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  • A Natural History of Pragmatism: The Fact of Feeling From Jonathan Edwards to Gertrude Stein
  • Richard E. Hart
Joan Richardson. A Natural History of Pragmatism: The Fact of Feeling From Jonathan Edwards to Gertrude Stein. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. xviii + 327 pp.

Louis Menand describes Joan Richardson's A Natural History of Pragmatism as ". . . nothing less than a revolution in our understanding of pragmatism." He claims further that "Her book will change the way you think about the history and meaning of pragmatism. . ." Book cover snippets, by their nature, tend to be mind-catching and perhaps inflated, but such robust declarations by an accomplished Harvard scholar like Menand deserve to be taken seriously. So what is Richardson's "take" on pragmatism and what about her "take" is so "revolution[ ary]"? What sort of objectives does she lay out? What sorts of novel interpretations or explications does she offer that we may not have either seen or sufficiently considered before? She poses fundamental questions: how does pragmatism emerge and develop on American soil and in American experience from late nineteenth century through modernism to the present moment? What factors influenced its formation and progression? What unique confluence of variables (cultural, historical, religious, literary) account for the evolution of America's quintessential, authentically homegrown philosophy?

For me, the book's title is revealing of her intentions and method. A close look at the particular words Richardson chose for her title provides clues for beginning to grasp her approach. A Natural History of Pragmatism contains two significant words joined together. "History", of course, indicates that she will not just be addressing or analyzing the main ideas or principles of a mode of thought, but rather how such things were born, nurtured and shaped to maturity. But her book is to be a "natural history," not a philosophical, social or political history per se (though such factors are included in her study). "Natural" suggests the organic or organic evolution, and the impact of Darwin is, indeed, a key element of her position. The book's subtitle includes a phrase Richardson borrows from Wallace Stevens—"the fact of feeling." The word, "fact", suggests that which is objective or science. "Feeling" typically leans toward the emotive or affective—art, literature, religion or [End Page 159] spirituality. The "fact of feeling" brings the seemingly different domains or practices together, weaving them into an explanatory whole. Feeling becomes an objective reality, not simply an ephemeral impulse. And the facts (of science or philosophy) become interwoven with feeling. Finally, "from Jonathan Edwards to Gertrude Stein" tells us that Richardson will be traversing considerable diverse territory, from religion to literary art, with a number of important stops in between.

Richardson's big picture—her broad themes—concerns the sense in which pragmatism, in its origins and development, must be understood as rooted in a particular and unique American experience, just as it must, also, be understood to change the way we think about, use and derive meanings from our language. One of her achievements may, thus, be the extent to which she successfully merges together American experience with the language we use to account for it. More specifically, the book tracks the interplay, in a period of history, of religious motive and experience, scientific speculation and literary art in shaping a unique "American aesthetic" and American philosophy. In broad strokes, the convergence of science and religion, according to Richardson, gave rise to a way of thinking (pragmatism), transforming the language of our explanations and yielding interpretations that inevitably break new ground in literary and cultural history. What is to be said more concretely about American experience, the role of religion and science, and the language employed to make sense of such a broad array of factors?

Regarding religion, Richardson's argument ". . . opens by tracing the conceptual framing of America's native philosophy out of an earlier form of thinking brought to the New World by seventeenth-century Puritan ministers" (ix). The grand theological motive to build a "city upon a hill" out of the vast wilderness and wildness of the new land was sustained by the view that all things, all experiences, were signs of continuing...

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