American Pragmatism and Poetic Practice: Crosscurrents from Emerson to Susan Howe by Kristen Case (review)

From Aristotle's Poetics to contemporary aestheticians grappling with the politics and poetics of rap, intellectual traffic between philosophy and poetry has formed an appreciable undercurrent in the historical ebb and flow of cross-disciplinary bridge building. If anything, in the postwar years this undercurrent has only become more pronounced. Not to look too far, Wittgenstein himself admonished in Culture and Value that philosophy ought really to be written only as a form of poetic composition. Skeptics will, of course, take Wittgenstein with a grain of salt, arguing that few statements could be more self-serving and that, like in the case of T.S. Eliot and the metaphysical school of poetry, Wittgenstein was simply promoting his own school of poetry—er, philosophy. In this he succeeded so well that some literary critics attempt to study him as a poet.

Be that as it may, Kristen Case endeavours to make a case that there is more to gain than lose by bringing philosophy and poetry together. And, to be sure, if the spirit of pragmatism is to be taken as 'whatever works,' then why not? In these days of interdisciplinary, cross-disciplinary, and transdisciplinary commerce, the leap from Emerson the inspirational philosopher to Emerson the lyrical New Age essayist seems to be hardly a leap at all. Bridging academic philosophy and the study of literature is a praiseworthy goal at any time. Alas, it is one of the few praiseworthy things about American Pragmatism and Poetic Practice.

The author begins with an admission: "I am a trespasser in the territory of philosophy" (xi), which perhaps explains why, somewhat confusingly, the book follows the chronology of the poets, not the philosophers. Even her commendable candour about lacking the wherewithal to mete out philosophical justice cannot mitigate the fact that her pragmatism is so narrowly defined as to raise more than a few eyebrows. Judging by the contents, the pragmatic tradition in philosophy starts with Emerson and Thoreau, flourishes with Peirce and James, and comes to an abrupt end with Dewey. Royce, Mead, Schiller, Addams, and C.I. Lewis, to name a few, are notable only by their absence. One would look in vain for a single word on the neo-pragmatist hijack executed by Rorty and Putnam (to the dismay of those who feel that it distorts the very spirit of pragmatic philosophizing) or on the contemporary flourishing of pragmatism in Scandinavia.

What there is is demonstrably wrong. Case states: "the pragmatist writers I investigate valued experience over the inherited problems and vocabulary of philosophy" (xii). This is emphatically true of James, somewhat true of Dewey, and emphatically untrue of Peirce. Yet, by her own admission, the author is not that interested in getting things right when it comes to pragmatist methodology and practice. In fact, her aim could hardly be more wishy-washy: "to explore the echoes of pragmatist thinking in corners where they may not be expected to sound" (xiii). This is just about as far from Peirce's efforts to make analytic rigour and scientific accuracy a backbone of pragmatism as can be. An accomplished mathematician in his own right, he insisted in a 1909 letter to William James that "philosophy is either a science or is balderdash".

In fact, if there is a prevalent understanding of pragmatism today— as it is delineated for example in the recent Continuum Companion to Pragmatism—it is far from a doctrinal perspective on science and cognition, a single categorical framework of inquiry, or a unified body of disciplinary tenets. Indeed, it would be difficult to expect anything else from a field that subsumes Peirce and Rorty or James and Quine's 'pragmatic turn.' It is rather an attitude and a method, an overarching approach to thinking about issues that elude testable and quantifiable study, a meta-philosophy given to reflecting on the ways philosophy is and ought to be pursued. Case's overarching conclusion that pragmatism...