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.

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.

The cause of Sense, is the Externall Body, or Object, which
presseth the organ proper to each Sense, either immediatly,
as in the Tast and Touch; or mediately, as in Seeing, Hearing,
and Smelling: which pressure, by the mediation of Nerves, and other
strings, and membranes of the body, continued inwards to the Brain,
and Heart, causeth there a resistance, or counter-pressure,
or endeavour of the heart, to deliver it self: which endeavour
because Outward, seemeth to be some matter without.  And this Seeming,
or Fancy, is that which men call sense; and consisteth, as to the Eye,
in a Light, or Colour Figured; To the Eare, in a Sound; To the Nostrill,
in an Odour; To the Tongue and Palat, in a Savour; and to the rest
of the body, in Heat, Cold, Hardnesse, Softnesse, and such other qualities,
as we discern by Feeling.  All which qualities called Sensible,
are in the object that causeth them, but so many several motions
of the matter, by which it presseth our organs diversly.  Neither in
us that are pressed, are they anything els, but divers motions;
(for motion, produceth nothing but motion.)  But their apparence to
us is Fancy, the same waking, that dreaming.  And as pressing, rubbing,
or striking the Eye, makes us fancy a light; and pressing the Eare,
produceth a dinne; so do the bodies also we see, or hear, produce
the same by their strong, though unobserved action

The absurdity, to me, was not merely that Hobbes thought that he had figured out the mechanisms that ruled over our senses and feelings simply by expanding simple principles of interaction of bodies.  Rather, I laughed because I thought it was preposterous that Hobbes thought to account for non-physical things, like emotions and mental activity, by means of materialist mumbo-jumbo.

Leviathan, cover from wikimedia.org

Curiously, I was simultaneously quite sincerely open to, if not entirely credulous of, the findings of modern psychological studies which played the exact same role–namely, making the naturalist presumption that those things which seem incorporeal (like thoughts, sensory data, and emotions) could be studied as causes of simple physical interactions observable, for instance, by means tools like nMRI.  Modern naturalist science (I’m convinced that naturalism is not in any way definitional of science, but rather a mere ubiquitous presumption of modern scientists and the in-vogue scientific paradigms) simply has a more complex version of Hobbes’ materialism.  Rather than simply positing that something “preseth on the eye”, biologists a conception of our senses as the products of a complex of chemical and physical interactions which can all be reduced, theoretically, to a naturalistic incarnation of particle physics.

Each of these two perspectives–Hobbesian materialism and modern naturalist science–has issues with the classical Cartesian mind/body dualism.  What I considered incredible in the Hobbesian perspective, I should recall, is not the given dualism ” between two sorts of ‘stuff’, material and immaterial” (as Rorty calls it), but was once an idea marked more by its novelty than its broad acceptance.  With what reasons did dualism replace materialism as the dominant metaphysical structural assumption?  Certainly a number of enticing dualist metaphysical systems exist, and we might have good reason/s–logical or practical–to accept any of these.  I am not convinced that this dualism is essentially reasonable (or for that matter, if it is, that it is reasonable that we should assume that the non-material side of this dualism should have laws similar to our empirically-derived laws for the natural world); I am likewise not convinced that the material dualism has any cogent appeal over metaphysical tri-ism, quad-ism, or infinit-isms (do metaphysicians have terms for these?), other than theoretical parsimony.

Rorty speaketh

Richard Rorty opens Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Chapter 1 with this to say about dualism:

Discussions in the philosophy of mind usually start off by assuming that everybody has always known how to divide the world into the mental and the physical–that this distinction is common-sensical and intuitive, even if that between two sorts of “stuff”, material and immaterial, is  philosophical and baffling”

While I don’t think that this position is completely fair or accurate, Rorty’s point is well-made.  If we need a dozen or more metaphysical systems for bridging that “between” in the mind/body dualism–epiphenominalism, parallelism, occasionalism, and their ilk–and the whole dualist project is so difficult for us to fine-tune, what makes this dualism seem so obvious?  I suspect Rorty is not just being eristic when he implies that its our dogmatic entrenchment which makes this dualism seem natural, not some objectively-apparent metaphysical substructure.  This dogmatic entrenchment, I think, is what made Hobbes’ materialist metaphysics seem so quaint and rediculous; meanwhile, my dogmatic entrenchment in the authority of modern scientific findings allowed me to provisionally accept a sort of materialist perspective.  Perhaps it is unfair of me to so readily accept one while simultaneously poo-poo-ing the other.

I enjoy Rorty’s criticism of this dualism, but I think my position is still largely gauche to his.  We should not ignore the predominant metaphysical assumption of dualism–nor, conversely, the metaphysical (or physical) presumption of monism/materialism (or other metaphysical -isms).  We simply ought to be aware of, but not necessarily strictly opposed to, our dogmatic assumptions.  Likewise, we should take note when our various presumptions do not jibe well.  Do we assume dualism, yet affirm the findings of research that presumes or requires monism?  If so, is it merely the result of the brute cultural force of one over the other, or are there good reasons for believing both?  Certainly we might simply mean “monism” and “dualism” in different ways.  Dualisms, of course, may be distinctions between “subtances”, “properties”, or “predicates”, among other things; or perhaps it is fair of us to utilize dualist assumptions in a monist reality or monist assumptions in a dualist reality, if they get us the practical results we desire in some parsimonious way in some areas.  In the same way that we still utilize Newton’s laws for some gravity calculations, despite the existence of more precise post-Einstein calculations, it may simply be the best to use one or the other as a tool.  By this point you surely have figured out that this is my pragmatic proposition for an approach to metaphysics; It is my belief that a “dualism assumption awareness” campaign is much more likely to give us the results we desire than a “dualist-smashing” campaign which it seems to me Rorty is using to get us to agree to presume materialism for pragmatic purposes (corrections/comments greatly appreciated!).