The Wilderness and the City. American Classical Philosophy as a Moral Quest (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 601 inquiry that ultimately concerns the nature of knowing. The traditional name for it is epistemology. Dihhey wanted to pursue it without jumping beyond the historical reflection of historically situated inquirers to a static, trans-historical standpoint. Rorty apparently does not want to pursue it on any basis. Yet his position is born of extensive, and often insightful, historical interpretation, which seems to be more than a "way of coping" (or refusing to cope) with the history of modern philosophy, His interpretations make an implicit claim to knowledge, and thereby naturally reopen at least some of the questions they were intended to dispatch. I suggest that as long as historical reflection plays this sort of problematic role in the effort to pass beyond our intellectual history, we are neither beyond modernity nor beyond Dilthey. His thought will still be a living voice in the conversation of mankind. Accordingly, the Dilthey-Jahrbuch is not likely to become just another museum guide. THEODORE D. NORDENHAUG Mercer University Michael A. Weinstein. The Wilderness and the City. American Classical Philosophy as a Moral Quest. Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, x98u. Pp. x + 16u, $17.5o. Looking in vain for the aspects of classical American philosophy that they have fondly discussed for so long, most philosophers and historians will read this short book with dismay. Let us forestall disappointment by warning that Michael A. Weinstein 's aim is to describe and evaluate American philosophy from the unusual standpoint of "life-philosophy" (i.e., Existentialism). After an introductory chapter in which he relates American philosophy to modern philosophy in general, Weinstein devotes a chapter each to Royce, Peirce, James, Dewey, and Santayana. The final chapter relates American philosophy to the author 's own views on "modern individualism," as influenced by Nietzsche and the literary critic Irving Babbitt. For ease of exposition Weinstein departs from chronology by discussing Royce first, before Peirce or James. "Royce," he says, "presented the clearest and most complete statement of life-philosophy" (31), and consequently the other classical American philosophers can be understood best against the backdrop of Royce whose "life-philosophy grows out of his fundamental belief that human beings need to be reconciled satisfactorily to their lives and to the universe, and that the primary task of philosophy is to accomplish such a reconciliation through the instrument of speculative reason" (32). Although Peirce's work does not lend itself to Weinstein's approach as well as Royce's, he manages to find in Peirce a life-philosophy which provides "an ethical mediation between science and religion" and "an analysis and defense of the scientific spirit, not only as a guide to the conduct of inquiry but as a way of living in the most comprehensive sense" (5o). But Peirce scholars may find disconcerting Wein- 602 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 23:4 OCTOBER 1985 stein's praise of Peirce's contribution to American philosophy as "the closest to a prayer to life" (55). Scarcely less disconcerting are his suggestions that Peirce anticipates Unamuno and has a mystical vision akin to Dostoevsky's. Unsurprisingly, Weinstein thinks that "the high point in American life-philosophy is reached in the thought of William James" (88). Many existentialist insights are attributed to him, and "The Will to Believe" is presented as "the central expression of American life-philosophy" (77). Even Dewey's work is found to be rich in existential insights. Dewey's account of the quest for certainty he likens to the existentialists' account of the human condition. However, having credited Dewey with a valuable life-philosophy, Weinstein takes pains to indicate the respects in which Dewey is not thoroughgoing in his Existentialism . Also existentialist but not existentialist enough, Santayana is thought to have made the serious blunder of misunderstanding the Angst and nothingness that are central to the thought of Kierkegaard and Heidegger. In ontological wonder, too, Santayana receives low marks since "[f]lux is as close as [he] comes to naming the mystery of being" (x2x). In his concluding chapter Weinstein devotes more space to Nietzsche than to any American philosopher. His intention is to show that, although Peirce, James, Royce, Dewey, and Santayana are worthy life...