The Drama of Possibility: Experience as Philosophy of Culture

3. An American Angle of Vision, Part 2

three an american angle of vision, part 2  When a way of thinking is deeply rooted in the soil and embodies the instincts or even the characteristic errors of a people, it has a value quite independent of its truth; it constitutes a phase of human life and can powerfully affect the intellectual drama in which it figures. —George Santayana, Character and Opinion in the United States In the case of America, to which Santayana’s text primarily refers, the stakes are somewhat higher than that of an intellectual drama. For better or worse, the American perspective is engaged with other major cultures in formulating the dominant metaphors for world culture.1 As with all massive cultural formulations, we find in America the perils and fruits of original attitudes not institutionalized elsewhere. Having already sketched some of the historical and methodological factors pertinent to the analysis of American culture,2 we turn now to the major philosophical assumptions and implications of this tradition. Naturally, there can be no exhaustive treatment here of any of these issues; we wish rather to emphasize the confusion that frequently exists between the analysis of American philosophy and the philosophical analysis of American culture. Categories and persuasions often taken to be characteristic of the former are actually found to be broadly based attitudes of the culture at large. During the classical phase of American philosophy, as well as in the subsequent work of Dewey, the culture and its philosophical tradition {  } an american angle of vision, part 2  shared basic concerns and methods of articulation. The studied neglect of the American philosophical tradition by all but a handful of contemporary American thinkers cuts us off, then, not simply from a philosophical option, but from the articulation of basic culture categories. Philosophy in America has made tremendous strides in a professional and technical way; but with rare exceptions, it has failed to address itself to the exigencies of the culture in a language commensurate with the way in which the culture understands itself. A major reason for this is the increased sophistication of philosophical discourse, which renders the work of Edwards, Emerson, James, and even Dewey inadequate and infelicitous in expression. What is not adequately realized, however, is the fact that these thinkers , among others, have their hands on a large set of basic, even primitive , reconstitutions of the way in which men structure inquiry, of the values they seek, and a fortiori of the role of philosophy. These concerns and their imaginative, though admittedly often vague, versions are indigenous to a culture which was attempting, within the ever-present framework of Western European civilization, to work out what Emerson plaintively called ‘‘an original relation to the universe.’’3 While not always explicit, this theme is basic to American thinkers, at least until World War I. In the long run, when one considers that it involves such questions as the meaning of nature, time, experience, and the experimental attitude, this cultural development should prove to be more important than the various responses given by individual philosophers. Granted that we cannot nostalgically return to the alleged ‘‘Golden Age’’ of American philosophy, it remains that the questions which bound those thinkers to their culture are still with us, and, as with all important questions, are badly in need of ever-renewed philosophical analysis. The remarks which follow are an attempt to reopen some of these questions from the perspective of philosophy, always recalling their broader cultural significance. The Ambiguity of the Spiritual Pilgrimage In speaking of the American people during their formative years, Sidney Mead opens up the question that should increasingly occupy us now  the drama of possibility that we have obviously and irrevocably come to the end of any cultural and political separation from the pressing burdens of world culture.4 We are, in a word, faced anew with the problem of national identity. Their great and obvious achievement was the mastery of a vast, stubborn , and ofttimes brutal continent. This is the ‘‘epic of America,’’ written with cosmic quill dipped in the blood, sweat, and tears of innumerable nameless little men and women and a few half-real, half-legendary heroes. . . . This is the mighty saga of the outward acts, told and retold until it has over-shadowed and suppressed the equally vital, but more somber, story of the inner experience. Americans have so presented to view and celebrated the external and material...