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  • Essaying America:A Declaration of Independence
  • John Lysaker

American life storms about us daily, and is slow to find a tongue.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Poetry and Imagination"

Early in his Meditations, Descartes suggests that, at least once, one should set one's epistemic bushel in order, as if beliefs were apples to be sorted. But that is not quite right, even though he uses the image in his replies to the seventh set of objections. Descartes's principal concern is not each and every belief but the ways in which he justifies them. It is thus not a stretch to find a kind of ethics of belief in the Meditations, at least with regard to scientia. (Regarding the epistemic challenges of everyday life, Descartes is quite clear in his synopsis that "no sane person ever seriously doubted these things," i.e., "that there really is a world, and that humans have bodies and so on" [1984, 11].) At its heart, then, and all doctrine aside, Cartesian philosophy responds to a call that asks us to formulate a rational basis for our epistemic commitments.1

I feel a similar obligation, though my concern does not lie with how to conduct myself in the way of belief or, better yet, with how to formulate commitments to assertoric speech acts. In its briefest form, it runs, "Am I an American philosopher?" though that wording is infelicitous insofar [End Page 531] as it seems to concern a factual matter, whereas my issue is not whether I satisfy the semantic conditions for the terms philosopher and American. Rather, I wonder whether I might or might not, or better still, should or should not, take myself to be an "American" in my approach to philosophy. Should a certain kind of "Americanness" or "America" (for lack of better words) inflect how I pursue philosophy? Should I commit to being an "American" philosopher?

My question is presentist. At stake is how to conduct myself, here and now, in the field of meanings and beings that interanimate one another in the term America. With Cartesian inflections, and a bit of the later Wittgenstein, I might say: the term American has become questionable. I am dubious of its merits, and now I am unsure of how to proceed. (No doubt this Cartesian Wittgenstein also can be found in texts signed "Cavell.") But since my lineage lies more with Aristotle and his post-Kantian heirs, I prefer to present my quandary this way: is there something living in "America" on which I can hang my philosophical hat? Is there a project to be found on that vast geography that I can recognize as my own or make my own? Note, my concern is not whether there is some period or school of thought—call it "American"—that I might term true or false, plausible or dubious. I am not bobbing for apples. The question, instead, concerns a project, one whose manner of engaging the world I too might conduct with my conduct, to quote one of Emerson's more powerful puns.2

In its focus on present concerns, my question arises in a complex modernity, a slice of which I find in Foucault's occasional praise for Kant's brief essay "What Is Enlightenment?" According to Foucault, the piece takes the present to be a matter of philosophical concern—"It is a reflection by Kant on the contemporary status of his own enterprise" (1997, 309). More elaborately, Foucault writes: "When in 1784 Kant asked 'What is Enlightenment?' he meant, 'What is going on just now? What is happening to us? What is this world, this period, this precise moment in which we are living?" (2000, 335). Foucault is drawn to this piece because in it, Kant defines his project by way of a stance toward the present, one he aligns with Aufklärung.

I do not want to defend Foucault's reading at this point. One could argue that in this public brief Kant puts the stamp of his "mature" philosophical project, call it critique, on the terms of his present, the Aufklärung, while barely engaging the concreteness of that present, his bargaining with [End Page 532] Frederick aside. But...

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