Native Pragmatism: Rethinking the Roots of American Philosophy

"I did a little moonlighting a while back, teaching a course in English at Sciences Po, the Paris Institute of Political Studies, just for fun. I felt like doing something different from my usual job, and I taught it on early American philosophy. It’s a consequence of being in a sort of exile, living in France, that I’m more attuned to the historical legacies that shaped the country I come from, and that also shaped me. And part of this is becoming attuned to the historical legacies that brought it about that philosophy was presented to me the way it was when I was an undergraduate, and when I was in graduate school. American philosophy, or philosophy as it’s understood in the United States now, is the result of a history. What I learned—and I’m not the best person to articulate this as there are people who have worked much more on this than I have—is that analytic philosophy was imported to the United States, and in a sense supplanted and concealed a very, very complicated, and much more eclectic, pre-analytic history in the United States. It’s different in Britain I think because so much of American intellectual history was conditioned by this idea that we are frontiers people. We’re out here on a frontier where we don’t have the luxury to engage in pure theory. So, you have these remarkable movements. One of my favourites is the so-called St. Louis Hegelians in the 19th century, mostly German immigrants. One of them, Henry Clay Brockmeyer, is an obscure character, also a horrible racist (another dimension of this that I’ll bracket for the moment.) But he wrote a kind of philosophical diary of his life in some cabin in rural Missouri. At some point he writes something like, ‘I read Spinoza for two hours this morning until I heard the rumble of a herd of buffalo outside my door, so I grabbed my rifle and chased after them.’ That, to me, is American philosophy in a nutshell. I had to read Spinoza, but I just had to grab my gun. “So much of American intellectual history was conditioned by this idea that we are frontiers people.” To come to Pratt, the St. Louis Hegelians are not the pragmatists, but I think a pretty good case can be made that we’re separating out the Transcendentalists and the Hegelians and the pragmatists from one another, in part because of the way they themselves affiliated. But one thing that is shared by all of them (that’s articulated best by Whitman in Leaves of Grass ) about the Old World is that we don’t have the time or the luxury for any of that stuff. What we’re going to do here on this continent and what’s going to define us intellectually is our rootedness in this new land, and our disdain for erudition and cultured book-learning. I’m really interested in that. In general, as a historian, I always have this natural inclination whenever anyone says that you know X or Y starts here, in a given year, I want to say like, ‘Okay, but what was it before that? What were the conditions that permitted that, and how do we go back further?’ That’s where Pratt really just was a true ‘wow’ moment for me, because his thesis is that we can not only find strands of the late 19th century pragmatists that go back to the early 19th century Transcendentalists, but that the Transcendentalists in turn can be traced back to certain developments that were going on in the colonial era. And that this was a direct consequence of the deep and real immersion of the colonists in the world of the Native Americans who lived there before them. The figures Pratt deals with mostly are people like Roger Williams in particular, and Cotton Mather is important as well. Cotton Mather is fascinating because he is an experimental philosopher, too. He was basically in the same intellectual orbit as Boyle, except that he was in the American colonies. But Roger Williams is a more interesting case, because he went out and wrote field a manual/dictionary for local native languages and how to communicate. As we know, I’m also very interested in comparable French Jesuit endeavours to the north of where Roger Williams was in, in what would become Canada, and also Leibniz’s proposals for the study of the ethnic diversity of the Russian Empire. They were all doing the same things. You learn about other cultural worlds by setting out to make bilingual dictionaries. That’s what Roger Williams was doing, and that’s why I think to some extent you can read Williams’s translation key as a philosophical work. What are the words that capture the concept that I’m trying to impart by English words like ‘soul’, or ‘God’, or ‘immortality’, or ‘salvation’? How do I communicate with these Native Americans about that? Pratt wants to argue that the difficulty of this project was directly connected to the formation of a new American intellectual sensibility that was, so to speak, ready to deal with imperfection and approximation, and to work on the fly in particular local contexts, rather than always having a certainty, for example, that that this or that Lenape word that we’re translating as ‘soul’ actually means ‘soul’. The basic thesis, which I think is actually mind-blowing and is also probably more of a suggestion than anything that’s rigorously grounded in documentary evidence, is that American philosophy is more Native American than you might think. Yes. It’s not just that you’re trying to communicate across cultural boundaries or cultural-linguistic boundaries, but also the fact that—and here’s where it gets somewhat more bold and perhaps overreaching as a thesis—the argument is that pre-contact, Native American intellectual culture was not exactly worried either about grounding truth claims in firm foundations, in some kind of Descartes-like epistemological project. That’s why in my book Irrationality that we discussed earlier, I discuss some cases of French Jesuit missionaries in New France who are troubled by the fact that the Iroquois conduct their lives in accordance with dreams. It’s driving this missionary who read Descartes himself crazy, because he’s trying to give them arguments about why they should do what they do. Pratt’s thesis is that that European-American philosophy does indeed borrow from some of these intellectual cultural patterns that were pre-existing on that continent. That in part explains the general lack of interest in foundationalist epistemology in the early part of American philosophy. As a hypothesis, it would take a lot more work. In a comparative approach, I’ve worked to some extent on the so-called rights controversy, the debate over whether traditional ritual expressions in China were compatible with conversion to Catholicism. Leibniz played an important role by doing an autopsy of what happened after the rights controversy around 1705. You see the same thing again and again. The Jesuits in China were at a standoff with the Vatican because they were saying, ‘Look, you don’t understand what things are like here. We’ve got to deal with these people as they are.’ And the Vatican was saying, ‘No, you have to suppress ancestor worship’, for example. So, again and again in a comparative perspective, you see this loosening up of dogmas and (you might also say) any form of foundationalism when you’ve got people moving out towards the periphery, out where the world gets less controllable. For that reason, it’s not at all implausible that American philosophy develops this distinctive character early on."