John E. Smith: Doing Something with American Philosophy

The philosophy of John Smith is not a dispassionate subject for me. He was my teacher from my sophomore year in college through the PhD, which he mentored. I worked in his office nearly every day during that time. He became my intellectual father and framed the way I took up philosophy. He performed my wedding and twenty-five years later taught my two daughters. We worked together philosophically and in the politics of the academy from my first day as his undergraduate typist, when I was utterly naïve about both topics, until the day he died, when I had no innocence left. His daughter Diana informed me of his death by responding to an e-mail I had sent him that afternoon. I preached his funeral, threw frozen dirt on his coffin in the Grove Street Cemetery, spoke at his memorial service, and now am here. I think of myself as one of his intellectual heirs and know that so many others also received philosophic life from him. So perhaps I speak for more than myself here in mourning the loss of an important intimate forebear. My aim in these remarks is to call to mind some of his heritage.

The first thing to stress about that heritage is that Smith found his earliest philosophic grounding in European philosophy, especially in German Idealism, and only later in American philosophy. Doubtless, his great teachers at Union Seminary, such as Paul Tillich, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Richard Kroner, were responsible for much of this. When he studied American philosophy at Columbia, it was Josiah Royce, the American who most closely identified with German Idealism, who became the subject of his dissertation and first book. His early teaching assignments at Yale were heavily weighted toward modern European philosophy. I took four courses with him in the late 1950s and early 1960s on Kant’s First Critique, and three on Hegel’s Lesser Logic. His pedagogical method was a classical “explication of the text,” moving paragraph by paragraph. Although in none of those courses did we officially get past the “Table of Categories” in the Critique, or “Being” in the Logic, his commentary carried us in detail through the whole of those books, the related works of the authors, their historical contexts, and their contemporary relevance.

Smith’s first book, Royce’s Social Infinite, his revised dissertation, has held the high ground in determining Royce scholarship for sixty years, and will continue to do so until Randall Auxier’s large book on Royce someday is published. But Smith’s second book, Reason and God (1961), was mainly about the problems arising from the European context, with only two chapters focusing on American philosophers.¹ The solid focus on European philosophy, especially on German Idealism, had two important consequences for Smith. It helped him see and express just how different and original American philosophy was. And it moved him to be primarily a philosopher of religion, and to read much of American philosophy through the interests of religion.

So the second point of Smith’s heritage was his elaboration of the new notion of experience in his many interpretations of American philosophers, beginning with Edwards and Emerson but treated most fulsomely with respect to the classical pragmatists, among whom he counted Royce (See Smith, Purpose and Thought ch. 3). His most common contrast was between the sense of experience in the British empiricists and that of pragmatism. William James, I think, was Smith’s least favorite of the great pragmatists, but he gave James primary credit for radical empiricism that saw relations and change as constitutive of direct experience, not as subsequent observations on something immediately given (See Smith, Spirit of American Philosophy ch. 2; and Smith, Themes in American Philosophy ch. 2). In discussing Peirce and Dewey, Smith regularly cited their notions of interpretive interaction in the laboratory and in social affairs, insisting that experience is inclusive of both its objects and its interpretation, not a medium between the world and the interpreter.

An equally important contrast for him was that between the Kantian and Idealist problematic of representative...