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

While I would not necessarily bet on "philosophy Americana" becoming the name of a style or subdiscipline, the idea is a good one: to connect the tradition of American philosophy with American culture more generally. In particular, Douglas Anderson ties together Emerson-Thoreau-Peirce-James-Royce-Dewey to Hank Williams, Tammy Wynette, Jack Kerouac, and Bruce Springsteen. In doing so he gives a rich vision of what used to be called "the American character" as a sort of comic, tragic, and beautiful pushing forward, into the wilderness, onto the road, onto the frontier, into the laboratory and classroom, or into the afterlife.

It is an old idea in some ways, of course, and has the charm of nostalgia: one thinks of Vernon Parrington's magisterial Main Currents in American Thought, which identified an American canon and connected it to a narrative of cultural identity. Anderson's own narrative—at once more focused and more diffuse—is purposely provisional, politically chastened, and unavoidably self-aware in a postmodern vein. Yet it nevertheless recovers the meaning of America: something that at this point has the bittersweet, compelling quality of an antique artifact, like the old gas station depicted on the cover of Philosophy Americana.

Anderson is at his sharpest when he is right at the cusp of philosophy and popular culture, but by and large he separates these chapters or essays into those that primarily address American philosophy and those that address popular music and culture. This has the paradoxical quality of making you see how really distinct and in tension the two discourses are. Deep in a defense of Dewey from the charge of raw instrumentalism or an excursus into Roycean idealist/pragmatist metaphysics, it is hard to remember that this has something to do with a close reading of "Stand by Your Man." On the other hand, the theme of wildness in persons, or in Emerson's phrase "insane angels," winds through these chapters and provides sudden wild juxtapositions that help you to understand the divisions, and the yearning across them, in American thought and culture.

In some ways, the tale of American philosophy that Anderson tells is also traditional, despite the inclusion of such figures as bell hooks. It is the tale of American thought that is conventional, for one thing, in the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy, according to which the tradition of the great figures of American philosophy was abandoned and betrayed by analytic philosophy and by Richard Rorty and other post-pragmatists.

This is one element of the atmosphere of nostalgia in Philosophy Americana: the tradition of thought Anderson discusses is essentially over by its own account, even as it is characterized by its supposed dedication to the constant reconstruction of the future. I might remark that Anderson's story could be extended and enriched by the inclusion of figures such as Quine and Eminem, showing how the tradition has made its way one way or another into today—or how it has not.

If I were advising Anderson on where to go from here, it would be to downplay or transcend the scholarship, to make due with fewer close readings of particular figures, to take on a looser and perhaps bolder voice. Philosophy Americana is almost an autobiography, almost a riffing improvisation on the American experience, almost a series of essays for a wide readership.

But it is not quite these things, and if it ever makes sense to think that a book is marred by its scholarship, it might make sense here. The scholarship is deep, and Anderson on Royce or Peirce is as true to the sources as we are likely to see. Also it is easy to see that Anderson is inspired by the texts: that the texts are not merely arguments but something meant to affect the way you live. But the book wants to loosen...