Critical notice: West's
'The American Evasion of Philosophy'
Rupert J. Read
ABSTRACT
Critical Notice: West's
'The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism'
West's book was conceived of as centrally
focussed on the idea that a right understanding of the nature of Pragmatism,
past and present, may be an integral component to contemporary American
radical/progressive political struggles. This focus is evident in the framing
of the book's narrative and its argument by its title, its introductory
section, and its concluding section. I argue that, although this central idea
of the book may well be right, West does not effectively realize its potential
in his narrative and argument. In particular, he misreads the title of his own
book, a title which points the way toward means of breaking more thoroughly
with Analytic/epistemology-centred philosophy, in part perhaps through a closer
alliance with certain strands in Continental philosophy (in both style and substance) than neo-Pragmatists tend
to allow for.
Critical notice: C.West's 'The
American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism' [1]
Five years or more after its
publication, the initial flush of revies and praise having died down (and
having been supplanted both by more recent productions of the author and his
continuing rise in the public perception),we may be at about the right distance
from it to appreciate both the worth
of and the trouble with this
important and already-influential work by Cornel West. This book ambitiously
attempts to chronicle that lately-resurgent body of intellectual activity
usually known as 'Pragmatism'. The below is not so much a book review as it is
a review of the impact of the title-- 'The American Evasion of
Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism'.[2]
Now by this I absolutely do
not mean that what follows is an analysis of that nominative string, considered
in isolation.[3] Rather, this article will be a sustained effort to
consider some various possible meanings of this string; considered in the
context first of the book by Cornel West which it names; second of that to which it refers -- namely Pragmatism, genealogised as an 'evasion' of
Philosophy; and third of that with which it has, like any text, become
inextricably intertwined -- namely, its scholarly and public reception. I shall argue that the body
of the book named on the one hand, and the philosophy referred to on the other,
are at times ill co-ordinated, and thus that a good deal is being missed if
one's best account of the history of Pragmatism is this book (To what degree and in what sense this might
constitute a criticism will only
become clear once we have considered what exactly it means to give a genealogy of something[4]). Thus by considering this title as synecdochal for
its subject, I hope to suggest where future research on Pragmatism's past and
present might usefully be aimed.
There is a sense of the word "title"
in which it is used synecdochally to mean that book which bears it (e.g. ''The
University of Wisconsin Press has published 757 titles since 1989..."). It
will be my suggestion that West may have missed two senses of his title and
sub-title, senses which could have illuminated the subject-matter to which they
refer. That such a failure to exploit the ambiguities of his chosen title may
reveal a repression of a tradition(s) of philosophic and social thought which
might have more of a claim on the future of (Prophetic) Pragmatism than West or
other self-identified Pragmatists tend to allow. And, moreover, that this may
be a clue to an apparent lack of writerly/textual self-consciousness or
innovativeness in this (and other) works by West, to his sometime unawareness
that this is a text, and that he has
chosen to write it in a very particular way.
Without further ado, let us
turn to the title in question. The American...; we will let pass almost
without comment the ubiquitous ethnocentric[5] use of the term, "American"; The
American Evasion of Philosophy..., "evasion" is one of the two terms that these remarks will be
concentrated on -- in what sense does West figure the authors he is reading to
be evading Philosophy? Then the sub-title: A Genealogy..., "genealogy" is the second term I will
be focussing on in detail; A Genealogy of Pragmatism -- in what sense is
this a genealogy of Pragmatism?
One further preliminary. The
reader may already have noticed a certain degree of (perhaps) indecision with
respect to c/Capitalization. I follow a convention of capitalizing when there
is proper naming but also where one suspects reification.[6] Throughout West's text, he does not capitalize
"evasion" or "genealogy" (they are capitalized on the front cover and the title page (unlike the
word "of")). And his usage of 'p/Philosophy', 'p/Pragmatist' etc. is identical -- i.e. capital
letters are used only in titles and headings.[7] There is perhaps thus a lost opportunity for nuance
in distinguishing between, for instance, 'philosophy' the general activity, and
'Philosophy' the fach.
This seemingly trivial
thought brings us directly to the potentially important question of the
non-standard -- and yet, limited -- senses that "evasion" and
"genealogy" are supplied with in West's book on Pragmatism. And we can
no longer avoid paying direct attention to those terms, as they figure in that
text.
In what sense(s) does West detail the American evasion
of philosophy, via genealogising
pragmatism?
Well, his book is a narrative
of the body of thought in action the title of which is due to Bain, Peirce and
James (but whose 'pre-historical' beginning is fascinatingly traced back to
Emerson) and progresses through Dewey to Neo-Pragmatism, via the leading 'mid-century pragmatic intellectuals' (Sidney Hook,
C.Wright Mills, W.E.B.Du Bois, etc.).
The inclusion of the latter group marks an important step away from conceiving
of Pragmatism as narrowly Philosophical. Parts of the text yield as much
discussion of social causes, and the effects of the inter-connecting views of these
figures, as they do of those views, simpliciter.
And the surprising omission of Mead[8] among others is perhaps justified by the
constraints of the narrative format and of the book's slenderness.
These points do not yet give
us a sense of West's account as
singular, as altogether more politicised and historically-conscious than
those of precursors, such as H.S.Thayer's.[9] Perhaps such is to be gleaned by attending further
to West's bold title.
Let us not avoid taking
West's non-standard use (given the context, of philosophy) of
"evasion" first, for it provides the most direct insight into this
matter. Every evasion discussed in 'The American Evasion of Philosophy' is a
valorized avoidance of an activity one had better not engage in, in short, of
what is taken to be the "antiquated, anachronistic''[10] method and subject-matter of Modern philosophy.
Kant had claimed with reference to his metaphysics that any philosopher:
"...must satisfy the demands
here made, either by adopting my solution or by thoroughly refuting it and
substituting another. To evade it is impossible."[11]
From Emerson,
American Pragmatism begins, and from its beginnings, endeavours to evade Kant's
demand. To quote from perhaps the richest and most resonant summation of what
West means by 'evasion', by the 'evasion of philosophy':
"To evade modern philosophy means to
strip the profession of philosophy of its pretense, disclose its affiliations
with structures of powers (both rhetorical and political) rooted in the past,
and enact intellectual practices, i.e. produce texts of various sorts and
styles, that invigorate and unsettle one's culture and society."[12]
A fine
evocation of a marvellous, multifarious 'program'; the question is whether or
not West's text can be regarded as an adequate account of the history of that
program(s), and/or as an instance, a continuation, of the 'evasion'. For while
West is to some degree successful
(unlike most of its other chroniclers) in not treating Pragmatism simply as a
"..philosophical tradition putting forward solutions to perennial problems
in the Western philosophical conversation initiated by Plato..."[13], it is not clear how sustained his 'evasion' of this model of philosophical
historiography actually is.
The phrase which is repeated
on a myriad occasions in the course of the tale West tells, so much so that I
hesitate before dwelling on it further, is the "..(Emersonian) evasion of
(modern/epistemology-centred) philosophy.."[14]. 'Emerson'[15] and the 'evasion' he fostered are drummed into the
reader, but without sufficient
explication.
Now it might be replied that
West can simply assume the irony of
invariably using the term ''evasion of modern philsophy" (and its
cognates) affirmatively, of mocking
the pretensions of the presently hegemonic form of Modern Western philosophy to
be that which one should (like Truth...) pursue
rather than evade. I apologise for a
potential lack of subtlety in my interpretation of West -- perhaps others of
his readers just read the alternative sense(s) of conjoing "evasion",
"Philosophy" etc. straight
into the silences of his text. However, one might justly find the gaps and
silences greater than one might have hoped -- in finding West almost evasive
when it comes to the significations of his title, and the substance of his
subject-matter. An overabundance of understatement is risky.
Let us then directly address alternative construals
of the title under review. I have in mind two. The first appeals to a possible
negative employment of "evasion", to make precisely the opposite
point to that which West's book is intended to illustrate, and re-make. In
short, this is the natural reading of West's title for a philosopher schooled
in Analytic or Anglo-American
orthodoxy -- that Pragmatism is precisely an evasion, a mere avoidance of
Philosophy, and (thus) of serious thought. Could West not seriously have played
with this point, to illumine the ideological breach between the
thought-community of professionalized
The other alternative is
perhaps the more interesting. It understands evasion negatively once more, but
reads what has been evaded (by non-Pragmatists) as the 'general activity' of
philosophising, with a distinctively small "p". In other words, this
would be a reclamation of the claim of Emerson, Dewey, West et al to be truly (
Interpolating the meaning
that (judging by the body of his text) West most obviously wishes to impart to
his title, we then have three readings of 'The American Evasion of Philosophy':
as the orthodox Anglo-American take on
Pragmatism's avoidance of (serious) Philosophy; as West's clever re-valuation of this evasion as an affirmative move;
and as a re-considering of pragmatistic
thought as actually and deeply philosophical in some important sense after all. (As noted, I do not find West
either contesting or making use of
either the first or the third of these readings.)
And, fourthly, as being intrinsically related to the project(s) of
Genealogy?[17] (Or) Is the sub-title of West's book noting that
its author will bring to bear on the subject-matter referred to some
technique(s) from a different tradition?
In West's text, the word
"genealogy"[18] features with far less frequency than any of the
other words in the book's full title. In contrast to effusive reiteration of
"the evasion of philosophy", in contexts which make it clear how West
understands the phrase, the reader is given little by way of discussion,
implicit or explicit, of the sense in which this work may be regarded as
genealogical. Let us then ask in what sense this could be "a genealogy of pragmatism"?
Uncontroversially, one could
respond that West puts forth this book, as described above, as an account of
the emergence, blooming and contemporary nature of the diffuse 'movement' known
as Pragmatism. But could this be a genealogical account in the (Continental)
philosophical sense of "genealogical" viz. in the sense in which Nietzsche, Foucault etc. have offered "genealogies"?[19] (That is, more than -- minimally -- being one
possible account among many, as any Nietzschian genealogy must begin by
recognising itself to be?[20])
It is hard to see how it
could, for it is in the nature of such genealogies to call into question, to
'unmask' that which is their subject. Whereas West is palpably not calling
pragmatism into question in this sense - he does not see his subject in
anything like the way the author of 'A Genealogy of Morals' saw his, as ripe
for psycho-philosophical diagnosis and systematical suspicion. Or is he; does
he? Is this a hint that the history and legacy of pragmatism are less certainly
worthy of affirmation than West's text seems to want to claim, or at least that
they require more critical re-assessment before or along with such affirmation?
Certainly, elements of the
latter are among some of the more important contributions that West's text
makes to our understanding of Pragmatism, as for instance when he juxtaposes
Emerson on Race with the purportedly democratic heritage of Pragmatic thought.
There are moments in this work, then,
when West does interrogate the vocabulary and the practice of Pragmatists, much
as Nietzsche interrogates ascetic ideals, or as Foucault interrogates our
meta-sexual or (more generally) surveillatory practices. Do we have to conclude
that West is unmasking Pragmatism? No, this would have to be a gross misreading
of the work as a whole. The alternative is as follows: we are forced to ask
whether West may be pursuing a similar policy with regard to genealogising as
he did in the case of evading, only in reverse. Is there an endeavour here to
foment or cement a re-orientation of a term of (philosophic) discourse?
But, in this case, what would
be the point? For while valorising ''evasion of philosophy'' is one thing, is
not taming the very notion of "genealogy" quite another? For while
the former move is directed against 'the Right' (traditional Philosophy), the
latter risks making a self-inflicted wound against 'the Left', putting in
question the alliance between prophetic pragmatism on the one hand and
"the continental travelling theories such as Marxism, structuralism, and
poststructuralism"[21] on the other. In sum, West is caught in something
of a dilemma; if he were to consistently follow a policy of, after Nietzsche or
Foucault, genealogising Pragmatism,
then he would risk alienating himself from Pragmatism; but if he does not
consistently and evidently write such genealogy (as indeed he does not), then,
again, how is this book living up to its title?
One feels that the question,
in what sense this book could possibly be a genealogy in the Nietzschian or
Foucauldian sense of "genealogy", is indeed as urgent as Giles Gunn
feels it to be, as he begins his study of Neo-Pragmatism with a section
entitled ''In lieu of a genealogy of Pragmatism".[22] One seems drawn to conclude that, on pain of
entering the mire just described, West is simply using the term
"genealogy" straightforwardly in its dictionary, 'family-tree' sense
(e.g. "Now if we study the genealogy of the James family, we will notice
that Henry James's brother ..."). This interpretation is supported if we
judge the book by (the illustration on) its cover, which envisions Pragmatism
as the growth of a tree (with its roots wrapped around a great book), whose
trunk is Emerson, whose major branches are Peirce and Dewey, and whose smaller
branches are the various other great names of the Pragmatic philosphical and
extra-philosophical tradition. And this evokes the irony, explored by Robert
Gooding-Williams,[23] that although any philosopher's genealogy cannot avoid association with Foucault and
Nietzsche, West's organismic account
of Pragmatism's growth and essential continuity cannot, at least without some
argument being given to the contrary, be regarded as a genealogy in anything
other than this non-philosophical 'family-tree' sense. Such an organismic account
is liable to harbour troubling telic elements, and to hide the themes of
contingency and of our constructing our own history and future which must
surely be central to a neo-Pragmatist account of Pragmatism's or of society's
development. Any account which suggests a natural
growth of the tree Emerson planted -- or that planted Emerson -- into Prophetic
Pragmatism, or even of the inherent
need of our society for such, is surely not credible in this historical moment.
Pragmatism did not grow -- it was made, and it may or may not make itself part
of the future of our society (rather than just of our philosophical community).
Now, West must at some level be aware
of this, for he makes his "highly selective interpretation of American
pragmatism in light of the present state...of American culture" such as to
provide "an interpretation of a progressive tradition that can inspire and
instruct contemporary efforts to remake and reform American society and
culture."[24] Thus we may be getting a little closer to a sense
in which, at least implicitly, West's book is a genealogy after the Continental
tradition: it was intended as and to some
degree definitely reads as a piece of '(reading/writing) history as strategic
intervention', and thus as a part of a (re-)making of Pragmatism.
But the hypothesis I wish to
entertain is this: that West may still be judged, to a not inconsiderable
degree, to have actively forgotten the potential and multivalence of his
sub-title, even more than of his title -- for he had somehow to explain or else
to avoid explaining why Nietszche and
Foucault (the 'originators' of genealogical method in philosophy and
historiography) are actively written out of his Prophetic Pragmatism (Also apparently forgotten is feminism, for
it is noticeable that among the dozen figures West draws upon in situating his
own Prophetic Pragmatism historically, there are no more women than there were
in Jesus's Twelve[25]).
Nietzsche, an inspiration for
some neo-Pragmatists, creeps into the book at several points, but is mostly
excluded by means of the (questionable, if increasingly popular) assumption
that he was thoroughly anticipated by Emerson. This could only conceivably be
correct if we have in mind a reading of Emerson on which he is a prophet of
discontinuity, of the slippage of language etc.;
but West's Emerson is largely a figure of and for stability and the beginnings
of a continuity, encouraging West's readers "to conceptualize the
pragmatist tradition as deriving its unity from a single vital potency."[26]
The case of Foucault is even
more instructive, for he is allotted a section of his own in the closing
chapter of West's book.[27] And what eventuates in West's discussion of
Foucault? Surprisingly, West misreads him not just 'creatively', but rather reductively-- he finds him nostalgic for
Kantian transcendentalism, and thus insufficiently
evasive of Philosophy. It is a reductive and dismissive misreading to find the
kind of 'transcendence' that Foucault may have looked for to be simply Kantian
in form for, as James Miller's intellectual biography of Foucault among others
has carefully pointed out, Kant may have had a major influence on the French philosophe,but
that could not possibly amount to an anticipation of Foucault's extraordinary
focus on the historical and bodily
processes of subjectification.[28]
And further, West sees
Foucault, as does Rorty,[29] as having absolutely nothing constructive to say
about normative-political matters, only dystopian visions and warnings against
trying to imagine any utopia. Why bring up the 'challenge' of Foucault, if only
to abruptly dismiss it thus?[30] This is a treatment that West applies to no other
of the dozen allotted their own sections in the course of his book; all are
read more or less sympathetically and are allotted some kind of place in or
near the Pragmatists' Pantheon. The punishment of Foucault by comparison smells
of an active distancing, a sense of danger, a wish to forget ... to forget that
someone who has read and taken seriously
Nietzsche (and not just his American predecessor Emerson) would not have
written a ''genealogy'' which largely 'evaded' the Nietzschian overtones of
that word.
The deep repugnance of
Pragmatism for the Nietzschian tradition in Continental philosophising has deep
roots, including of course a sense of their being in some respects similar, all-too-similar. Bernstein and Rorty among
others have expressed in terms somewhat
similar to West's the risks of choosing a ''Nietzschian'' (i.e. in their view
overly radical and destructive) as opposed to a ''Hegelian'' perspective, for
philosophers opposed to the Systematic ''Cartesian'' tradition.[31] Contemporary pragmatists appear to find it very
hard to accept that there may be (transvalued) emancipatory value even in the
political histories of Foucault. Yet a few pragmatistic thinkers have managed to do so, by reading
Foucault more contextually and sympathetically -- e.g. Connolly, and Hacking.
The immediate point here is
this: Foucault, Paul Bové,[32] and a few others have given substance to the notion
of writing history, particularly (but by
no means exclusively) 'intellectual history', as genealogy, as one possible unmasking account of unpredictable and
non-telic development which is not fascinated by the revelation of any
originary or subsequent origin.[33] Along with certain other intellectual tools
(including some of those recently in or near vogue under the name of 'New
Historicism' or 'Cultural Poetics'), they have opened up a space for the
writing of very different kinds of histories from those we have traditionally
been used to -- sustainedly suspicious (yet not nihilistically pointless)
self-consciously political histories (of the present[34]) of movementsfacilitating
or embodying socio-political interventions, by hand or by brain -- just what
West wanted his book to be.
At this point, it might be
objected that I am attending insufficiently to West's Gramscian leanings,[35]in attempting (e.g.) to impose too much
"(European) travelling theory" on his strategically-motivated
America-based theory. The objection would be that when, toward the very close
of his book, West invokes Gramsci as an ally, he is making the case that, contra the 'Leninism' that would perhaps
appear to offer the greatest possible consequences, one has deliberately to
appeal effectively to the sensibilities of
those one is concerned with organizing. Gramsci in his 'Prison Notebooks'
argues that any insurgent political movement will have to be crafted using the
indigenous cultural (and philosphical) resources at hand.
However, the political praxis that West actually recommends is
rather far from Gramsci's preference -- as is common among latter-day
(non-Communist/Anarchist) 'Gramscians'.
It should also be noted that,
just as West insufficiently acknowledges the thoroughgoing complicity of some
of his pragmatists (particularly, but not only, that "liberal" Cold
Warrior, Reinhold Niebuhr[36]) with the dominant economic/political forces in the
U.S. -- i.e. with the rapacious exploitation of the Third World, support for
foreign dictators, ideological Anti-Communism, etc. -- so he fails to follow through on his purportedly Leftist
heritage when he himself slips, once in a while, into the same mode as Niebuhr
and the later Hook:
"Yet principally owing to the tragic facts of
survival, myopic leadership, and limited options, most third-world romanticism
was diverted from the third wave of left romanticism into the traps of a
regimenting Marxist-Leninism or a rapacious Americanism. The major exceptions
--
The rhetorical contrast
between the 'brutal crushing' of East European uprisings (which, "needless
to say", is the work of the
The word 'genealogy' is at or
near the centre of the possibility of writing a history of a philosophical
'ism' which could make sense of that 'ism' by placing "..the leading
figures...within a partial genealogy of their discursive and non-discursive
practice";[38] and moreover by problematising the
self-determination of any 'leading individuals', and emphasising their
intellectual and practical indebtedness to various micro-social factors,
including collectivities. For instance, mightn't Dewey's educational
experiments, which of course were possible only with the creative input and
activity of a body of people as well
as of thought[39], be adjudged as significant a part of the history
of Pragmatism as the publication of 'Democracy and Education' or 'Experience
and Nature'?
West, with Nancy Fraser,
Anthony Appiah, and others on the intellectual Left, has rightly chided Richard
Rorty for being too content in a self-proclaimed bourgeois democratic
individualism, and for his Pragmatism thus having insufficient consequences, outside the discipline of
Philosophy. As John Lyne has noted, "West seems to be exhorting Rorty to a
heartier style of social critique, toward "genealogical accounts deployed
as moral and political weapons"".[40] But what none of West's commentators have managed to do is to demonstrate how he can
retain the right to usefully term his own work a 'genealogy'. Rorty's
influential shadow is already a long one, and it perhaps requires more
'non-American' resources than West allows himself to employ in order to swerve
out of its reach. West has successfully refused to write a reductionistic
account of Pragmatism as merely an instrument of bourgeois reaction; why did he
not strive more strongly also to refuse to write an account that remains
essentially a quasi-Bloomian story of
strong 'paternal' thinkers? An
overall problem with West's book is that at the level of methods (and even of genre) it is not evident that the
marvellous hopes immanent in its title and evident in its Introduction are
realised,[41] and thus one might incline toward the conclusion
that "West's pragmatism, like Rorty's, is likely to remain a pragmatism
without consequences."[42]
I have already explained this
in respect of the title. In the
Introduction of 'The American Evasion of Philosophy', one is given some
reason to hope that West will deliver, as he writes of..
"..American pragmatism as a specific
historical and cultural product of American civilization, a particular set of
social practices that articulate certain American desires, values, and
responses that are elaborated in institutional apparatuses principally
controlled by a significant slice of the American middle-class."[43]
And again, as he rightly claims that..
"..with Dewey...American
Pragmatism achieves intellectual maturity, historical scope, and political
engagement. In this sense my genealogy of American pragmatism is an explicitly
political interpretation..."[44]
But West does not deliver
what he prophesises; in part, for reasons already given. In addition to these,
it is salient in this connection to note that -- like Rorty, whose work he (critically)
assumes and resumes[45] -- West is typically Pragmatist in writing
antiphilosophical philosophy in
nonphilosophical language only to the
(not insignificant) extent of not conforming to the Anglo-American norm of
utilising a quasi-technical vocabulary in order explicitly to make arguments
to (philosophical) conclusions. That is, Rorty and West otherwise read much as any other 'Analytic' philosopher -- there is
none of the supra-literary innovativeness of Derrida or Irigaray, or the dense
'diagrammatic' approach of Deleuze or Foucault, or the intricate criss-crossing
later Wittgensteinian technique. West's writing in the book under consideration
here, (or Rorty's in 'Contingency, irony and solidarity', in the course of
which Rorty enthusiastically endorses precisely such Continental innovativness)
is arguably much more similar stylistically to J.Fodor's or B.Williams's than
to Foucault's, or Wittgenstein's. This is truly a problematic self-referential
irony for both West and Rorty -- for Pragmatists, unlike 'mainstream'
Analytics, cannot try to appeal to the alibi of writing 'neutrally', or without
a particular style.[46] In
short, even if style and method are in some sense separable, West is arguably
no more differentiable from Rorty at the level of style[47] than he is at the level of method. This is one of
several reasons for believing that West has broken with 'Philosophy' (or
contributed to a link in its evolution) less substantially or consequentially
than he wishes.
It might be objected, to
continue the 'Gramscian' line commenced above, that it is precisely in respect
of style and method that West is savviest, because most appealing to American
sensibilities. He thus has some hope of marshalling (the local) philosophical
resources needed to catalyze political and cultural change. (According to
Rorty, philosophy can have little such role, though he insists that the
Pragmatists provide sufficient resources for those (e.g. Feminists) who might be aided by the tools of
philosophers' deflationary critique(s).[48]) According to West, perhaps, philosophers' role(s)
here can be not insignificant, but for American philosophers to speak in the
idiom of M.Foucault would be too jarring. Foucault -- like Lenin in 1920s
This is potentially a real
objection to my argument, and it makes clear that, even if West comes up short
on "evasion" and "genealogy", there may still be
practically pressing options concerning which his line in the title under
review calls for close attention. A full response would take us too far afield.
In my judgement, however, the criticisms of West already made above (e.g.
around the very idea of "America", and his sometimes brittle leftist
credentials), combined with a close examination of the perhaps dangerous habits
of minds behind the very idea of such notions as "the American habit of
mind", and with a reiteration of the vital Foucauldian critique of
"organic intellectualism" (taking seriously the alternatives to it that Foucault described and
exemplified) would suffice to largely rebut it; but this must be for the reader
to decide.
In the wake of these
criticisms it is salient to re-iterate that West's book [49] is definitely worth reading, and acting upon. That
this is so is, one might say, because it does realize at least some of the
promise of its quite wonderful title, and Introduction.
And so West's is truly an achievement, to have
managed to combine philosophy and critical history to the extent that 'The
American Evasion of Philosophy' has done; for others have generally only
managed one or the other. For instance, Thayer's massive study never shows a
serious effort to comprehend Pragmatism socio-politically; and Thayer's account
is not less interested in non-discursive and other historical features of
Pragmatism than most others. Most narratives on the topic have been primarily
intellectualist, even narrowly philosophical; while those which have taken
history or politics seriously (particularly in the form of concrete social
interventions) have in general lacked philosophical nuance. This is an irony which should not be lost on any familiar
with the deeply Deweyan antipathy toward separation between theory and
practice, between ideas and their contexts.
Yet the irony seems partly
lost even on Morton White, that insightful and most prodigious of recent
philosopher-chroniclers of Pragmatism.[50] My point in this critical notice is ultimately the
following: West has succeeded more than anyone else in pointing out how and
where a contemporary understanding of Pragmatism should be headed, and even in
writing its history of and for the
present, a history which is not only that of successive philosophical
positions. That he should have done
so is inevitably of particular noteworthiness, given his seemingly
ever-increasing visibility as a standard-bearer for the intellectual/activist
Left. Perhaps, however, while swerving away from the Analytic paradigm which
has attempted to find in philosophy's history only the history of
ever-improving arguments over narrowly-definable problems, West has lost sight
of certain problematic features of both
narrowly philosophical and historico-political histories of ideas, features
which are not absent from his account.
Let us now look toward an
account of Pragmatism which will be worthy of all the words we find on the
cover of West's book. Such an account would methodologically consider the
spoken as well as the written word, the non-linguistic as well as the
linguistic action, and it would strive harder not to consider writings
abstracted from their socio-historical contexts and from the material category
changes that mould such contexts. Still less would it consider only individuals-- Pragmatism is, as West
well explains, a different kind of philosophy if it is philosophy at all, and
it requires a different accounting to be given of itself. Pragmatists can learn
from feminists, who tend to conceptualise theoretical and empirical
developments more socially (though hardly impersonally).
Such a re-reading/re-writing
would eventuate not only in a Pragmatism with consequences, but in a Pragmatism
genuinely open both to Foucault and Feminisms, to reading its own history more
self-critically aware, in particular, of its historic determinants and
blindnesses. West does a stunning job of re-reading Pragmatism in respect of
Race and to some extent in respect of Class -- I look forward to the same being
true of a future work in respect of, for instance, Nationality and Gender too,
such that West's goal of including those unjustly excluded from (accounts of)
this movement, in the past or in the present, might be more fully satisfied. A genealogy, neither organismic nor
individualistic, should be able "to evade the narrative myth of '
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[1] Full bibliography appended. I
wish to acknowledge, besides a couple of very helpful anonymous reviewers, the
participants in a talk (from which this paper has grown) given to the Phil.
Dept. at the U. of Houston, June 5 '92, and to the Phil. Dept. at Rutgers U.,
NJ, Dec.2 '92, entitled ''Three Pragmatists? -- West, Stich, Goodman'';
particular thanks go to A.Jacobson, C.Freeland, and also to S.Fitzgerald and
A.de Vivo, without whom this would never have been written.
[2]Following in the spirit of Colin
McGinn's teaching method -- he once claimed to teach an entire course on the title Naming and Necessity...
[3]It would be an enterprise in
absurdity to try to make sense of a non-sentential
string; and without reference to its (linguistic and extra-linguistic)
context(s).
[4]See West (1989), p.6.
[5]R.Rorty attempts to rewrite
'ethnocentricity' without negative connotations -- but try telling a Latin American there are no strings
attached to the unproblematised appropriation by
[6]Cf. Rorty on philosophy and
Philosophy, in Rorty, (1979). And Sabina Lovibond on this treatment of the
"fetishistic capital letter", on p.59 of her (1992).
[7]In fact, the only one of his
titular terms not to be consistently lower-cased in the text itself is --
revealingly? -- 'american'. See note 5, above; but also see n.9 on p.140 of
Berel Lang, (1990). lang suggests that it is an act of Neo-Pragmatist
nominalism to refuse capitalization except to begin a sentence with...
[8]One account implying the
indispensability of Mead to a Pragmatism encompassing more than just Philosophy
is Darnell Rucker's (1969). Can one evade Philosophy without attending closely
to its successors in the domains of education, psychology, and politics? One's
thoughts turn (contra West, on p.235
of his (1989)) to M.L.King Jr., who,
J.Green argues in the Journal of Social
Philosophy (forthcoming), held "[A] Pragmatic Philosophy of Political
Transformation".
[9]Meaning and Action: A critical
history of Pragmatism
(1968). This thorough work anticipates West's book in some respects (without
being mentioned by the latter).
[10]West, (1989), p.36.
[11]Preface to (1783), p.9.
[12]West, (1989), p.37.
[13]Ibid.,
p.5.
[14]Ibid.; vida, e.g., p.4, p.5, p.36, p.37,
p.42, p.49, p.53, etc.. Does West's
adding "evasion", re-valued, to our philosophical vocabulary, really
abett his project; as oppposed to (say) a more extended exposition on his part
of the relation of evading philosophy to a Deweyan overcoming of philosophical
dichotomies? The phrase,
"(Emersonian/Deweyan) culture of creative
democracy" is also frequently repeated, without much explanantion at all.
Might creative democracy's nature not be considered in greater depth by contrast with the Niebuhr/Lippmann alternative (as documented by
R.Westbrook, in Parts 3 & 4 of his (1991), and in effect by N.Chomsky,
scatteredly throughout his corpus);
or of just how, concretely, the prophetic pragmatist should pursue 'creative
democracy' in the contemporary North. With regard to the latter, West is
unforthcoming in The American...; probably he would appeal to his other/future work, including more directly political
acts of writing (and activism), such as his (1993).
[15]On West's synechdocal reliance
on 'Emerson' tropologicaly or as a myth of origins for Pragmatism, see
R.Gooding-Williams's (1991). This piece lays out the ironies of thus employing
the proto-Nietzschian Emerson as the 'roots' of a quasi-organic movement -- one which one is supposedly genealogising; cf. note 23, below.
[16]West, (1989), p.87. Compare
Dewey's evocative call for Reconstruction in Philosophy (1920); also
Hilary Putnam's for Renewing Philosophy (1993).
[17]The key specification of a
genealogical project is Foucault's 'seminal' essay, (1971).
[18]On the back dust jacket of
West's book, "genealogy" appears in scare quotes, just thus. Someone
disinclined to use the term 'genealogy' except in its 'family-tree' sense might
of course want to question whether Pragmatism was/is really the kind of 'family' that one could usefully describe the
tree of... . In his "The limits of Neo-Pragmatism" (1990), a
supporting article to his book, West strangely writes of his book being a
"genealogy on pragmatism"
(p.1749, my italics).
[19]Non-reductive exegetical
accounts of what exactly this comes to are surprisingly hard to come by; the
best three are perhaps those given by B.C.Sax, (1990), although Sax tends
rhetorically to over-estimate the discontinuity between Nietzschean and
Foucauldian Genealogy; by Dreyfus and Rabinow, in early chapters of their
(1982); and by Paul Bove (cf. note 32, below).
[20]See again p.6f. of West's book.
[21]Ibid., p.239.
[22]In the American Grain, (1992).
[23]Gooding-Williams (1991),
especially pp.519-521. He draws on Poirier to argue, as I also suggest below,
that it is not Pragmatistic to argue
against the Nietzschian tradition here, that to do so misses the instability of
language. See note 26, below.
[24]West (1989), pp.6-7.
[25] More tellingly, the eleven or
so contemporary American pragmatists West mentions (including the nine on p.3)
are all men. He addresses the apparent paucity of women (pp.180-1) thus:
"I suspect that American culture, with its Emersonian individualism, and
pragmatist experimentalism, cuts deeper than sexual identity. If so, the issue
is how American women will reshape and revise pragmatism...". Indeed; but
he might have mentioned women who arguably are
already doing just that, such as the likes of Nancy Fraser, Annette Baier,
Joan Williams, even (more recently) Gayatri Spivak.
[26]Gooding-Williams (1991),
p.519. Organicism and genealogy are
simply not compatible -- here is a respect in which Emerson did not anticipate Nietzsche (This is not substantively contested by
G.Stack, in his (1992)). Incidentally, backing my stress on West's repetitions,
Gooding-Williams's quote begins thus: "[I]t is West's rhetorical
repetition of the name "Emerson"...that more than any of the
rhetorical strategies he otherwise employs encourages his readers to ...".
[27]West (1989), pp.223-226: ''The
challenge of Michel Foucault''.
[28]Miller (1993); cf. particularly
chapters 9 and 10. It would take us too far afield here to substantiate these
points; but my point is that West's own brief discussion is hardly sufficient
to substantiate the wildly novel view (which is not shared by any other
neo-Pragmatists, to my knowledge) that Foucault is not radical enough in his break with traditional
epistemology-centred philosophy's methods and conclusions.
[29]Particularly in his (1992).
Rorty explains his distrust of 'Nietzschian' contemporaries such as Foucault in
his (1986).
[30]Miller (1993) is even more
useful in this respect, bringing out several phases in Foucault's evolution as
a political philosopher (though he
overplays Foucault's late enthusiasm for liberalism in his discussions of
'governmentality' -- see pp.299-312).
[31]These terms are from Rorty,
(1986).
[32]Intellectuals in Power: A
genealogy of Critical Humanism. The importance of Bové's account in this context is
that, while he too is generally deeply sympathetic to the philosophes (and their projects and movements) which he is
attempting to genealogise, he succeeds more than West in critically
interrogating the humanism of these oppositional intellectuals, and arguably
also in placing them historico-culturally. He details how Foucault was neither
the "organic intellactual" he criticised nor, contra West (on p.225 of his (1989)), a "specific
intellectual", but something in between. And compare his vivid Foreword to
G.Deleuze's Foucault, (1988).
[33]Thus not a 'diagnosis' of
Pragmatism as simply the philosophy of Capitalism/Imperialism (see Harry K.Wells (1954), and George Novak (1975)), nor
simply a 'history of (philosophical) ideas' account, of which there have been
many (compare for instance Phillip Wiener's (1973), or A.J.Ayer's (1968)), but
a genealogyof (a non-Essentialized)
Pragmatism. More on what exactly the latter would mean is to be found in
Gooding-Williams's (1991), particularly at p.520.
[34]This redolent phrase is from
p.31 of Foucault, (1977).
[35]See especially pp.230-2.
[36]Contrast (e.g.) p. 253, p.365,
and p.371 of Chomsky's (1992) with the friendly treatment Niebuhr receives at
West hands on (e.g.) p.163 and p.228 of his (1989). Cf. note 14, above.
[37]West (1989), pp.218-9. It is
important to acknowledge that there are some perhaps countervailing moments in;
e.g. on p.122 and p.162.
[38]Bové, (1986), p.10. However, one
should note that the one thing which Bové does not really succeed in doing any
better than West is to succeed in turning the focus away from considering
'leading figures' to considering the discipline or the 'ism' in question as a
partially unified, partially contested
collectivity of subjects (and their inter-relations).
[39]See J.Chambliss's ''On the claim
that Dewey's educational views were not put into practice by Dewey"
(forthcoming); and Westbrook (1991), passim.
[40]John Lyne, p. 202 of his (1990);
the nested quote is from The American... .
[41]Lang's (1990) sufficiently defines
"genre", "method"
and "style" for my purposes.
[42]Gooding-Williams,(1991), p.537.
[43]West, (1989), p.4.
[44]Ibid.,
p.6. This politicality of the work is a strength and, as mentioned earlier,
partially supports a claim to its being a genealogy; I am claiming however that
the reach of the claim is deeper than (that of) the work. There are various --
partially political -- questions
around one's genre, method and style
that West fails adequately to answer.
[45]Compare the aphorism prefacing The
American Evasion of Philosophy: ""Pragmatists keep trying to find
ways of making anti-philosophical points in nonphilosophical language" -
R. Rorty."
[46]This point is structurally the
same as that made by Gary Shapiro in his ironising commentary on Berel Lang's
''The style of method'', presented Dec. 29 1991 at the APA Eastern Division
Conference, N.Y.C., in which he demonstrated that Lang's practice contradicted
his dictum that "style is largely constitutive of method". Lang's
general perspective here remains useful, because he does at least take
unusually seriously the 'literary' elements of philosophical writing.
[47]Form/style is a crucial aspect of what
non-philosophers (e.g. social or literary critics) get out of philosophy; this
is arguably a respect in which Rorty and West remain 'philosophers'
philosophers' in the Anglo-American tradition, with a quasi-New York Review of Books style. This
point may not be restricted in import to intra-academic
politics, any more than were Marx's style and methods.
[48]See his (1990).
[49]Others have criticised it far
more severely, and too unsympathetically. For instance, M.Grossman in a Review,
slams it as, "a part of a body of writing that belongs to the very highest
levels of intellectual elitism..." (1991, p.436), on account of West's
perhaps over-zealous hopes for its socio-political impact.
[50]White understands Pragmatism
less narrowly than most philosophers, yet his work does not match West's in the
level of its political consciousness. See White (1956), (1973), (1976).
[51]Gooding-Williams, (1991), p.532.