A Natural History of Pragmatism: The Fact of Feeling From Jonathan Edwards to Gertrude Stein (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: A Natural History of Pragmatism: The Fact of Feeling From Jonathan Edwards to Gertrude Stein Jay Martin (bio) Joan Richardson , A Natural History of Pragmatism: The Fact of Feeling From Jonathan Edwards to Gertrude Stein, (Cambridge University Press, 2007), 327 pp. The curiosity of Americans concerning their identity or character is scarcely surprising in that unlike most European countries our character needed to be made. No wonder, then, that since Moses Coit Tyler's literary history, through V.L. Parrington, Granville Hicks, Perry Miller, Henry Nash Smith, Richard Slotkin, and dozens of others, literary scholars have outlined various versions of the core American character. Was it the conflict between the Jeffersonian and Hamiltonian visions, the dialectic between workers and owners, an "errand into the wilderness," a new experience of open possibility in an unsettled land, or the experience of violence, that predominated in the formation of this "American, this new man"? Or, for such historians as George Bancroft, Frederick Jackson Turner, Charles M. Andrews, Herbert Bolton, Stow Persons, and Michael Kammen, was it the democratic revolution, the expanding frontier, the "Caribbean triangle," the "borderland" experience, or the paradoxes suffusing American life that gave Americans a distinctive perspective? Given the complex multiplicity of American life, each of these and many other ascriptions seemed "right" for a time, even as none seemed fully and permanently satisfying. And so investigation of the nature of the American character has proceeded on, and there seems no reason to expect an end to this endeavor. Joan Richardson's A Natural History of Pragmatism is one of the latest contributions to this, by now, immense body of scholarship. Happily, [End Page 505] she makes no effort to remember and reject predecessors in this field, but plunges without hesitation into her own conception of the "underlying principle" informing American "frontier instances." In America, she argues, "the intruding features of as yet unaccountable phenomena, instances of being, interrupt an old logic to produce new habits of mind, new species of thinking, motives for metaphor." To this she adds that, "at the heart of the American experience" is a "tensive interplay between thinking and feeling," along with an "appetition of language for new forms of expression." An "essential feature of New World experience," she writes, is an "anamorphic" perspective that "requires the reader to abandon 'normal' reading practices and learn entirely new ways of engagement" in perceiving "a new language." By the nature of their unique New World experience, Americans came necessarily to feel "an appetition for forms where questions and questing reflexively undermined predication: for forms of paradox; for a preponderance of analogy; for repetitions imitating ritual and prayer; for paratactic listings of experiences and phenomena not encountered before." Finally, Americans' "close attention to natural processes" promulgated an attitude of (in William James's phrase) "stubborn fact," mixing "theological and natural cues." Unlike many of the earlier descriptions of the American experience, Richardson's thesis is not primarily a conflictual, dialectic, or paradoxical one, though she still, like her predecessors, "distinguishes the American from the British and European" mind. Rather, on native grounds, she discerns a strong, evolving unity, a "natural" pragmatism, as her title has it. As she sees it, the pragmatic way of thinking was brought to American shores by the Puritans; it was reshaped by Jonathan Edwards and then secularized by Emerson, William James, and Wallace Stevens. It formed a distinctive "America aesthetic," consisting of a special "language game" fusing thinking and feeling, nature and spirit, fact and mind. Her view is not philosophic but aesthetic, a tradition of pragma, thing becoming word and word becoming thing. Of the philosophic pragmatists only William James "counts." Peirce is a minor figure. John Dewey is barely mentioned, as if he were James's epigone, and Horace Kallen, George Herbert Mead, Sidney Hook, and Hilary Putnam are not mentioned. Her emphasis on the aesthetic downplays the philosophic character of pragmatism. Richardson pays a price for the intense focus of her conception and the narrow lineage of central pragma-tists. Hawthorne and Melville are excluded "because each was . . . still too haunted by the idea of an 'unnaturalized' Calvinist being . . . to [experience] an original relation to the universe." Whitman...