remarked, we have entered into an economy of academic marketing and entrepreneurship. Insight, joy, and truth are no more strangers to fourth-rate bars than to academic offices; nor are pains and self-deceptions any less rare in the latter. Recovery of an amateur status seems crucial to the health of any future for pragmatic intellectuals. To be an amateur is to recognize one’s ordinariness and, in that moment, to recall that philosophy—in both its therapeutic and its constitutive strands— grows out of questions that occur in the ordinary. We need neither demean nor ignore the history of philosophy to recognize that its questions are ours only insofar as we experientially appropriate them.

................. 15741$

CH15

02-13-06 14:43:56

PS

PAGE 249

2 50


Formal and distanced accounts of third-man arguments, mind–body problems, and questions of the existence of God provoke no philosophy in us unless, in Thoreau’s way of putting it, we find a way to own them as our questions. James’s extended depression, Dewey’s worry in the little town of Oil City about his own possibilities, and Peirce’s awakening at age fifty to the absence of any source of income put Peirce’s claim that philosophical inquiry should not begin with ‘‘fake doubt’’ in a somewhat different light. Philosophy Americana grows out of our experiences of better and worse. The naked joys and sheer hurts of existing; the startling silence of a winter storm; the green smell of alfalfa in a summer night; the haunting and lingering wonder of a twelve-year-old boy awakened by the doorbell in the deep of night, who, in a gray Formica-ed kitchen, sees his mother comfort the sobbing, hunched, and beaten form of a friend’s mother: such are the origins of pragmatic intellectuals in an amateur status. In bringing philosophy back home, the amateur status invests thinking with an openness and receptiveness to its culture, its environment. Peirce’s ‘‘musement’’—the living process of making room for ideas to present themselves to us—involves the attempt, open to geniuses and clodhoppers alike, to allow thought to develop from lived hopes and doubts. It is in part, I think, this amateurness that James and Dewey sought to indicate through their respective emphases on ‘‘the popular’’ and ‘‘the democractic.’’ They were not seeking, as Mu¨nsterberg claimed, to oversimplify their intellectual and professional tasks, but to tether these to their experiential origins. John William Miller, though only indirectly on behalf of the pragmatists, highlighted the role of an amateur orientation: But philosophy that does not begin with life, with concern over the absolute victory to be won or the absolute defeat to be suffered, will sound no trumpets for battle and usher in no healing peace. Decadence and enervation, perhaps highly ornamented in fine logic, thoroughly urbane and elaborately mannered, is their deadly substitute for a keen abundance of life. Philosophy, like religion, must lay an absolute challenge and be content to accept the sequel for better or worse.25

................. 15741$

CH15

02-13-06 14:43:57

PS

PAGE 250


2 51

Apprenticeship to the pragmatic attitude requires another, related resistance to professionalization. Our profession is that of the professor, and the habit of pro-fessing easily becomes an agency for escape and forgetfulness. Inveterate professors, like men driving in unfamiliar cities, often become unable to admit that they can get lost. To resist this degenerative dimension of our professional professing, we must recover an ability to confess: to acknowledge our finitude, our doubts, and our romances. Confessional thinking articulates a home for philosophical endeavor; it openly admits to the constraints of its environment. It provides a way for us to admit to and live with the possibility of our own failure. In doing so, I think, it also works the popular and the democratic into its language. As pro-fessors, as James noted early on, we are lecturers; we speak at, not with, whatever audience we can find. In professing without confessing, we move toward a sterile isolation in which our talk always seems to be about secondhand problems. ‘‘Such are the rules of the professorial game,’’ James complained, ‘‘they think and write from each other and for each other and at each other exclusively.’’26 This dimension of the professional side of the philosophical vocation has ongoingly worried pragmatic intellectuals; the irony of the present is that we must now worry about ourselves. Although the pragmatic method begins with living doubts and actual problems, and the pragmatic attitude recognizes and confesses these in their particularity, this is not yet adequate to the pragmatic intellectual’s needs. Pragmatism never relinquished commitment to metaphysical or constitutive thinking. Rather, it emphasized the amateur and the confessional in order both to display the local origins that demand it and to temper its creative development. Pragmatic intellectuals have always engaged possibilities-in-view with imaginative and speculative power, which, though acknowledging its finitude, risked describing the natures of things. Thus, as John McDermott notes, ‘‘Pragmatism features a paradoxical combination of epistemic modesty and boldness.’’27 The ongoing life of recovery that we all face in an aleatory world, in a gambling existence, is one that demands

................. 15741$

CH15

02-13-06 14:43:57

PS

PAGE 251

2 52


experientially, not logically, not only local problem solving but also the wider healing effect of thinking through what we are and what sorts of transactions we have with our environment. The third feature of the pragmatic attitude, then, is precisely a willingness to risk constitutive thinking. The centrality of this willingness is, again, fully apparent in both the content and the practice of the pragmatic tradition. Peirce’s fascination with tychism and the creative work of abduction, and Dewey’s persistent appeal to creative intelligence, mark this centrality. James demanded not only that we always begin where we are, but also that we always make room for spontaneity and awakening: that we maintain ‘‘another realm into which the stifled soul may escape from pedantic scruples and indulge its own faith at its own risk.’’28 In performance, as Charlene Seigfried thoroughly illustrates, James reinvigorated his own constitutional thinking with an original analogical and metaphorical vocabulary whose constituents have become staples of our own pragmatic vocabularies: stream of consciousness, radical empiricism, cash value, and so on. Except insofar as what I say here demands one, I am not concerned with specific constitutive accounts of the world. Rather, I am concerned with the responsibility we have to maintain our world through them. The wonder sickness is not curable, but it is treatable. Constitutive thinking is not, as Rorty suggests, itself a disease, but a treatment whose excesses of presence (dogmatism) and absence (skepticism) must be constantly monitored. Relinquishing this responsibility for treatment, for establishing philosophically gained worlds, will always have the consequence of enabling these excesses to flourish. Conclusion The pragmatic attitude involves not only attentiveness to the instabilities of our existence but also the willingness to think toward conceptions of the world that will carry the freight of our experience. As we have already seen, Thoreau, by way of an analogy between thinking

................. 15741$

CH15

02-13-06 14:43:57

PS

PAGE 252


2 53

and walking, perhaps more sharply even than the pragmatists, captured the existential demand of this willingness: If you are ready to leave your father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again—if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man, then you are ready for a walk.29

Allowing this particular both/and-ness of amateur/confessional and constitutive/professional thinking to inhabit us, permits us, I think, to face the losses of pragmatism within the spirit of American philosophy. It enables us to be philosophers Americana. Through it we may both confess our present pragmatic doubts and failures and risk our own reconstructions of the constitutive orders of experience and nature. The vocation of apprenticeship to this both/and attitude and its dual function of bringing us home to ourselves and launching us toward the gambling of constitutive thinking allows us to be at home in transition. I opened this exhortation with Gary Davis’s appeal to the importance of failure; I close with a reflection on another of his habits. Reverend Davis recorded a variety of his guitar work, but always on the condition that there would be no retakes. Retakes, he believed, estranged him from his own risk and spontaneity. As this Indian summer of the pragmatic tradition and our romance with pragmatism come to an end, we might take our apprenticeship in the direction Reverend Davis indicates. In so doing, we might take a run at the sort of philosophical vocation Ralph Barton Perry attributed to William James: Philosophy was never, for James, a detached and dispassionate inquiry into truth; still less was it a form of amusement. It was a quest, the outcome of which was hopefully and fearfully apprehended by a soul on trial and awaiting its sentence.30

................. 15741$

CH15

02-13-06 14:43:58

PS

PAGE 253

................. 15741$

CH15

02-13-06 14:43:58

PS

PAGE 254

Notes

introduc tion inheritanc e , t e a c h i n g, and the insane angels of americ an c ulture Our Cultural Invisibility 1. All references to the writings of John Dewey will be to Early Works (EW), 5 vols. (1967–72); Middle Works (MW), 15 vols. (1976–83); and Later Works (LW), 17 vols. (1981–90), all edited by Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press). They are listed in the text with abbreviated titles and volume and page numbers. 2. I will employ the term ‘‘tychism’’ throughout the book. Charles Peirce coined the term to indicate a belief that some real chance was a feature of the universe. It was tychism that most attracted William James’s interest in Peirce’s early cosmological essays. 3. Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (CW), 6 vols., ed. Alfred R. Ferguson, Robert E. Spiller, Joseph Slater, and Douglas E. Wilson (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971–2003). References in text consist of CW with volume and page number. 4. John J. McDermott, ‘‘Trumping Cynicism with Imagination,’’ in A Parliament of Minds: Philosophy for a New Millennium, ed. Michael Tobias, J. Patrick Fitzgerald, and David Rothenberg (Albany: SUNY Press, 2000), pp. 60–75. 5. See Scott Pratt, Native Pragmatism: Rethinking the Roots of American Philosophy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002); and Leonard Harris, Scott Pratt, and Anne Waters, eds., American Philosophies: An Anthology (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002). 6. Carl Bode, ed., The Portable Emerson, rev. ed. (New York: Penguin, 1989), p. 53. { 25 5 }

................. 15741$

NOTE

02-13-06 14:42:21

PS

PAGE 255

2 56

N otes to Pa g e s 6 –1 3

7. bell hooks, Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (Boston: South End Press, 1990), p. 165. 8. References to the works of Charles Peirce will be made in the following manner. The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, 8 vols., ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (vols. 1–6) and Arthur Burks (vols. 7–8) (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1931–1958), cited in the text as CP with volume and paragraph number. The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, 2 vols., ed. Nathan Houser and Christian Kloesel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992–98), will be cited in the text as EP with volume and page number. The Charles S. Peirce Papers at the Houghton Library, Cambridge, MA, will be listed in the text as MS with manuscript number. Writings of Charles Peirce: A Chronological Edition, 6 vols., ed. Max Fisch, Christian Kloesel, and Nathan Houser (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982–2000), will be cited in the text as W with volume and page number. 9. Gloria Anzalduá, Borderlands: La Frontera (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987), p. 53. 10. Ibid., p. 59. 11. Margaret Fuller, Woman in the Nineteenth Century and Other Writings, ed. Donna Dickenson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. ix. 12. Anzalduá, Borderlands, p. 59. 13. Fuller, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, p. 75. 14. www.don-williams.com. Bob McDill, ‘‘Good Ole Boys like Me’’ (Universal Polygram International Publishing). The song appears on Don Williams, Portrait (MCA 3192, 1979). 15. William James, Some Problems of Philosophy: A Beginning of an Introduction to Philosophy (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), p. 8. 16. Carl Bode, ed., The Portable Thoreau (New York: Penguin, 1982), p. 611. 17. Jerry Garcia is the better known of these two, having been for many years the musical center of the Grateful Dead. Warren Zevon, perhaps best known for his song ‘‘Werewolves of London,’’ was another offbeat California musician of the 1970s. The point here is that both Zevon and Garcia, as ironist, poetic, social critics, remind me of Thoreau’s similar role in his hometown of Concord, Massachusetts. 18. William James, The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (New York: Longmans, Green, 1937), p. 59. 19. The song of this name can be found on Charlie Daniels’s 1982 album Windows (Epic 85443).

................. 15741$

NOTE

02-13-06 14:42:22

PS

PAGE 256

N otes to Pa g e s 1 3 –34

2 57

20. Some of these letters can be seen at the Experience Music Project in Seattle, WA. 21. Erin McKenna, The Task of Utopia: A Pragmatist and Feminist Perspective (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002). 22. John J. McDermott, The Culture of Experience (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1987), p. 44. c hapter one some preliminary remarks on the origins of pragmatism 1. I do not intend to provide a full history of the origins of pragmatism. Those interested in this question should see Max Fisch, Peirce, Semiotic, and Pragmatism: Essays, ed. Kenneth Ketner and Christian Kloesel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986); Horace S. Thayer, Meaning and Action, 2nd ed. (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1981); and Charles Morris, The Pragmatic Movement in America (New York: George Braziller, 1970). 2. William James, Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (New York: Longmans, Green, 1907), p. 296. 3. J. E. Creighton, ‘‘The Nature and Criterion of Truth,’’ The Philosophical Review 17 (1908): 592–93. 4. Ibid., p. 593. 5. Ibid. 6. Cheryl Misak, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Peirce (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 15. 7. Alfred Sidgwick, ‘‘The Ambiguity of Pragmatism,’’ Mind 33 (1908): 368. 8. Vincent Potter, Charles S. Peirce: On Norms and Ideals (New York: Fordham University Press, 1997), p. 26. 9. William James, The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (New York: Longmans, Green, 1937). 10. William M. Salter, ‘‘Pragmatism: A New Philosophy,’’ Atlantic Monthly 101 (1908): 660. 11. Paul Carus, ‘‘The Philosophy of Personal Equation,’’ The Monist 19, no. 1 (1909): 80. 12. James, The Will to Believe, p. 64. c hapter two royc e, philosophy , a n d w a n d e r i n g A Job Description 1. John Clendenning, ed., The Letters of Josiah Royce (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), pp. 370–71.

................. 15741$

NOTE

02-13-06 14:42:22

PS

PAGE 257

2 58

N o te s t o P ages 35 – 4 9

2. John E. Smith, ‘‘Introduction,’’ in Josiah Royce, The Problem of Christianity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), pp. 13–14. See also Frank M. Oppenheim, Royce’s Mature Philosophy of Religion (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1987), pp. 30–31. 3. John McDermott, ed., The Basic Writings of Josiah Royce, 2 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), vol. 1, p. 34. 4. Ibid., p. 35. 5. Ibid., p. 348. 6. Ibid., p. 349. 7. Frank M. Oppenheim, Royce’s Voyage Down Under: A Journey of the Mind (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1980), p. 22. 8. McDermott, Basic Writings of Josiah Royce, vol. 2, p. 853. 9. This description of God interestingly foreshadows Royce’s later move to focus on community, because a God who is at home as a wanderer cannot merely be a static totality. 10. McDermott, Basic Writings of Josiah Royce, vol. 2, p. 853. 11. Ibid. 12. Josiah Royce, The World and the Individual (New York: Dover, 1959), p. 6. 13. Ibid., p. 54. 14. Ibid., p. 57. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid., p. 148. 17. Ibid., p. 154. 18. Ibid., p. xv. 19. Ibid., p. 2. 20. Ibid., p. xv. 21. Ibid., p. 2. 22. Ibid., p. 3. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid., p. 5. 25. Ibid., pp. 28–29. 26. Ibid., p. 374. 27. Smith, ‘‘Introduction,’’ p. 2. 28. Royce, Problem of Christianity, p. 128. 29. John E. Smith, America’s Philosophical Vision (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 144. 30. McDermott, Basic Writings of Josiah Royce, vol. 1, p. 265.

................. 15741$

NOTE

02-13-06 14:42:22

PS

PAGE 258

N otes to Pa g e s 5 0 –5 5

2 59

c hapter three wilderness as philosophic al home 1. I use the word ‘‘wilderness’’ here as did European–Americans in the nineteenth century. However, what is wilderness for some is ‘‘home’’ for others, and it is important to keep these perspectives in mind. As Bruce Wilshire suggests, some persons have a ‘‘wilderness self’’ that allows them to be at home in wild situations (Wild Hunger: The Primal Roots of Modern Addiction [Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998], pp. 84–85). Nevertheless, the European–American version is useful in establishing the analogy that Bugbee develops. 2. Henry Bugbee chose to do philosophy differently in the 1950s. The Inward Morning was unique and drew significant praise, but was held to be something other than philosophy. After working for several years at Harvard, Bugbee was let go for the usual reason—he didn’t publish enough in the right places. Nevertheless, W. V. Quine, who worked with Bugbee for a time, recalled that ‘‘Henry is the ultimate exemplar of the examined life.’’ Edward F. Mooney, ed., Wilderness and the Heart: Henry Bugbee’s Philosophy of Place, Presence, and Memory (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1999), n.p. 3. Ibid., p. 76. 4. Henry Bugbee, The Inward Morning: A Philosophical Exploration in Journal Form (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1999), p. 138. 5. Ibid., p. 39. 6. John Anderson, The Individual and the New World: A Study of Man’s Existence Based upon American Life and Thought (State College, PA: Bald Eagle Press, 1955), p. 20. Anderson and Bugbee were good friends and longtime correspondents; Bald Eagle Press was the initial publisher of The Inward Morning in 1958. 7. Bugbee, Inward Morning, p. 24. 8. Ibid., p. 107. 9. Mooney, Wilderness and the Heart, p. 12. 10. Anderson, Individual and the New World, p. 3. 11. Bugbee, Inward Morning, p. 156. 12. Ibid., p. 164. 13. Ibid., p. 209. 14. Ibid., p. 154. 15. Mooney, Wilderness and the Heart, p. 96. 16. Ibid., p. 15.

................. 15741$

NOTE

02-13-06 14:42:22

PS

PAGE 259

2 60

N otes to Pa g e s 5 5 – 68

17. Ibid., p. 93. 18. Bugbee, Inward Morning, p. 155. 19. Ibid., p. 43. 20. Mooney, Wilderness and the Heart, p. 8. 21. Bugbee, Inward Morning, p. 47. 22. Ibid., p. 51. 23. Ibid., p. 53. 24. Ibid., p. 83. 25. Ibid., p. 53. 26. Ibid., p. 66. 27. Ibid., p. 170. 28. Ibid., p. 155. 29. Ibid., p. 96. 30. Ibid., pp. 144, 141. 31. Ibid., p. 160. 32. Ibid., p. 155. 33. Ibid., p. 126. 34. Ibid., p. 128. 35. Ibid., p. 220. 36. Ibid., p. 152. 37. Henry Bugbee, ‘‘Wilderness in America,’’ manuscript of a talk given by Bugbee, from Edward Mooney’s collection of Bugbee manuscripts, p. ix–5. Later published as ‘‘Wilderness in America,’’ Journal of the American Academy of Religion 42, no. 6 (December 1978): 614–20. 38. Bugbee, Inward Morning, p. 140. 39. Ibid., p. 158. 40. Bugbee, ‘‘Wilderness,’’ pp. ix–13. 41. Ibid., p. ix–7. 42. Ibid., p. ix–6. 43. Ibid., p. ix–9. 44. Ibid., p. ix–6. 45. Ibid. 46. Bugbee, Inward Morning, p. 163. 47. Bugbee, ‘‘Wilderness,’’ p. ix–10. 48. Bugbee, Inward Morning, p. 165. c hapter four working c ertainty and d eweyan wisdom 1. William Ernest Hocking, ‘‘Action and Certainty,’’ Journal of Philosophy 27, no. 9 (April 1930): 235.

................. 15741$

NOTE

02-13-06 14:42:23

PS

PAGE 260

N otes to P ages 68 – 8 6

2 61

2. Ibid., p. 233. 3. Ibid., p. 232. 4. Ibid., p. 233. 5. By ‘‘belief’’ I do not mean a dead proposition but, following Peirce and Hocking, that upon which I am willing to act, a living animation of will. 6. Hocking, ‘‘Action and Certainty,’’ p. 227. 7. Gabriel Marcel, The Mystery of Being (South Bend, IN: Regnery/Gateway, 1950; new ed., 1968), vol. 2, pp. 79–80. Marcel is here discussing ‘‘belief taken in its full or comprehensive reality’’ and not ‘‘a particular belief.’’ Nevertheless, I think his point is effective at least as a description of what I have in mind for our disclosed intuitions and found inheritances. 8. Henry Bugbee, The Inward Morning: A Philosophical Exploration in Journal Form (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1999), p. 36. Bugbee does suggest that Dewey moves in this direction when he speaks of a ‘‘sense of the whole and of communal solidarity’’ (Ibid.). 9. Carl Bode, ed., The Portable Thoreau (New York: Penguin, 1982), p. 350. 10. Hocking, ‘‘Action and Certainty,’’ p. 236. 11. Bugbee, Inward Morning, p. 35. 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid., p. 113. 14. Ibid., p. 37. 15. Thomas Alexander, John Dewey’s Theory of Art, Experience and Nature: The Horizons of Feeling (Albany: SUNY Press, 1987), p. 337. 16. Brand Blanshard, Reason and Goodness (New York: Macmillan, 1961), pp.169–71. c hapter five wildness as politic al ac t 1. Carl Bode, ed., The Portable Thoreau (New York: Penguin, 1982), p. 592. 2. Ibid., p. 821. 3. Ibid., p. 592. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid., p. 106. Richard Drinnon notes this mediation in ‘‘Thoreau’s Politics of the Upright Man,’’ in Thoreau in Our Season, ed. John H. Hicks (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1966). Thoreau’s differences with the social reformers, like Emerson’s, resulted directly from his different conception of political action and what constituted ameliorative work. By and large, he saw reformers as unfree—as disciples of one sort or another, or as marketers.

................. 15741$

NOTE

02-13-06 14:42:23

PS

PAGE 261

2 62

N otes to Pages 87 – 93

6. Thoreau’s differences with the social reformers, like Emerson’s, resulted directly from his different conception of political action and what constituted ameliorative work. By and large, he saw reformers as unfree—as disciples of one sort or another, or as marketers. 7. Bode, Portable Thoreau, p. 343. 8. Ibid., p. 594. 9. Ibid., p. 624. 10. Ibid., p. 593. 11. Numerous folk songs attest to this role of the walker. The opening line of ‘‘Black Jack Davy’’ is exemplary: ‘‘Black Jack Davy is the name that I bear; I been alone in the forest a long time.’’ 12. Bode, Portable Thoreau, p. 609. 13. Leo Stoller, After Walden: Thoreau’s Changing Views on Economic Man (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1957), p. 62. 14. Ibid., p. 63. 15. Bode, Portable Thoreau, pp. 592–93. 16. It is important to note here that Thoreau’s Walker walks with a different sort of aimlessness—a willingness to get lost. Whereas the vagabond is merely wandering, the saunterer wanders with a generic aim whose specificity can be found only in the walking. 17. Bode, Portable Thoreau, p. 593. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid., p. 624. 20. Heinz Eulau, ‘‘Wayside Challenger: Some Remarks on the Politics of Henry David Thoreau,’’ in Thoreau: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Sherman Paul (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1962), p. 118. 21. Bode, Portable Thoreau, p. 623. 22. Ibid., p. 594. 23. Thoreau, ‘‘Wild Apples,’’ in his Excursions (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1884), p. 298. 24. Bode, Portable Thoreau, p. 620. 25. Ibid., pp. 613–14. 26. Ibid., p. 602. 27. Jack Kerouac, Lonesome Traveler (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1988), p. 181. 28. Ibid., pp. 180–81. 29. Bode, Portable Thoreau, p. 601. 30. Ibid., p. 650. 31. Ibid., p. 624. 32. Ibid., p. 119.

................. 15741$

NOTE

02-13-06 14:42:24

PS

PAGE 262

N otes to P ages 94 –103

2 63

c hapter six ‘‘ after a ll , he’s just a m an ’’ The Wild Side of Life in Country Music 1. Margaret Fuller, Woman in the Nineteenth Century and Other Writings, ed. Donna Dickenson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 16. 2. Note, for example, the political risk undertaken by the Dixie Chicks in disagreeing with the ‘‘war’’ in Iraq. It appears that from early on, country women had a better sense of the ‘‘border life’’ Thoreau described. It’s not that they were less ‘‘wild,’’ but, perhaps because of the sexism they suffered under, they understood how to use their wildness more effectively. 3. Mary A. Bufwack and Robert K. Oerman, eds., Finding Her Voice: The Saga of Women in Country Music (New York: Crown, 1993), p. 114. 4. Ibid., p. 169. 5. Ibid., p. 179. 6. Ibid., p. 311. 7. The song, written by Tammy Wynette and producer Billy Sherrill, appeared in late December 1968 and can be found on Wynette’s 1969 album Stand by Your Man (Epic/Legacy) as well as on any number of collections and reprints. In a 2003 poll conducted by Country Music Television, ‘‘Stand by Your Man’’ was voted the top song in country music history. 8. Bufwack and Oerman, Finding Her Voice, p. 334. 9. Curtis Ellison, Country Music Culture: From Hard Times to Heaven (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995), p. 89. 10. Bill C. Malone, Don’t Get Above Your Raisin’: Country Music and the Southern Working Class (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), p. 119. 11. Colin Escott, Hank Williams: The Biography (Boston: Little, Brown, 1994), p. 72. 12. Malone, Don’t Get Above Your Raisin’, p. 124. 13. Clearly there are a number of male country stars one might use to investigate the male world of country music. I leave Elvis out of account here primarily because of his complexity and because his influence moved so directly beyond the world of country music. Others left out of consideration here include Lefty Frizzell, Merle Haggard, David Alan Coe, Roger Miller, Willie Nelson, and Jerry Jeff Walker, to name but a few. 14. Carl Bode, ed., The Portable Thoreau (New York: Penguin, 1982), p. 615. 15. Malone, Don’t Get Above Your Raisin’, p. 147. 16. Escott, Hank Williams, p. 64.

................. 15741$

NOTE

02-13-06 14:42:24

PS

PAGE 263

2 64

N otes to Pa g e s 1 0 3 –1 3

17. Waylon Jennings, ‘‘The Hank Williams Syndrome.’’ The song can be heard on Too Dumb for New York City, Too Ugly for L.A. (Sony, 1992). See www.sing365.com. 18. Escott, Hank Williams, p. 52. 19. Ibid., p. 46. 20. Out of this Austin movement there developed a long and rich tradition of alternative country music that is not driven by high-end income or constrained by the mainstream, crossover sounds of Nashville. 21. If one suspects that the Grateful Dead are inappropriate in this context, it is important to note both Garcia’s roots in bluegrass and the various country influences on his style that can be found throughout the musical history of the Dead. Jackson Browne, although he blends folk and rock, writes with a strong country flavor. See, for example, his ‘‘Shaky Town’’ on Running on Empty. 22. Waylon Jennings, Waylon: An Autobiography (New York: Warner Books, 1996), p. 320. 23. Ibid., p. 224. 24. David Allan Coe and Jimmy Rabbit, ‘‘Longhaired Redneck,’’ on Longhaired Redneck (Sony, 1976). www.sing365.com. 25. Escott, Hank Williams, p. 217. 26. Ibid., p. 200. 27. Merle Haggard, ‘‘Wishing All These Old Things Were New,’’ on If Only I Could Fly (Epitaph, 2000). 28. Malone, Don’t Get Above Your Raisin’, p. 119. 29. Jennings, ‘‘The Hank Williams Syndrome.’’ 30. Malone, Don’t Get Above Your Raisin’, p. 134. 31. Ibid., p. 148. c hapter seven w i l l i a m ja m e s a n d th e w i l d b e a s t s o f the philosophic al desert 1. Julius Bixler, Religion in the Philosophy of William James (Boston: Marshall Jones, 1926), p. 1. 2. Ralph Barton Perry, The Thought and Character of William James, 2 vols. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1935), vol. 2, p. 330. 3. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (New York: Collier Books, 1961), pp. 100–1. It is interesting to note that James includes religious officials among those who engage in this rejection of religious experiences. It was certainly an issue among reli-

................. 15741$

NOTE

02-13-06 14:42:25

PS

PAGE 264

N otes to Pages 114 –2 2

2 65

gious intellectuals who did not want religion’s integrity muddied up with actual religious experiences. This remains an issue today, for example, among mainline Protestant groups. 4. See Bruce Wilshire, William James and Phenomenology: A Study of the Principles of Psychology (New York: AMS Press, 1979). 5. William James, A Pluralistic Universe (New York: Longmans, Green, 1912), p. 330. 6. James, Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 74. 7. Ibid., p. 341. 8. Ibid., p. 48. 9. See William James, Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (New York: Longmans, Green, 1907), p. 282. 10. William James, The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (New York: Longmans, Green, 1937), pp. vii–viii. 11. William James, Manuscript Lectures (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 29. 12. James, Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 29. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid., p. 370. 15. Charlene Haddock Seigfried, William James’s Radical Reconstruction of Philosophy (Albany: SUNY Press, 1990), p. 161. 16. James, Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 34. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid., p. 107. 19. Ibid., p. 106. 20. Ibid., p. 124. 21. Ibid., p. 47. 22. Ibid., p. 211. 23. Perry, Thought and Character of William James, vol. 2, pp. 326–27. 24. James, Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 61. 25. Richard Gale, in The Divided Self of William James (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), argues for a systematic and irreparable division in James’s life and work. His claim is that a ‘‘mystical’’ James eventually overcomes a ‘‘Promethean’’ James. Though I am not fully convinced of the victory of the mystical James, I am convinced that Gale’s work is an important contribution to the reading of James’s religious work. 26. Bixler, Religion in the Philosophy of William James, p. 199. 27. James, Pragmatism, p. 296. 28. Ibid., p. 290.

................. 15741$

NOTE

02-13-06 14:42:25

PS

PAGE 265

2 66


29. James, Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 392. 30. Perry, Thought and Character of William James, vol. 2, p. 328. 31. James, Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 108. 32. Ibid. 33. Ibid., p. 284. 34. Ibid., p. 175. 35. See William Clebsch, American Religious Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), pp. 168–169. 36. James, Varieties of Religious Experience, pp. 217–18. 37. Ibid., p. 210. 38. Clebsch, American Religious Thought, p. 169. 39. James, Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 284. 40. Ibid., p. 285. 41. Ibid., p. 32. 42. William James, Talks to Teachers on Psychology: And to Students on Some of Life’s Ideals (New York: Henry Holt, 1899), p. 14. 43. James, Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 110. 44. Ibid. 45. Perry, Thought and Character of William James, vol. 2, p. 327. 46. James, Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 408. c hapter eight j o h n d e w e y’s se n s i b l e my s t i c i s m 1. Victor Kestenbaum, The Grace and the Severity of the Ideal: John Dewey and the Transcendent (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), p. 27. 2. William E. Hocking, The Meaning of God in Human Experience: A Philosophic Study of Religion (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1912), p. 353. 3. Ibid., p. 352. 4. Ibid., p. 353. 5. I borrow ‘‘synechistic’’ from Peirce; ‘‘synechism’’ was his theory that the world is at bottom marked by continuity. 6. Thomas Alexander, John Dewey’s Theory of Art, Experience and Nature: The Horizons of Feeling (Albany: SUNY Press, 1987), p. 26. 7. Richard Bernstein, Praxis and Action: Contemporary Philosophies of Human Activity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971), p. 212. 8. Stanley Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 21.

................. 15741$

NOTE

02-13-06 14:42:26

PS

PAGE 266

N otes to Pa g e s 1 4 1 –57

2 67

9. George Dykhuizen, The Life and Mind of John Dewey, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1973), pp. 21–22. 10. Ibid., p. 22. 11. Hocking, Meaning of God, p. 350. c hapter nine ‘‘ born to run’ ’ Male Mysticism on the Road 1. Carl Bode, ed., The Portable Thoreau (New York: Penguin, 1982), p. 343. 2. Ibid., pp. 343–344. 3. Springsteen’s lyrics can be found at Brucespringsteen.net (SONY Music, 2001). Copyright, Bruce Springsteen (ASCAP). 4. Holly George-Warren, ed., Rolling Stone: The Decades of Rock and Roll (San Francisco: Rolling Stone Press, 2001), p. 184. 5. See univie.ac.at/Alistic/easy rider/dtat/FeatWilling.htm. 6. From Warren Zevon (Asylum/Elektra, 1976). 7. From Neil Young, Long May You Run (Reprise, 1976). 8. Andrew Edelstein and Kevin McDonough, The Seventies: From Hot Pants to Hot Tubs (New York: Dutton, 1990), p. 169. 9. Jack Kerouac, Lonesome Traveler (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1988), p. 172. 10. George-Warren, Rolling Stone, p. 152. 11. From George Gritzbach, All American Song (Flying Fish Records, 1984). 12. See Tracy Chapman (Sbk/Elektra, 1988). 13. Bode, Portable Thoreau, p. 630. c hapter ten philosophy as teac hing James’s ‘‘Knight Errant,’’ Thomas Davidson 1. William James, Memories and Studies (New York: Longmans, Green, 1911), p. 80. 2. Ibid., p. 85. 3. Mildred Hooker, notes in the archives of the Keene Valley, New York, Public Library. Filed under VF Glenmore. I am indebted to the library and to those who organize and maintain the archives for external researchers. 4. Tom Anderson, ‘‘Glenmore,’’ Adirondack Life, March/April 1982, p. 20.

................. 15741$

NOTE

02-13-06 14:42:26

PS

PAGE 267

2 68

N otes to Pages 157– 6 3

5. Thomas Davidson, Education as World-Building (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1925), p. xxi. 6. Joseph Blau, ‘‘Rosmini, Domodossola, and Thomas Davidson,’’ Journal of the History of Ideas 18, no. 4 (1957): 527. 7. William James, The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (New York: Longmans, Green, 1937), p. 258. 8. Hooker, notes, p. 2. 9. Thomas Davidson, Education of the Wage-Earners (Boston: Ginn, 1904), p. 73. 10. Ibid., p. 34. Davidson’s resistance here is similar to Dewey’s worry over the mechanical inflexibility of Marxism; however, on the whole, he is more attuned to James’s emphasis on the individual’s need for a creative life. 11. Ibid., p. 27. 12. Ibid., p. 37. 13. Ibid., p. 93. 14. Ernest Moore, ‘‘Introduction,’’ in Davidson, Education as WorldBuilding, p. xv. 15. James, Memories and Studies, pp. 82–83. 16. Thomas Davidson, A History of Education (New York: Scribner’s, 1912), p. 227. 17. Davidson, Education of the Wage-Earners, p. 48. 18. Davidson, History of Education, p. 261. 19. Ibid., p. 258. 20. Ibid., p. 257. 21. Davidson, Education of the Wage-Earners, p. 72. 22. Davidson, Education as World-Building, p. 17. 23. Ibid., p. xxv. 24. Davidson, History of Education, p. 275. 25. Ibid., p. 250. 26. Davidson, Education as World-Building, pp. 39–40. 27. Davidson, Education of the Wage-Earners, p. 42. 28. Davidson, Education as World-Building, p. 31. 29. James, Memories and Studies, p. 89. 30. Dewey did purchase land next to Davidson’s Glenmore in the Adirondacks and participated in some of the summer discussions. Nevertheless, the two men were temperamentally quite different and noted their differences more than their similarities. 31. Davidson, Education of the Wage-Earners, p. 43. 32. Ibid., p. 34.

................. 15741$

NOTE

02-13-06 14:42:27

PS

PAGE 268

N otes to Pa g e s 1 6 3 –75

2 69

33. Ibid., p. 44. 34. Ibid., p. 69. 35. Davidson, History of Education, p. 264. 36. Ibid., p. 265. 37. Davidson, Education of the Wage-Earners, p. 263; History of Education, p. 265. 38. Hooker, notes, p. 2. 39. James A. Good, ‘‘The Development of Thomas Davidson’s Religious and Social Thought,’’ at www.autodidactproject.org/other/TD.html, p. 1. Good’s work here and elsewhere provides the fullest contemporary account of Davidson’s life and thought. See also ‘‘The Value of Thomas Davidson,’’ Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 40, no. 2 (Spring 2004): 289–318. 40. Good, ‘‘Development of . . . Davidson’s . . . Thought,’’ p. 9. 41. Louis Dublin, ‘‘Thomas Davidson: Educator for Democracy,’’ American Scholar, Spring 1948, p. 203. 42. Good, ‘‘Development of . . . Davidson’s . . . Thought,’’ p. 5. 43. Davidson, Education as World-Building, p. xxxiii. 44. Leonora C. Rosenfield, ‘‘Morris R. Cohen: The Teacher,’’ Journal of the History of Ideas 18, no. 4 (1957): 554. 45. Ibid. 46. James, Memories and Studies, pp. 87–88. c hapter eleven learning and teac hing Gambling, Love, and Growth (with Michael Ventimiglia) 1. George Gritzbach, from The Sweeper (Kicking Mule Records, 1979). 2. William James, The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (New York: Longmans Green, 1937), pp. 19, 25. For a few of James’s more colorful passages on risk, see the following in The Will to Believe: ‘‘Is Life Worth Living?’’ p. 59; ‘‘The Sentiment of Rationality,’’ p. 94n, p. 110; ‘‘The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life,’’ p. 206. 3. Jacques Barzun, Teacher in America (Boston: Little, Brown, 1945), p. 12. 4. Gill Helsby, ‘‘Developing Teachers Professionally: Creative Artists or Compliant Technicians,’’ in The Life and Work of Teachers, ed. Christopher Day et al. (London: Falmer Press, 2000), p. 107. 5. For an interesting discussion of the loss of teacher autonomy in British schools in the second half of the twentieth century, see Gary McCulloch,

................. 15741$

NOTE

02-13-06 14:42:27

PS

PAGE 269

2 70

No t e s t o P ages 175 – 86

‘‘The Politics of the Secret Garden,’’ in Day et al., The Life and Work of Teachers, pp. 93–108. 6. Ronald Rebore, Personnel Administration in Education: A Management Approach (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1991), pp. 183–84. 7. I have no quarrel with the establishment of standards. However, standards need to be understood not as narrow formulas but as generic, regulative ideals that may be met in a variety of ways. It is always important to keep in mind the question What are the best ways to achieve one’s standards and to ensure they have a lasting effect? 8. Rebecca Hawthorne tells the interesting story of middle school teacher Cecilia Braddock. Braddock exercises her autonomy and displays all the traits of an outstanding teacher. However, to do so, she requires the assistance of her department chair: ‘‘Cecilia Braddock’s department chair acts as a buffer between Cecilia and the organization in which she works, protecting Mrs. B’s highly prized autonomy by mediating her organizational obligations.’’ Braddock’s case is not an unusual one. Rebecca Hawthorne, Curriculum in the Making: Teacher Choice and the Classroom Experience (New York: Teachers College Press, 1992), p. 58. 9. Stephen Clem and Zebulon V. Wilson, eds., Paths to the New Curriculum (Boston: National Association of Independent Schools, 1991), p. 19. 10. It is one of the tragedies of our culture that we persistently work to lower the status of teachers. It is almost as if we culturally feel a need to reduce teachers to an ancillary status to make sure they don’t threaten someone else’s status. 11. Carl Hausman, Discourse on Novelty and Creation (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1975). 12. It is worth noting that the strand of postmodern thought which argues that all canons are socially constructed along political lines maintains its own canon which includes Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, and others. The important point is that the success of Derrida and Foucault, for example, is in large measure a function of their extensive knowledge of and familiarity with the history of Western philosophy and their ability to write sophisticated philosophical texts. Their texts are not chosen randomly or arbitrarily, but because they measure up to a working standard of philosophical expertise. 13. Though discussions of cherishing love or concern are not easy to find in textbooks for teaching teachers, they are not entirely absent from general discussions of teaching. See, for example, Alicia Fernandez, ‘‘Leadership in an Era of Change,’’ in The Life and Work of Teachers, ed. Day et al., pp. 239–55.

................. 15741$

NOTE

02-13-06 14:42:28

PS

PAGE 270


2 71

c hapter twelve emerson’ s p latonizing of americ an thought 1. John J. McDermott, Streams of Experience: Reflections on the History and Philosophy of American Culture (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986), p. 29. 2. John Dewey, ‘‘Ralph Waldo Emerson,’’ in Emerson: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Milton Konvitz and Stephen Whicher (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1962), pp. 24–30. The essay was initially published as ‘‘Emerson—The Philosopher of Democracy,’’ International Journal of Ethics, July 1903 (MW, 3): 405–13. 3. Most recently, Richard Rorty has chosen not to identify himself with philosophy, in part it seems, because of the constraints the name of philosophy tries to impose on one’s thinking and writing. 4. In Francis J. McConnell, Borden Parker Bowne: His Life and Philosophy (New York: Abingdon Press, 1929), p. 279. 5. John Edwin Smith, ed., The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 2 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1959). 6. Octavius B. Frothingham, ‘‘Emerson the Seer,’’ in The Recognition of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Selected Criticism Since 1837, ed. Milton R. Konvitz (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972), p. 54. 7. George Woodberry, ‘‘The Poems,’’ in Konvitz, The Recognition of Ralph Waldo Emerson, p. 129. 8. Charles Feidelson, Jr., ‘‘Toward Melville: Some Versions of Emerson,’’ in Konvitz and Whicher, Emerson, p. 137. 9. Theodore Parker, ‘‘The Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson,’’ in Konvitz, The Recognition of Ralph Waldo Emerson, p. 34. 10. For an account arguing that ‘‘pleasure’’ is pretty much the extent of Emerson’s importance, see James Truslow Adams, ‘‘Emerson Re-read,’’ in Konvitz, The Recognition of Ralph Waldo Emerson, pp. 182–193. 11. See Maurice Gonnaud, An Uneasy Solitude: Individual and Society in the Work of Ralph Waldo Emerson, trans. Lawrence Rosenwald (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), p. 412. 12. Stanley Cavell’s work on Emerson often raises this point—as, for example, when in his ‘‘The Division of Talent’’ (Critical Inquiry 11, no. 4 [June 1985]: 519–38) he places Emerson in the context of a Romanticism ‘‘whose defining mission’’ is ‘‘the redemption of philosophy and poetry by one another’’ (p. 521). Two points, however, make me shy from following Cavell more closely: (1) he tends to underplay Emerson’s influence on later American thinkers—an influence important to the way I am reading Emerson, and

................. 15741$

NOTE

02-13-06 14:42:28

PS

PAGE 271

2 72

N otes to Pa g e s 1 9 4 – 99

(2) his labeling of Emerson as Romantic, while obviously accurate to some degree, seems to miss the streaks of shrewd, pragmatic commonsensism found throughout Emerson’s work. 13. William H. Gilman et al., eds., The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 16 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1960–1982). Cited in text as JMN with volume and page number. 14. George Santayana, Interpretations of Poetry and Religion, ed. William G. Holzberger and Herman J. Saatkamp (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), p. 131. 15. Ibid., p. 136. 16. Feidelson, ‘‘Toward Melville,’’ p. 141. 17. Kenneth M. Harris, ‘‘Emerson’s Second Nature,’’ in Emerson: Prospect and Retrospect, ed. Joel Porte (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), p. 40. Harris, in his discussion of Emerson’s defining of ‘‘nature’’ in ‘‘Nature’’ (Essays: Second Series), also points out that Emerson probably intends this defining to be philosophical. Furthermore, he argues for the subtlety of the second ‘‘Nature’’ vis-a`-vis the first—a point many Emerson scholars seem unwilling to admit. 18. See, for example, Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss, eds., The Collected Papers of Charles S. Peirce (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1934), vol. 6, pp. 494, 496. 19. James Cox, ‘‘R. W. Emerson: The Circles of the Eye,’’ in Emerson: Prophecy, Metamorphosis, and Influence: Selected Papers from the English Institute, ed. David Levin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1975), p. 67. 20. There is some irony here, however, insofar as the literary appropriation of Emerson’s phrases and sentences has tended to mark him as a writer of quips and maxims. 21. Theodore Parker, ‘‘The Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson,’’ in Konvitz, The Recognition of Ralph Waldo Emerson, p. 37. 22. Matthew Arnold, ‘‘Emerson,’’ in Konvitz, The Recognition of Ralph Waldo Emerson, p. 71. 23. Samuel Crothers, Ralph Waldo Emerson (Indianapolis, IN: BobbsMerrill, 1921), p. 11. 24. Santayana, Interpretations of Poetry and Religion, p. 131. 25. Dewey, ‘‘Ralph Waldo Emerson,’’ p. 24. 26. W. T. Harris, ‘‘The Dialectic Unity in Emerson’s Prose,’’ Journal of Speculative Philosophy no. 18 (April 1887). Harris’s reading of Emerson, while perhaps in part too Hegelian, is extremely insightful and, so far as I can tell, has for the most part been overlooked.

................. 15741$

NOTE

02-13-06 14:42:29

PS

PAGE 272

N otes to Pages 199 –205

2 73

27. William Barton, ‘‘Emerson’s Method as a Philosopher,’’ in Emerson’s Relevance Today: A Symposium, ed. Eric W. Carlson and J. Lasley Dameron (Hartford, CT: Transcendental Books, 1971), p. 23. 28. Robert Pollock, ‘‘Emerson and America’s Future,’’ in Porte, Emerson: Prospect and Retrospect, p. 65. 29. Glen Johnson, ‘‘The Making of Emerson’s Essays,’’ dissertation, Indiana University (Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms, 1976). Johnson’s concern is only with the first edition (1841) of Essays, which does not include, of course, the Second Series. 30. Ibid., p. 7. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid., p. 11. 33. Although there is no room to make the case here, I see the essays aligned in a reciprocal order, as if meant to face and confront each other. Roughly, I align ‘‘History’’ and ‘‘Nominalist and Realist,’’ ‘‘Self-Reliance’’ and ‘‘Politics,’’ ‘‘Compensation’’ and ‘‘Nature.’’ Then, collectively, ‘‘Spiritual Laws,’’ ‘‘Love,’’ ‘‘Friendship,’’ ‘‘Prudence,’’ and ‘‘Heroism’’ face ‘‘Gifts,’’ ‘‘Manners,’’ and ‘‘Character.’’ Finally, ‘‘The Over-Soul’’ and ‘‘Circles’’ match ‘‘Experience,’’ and ‘‘Intellect’’ and ‘‘Art’’ are coupled with ‘‘The Poet.’’ I exclude ‘‘New England Reformers’’ because it was added later. 34. Stephen Whicher, ‘‘Emerson’s Tragic Sense,’’ The American Scholar 22 (1953): 285–92; and Freedom and Fate: An Inner Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1953). 35. For a convincing account of the Platonic source of Emerson’s vigil, see Ray Benoit, ‘‘Emerson on Plato: The Fire’s Center,’’ in On Emerson, ed. Edwin H. Cady and Louis J. Budd (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1988). 36. In ‘‘The Dialectical Unity in Emerson’s Prose’’ Harris offers dialectical readings of ‘‘Experience,’’ Nature, and ‘‘The Over-Soul.’’ Again, despite the narrowing effect of his Hegelianism, Harris begins to suggest what it means to take Emerson seriously as a philosopher on his own terms. 37. It is true that the address ‘‘New England Reformers’’ was added to the end of the original eight essays. However, Emerson added it only after his publisher maintained that the initial collection was too short. Moreover, the address, in its emphasis on a particular aspect of lived experience, remains consistent with my general description of the two series of essays. 38. See Russell Goodman, American Philosophy and the Romantic Tradition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 44ff.

................. 15741$

NOTE

02-13-06 14:42:29

PS

PAGE 273

2 74

No t e s t o Pages 206 –209 c hapter thirteen americ an loss in c avell ’s em erson

1. Stanley Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). Because of the extensive number of references to this text, I will cite it in text as ‘‘C’’ with page number. 2. Stanley Cavell, The Senses of Walden (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1981). See also Cavell’s This New Yet Unapproachable America: Essays After Emerson After Wittgenstein (Albuquerque, NM: Living Batch Books, 1989) and In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). 3. I take James’s absence to be equally important. However, that marks a second project. For now, I confine myself to the limited mention of Dewey that Cavell provides. 4. See John Dewey, ‘‘Ralph Waldo Emerson,’’ in Emerson: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Milton Konvitz and Stephen Whicher (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1962), pp. 24–30. The essay was originally published as ‘‘Emerson—The Philosopher of Democracy,’’ in International Journal of Ethics (July 1903): 405–13. 5. For an account of Cavell’s intellectual background, see his interview with James Conant in The Senses of Stanley Cavell, ed. Richard Fleming and Michael Payne (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1989), esp. pp. 33–37. 6. This failure to follow Rorty is perhaps less ironic than it seems, since Rorty squeezes much of the Emersonianism out of Dewey by eliminating interest in Dewey’s metaphysical thinking in Experience and Nature and Art as Experience. 7. John Edwin Smith, The Spirit of American Philosophy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965). See, for example, pp. 140–142. For another angle on Dewey’s ongoing concern for some kind of self-realization, see Robert B. Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), pp. 42–45, 157–60. 8. Thomas Alexander, John Dewey’s Theory of Art, Experience, and Nature: The Horizons of Feeling (Albany: SUNY Press, 1987), p. 182. 9. Russell Goodman, American Philosophy and the Romantic Tradition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), chap. 4. Although Goodman draws heavily on the work of Cavell, he sees much more in Dewey’s work than does Cavell. 10. Emerson, ‘‘The American Scholar,’’ in his Nature: Addresses, and Lectures (Philadelphia: David McKay, n.d.), pp. 94–95. Hereafter Nature.

................. 15741$

NOTE

02-13-06 14:42:30

PS

PAGE 274


2 75

11. Richard Shusterman, ‘‘Form and Funk: The Aesthetic Challenge of Popular Art,’’ British Journal of Aesthetics 31, no. 3 (July 1991): 203–213. 12. John J. McDermott, Streams of Experience: Reflections on the History of Philosophy in American Culture (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986), pp. 129–40. 13. Ibid., p. 43. 14. I mean to employ the ambiguity in the term ‘‘culture’’ here. Dewey’s rich notion of culture may in fact be part of the source of Cavell’s resistance to him. Cavell, in calling on psychoanalysis and modern art, seems to have in mind a more ‘‘cultured’’ culture. If this is the case, the challenge is for Cavell, not Dewey, to demonstrate his Emersonianism. 15. ‘‘Moral perfectionism’’ is Cavell’s term, and while he wants its meaning, in Emersonian fashion, to be exemplified by and disclosed through the whole of his text, he does offer a brief definition at the outset of the book: ‘‘Perfectionism, as I think of it, is not a competing theory of the moral life, but something like a dimension or tradition of the moral life that spans the course of Western thought and concerns what used to be called the state of one’s soul’’ (C:2). 16. Although Cavell does suggest that elements of this description fit Emerson, he does not show just how close the fit might be. Consider, for example, the following from ‘‘Self Reliance’’: ‘‘Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day’’ (CW, 2:33). 17. Emerson, Nature, p. 95. 18. Ibid., p. 81. 19. Cornel West, The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), p. 74. 20. Cavell displays this same misreading of Dewey’s notion of intelligence in This New Yet Unapproachable America, where he argues that for Dewey ‘‘the mission of philosophy is to get the Enlightenment to happen’’ (p. 95). 21. In the one place where Dewey is mentioned, Cavell again tries to separate him from Emerson. In discussing Emerson’s suggestion in ‘‘Experience’’ that certain features in experience veil us from nature, Cavell thinks he finds a significant point of difference: An opening and recurrent target of Dewey’s Experience and Nature is thinkers who take experience to ‘‘veil or screen’’ us from nature. Its dissonance with Emerson is interesting in view of Dewey’s being the major American philosopher who, without reservation, declared Emerson to be a philosopher—without evidently finding any use for him. (C:40)

................. 15741$

NOTE

02-13-06 14:42:30

PS

PAGE 275

2 76

N otes to Pages 216 –2 1

It is interesting that Cavell should read both Dewey and Emerson with such abandon. Dewey did not, in his attacks on classical empiricism, mean that all experience speaks the truth, but that experience is not an epistemological prison in all its guises. Likewise, Emerson does not make experience necessarily imprisoning, but potentially (and in many cases effectively) so. For Emerson, the answer to skepticism was not philosophy alone but courage—a point I am not sure Cavell admits. The radical separation of Emerson and Dewey by way of their accounts of experience simply does not make sense. 22. I am well aware that my reading of Emerson here is much more straightforward than Cavell might wish. However, while I recognize the importance of reading Emerson with the irony and daring Cavell provides, I do not think the reading of Emerson ends there. However much Emerson sees philosophy transformed in his own Platonic adoption of the balance of poetry and philosophy, he still acknowledges strands of traditional ‘‘first philosophy’’ in his thinking. 23. For an excellent account of the importance of Emerson’s ‘‘social philosophy,’’ see Joseph L. Blau, ‘‘Emerson’s Transcendentalist Individualism as Social Philosophy,’’ Review of Metaphysics 31, no. 1 (September 1977): 80–92. 24. Contemporary students of Dewey might be as uncomfortable as Cavell with the lineage I am suggesting here. However, my point is not to reduce one thinker to the other, but to show that by seeing the lineage we can find in both Emerson and Dewey possibilities that we might otherwise be tempted to overlook. 25. West, The American Evasion of Philosophy, p. 70. 26. In ‘‘Fate’’ Emerson takes up the presence of various encounters of and resistances to the developing selves of a community. His interest in environing circumstances also shows up clearly in ‘‘Nature’’ and ‘‘New England Reformers.’’ 27. McDermott, Streams of Experience, p. 32. 28. See Cavell, This New Yet Unapproachable America and In Quest of the Ordinary. 29. Goodman, American Philosophy and the Romantic Tradition, p. 128. 30. McDermott, Streams of Experience, p. 35. c hapter fourteen emerson and kerouac Grievous Angels of Hope and Loss 1. Jack Kerouac, Visions of Cody (New York: Penguin, 1993), dedication page.

................. 15741$

NOTE

02-13-06 14:42:30

PS

PAGE 276

N otes to P ages 222 –3 7

2 77

2. Parsons’s death and the burning of his body in Joshua Tree National Forest by his friend Phil Kaufman have become the subjects of a film, Grand Theft Parsons. 3. www.gramparsons.com, ‘‘The Return of the Grievous Angel’’ (Wait and See Music/BMI, 1974). 4. www.gramparsons.com, ‘‘The Return of the Grievous Angel.’’ 5. www.gramparsons.com. Written by Parsons and Bob Buchanon (Tickson Music/BMI, 1969). 6. See, for example, Jone Johnson Lewis’s two-part essay ‘‘Transcendentalist Women,’’ at womenshistory.about.com, and Brenda Knight’s Women of the Beat Generation (Berkeley, CA: Conari Press, 1996). General information can be found at www.transcendentalists.com, ‘‘Others in the Circle.’’ 7. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History, trans. John Sibree (New York: Colonial Press, 1900), p. 87. 8. Emerson, Nature: Addresses and Lectures (Philadelphia: David McKay, n.d.), p. 324. 9. Jack Kerouac, On the Road (New York: Penguin, 1985), pp. 70–71. 10. Ibid., p. 7. 11. Ibid., p. 292. 12. Ibid., p. 293. 13. Emerson, Nature, p. 318. 14. Ibid. 15. Jack Kerouac, Lonesome Traveler (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1989), p. 36. 16. Ibid., pp. 59, 64. 17. Jack Kerouac, Big Sur (New York: Penguin, 1993), p. 216. c hapter fifteen pragmatic intellec tuals Facing Loss in the Spirit of American Philosophy 1. Paul Carus, ‘‘Pragmatism,’’ The Monist 13, no. 3 (July 1908): 360. 2. Stefan Grossman, ‘‘Interview with Gary Davis,’’ Stefan Grossman’s Guitar Workshop, guitarvideos.com/interviews/davis. 3. C. Wright Mills, Power, Politics and People: The Collected Essays of C. Wright Mills, ed. Irving L. Horowitz (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963), p. 167. 4. Carus, ‘‘Pragmatism,’’ p. 362. 5. Albert Schinz, ‘‘Anti-Pragmatisme,’’ unsigned review in The Monist 19, no. 3 (July 1909): 474. 6. Carus, ‘‘Pragmatism, p. 361.

................. 15741$

NOTE

02-13-06 14:42:31

PS

PAGE 277

2 78

N otes to P ages 238 –5 1

7. William James, Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (New York: Longmans Green, 1907), p. 54. 8. John J. McDermott, The Culture of Experience: Philosophical Essays in the American Grain, new ed. (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1987), p. 102. 9. Edwin Tausch, ‘‘William James, the Pragmatist—A Psychological Analysis,’’ The Monist 19, no. 1 (January 1909): 15. 10. James, Pragmatism, p. 60. 11. Ibid., p. 222. 12. William James, Pragmatism and the Meaning of Truth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), p. 272. 13. Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), p. xvii. 14. Henry W. Johnstone, What Is Philosophy? (London: Macmillan, 1965), p. 7. 15. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 96–97. 16. See, for example, ibid., pp. 90ff. 17. Cornelius F. Delaney, Science, Knowledge and Mind: A Study in the Philosophy of C. S. Peirce (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993), p. 9. 18. Peirce, Reasoning and the Logic of Things: The Cambridge Conferences Lectures of 1898, ed. Kenneth Ketner (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 107. 19. Hugo Mu¨ nsterberg, The Eternal Values (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1909), p. viii. 20. This is noticeable, for example, in Rorty’s persistent practice of dividing issues into two camps and then opting for one camp and deriding the other. The irony involves asking why a poet would take such an approach. 21. Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, p. 88. 22. William James, The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (New York: Longmans Green, 1937), p. ix. 23. James, Pragmatism, p. 6. 24. Ibid., p. 51. 25. Eugene Miller’s collection of his father’s correspondence in the Williams College Archives, Williamstown, MA, p. 369. 26. William James, A Pluralistic Universe (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), pp. 17–18. 27. John J. McDermott, Streams of Experience: Reflections on the History and Philosophy of American Culture (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986), p. 100.

................. 15741$

NOTE

02-13-06 14:42:31

PS

PAGE 278


2 79

28. James, The Will to Believe, p. 110. 29. Carl Bode, ed., The Portable Thoreau (New York: Penguin, 1982), p. 593. 30. Ralph Barton Perry, The Thought and Character of William James, 2 vols. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1935), vol. 1, p. 323.

................. 15741$

NOTE

02-13-06 14:42:31

PS

PAGE 279

................. 15741$

NOTE

02-13-06 14:42:32

PS

PAGE 280

Bibliography

Alexander, Thomas. John Dewey’s Theory of Art, Experience and Nature: The Horizons of Feeling. Albany: SUNY Press, 1987. Anderson, John. The Individual and the New World: A Study of Man’s Existence Based upon American Life and Thought. State College, PA: Bald Eagle Press, 1955. Anderson, Tom. ‘‘Glenmore.’’ Adirondack Life, March/April 1982, pp. 19–22, 48–49. Anzalduá, Gloria. Borderlands: La Frontera. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987. Barton, William. ‘‘Emerson’s Method as a Philosopher.’’ In Emerson’s Relevance Today: A Symposium. Ed. Eric W. Carlson and J. Lasley Dameron. Hartford, CT: Transcendental Books, 1971. Barzun, Jacques. Teacher in America. Boston: Little, Brown, 1945. Benoit, Ray. ‘‘Emerson and Plato: The Fire’s Center.’’ In On Emerson. Ed. Edwin H. Cady and Louis J. Budd. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1988. Bernstein, Richard. Praxis and Action: Contemporary Philosophies of Human Activity. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971. Bixler, Julius. Religion in the Philosophy of William James. Boston: Marshall Jones, 1926. Blanshard, Brand. Reason and Goodness. New York: Macmillan, 1961. Blau, Joseph. ‘‘Rosmini, Domodossola, and Thomas Davidson.’’ Journal of the History of Ideas 18, no. 4 (1957): 522–528. ———. ‘‘Emerson’s Transcendentalist Individualism as Social Philosophy.’’ Review of Metaphysics 31, no. 1 (September 1977): 80–92. Bufwack, Mary A., and Robert K. Oerman, eds. Finding Her Voice: The Saga of Women in Country Music. New York: Crown, 1993. Bugbee, Henry. ‘‘Wilderness in America.’’ Journal of the American Academy of Religion 42, no. 6 (December 1978): 614–620. { 28 1 }

................. 15741$

BIBL

02-13-06 14:42:25

PS

PAGE 281

2 82

bibliography

———.The Inward Morning: A Philosophical Exploration in Journal Form. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1999. Carus, Paul. ‘‘Pragmatism.’’ The Monist 13, no. 3 (July 1908): 321–362. ———. ‘‘The Philosophy of Personal Equation.’’ The Monist 19, no. 1 (1909): 79–84. Cavell, Stanley. The Senses of Walden. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1981. ———. ‘‘The Division of Talent.’’ Critical Inquiry 11, no. 4 (June 1985): 519–538. ———. In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. ———. This New Yet Unapproachable America: Essays After Emerson After Wittgenstein. Albuquerque, NM: Living Batch Books, 1989. ———. Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. Clebsch, William. American Religious Thought. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964. Clem, Stephen, and Zebulon V. Wilson, eds. Paths to New Curriculum. Boston: National Association of Independent Schools, 1991. Cox, James. ‘‘R. W. Emerson: The Circles of the Eye.’’ In Emerson: Prophecy, Metamorphosis, and Influence. Selected Papers from the English Institute. Ed. David Levin. New York: Columbia University Press, 1975. Creighton, James. ‘‘The Nature and Criterion of Truth.’’ Philosophical Review 17 (1908): 592–605. Crothers, Samuel M. Ralph Waldo Emerson: How to Know Him. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1921. Davidson, Thomas. Education of the Wage-Earners. Boston: Ginn, 1904. ———. A History of Education. New York: Scribner’s, 1912. ———. Education as World-Building. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1925. Day, Christopher, et al., eds. The Life and Work of Teachers. London: Falmer Press, 2000. Delaney, Cornelius. Science, Knowledge and Mind: A Study in the Philosophy of C. S. Peirce. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993. Dewey, John. John Dewey: The Early Works: 1882–1898. Ed. Jo Ann Boydston. 5 vols. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967–1972. ———. John Dewey: The Middle Works: 1899–1924. Ed. Jo Ann Boydston. 15 vols. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1976–1983. ———. John Dewey: The Later Works: 1925–1953. Ed. Jo Ann Boydston. 17 vols. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1981–1990.

................. 15741$

BIBL

02-13-06 14:42:25

PS

PAGE 282

bibliography

2 83

Drinnon, Richard. ‘‘Thoreau’s Politics of the Upright Man.’’ In Thoreau in Our Season. Ed. John H. Hicks. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1962. Dublin, Louis. ‘‘Thomas Davidson: Educator for Democracy.’’ American Scholar, Spring 1948, pp. 201–211. Dykhuizen, George. The Life and Mind of John Dewey. Ed. Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1973. Edelstein, Andrew, and Kevin McDonough, eds. The Seventies: From Hot Pants to Hot Tubs. New York: Dutton, 1990. Edwards, Jonathan. The Works of Jonathan Edwards. Vol. 2. Ed. Perry Miller. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1959. Ellison, Curtis. Country Music Culture: From Hard Times to Heaven. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson. 16 vols. Ed. William H. Gilman et al. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1960–1982. ———. The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Ed. Alfred Ferguson, Robert E. Spiller, Joseph Slater, and Douglas E. Wilson. 6 vols. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971–2003. ———. The Portable Emerson. Ed. Carl Bode. Rev. ed. New York: Penguin, 1981. Escott, Colin. Hank Williams: The Biography. Boston: Little, Brown, 1994. Eulau, Heinz. ‘‘Wayside Challenger: Some Remarks on the Politics of Henry David Thoreau.’’ In Thoreau: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Sherman Paul. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1962. Fisch, Max. Peirce, Semeiotic, and Pragmatism: Essays. Ed. Kenneth Ketner and Christian Kloesel. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986. Fleming, Richard, and Michael Payne, eds. The Senses of Stanley Cavell. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1989. Fuller, Margaret. Woman in the Nineteenth Century and Other Writings. Ed. Donna Dickenson. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Gale, Richard. The Divided Self of William James. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. George-Warren, Holly, ed. Rolling Stone: The Decades of Rock and Roll. San Francisco: Rolling Stone Press, 2001. Gonnaud, Maurice. An Uneasy Solitude: Individual and Society in the Work of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Trans. Lawrence Rosenthal. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987. Good, James A. ‘‘The Development of Thomas Davidson’s Religious and Social Thought.’’ www.autodidactproject.org/other/TD.html.

................. 15741$

BIBL

02-13-06 14:42:26

PS

PAGE 283

2 84

bibliography

Goodman, Russell. American Philosophy and the Romantic Tradition. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Grossman, Stefan. ‘‘Interview with Gary Davis.’’ www.guitarvideos.com. Harris, Leonard, Scott Pratt, and Anne Waters, eds. American Philosophies: An Anthology. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002. Harris, Marc. ‘‘Emerson’s Second Nature.’’ In Emerson: Prospect and Retrospect. Ed. Joel Porte. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982. Harris, William T. ‘‘The Dialectical Unity in Emerson’s Prose.’’ Journal of Speculative Philosophy 18 (April 1887). Hausman, Carl. Discourse on Novelty and Creation. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1975. Hawthorne, Rebecca. Curriculum in the Making: Teacher Choice and the Classroom Experience. New York: Teachers College Press, 1992. Hegel, Georg W. F. Lectures on the Philosophy of History. Trans. John Sibree. New York: Colonial Press, 1900. Hocking, William E. The Meaning of God in Human Experience: A Philosophic Study of Religion. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1912. ———. ‘‘Action and Certainty.’’ Journal of Philosophy 27, no. 9 (April 1930): 225–238. Hooker, Mildred. ‘‘Notes.’’ Keene Valley, NY, Library Archives. Filed under VF Glenmore. hooks, bell. Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics. Boston: South End Press, 1990. James, William. Talks to Teachers on Psychology: And to Students on Some of Life’s Ideals. New York: Henry Holt, 1899. ———. Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking. New York: Longmans, Green, 1907. ———. Memories and Studies. New York: Longmans, Green, 1911. ———. A Pluralistic Universe: Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College. New York: Longmans, Green, 1912; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996. ———. The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy. New York: Longmans, Green, 1937. ———. The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature. New York: Collier Books, 1961. ———. Pragmatism and the Meaning of Truth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978. ———. Manuscript Lectures. Ed. Frederick Burkhardt. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988.

................. 15741$

BIBL

02-13-06 14:42:27

PS

PAGE 284

bibliography

2 85

———. Some Problems of Philosophy: A Beginning of an Introduction to Philosophy. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996. Jennings, Waylon. Waylon: An Autobiography. New York: Warner Books, 1996. Johnson, Glen. The Making of Emerson’s Essays. Dissertation, Indiana University. Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms, 1976. Johnstone, Henry. What Is Philosophy? London: Macmillan, 1965. Kerouac, Jack. On the Road. New York: Penguin, 1985. ———. Lonesome Traveler. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1988. ———. Big Sur. New York: Penguin, 1993. ———. Visions of Cody. New York: Penguin, 1993. Kestenbaum, Victor. The Grace and the Severity of the Ideal: John Dewey and the Transcendent. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Knight, Brenda. Women of the Beat Generation. Berkeley, CA: Conari Press, 1996. Konvitz, Milton, ed. The Recognition of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Selected Criticism Since 1837. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972. Konvitz, Milton, and Stephen Whicher, eds. Emerson: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1962. Lewis, Jone Johnson. ‘‘Transcendentalist Women.’’ www.womenshistory .about.com. Also available at www.transcendentalists.com. Malone, Bill. Don’t Get Above Your Raisin’: Country Music and the Southern Working Class. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002. Marcel, Gabriel. The Mystery of Being. Vol. 2. South Bend, IN: Regnery/Gateway, 1950; new ed., 1968. McConnell, Francis. Borden Parker Bowne: His Life and His Philosophy. New York: Abingdon Press, 1929. McDermott, John J. Streams of Experience: Reflections on the History and Philosophy of American Culture. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986. ———. The Culture of Experience: Philosophical Essays in the American Grain. Repr. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1987. ———. ‘‘Trumping Cynicism with Imagination.’’ In A Parliament of Minds: Philosophy for a New Millennium. Ed. Michael Tobias, J. Patrick Fitzgerald, and David Rothenberg. Albany: SUNY Press, 2000. McDill, Bob. ‘‘Good Ole Boys like Me.’’ Universal Polygram International Publishing, 1980. www.don-williams.com, see ‘‘Lyrics.’’ McKenna, Erin. The Task of Utopia: A Pragmatist and Feminist Perspective. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001.

................. 15741$

BIBL

02-13-06 14:42:27

PS

PAGE 285

2 86

bibliography

Mills, C. Wright. Power, Politics and People: The Collected Essays of C. Wright Mills. Ed. Irving L. Horowitz. New York: Oxford University Press, 1963. Misak, Cheryl, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Peirce. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Mooney, Edward, ed. Wilderness and the Heart: Henry Bugbee’s Philosophy of Place, Presence, and Memory. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1999. Morris, Charles. The Pragmatic Movement in America. New York: George Braziller, 1970. Mu¨nsterberg, Hugo. The Eternal Values. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1909. Oppenheim, Frank. Royce’s Voyage Down Under: A Journey of the Mind. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1980. ———. Royce’s Mature Philosophy of Religion. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1987. Peirce, Charles S. The Collected Papers of Charles S. Peirce. Ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (vols. 1–6) and Arthur Burks (vols. 7–8). Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1931–1958. ———. The Charles S. Peirce Papers. Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. ———. Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition. 6 vols. to date. Ed. Max Fisch, Christian Kloesel, and Nathan Houser. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982–2000. ———. Reasoning and the Logic of Things. Ed. Kenneth Ketner. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992. ———. The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings. 2 vols. Ed. Nathan Houser and Christian Kloesel. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992–1998. Perry, Ralph Barton. The Thought and Character of William James. 2 vols. Boston: Little, Brown, 1935. Pollock, Robert. ‘‘Emerson and America’s Future.’’ In Emerson: Prospect and Retrospect. Ed. Joel Porte. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982. Potter, Vincent. Charles S. Peirce on Norms and Ideals. New York: Fordham University Press, 1997. Pratt, Scott. Native Pragmatism: Rethinking the Roots of American Philosophy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002. Rebore, Ronald. Personnel Administration in Education: A Management Approach. 3rd ed. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1991. Rorty, Richard. Consequences of Pragmatism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1978.

................. 15741$

BIBL

02-13-06 14:42:27

PS

PAGE 286

bibliography

2 87

———. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Rosenfield, Leonora. ‘‘Morris R. Cohen: The Teacher.’’ Journal of the History of Ideas 18, no. 4 (1957): 552–571. Royce, Josiah. The World and the Individual. New York: Dover, 1959. ———. The Problem of Christianity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968. ———. The Basic Writings of Josiah Royce. Vol. 1. Ed. John McDermott. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969. ———. The Letters of Josiah Royce. Ed. John Clendenning. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970. Salter, William. ‘‘Pragmatism: A New Philosophy.’’ Atlantic Monthly 101 (1908): 657–663. Santayana, George. Interpretations of Poetry and Religion. Ed. William G. Holzberger and Herman J. Saatkamp. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989. Schinz, Albert. ‘‘Anti-Pragmatisme.’’ Unsigned review in The Monist 19, no. 3 (July 1909): 474–475. Seigfried, Charlene Haddock. William James’s Radical Reconstruction of Philosophy. Albany: SUNY Press, 1990. Shusterman, Richard. ‘‘Form and Funk: The Aesthetic Challenge of Popular Art.’’ British Journal of Aesthetics 31, no. 3 (July 1991): 203–213. Sidgwick, Alfred. ‘‘The Ambiguity of Pragmatism.’’ Mind 33 (1908): 24–25. Smith, John E. The Spirit of American Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1965. ———. America’s Philosophical Vision. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Stoller, Leo. After Walden: Thoreau’s Changing Views on Economic Man. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1957. Tausch, Edwin. ‘‘William James, the Pragmatist—A Psychological Analysis.’’ The Monist 19, no. 1 (1909): 1–26. Thayer, Horace S. Meaning and Action: A Critical History of Pragmatism. 2nd ed. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1981. Thoreau, Henry. Excursions. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1884. ———. The Portable Thoreau. Ed. Carl Bode. New York: Penguin, 1982. West, Cornel. The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989. Westbrook, Robert. John Dewey and American Democracy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991. Whicher, Stephen. ‘‘Emerson’s Tragic Sense.’’ The American Scholar 22 (1953): 285–292.

................. 15741$

BIBL

02-13-06 14:42:28

PS

PAGE 287

2 88

bibliography

———. Freedom and Fate: An Inner Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1953. Wilshire, Bruce. William James and Phenomenology: A Study of the Principles of Psychology. New York: AMS Press, 1979. ———. Wild Hunger: The Primal Roots of Modern Addiction. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998.

................. 15741$

BIBL

02-13-06 14:42:28

PS

PAGE 288

Index

Abduction, 28, 244, 252 Absolutism, 23, 25, 29, 34, 36–40, 42–46, 60–61, 69, 83, 86, 90, 115, 125, 132, 137, 152, 169, 248, 250 Action, 16, 40, 43, 53, 55–61, 69–72, 74–75, 78, 81–83, 87–88, 93–94, 122, 139–41, 164–65, 215, 218, 227–29, 232, 246, 248 Addiction, xi, 106–8, 170 Adventure, 12, 53, 55, 58, 60–61, 87, 122, 160, 181–82 Aesthetic, 4, 17, 61, 20, 22, 28, 61, 67, 82, 120, 124, 132–40, 143, 148, 150, 169, 182, 209, 213–14 Agape, 170–72, 186 Alexander, Thomas, 81, 130, 135, 139, 209, 220 Amateur, 249–51, 253 American scholar, 5, 15, 18, 189, 207–9, 220, 236, 241 Anaxagoras, 17 Analytic philosophy, 16, 19–20, 60 Anarchism, 87, 89, 160–61 Anderson, John, x, 51, 63, 259 Angel desolation, 15, 226, 232 grievous, 14, 221–23, 231–32 honky-tonk, 14, 95–96 insane, 3, 6, 14–15, 17, 226, 256 Anzalduá, Gloria, xi, 7, 9, 152 A priori, 66, 69, 73, 75 Aristotle, 28, 158, 179, 188, 192, 194 Arnold, Matthew, 198 Augustine, 26, 179, 188–89 Authority, 24, 106, 125, 159–61, 178, 186, 207 Autonomy, 45–46 teacher, 174–83

Aversive thinking, 10, 47, 99, 214, 220, 236 Awakening, 14, 32, 58, 64, 85, 90, 107, 113, 146, 151, 152, 154, 205, 237, 250, 252

Barton, William, 199 Beat generation, 15, 119, 146–47, 153, 223–26, 229, 231–33 Beatific, 225, 231–32 Being, 42–44, 48, 50–52, 58–60, 62–63, 65, 71, 108, 132–33, 152, 212, 214, 220 Bergson, Henri, 114, 134, 136 Bernstein, Richard, 19, 139 Berry, Chuck, 15, 144, 222 Blanshard, Brand, 82 Blau, Joseph, 19, 157, 189 Borderland, 16, 86–87, 93, 110–11 Bowne, Borden, 190–91 Brown, John, 89, 93–94, 99 Bugbee, Henry, x, 50–65, 67, 71–72, 74– 78, 80, 83, 140, 145 Calvinism, 10, 32, 191, 227 Carus, Paul, 29–30, 234–35, 237 Cassady, Neal, 147, 226 Cavell, Stanley, xi, 140, 189–90, 193, 204–20 Certainty, 36, 59, 66–75, 78, 83, 130, 169, 172, 193 Civil disobedience, 57, 87, 89, 93–94 Civilization, 44, 50, 86, 88, 93–94, 104, 106, 246 Clarity, 12, 59–60, 63, 74, 115, 195, 197, 231 Clarification, 74

{ 28 9 }

................. 15741$

INDX

02-13-06 14:42:31

PS

PAGE 289

index

2 90

Classism, 95, 97, 103, 107, Clebsch, William, 124 Cline, Patsy, 96 Coe, David Alan, 105–6, 263 Cohen, Morris Raphael, 165 Collingwood, R. G., 66 Community, 4, 17, 19–20, 30, 35, 37, 39, 41–49, 57–59, 62–63, 77, 107, 116, 138–39, 158–59, 169, 190, 216–17, 219, 232–33 Complacency, 75, 86 Conduct of life, 3, 21, 25, 28, 32, 67, 75, 201, 248 Confession, 14, 185, 189, 249, 251, 253 Contemplation, 74, 77, 157 Contingency, 115, 237, 240, 248 Continuity, 16, 50, 135, 247, 266 Conversion, 32, 120, 124, 143–45, 151–52, 236 Conway, Daniel, 53, 55–56 Creativity, 18, 51, 119, 122–23, 133, 138, 174, 176–77, 179–80, 182–83, 185 Creighton, J. E., 26–27 Croce, Benedetto, 66, 82 Crothers, S. M., 198 Curriculum specialists, 176–78, 183–84, 186 Cynicism, 48, 169

Dillard, Annie, xi, 135, 232 Dogmatism, 24, 67, 70–71, 119, 129, 140, 160, 181, 184–86, 252 Dublin, Louis, 165 Du Bois, W. E. B., 150, 152, 156 Dwelling, 91, 202 Eckhardt, Meister, 52, 58, 151 Education, 5, 15, 18, 20, 23, 25, 29, 32, 126–27, 139–41, 155–66, 175–87, 246–47 higher, 2, 159, 164–65, 175 Edwards, Jonathan, 4, 17, 32, 118, 150, 189–93, 223, 236 Eliot, T. S., 13 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, x, 3–5, 14–15, 82–83, 87–88, 130, 142, 148, 168, 188–233, 236–37 Empedocles, 17, Empiricism, 135, 190, 193, 212, 276 radical, 26–27, 53, 68, 114–18, 134, 137, 237–38 British, 80, 117 134 Ends-in-view, 15, 80–82 Enlightenment, 28, 80, 231, 275 Eulau, Heinz, 89 Evolutionary, 21, 170–71, 228–29 Exclusionary, 9 Existentialism, 21, 26, 119, 229 Experience, xi, 4, 6–11, 17–18, 23–26, 29, 48, 52–58, 60–63, 66, 68–71, 74–75, 80–83, 87–88, 98–99, 102–41, 152, 160, 168–69, 180, 183, 187, 193–97, 200–5, 210–18, 238–39, 248, 253 religious, 31, 62, 112, 148–51, 240, 243 Experiment, 13–14, 21, 23–24, 26–29, 31, 43, 46, 51, 68–69, 78, 110, 137–38, 143, 146, 174, 181–85, 237, 248

Davidson, Thomas, x, 53, 155–66, 158– 62, 164–66 Davis, Rev. Gary, 235, 253 Definition, 19, 73, 194–95, 197–99 Deductivism, 26 Dehumanizing, 107 Delaney, C. F., 241 Democracy, 5–6, 25, 73–74, 76, 88, 139, 159, 161–63, 170, 179, 190, 211, 214– 17, 236 Determinism, 116–17, 128 Dewey, John, x, 2, 5, 9, 12–13, 16–17, 19– 32, 52, 59, 65–84, 87, 93, 127–40, 143–44, 149, 153–59, 162, 166–70, 179, 184–85, 189–90, 196–97, 206– 20, 238, 243–52 Dialectical, 4, 16, 63, 86, 153, 199, 204 Dickenson, Donna, 8

................. 15741$

Failure, x, 13, 21–25, 31, 53, 99, 109, 169, 172, 179–81, 215–16, 237, 239, 244, 248–53 Faith, 9, 13, 23, 29–30, 32, 34, 51, 58, 65– 66, 70–74, 83–84, 115–17, 125, 139, 141, 168–69, 211, 216, 228, 252 Fallibilism, 9, 23, 30, 32, 44, 237, 248 Feidelson, Charles, Jr., 191–92, 194

INDX

02-13-06 14:42:32

PS

PAGE 290

index Feminism, 5, 97 Freedom, 34, 86, 90–92, 100, 104–6, 109, 118, 121–22, 148–49, 152, 158–62, 171, 180, 186–87, 230 of the will, 17, 92, 122, 191 Friendship, 34, 72–75, 135, 204, 215, 219 Frontier, 16, 35, 42, 44–46, 52, 58, 87–88, 146–47, 224–25 Frothingham, O. B., 191 Fuller, Margaret, x, 5, 8, 10, 17, 26, 48, 94, 146, 150, 156

Hope, x, 6, 15, 29–31, 34–35, 39–43, 52– 53, 71–73, 126, 147, 150, 165, 222–33, 250, 253 Humanism, 2, 20, 26, 126, 128, 158, 164, 187, 238 Humanities, 120, 128, 161–62, 166, 173, 184 Hypothesis, 24, 27–28, 69 Idealism, 20, 23, 34, 40, 54–55, 65–66, 76–77, 84, 115, 125, 128, 164, 200, 228, 238 Illumination, 140, 229, 242 Immediacy, 40, 48, 51, 130, 135, 140, 145, 149, 151–52 Indeterminacy, 23, 195, 248 Individual, 4, 16, 26, 37–48, 115, 118–21, 158–62, 169–71, 204–5, 215–17, 247 Induction, 116, 244 Ineffable, 62, 137, 148 Inheritance, 8, 10, 18, 20, 35, 69–71, 74, 78, 101, 153, 183, 220 Inquiry, xi, 22–24, 27–28, 41–46, 69–78, 114–18, 137–40, 160, 187, 220, 237, 241–45, 250 Inspiration, 24, 103, 194, 229, 243, 246 Instinct, 68–69, 142, 194 Instrumentalism, 66, 75–76, 130 Intellectualism, 128, 193, 218–19, 236 Intelligence, 17, 23, 74, 84, 140, 195–96, 209–17, 252, 275 Interpretation, 20, 35, 46, 48 Intuition, 67, 70–71, 74, 83, 114, 131–36, 139, 192, 261 Invisibility, cultural, 1–3, 16

Gambling, 15, 21–23, 167–69, 179, 180– 82, 187, 251–53 Garcia, Jerry, 12, 152, 256, 264 Generic traits, 143, 239 Genius, 88, 109, 126, 142, 200, 211, 246, 250 George, Lowell, 108, 144 Gilmore, Mikal, 144 Ginsberg, Allen, 225 God, 37–40, 45, 65, 69–71, 91, 95, 116, 122, 124, 130, 134, 171, 195, 250, 258 Goodman, Russell, 189, 204, 209, 219 Gritzbach, George, 148, 167 Growth, 22–23, 80, 83, 143, 149, 161, 169– 76, 186, 216 Habit, 9, 16, 57, 86, 90–91, 104, 143, 149, 162–63, 172–74, 184–85, 216, 246–47 Haggard, Merle, 108, 263 Hall, G. Stanley, 33 Harris, Emmylou, 11, 96, 221–23 Harris, Kenneth Marc, 196 Harris, William T., 157, 199 Hausman, Carl, 19, 183 Healthy-minded, 120–24 Hegel, G. W. F., 1, 122–23, 158, 188, 191, 193, 199, 205, 224, 227 Hendrix, Jimi, 13, 103, 232 Hickman, Larry, 66 Hillbilly, 95, 100–9 Hocking, William E., 58, 65, 67–78, 80, 83, 136–41 Homelessness, 7, 37, 51, 64, 105, 107 Hooker, Mildred Baker, 156 Hooks, bell, xi, 6, 10, 16, 152

................. 15741$

2 91

Jackson, Aunt Molly, 95–96 James, Henry, Sr., 130, 171 James, William, x–xi, 12–13, 33, 55, 60, 77, 112–28, 146, 152, 156, 159, 166, 187, 190, 207, 234, 253 Jennings, Waylon, 95, 98–110 Job, 34, 37–40 Johnson, Glen, 200–1, 273 Johnstone, Henry, Sr., 241 Jones, George, 97–110

INDX

02-13-06 14:42:33

PS

PAGE 291

index

2 92

Kerouac, Jack, 11, 15, 91, 146–53, 221–33 Kestenbaum, Victor, 66, 83, 129, 134, 220 Kierkegaard, Søren, 26 Knight, William, 156 Knowing, 17, 54, 71, 82, 160, 211–14

Mysticism, 41–42, 45, 58, 113, 127, 130–41, 142–54 Naturalism, 54–55, 238 Nature, 18, 37, 55, 61, 85–86, 119, 122–23, 132–35, 148, 195, 197, 202, 205, 220, 227–29, 238, 253 Nelson, Willie, 104–5 Neopragmatism, 20, 198 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 13, 26, 189, 193, 207–8, 214–15, 218 Nominalism, 114, 191, 243 Normative science, 28–29 Novelty, 33, 90, 179, 186, 226

Langer, Susanne, 12 Learning, 40, 58–63, 126, 139–40, 155, 159–66, 167–87 Liberalism, 48 Loss, x, 14, 21–25, 30–32, 42, 90–91, 107–8, 133, 143, 169, 221–32, 236–44, 253 Lostness, 14, 36–46, 51, 60–62, 90, 99– 100, 107–10, 134, 225, 230–33, 251, 262 Love, 46, 72–73, 126, 150–51, 170–75, 186–87, 214 Loyalty, 46–48 Lynn, Loretta, 96, 110–11

Objectivism, 54 Ontological wonder sickness, 64, 240, 242 Ontology, 114, 118 Oppenheim, Frank, 34, 37 Oppression, 99, 125 Optimism, 23, 169 Ordinary, 4, 16, 26, 53, 65, 75, 80, 106, 114, 135–38, 143, 146, 148, 210–11, 219, 223, 225, 242, 249 Ortega y Gasset, Jose´, 8, 66 Outlaw, 39, 67, 87–88, 98–100, 104–7, 166 Overcivilization, 50, 86

McDermott, John, xi, 4, 18, 19, 32, 189, 193, 210, 218, 220, 238–39, 251 McDill, 10–11 McKenna, Erin, 15 Maeroff, Gene, 177 Malone, Bill, 99, 101, 109–10 Marcel, Gabriel, 50, 65, 67, 70–76, 80, 83, 261 Marcuse, Herbert, 48, 143, 149 materialism, 117, 125–26, 134 Meaning, 4, 18, 20, 43, 59–64, 71, 74–75, 78, 80–83, 118, 120, 125, 129, 134, 136–41, 144, 195, 198, 213–14, 235, 237 Meliorism, 28–29, 122, 128, 211 Memory, 132, 145, 156, 224–26 Metaphysics, 16–17, 129, 196, 199, 243 Midworld, 70, 86, 200 Miller, John William, 66, 241, 250 Mills, C. Wright, 235, 249 Misak, Cheryl, 28 Mistake, ix, 8, 59, 172, 209, 218, 235 Monism, 116–17 Moore, Ernest, 159 Musement, 250

................. 15741$

Parker, Theodore, 192, 198 Parmenides, 70, 202 Parsons, Gram, 14, 108, 221–32, 276 Passion, 4, 14–17, 185–87 Patience, 51–53, 61, 124, 230–31 Pearson, Karl, 27 Pedagogy, 174, 247 Peirce, Charles S., 6, 12–13, 19–37, 41, 43–46, 53, 69–70, 78, 83, 115, 132, 134–35, 149, 156, 168, 170–73, 195– 96, 208, 237–52 Perception, 133–40, 175, 203, 227 Perfectionism, 211, 214–16 Perry, Ralph Barton, 253 Phenomenology, 26, 114, 169 Phronesis, 26, 75–76, 213

INDX

02-13-06 14:42:34

PS

PAGE 292

index Plato, 26, 34, 70, 158, 172, 188–89, 192, 194–200, 204–5, 218 Platonism, 190–91, 205, 240 Pluralism, 22, 114–15, 118, 121, 125, 238 Poet, x, 7, 54, 59, 72, 88, 93, 128, 189, 191– 208, 218, 224, 232, 234, 241, 243 Politics, 2, 85–86, 90, 95–96, 101, 139, 141, 164, 191, 195, 209, 219, 246 Pollock, Robert, 19, 189, 199 Positivism, 44, 114–21, 125, 128, 212, 235, 240–41 Possibility, x, 18, 32, 51, 83, 92, 124, 143, 149, 151, 180, 210, 232, 244 Potter, Vincent, 28 Pragmaticism, 241 Pragmatism, 9, 16, 19–32, 43, 65–66, 114, 118, 130, 140, 156, 190, 234–53 Pratt, Scott, 4 Precarious, 13, 23, 32, 47, 51, 70–74, 79, 118, 121, 163, 168, 180, 215, 237, 248 Progressivism, 139 Provocation, 86 Prudence, 76, 80, 125, 204, 219

Rose, Fred, 100, 103 Rosenfeld, Leonora, 165 Royce, Josiah, 13, 17, 20–21, 23, 31, 33–49, 65, 115, 123, 157, 189, 238, 241 Saints, 119–26 Salter, William M., 29 Santayana, George, 190–91, 194, 198 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 52, 61 Sartwell, Crispin, xi Schiller, F. C. S., 20–21, 237–38 Scientific, 13, 20, 23–28, 44, 59, 68–71, 78–79, 113–18, 126, 140, 183, 212, 237, 239, 241, 243, 245–47 Secondness, 53–54 Seigfried, Charlene, 118, 252 Self-aversion, 10, 31, 47, 99, 236–37 Self-reliance, 217, 226–30 Semiotic, 6, 195, 245 Sensitiveness, 81–82, 139 Sentiment, 29–30 Sexism, 97, 263 Shaman, 143, 152, 223–24 Shusterman, Richard, 210 Sick soul, 120–24 Sidgwick, Alfred, 28 Situation, 23–24, 55, 60, 71, 80, 132–40, 176, 210, 213, 240 Skepticism, 71, 169, 241, 252 Smith, John E., xi, 19, 34, 46, 48, 74, 209 Socialism, 158, 160 Socrates, 24, 38, 79, 158–62, 166, 179 Spanish language, 7–9 Speculation, 49, 140, 191 Spinoza, Benedict, 52, 199 Spontaneity, 21–22, 86, 168, 173–74, 179– 80, 224, 228, 230, 244, 252–53 Springsteen, Bruce, 15, 142–54 Stability, 22–24, 48, 60, 68–70, 75–79, 173–74, 180, 248 Stoics, 21, 99, 231 Stoller, Leo, 88 Strong, David, 55 Sympathy, 77, 81–83, 134, 139, 160–61

Qualitative immediacy, 83, 131–44, 150, 152 Rationalism, 115, 125, 128, 190, 196 Rawls, John, 214–15 Realism, 12, 21, 238 Reason, 27, 29, 115, 118, 193, 208, 219 Rebore, Ronald, 175 Reconstruction, 21, 31–32, 66, 190, 244– 45, 253 Religion, 11, 18, 20, 29, 40, 72, 112, 117–22, 127–28, 171, 191, 195, 206, 212, 246, 250 Representative, 8, 10, 99, 192, 203–4 Responsibility, 62, 90, 93–94, 160, 162, 174, 177–87, 244, 252 Risk, 12–14, 21–22, 25, 27, 29–30, 45–46, 51, 67, 70, 93, 124, 167–87, 228, 231, 245, 248–49, 252–53 Romantic, 11, 13, 25, 40, 46, 145–46, 153, 189, 208–9, 216 Rorty, Richard, 20, 26, 31, 53, 189, 208, 220, 236, 239–41, 252

................. 15741$

2 93

Teachers, 1–2, 7, 13, 14–16, 34, 63, 126, 140, 155–57, 161–65, 167, 170, 172–87

INDX

02-13-06 14:42:34

PS

PAGE 293

index

2 94

Teaching, x, 2–3, 12, 14, 17, 31, 33, 35, 62– 63, 126, 139–41, 155–87 Technologism, 213–14 Teleology, 73, 200 developmental, 23 Telos, 228 Temperament, 21, 29, 31, 66, 121, 193, 223, 247 Thinking, 10, 21, 33, 40–41, 47, 50, 60– 63, 74, 76, 78–80, 96, 127, 131, 138, 140–41, 198, 200, 209, 212–19, 237, 239–44, 248–53 Thompson, Hank, 96 Thoreau, Henry David, x, 12, 22, 26, 47, 53, 55–57, 60–63, 72, 85–93, 94–95, 99, 102, 104–7, 110–11, 133, 143, 152, 154, 173, 219, 237, 252 Transcendence, 66, 108, 129, 223–31 Transcendentalism, 5, 12, 17, 20, 223 Transformation, 16, 109–10, 133, 144, 149, 151–53, 155, 161–63, 171, 211, 223 Truth, 3, 8, 18, 21, 28–30, 36, 40–43, 45– 46, 54, 64, 72, 77–78, 89–90, 101, 117, 137, 202, 213, 236, 239, 242, Tufts, James Hayden, 76 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 87, 147 Tychism, 21, 252

Vague, 83, 115, 195–96, 198 Valuation, 80, 114 Values, 42, 49, 72, 79–82, 120–21, 137, 195, 201 Variety, 70, 174, 198, 200–4 Vigilance, 83, 202–5 Wayne, John, 149 Wells, Kitty, 14, 95, 110 Wenders, Wim, 6 West, Cornel, 213, 217 Whicher, Stephen, 202, 204 Whitehead, Alfred North, 12 Wilderness, 37–48, 50–64, 66, 72, 85, 91– 92, 106–7, 152, 224–25 Wildness, 12, 50, 54, 60, 85–93, 94–95, 98, 100, 102–11, 152, 157, 173 Wilshire, Bruce, xi, 259 Williams, Don, 10, Williams, George, 50–51 Williams, Hank, 11, 94–111, 222 Wisdom, 17, 26–27, 38–39, 75–84, 129– 30, 159, 169, 192, 214, 227 Woodberry, George, 191, 193 World building, 160–62 Worship, 131, 141 Wynette, Tammy, 96–99, 101, 107, 109– 11, 150

Unamuno, Miguel, 8 Undergoing, 82–83, 227–30 Unions, 176–77 Universe, 22, 29, 58, 64, 70, 116, 118–23, 141, 199, 227, 229, 241

................. 15741$

Young, Neil, 103, 145 Zevon, Warren, 12, 145, 256

INDX

02-13-06 14:42:35

PS

PAGE 294

american philosophy series Douglas R. Anderson and Jude Jones, series editors

1. Kenneth Laine Ketner, ed., Peirce and Contemporary Thought: Philosophical Inquiries. 2. Max H. Fisch, ed., Classic American Philosophers: Peirce, James, Royce, Santayana, Dewey, Whitehead, second edition. Introduction by Nathan Houser. 3. John E. Smith, Experience and God, second edition. 4. Vincent G. Potter, Peirce’s Philosophical Perspectives. Edited by Vincent Colapietro. 5. Richard E. Hart and Douglas R. Anderson, eds., Philosophy in Experience: American Philosophy in Transition. 6. Vincent G. Potter, Charles S. Pierce: On Norms and Ideals, second edition. Introduction by Stanley M. Harrison. 7. Vincent M. Colapietro, ed., Reason, Experience, and God: John E. Smith in Dialogue. Introduction by Merold Westphal. 8. Robert J. O’Connell, S.J., William James on the Courage to Believe, second edition. 9. Elizabeth M. Kraus, The Metaphysics of Experience: A Companion to Whitehead’s ‘‘Process and Reality,’’ second edition. Introduction by Robert C. Neville. 10. Kenneth Westphal, ed. Pragmatism, Reason, and Norms: A Realistic Assessment—Essays in Critical Appreciation of Frederick L. Will. 11. Beth J. Singer, Pragmatism, Rights, and Democracy. 12. Eugene Fontinell, Self, God, and Immorality: A Jamesian Investigation.

................. 15741$

SERI

02-13-06 14:42:34

PS

PAGE 295

13. Roger Ward, Conversion in American Philosophy: Exploring the Practice of Transformation. 14. Michael Epperson, Quantum Mechanics and the Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. 15. Kory Sorrell, Representative Practices: Peirce, Pragmatism, and Feminist Epistemology. 16. Naoko Saito, The Gleam of Light: Moral Perfectionism and Education in Dewey and Emerson. 17. Josiah Royce, The Basic Writings of Josiah Royce.

................. 15741$

SERI

02-13-06 14:42:35

PS

PAGE 296

Philosophy Americana: Making Philosophy at Home in American Culture (American Philosophy)

Creativity in American philosophy

Slavery philosophy american literature

Spirit of American Philosophy

American Philosophy: The Basics

On philosophy in american law

Emerson and Self-Culture (American Philosophy)

Time and reality in American philosophy

Doctrine and Experience: Essays in American Philosophy

A Companion to African-American Philosophy (Blackwell Companions to Philosophy)

The Blackwell Guide to American Philosophy (Blackwell Philosophy Guides)

The Blackwell Guide to American Philosophy (Blackwell Philosophy Guides)

Kant's Philosophy of Hope (American University Studies Series V, Philosophy)

The Philosophy of Loyalty (Vanderbilt Library of American Philosophy)

Social Philosophy (Explorations in Philosophy)

Philosophy

Philosophy

Philosophy

The Philosophy of Philosophy

Americana (Contemporary American fiction)

A Companion to Latin American Philosophy

Latin American Philosophy: Currents, Issues, Debates

The Philosophy of Mathematics (Readings in Philosophy)

The Philosophy of Mathematics (Readings in Philosophy)

Philosophy of Existence (Works in Continental Philosophy)

Revisioning Philosophy (SUNY Series in Philosophy)

Political Philosophy (Dimensions of Philosophy)

Political Philosophy (Dimensions of Philosophy)

Philosophy after Objectivity: Making Sense in Perspective

Trauma: Culture, Meaning and Philosophy

Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making

Philosophy Americana: Making Philosophy at Home in American Culture (American Philosophy)

Creativity in American philosophy

Slavery philosophy american literature

Spirit of American Philosophy

American Philosophy: The Basics

On philosophy in american law

Emerson and Self-Culture (American Philosophy)

Time and reality in American philosophy

Doctrine and Experience: Essays in American Philosophy

A Companion to African-American Philosophy (Blackwell Companions to Philosophy)

The Blackwell Guide to American Philosophy (Blackwell Philosophy Guides)

The Blackwell Guide to American Philosophy (Blackwell Philosophy Guides)

Kant's Philosophy of Hope (American University Studies Series V, Philosophy)

The Philosophy of Loyalty (Vanderbilt Library of American Philosophy)

Social Philosophy (Explorations in Philosophy)

Philosophy

Philosophy

Philosophy

The Philosophy of Philosophy

Americana (Contemporary American fiction)

A Companion to Latin American Philosophy

Latin American Philosophy: Currents, Issues, Debates

The Philosophy of Mathematics (Readings in Philosophy)

The Philosophy of Mathematics (Readings in Philosophy)

Philosophy of Existence (Works in Continental Philosophy)

Revisioning Philosophy (SUNY Series in Philosophy)

Political Philosophy (Dimensions of Philosophy)

Political Philosophy (Dimensions of Philosophy)

Philosophy after Objectivity: Making Sense in Perspective

Trauma: Culture, Meaning and Philosophy

Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making

Recommend Documents