Hard-core meliorists, insane angels

"Following James and Dewey, these American scholars are hard-core meliorists. We are attentive to the ills around us. We think about things; we are committed to goods as ends-in-view. Hence the appropriateness of the tag “insane angels.” We are utopian with our eyes open. That is, as Erin McKenna suggests, we seek to improve things along the way, not to construct some magic, fixed, end-state world.21 We are, one might say, working utopians. Our bringing of “heaven” to Earth is always a finite and fallible project, as Emerson recognizes when he points out that when not in our angelic modes, we easily become “moping dogs.” Both our strangeness—our cultural insanity—and our angelic practices are underwritten by our passion for thinking, writing, and talking. We are practitioners of philosophy. This is not something I think we should deny or dismiss as unimportant. This is where our passions and our abilities lie. I have emphasized the fact that we are teachers because it is a fact often obscured when we describe our profession. But this does not mean that we are not also philosophers and scholars with an angelic passion for some particular strains of literature, history, and reflective thought. We think and write with an eye toward transforming ourselves, each other, and our culture. And though I opened this chapter with a concern for our invisibility, I do not want to underestimate the impact we can have, even when we as individuals remain invisible to our culture. Almost all thinkers in the American tradition have been realists in the same way. This includes James, whom Dewey rightly identifies as a realist in this respect—that our ideas have real effects in the world, they make a difference. The transactions among ideas, actions, and habits constitute a natural process whose powers should not be underestimated. Philosophy understood this way is never “just talk.” Talking turns out to be an important medium of transformation."

"Philosophy Americana: Making Philosophy at Home in American Culture (American Philosophy Book 18)" by Douglas R. Anderson: https://a.co/9HIaeVt