Objectively True

Short film #2 in Phillip McReynolds‘s American Philosopher series offers a few pieces of information that divide up into histories of the early lives of contemporary American philosophers and the early life of philosophy in historic America. The former, tales about the temptations of philosophy in the early lives of modern thinkers, makes up the majority of the segment’s 10 minutes. It offers a good potopourri of experiences which led those interviewed into the “life of the mind”–ranging from those whose privileged and intellectually-amiable environments invited the depth of thought to those hardships or lack of privilege seemed to demand it. Many of their stories sound as if they would be quite interesting, if they were more thoroughly fleshed out. There were a few noticeable themes (each with exceptions) among the stories, such as an initial interest in pursuing religious questions or the experience of the befuddled parent when each philosopher broached his or her intended career choice.

All in all, I don’t think much of what was revealed was unexpected. I have seriously considered academic philosophy, and my gateway into such considerations stem from my personal experiences with both ends of the experiential gamut described by these philosophers. For instance, on the one hand, I grew up in an environment wherein thought was considered something to be nurtured. This is one of the best privileges youth can be given, in my humble opinion¹. I think this kind of philosophical thought reflects the traditional Aristotelian sentiment that philosophy begins in wonder. When allowed and encouraged to think philosophically, these thoughts and the concomitant practical manifestations of their realization are rewards which encourage yet more reflection. I only wish more youth had these experiences growing up.

The second general category of experiences which led those interviewed to lean philosophical relate to observed and felt problems or injustices. This type of motivation better reflects Simon Critchley’s assertion that “Philosophy begins in disappointment.”. People see or experience something which seems at odds with the notion of a just or moral universe, and they need to explain it in order to feel that it can be ameliorated (or perhaps simply to cope).

While I suspect that it was the latter of these two options which more closely describes my experience (at a young age, I was deeply affected by certain historical moral failures of humanity, not to mention a few salient tangible examples of contemporary moral and economic inequity), once again I am tempted to take the both/neither approach to conceiving of these two different motivations for engaging philosophical thought. If anything, philosophical thought—and I would like to emphasize American philosophy in particular here—has to do with coming to conceive of the wonder of experiences while simultaneously recognizing the deficiencies of the world. In other words, we can conceptualize moral ideals, be amazed by the capabilities of the human mind, and feel awe of nature yet we also witness moral failure, mental error, and destruction and disorder. It better characterizes philosophy, I think, to say it begins in realizing the discrepancy between the ideal (and experienced) wonder and the actualized experienced disappointment.

From the sound of these interviews, it sounds like most of these thinkers began struggling with these sorts of issues at a very young age.  Part of me finds this a bit discouraging, actually.  Although I did get a bit of philosophy early on in life (Somehow, I took it upon myself to read² Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, the State, and Utopia when I was in middle school.  There were a few other odd text tidbits I picked up in high school, but I distinctly remember remember not knowing who Plato was my freshman year of college).  This is partially disheartening because it makes me feel a bit behind in the race for deep-enough philosophical thought, but I find it worrisome much moreso because I fear that many who were not encouraged to think deeply at an early age will have great difficulty conceptualizing things critically later on in life…and, yes, I do know that this is dangerously close to the fallacy of denying the antecedent.

The last little chunk of this mini-film discusses the first American philosophers.  They begin with a good candidate, Jonathan Edwards (b. 1703) and skip all the way to Ralph Waldo Emerson (b. 1803–a century later).  While this I think agreement on this is pretty widespread, I’m tempted to say there must be some other major philosophical figures, especially political-philosophical figures, who qualify as American philosophers.  I’d love to hear some good suggestions on who they might be and what how they made sense of their worlds.  Surely, as implied by the close relationship anecdotally drawn between religious thought and philosophy in the examples of these interviewees, there were a few creative ministers or theologians who qualify as searching for philosophical answers to the “big questions”.  I have found this Dictionary of Early American Philosophers to page through, but it all seems a slough of names at this point.  Suggestions are welcome.

There are a couple of nice little nuggets I’d like to pull out of this second video of American Philosopher.  First, I was excited to see the late John E. Smith join the video as an interviewee, though he seemed not to be mentioned in the teaser.  Smith was a great distiller of good information, and his work Spirit of American Philosophy has much merit.  That said, I am a bit skeptical about the claims he makes about the origin and character of archetypal American philosophy.  While it’s easy to see that pragmatism as an trend more readily absorbed into American academia.  Here are some of the claims from the film blurbs that I’ll address in kind.

• “I think our practicality had so much to do with our need to subdue a continent.” –Smith
• “I don’t think that pragmatism would ever have existed without the USA.  I just don’t think it could have developed on the soil of European philosophy at that time.” –Sartwell
• “There’s a tendency among Americans to want to solve problems.” –Lachs

While I’m all for American philosophy and the laudable insights of pragmatism, phrases like this go a bit too far.  Sure, the American context may have been conducive to the flourishing of practical thought, but to say that America is the only possible progenitor of this thought is narrow-minded.  I think already in the time of Ancient Greek philosophy there are some decent examples of a pragmatic turn (Aristotle expresses a number of these characteristics).  Roman philosophy expresses a bit of this tendency, as do a number of aspects of Eastern philosophies (of which there is an implicit, almost chauvanistic, dismissal in Sartwell’s comment).  Furthermore, there is a sense in which Europe was already leaning towards a practical form of Existentialism (evident in Nietzsche and Heidegger, I think), and now the continent has their own pragmatists (Habermas, Vattimo, etc.).  I sincerely doubt Americans want to solve problems more than people in other countries, nor are they necessarily in general more practical.  My sense is that what got America a reputation for solving problems and being pragmatic is simply that a few of the proponents of such ideas found their way into higher academia and were accepted anyway¹.  America is great and we’ve had some great philosophical insights, but let’s not give ourselves too much credit or resort to denying the possibility of historical counterfactuals wherein we didn’t provide such thought.

More interesting to me were Bernstein’s reflections on the relevance of philosophy to the American practicality (as opposed to the relevance of practicality to it’s philosophy).  It is actually surprising, if the textbooks are to be believed, that philosophical thought (particularly Enlightenment European philosophy) would have had such a powerful influence on the statebuilding process.  The founding fathers myths and stories are dripping with tales of inspiring figures with particular philosophical ideas conjoined with the concomitant practicality required to compromise where necessary to make them effective.  Likewise, American history is at least characterized as following a trajectory of philosophical self-awareness at the time of various social revolutions.  As Bernstein put it, “you couldn’t make any sense of America without understanding philosophy.  Very frequently the most significant progressive moments in American life is a coming together of a certain kind of practical-idealism.”  I nearly laughed when I heard the start of this sentence, but Bernstein, Anderson, Campbell, and Anne Rose (also not mentioned in the teaser) actually make a pretty decent, if succinct, case for this idea that philosophy is actually relevant to progress in American culture ².  I have elsewhere read exchanges between Bernstein and Rorty arguing more broadly on this topic–whether philosophy really has the ability to impact culture.  I have always thought that whether or not it was true (I suspect it is) that Bernstein’s position is the more “pragmatic”; in other words, it is good for us to at least act like philosophy can influence culture and human progress.  Nobody is arguing that it can provide insight, so there is no need to dismiss the possibility that that insight can have a fruitful consequential bearing on our practical experiences unless we have a more effective replacement.

Also interesting was the brief defense of philosophy as a bastion of practicality.  John Sturh and David Vessey (both uncredited in the teaser video) made this point by essentially stating that philosophy is the only discipline that really systematically gravitates towards questions of what we ought to do–or how our choices and actions can be used to alter ourselves and our world.  It’s certainly an argument I would love to flesh out more in discussion.

In the end, I think SIU Carbondale’s Randy Auxier really does the best job of giving a good “American character” to the conception of the American Philosopher:

It’s not the Anglo- or European- American experience; it just includes that.  It includes the Native American experience.  It includes the African American experience.  And all of these things come together to form the context of insight, intuition, and experience that gives rise to the philosophy.  You couldn’t have Ralph Waldo Emerson without the combined influence of all of those different traditions.  There is something in Pragmatism and American Personalism, American Idealism, and even in process philosophy that expresses the American experience.  The thing that I would say characterizes that most adequately has to do with a certain–not only practicality–but a certain assumption about the inseparability of the way a person lives and the way a person thinks. –Auxier

While Auxier is guilty of a few simplifications about what could have caused what, he does a good job of capturing the complexity and variety of “American” philosophy in a way that neither dilutes its definition to the point of meaninglessness nor narrowly overemphasizes specific content…other than the fact that this implicitly cuts the cord between so-called American philosophy and the defacto standard of philosophy in America, contemporary analytic thought.  Sartwell also has a quoteable nugget right at the end of this short which hints at many of the same assumptions:

I think the way I have tried to answer some philosophical questions has changed the way live…or, the way I live has changed my answers to philosophical questions.

The artificially spliced in editorial comment from Lachs, “That’s very American”, couldn’t have been a more apropos way to end the short film.

There’s a new film (or series of eight rather short films, I guess) by Phillip McReynolds called American Philosopher.  You can watch the whole thing online, and it’s a pleasure that I recommend taking.  Quite frankly, it seems mostly to be a bunch of spliced-together interviews with a few major living (or recently living) academic philosophers.  There’s not too much unity of thought, other than the vague thematic American-philosophical self-reflection and a few shared terms, and the discussion does not get too deep or technical.  It is, however, an easy watch and it’s great to hear how these thinkers reflect on their work and environment after years of being immersed in it.  I’m going to do a quick series of posts walking through my reactions to the 8 ‘films’.

Part 0 of 8 is just a little teaser.  It begins with a brief little reflection by the late Richard Rorty:

I think that the Socratic ideal of self-knowledge is replaced among contemporary intellectuals by the Nietzschean idea of self-creation.  The life of the intellectual is not a matter of finding out what finding out what has been inside himself or herself all the time, it’s a matter of becoming someone new

I’m more than a bit confused about the relevance of this little thought nugget ¹, but there seems to be a smattering of dangling opinions here and there in the film, so I’ll write it off as a teaser for that aspect.

The teaser is nice enough to give us a good sneak preview of the interviewees.  As someone who considers American philosophy to be one of my primary influences, especially among relatively contemporary thinkers, I was excited to see the roll call.  First up, Richard Rorty, an incisive thinker from whom I have read a lot.  While I disagree with Rorty on some key things, I believe him to be one of the best recent examples of a public intellectual that actually has an influence in America.  ²

Another featured philosopher with whose work I am well acquainted is The New School’s Richard J. Bernstein.  It would be misleading for me to mention Bernstein as anything less than among my favorite thinkers, especially among those currently living³.  Douglas Anderson is also featured.  I’ve read his book on Peirce, Strands of System: The Philosophy of Charles Peirce, and found it to be quite good in most respects.  Thomas Alexander,who like Anderson resides at the very American SIU Carbondale, also makes an appearance.  He has contributed some great thoughts on Dewey.  Joseph Margolis–who has himself produced some works summarising, distilling, and contextualising American philosophical thought in general–is interviewed as well.  Crispin Sartwell, who I have found provocative yet insightful, gets a lot of airtime in the film.  The salient Hilary Putnam makes a few brief cameos.  John Lachs provides his insight (which comes off as delightfully just-outside the American philosophy cadre, I think because he’s a Santayana scholar⁴.  John Lysaker, Erin McKenna, James Campbell, Michael P. Hodges, Richard Schusterman, Scott Pratt, Russell Goodman, Bruce Wilshire, Judith Green, and Lucious Outlaw also contribute positively to the discussion, though I am not familiar enough with their other work to say more about them.

This short preview ends with the philosophers naming a good list of questions, a few of which I think are distinctly of interest to contemporary American philosophy, but most of which are just interesting for academic philosophers in general.  A few of those questions, seem even to be of the type that some American philosophers would not bother worrying about; for instance, Rorty would certainly poo-poo Judith Green’s question “What is Justice?” or Bruce Wilshire’s quick list of pesudo-metaphysical questions as being unhelpful.  The fact that these thinkers might have been pushing these questions as relevant for the American Philosopher probably speaks to the divisiveness of its character makeup, which makes it interesting.