Tocqueville and the Challenge of American Philosophy

Abstract

Less attention, I suppose, is paid to philosophy in the United States than in any other country of the civilized world.1Thus Alexis de Tocqueville begins his paradoxical chapter on philosophy in America. It is paradoxical because, should its premise hold, the chapter would have to break off right there then. But of course goes on. So we might say that Tocqueville understands there is no easy way out of philosophy, that indifference to philosophy too is a philosophical stance. The challenge for Tocqueville will be to describe how philosophy looks like when has no method, no grand projects to tackle, no attention to consume. A century a half after the writing of Democracy in America we have learned to give this new strange way of doing the philosopher's work a name, i.e., analytic pragmatism. It is analytic because, unlike synthetic European metaphysics, is not interested in finding the overall theoretical picture of all things; is pragmatic because its concern is making use of empirical situations on hand, rather than ultimate teleology. However, America is a troublesome case. For all its pragmatic vigor, Tocqueville finds that the American way of thinking nonetheless makes profligate use of metaphysical generalizations. It philosophizes while claiming has no use for philosophy. To Tocqueville, this does not mean that America is philosophically confused or immature. On the contrary, his book helps us find a keystone where the conflict of American pragmatism Continental metaphysics is shown to be a relatively false problem. And his suggestion is that each philosophical tradition in some sense addresses its claims to the other in order to hold a claim at all. But first things first: Tocqueville's basic problem with America rests with the country's beginning comes up in his opening sentence: America, Tocqueville writes, is something without parallel elsewhere in the world(Dem. 454). It presents the world with a spectacle for which past history had not prepared it (Dem. 30). The first challenge in understanding America is to come to terms with its novelty, with the fact that the world has never yet seen the like of it. In America history happened without precedent. The question here is, not so much about what we are going to do with this freak occurrence, but about what we are going to do with history. For, if anything can happen, if the unprecedented the unforeseeable can occur, then historical wisdom is in no position to explain to us why we live the way we do. America throws sociological history into doubt: exposes the fact that not everything is rooted in the past, or that consequences have lately acquired a queer way of springing out of nowhere. Some, like Tocqueville, will be likely to feel that America awakens us to the happenstance of our times, call modernity, a breakaway era from parent ages tradition: Where are we then? Tocqueville asks in his introduction, and have men always dwelt in a world in which nothing is connected? (Dem., 17). The realization that unconnected or unaccountable events can happen means that history tells a story which cannot explain. In the wake of America, we must see that we sometimes make things we did not anticipate or mean to do: we have become unpredictable and, to this extent, strange to ourselves.2 To explain this strangeness, this mystery of our times, Tocqueville turns to the national origin puts forward two entities: the on the one hand (what today we would call society); on the other hand, or how we organize this society (that is, culture). The critical question for Tocqueville is: which one comes first creates the other-society or culture? The way we live, or how we say we live? Given the interwoven pattern of action thought in human affairs, his answer necessarily comes up inconclusive: `The social state is commonly the result of . . . laws; but once has come into being, may be considered as the prime cause of most of the laws (Dem. …