The Primal Roots of American Philosophy: Pragmatism, Phenomenology, and Native American Thought (review)

The retreat to academic insularity and specialization that dominates much of twentieth-century American philosophy pains Bruce Wilshire. He knows what the tradition of James, Emerson, and so many others can deliver. He takes his task to be the regeneration of this tradition, celebrating its living core. The familiar stalwarts, James, Peirce, and Dewey, are placed in an expanded narrative that brings them alive in unexpected ways. Wilshire finds a vital continuity reaching back to the primal life-view of a Native American thinker, Black Elk, through Emerson and James, and on to what is most powerful in Hocking, Bugbee, and Rorty. The narrative aims to serve as mid-wife to and evidence for new life in American Philosophy.

The affirmation of the living core is ringing, neither guarded nor muffled. There is no sense that "we scholars" should apologize for those American writers who wear a heart upon their sleeves, or display a living pulse upon their pages. James and Dewey, Peirce and Thoreau, and Bugbee and Black Elk are not hide-bound academicians. Neither are those on the even wider list of notables we might include: Margaret Fuller, Mary Emerson Moody, W. E. B. Du Bois, or Cornell West. These writers exceed standard disciplinary thinking as represented in contemporary universities. James allies himself with healing and psychology as well as with metaphysics, or ethics, and could attract thousands to his lectures. Black Elk spellbinds but has no B.A. Dewey transforms education and presides in Mexico over Trotsky's defense in exile against Stalin's mock-legal charges. Bugbee opens up the world of Melville, Spinoza, or Meister Eckhart in the quiet instruction of waters and whispering Aspens. The dominant tone of these Americans is affirmative; they dwell, as Emily Dickinson has it, "in possibility, a fairer house than prose."

Wilshire finds the connective tissue in this expanded American tradition in a broadly aesthetic-religious post-Kantian sensibility that refuses the extremes both of reality reduced exclusively to an inert nature known to physics on the one hand and on the other a mysterious transcendental domain left free for moral autonomy. He celebrates an American embrace of creative, poetic imagination, even archetypal thinking. He sees it elaborating in its own idiom the promise of a reconciliatory "religious-aesthetics" foreshadowed in Kant's late work and brought to maturity in German Idealism and Romanticism. This philosophical sensibility promises to overcome the disastrous dualisms of thought and feeling (or inclination), of a dead material world and a disembodied space of conscious freedom, an "atomic individualism" and communal belonging. Black Elk would not have known the pitfalls of such dualisms. James and Bugbee and Emerson and Thoreau are immersed in the promise of overcoming them.

Reducing the rich detail of Wilshire's account, we might find "the primal roots of American philosophy" in the following insights. (1) We are body-minds, not free-floating consciousness, not brain-stuff, and not some strained union of the two. We are embodied creatures already fully placed in a world suffused with meaning where neither a detached objectivism nor a fuzzy subjectivism makes sense. We belong to world as much as world belongs to us.

(2) We live in experiential fields and ecosystems rooted in nature, the body, and human affiliation. Experience doesn't come in discrete "bits" but rather in ways that blend the focal point of attention with the spatial and temporal surround. I don't experience a temporally discrete "atomic" clap of thunder, but rather a clap emerging out of prior silence and feathered forward into quiet. Spatially, the sound arises not just from sky above and peak ahead, but from an aural canopy that shapes the...