Philosophy Americana and experience

"Interestingly, within the pragmatic tradition, it was Charles Peirce, whose work is most traditionally oriented, who explicitly defended the claim that philosophers should describe themselves to their readers. “The reader,” he said, “has a right to know how the author’s opinions were formed” (CP, 1:3).8 For Peirce, philosophy is a historical conversation, and a key piece of this semiotic process is understanding the place from which one speaks (see MS 842). Thus, if one has grown up with Beethoven and Aaron Copland, one should maintain their acquaintance. So, too, if one has grown up on the Ramones and Blondie, on the Temptations and the Shirelles, on R.E.M. and Matchbox 20, or on Thelonius Monk and Charlie Parker. These are not to be abandoned at the doorstep of philosophy. We need to keep them with us to inform, instruct, and be transformed by our philosophical lives. All of these features of our experiences help constitute the very language of outlooks on the world... This maintenance of our experiential home, it seems to me, is a sort of baseline for what I am calling philosophy Americana. For those of us in dominant sectors of this culture, such maintenance is reasonably easy but needs to be undertaken precisely because we often forget that ours is only one dimension of “America.” For those like Anzaldúa who are not in the dominant sectors, such maintenance is always a difficult and politically oppositional task, but a task the rest of us, through listening, can come to make easier: I will no longer be made to feel ashamed of existing. I will have my voice: Indian, Spanish, white. I will have my serpent’s tongue—my woman’s voice, my sexual voice, my poet’s voice. I will overcome the tradition of silence.10 Philosophy Americana will thrive only insofar as there is a genuine conversation among our philosophical outlooks, a conversation in which we listen closely not only to each other’s arguments, but also to the stories we tell about and from the perspectives of our experiential homes. Acknowledging Inheritance In the opening paragraph of “Nominalist and Realist,” Emerson spoke an experiential truth: “I cannot often enough say, that a man is only a relative and representative nature. Each is a hint of the truth, but far enough from being that truth, which he [or she] yet quite newly and inevitably suggests to us” (CW, 3:133). If we embrace our inheritances individually, American philosophy will continue to reawaken itself. It will both imbibe and express, from our representative angles of vision, the richness of our own history and culture, the depth of our despairs and the wealth of our expectations. Margaret Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century met with ridicule and resistance in professional philosophical circles. But it was spoken directly from her experience and it spoke honestly of her own possibilities. As Donna Dickenson points out, Emerson’s “Nature (1836) took seven years to clear an edition of 500 copies. Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century sold out an edition twice that size in one week.”11 It was popular philosophy because it captured and expressed experiences lived by many women of the nineteenth century, and for the same reasons it has become important philosophy. We now take Fuller’s awakening call seriously across the culture, even if we do not yet read her work as often as we should, or meet her demands. As noted earlier, American philosophers and philosophers in America, just as the culture at large, have been blind to a variety of representative perspectives and have left a number of needs unattended. Only recently have we really begun to believe that American philosophy north of Mexico speaks Spanish. In 1980 Spanish was not recognized in most graduate programs in philosophy in the United States as a legitimate philosophical language. Only Greek, Latin, German, and French were acceptable. Fond as I am of these languages and their philosophical importance, the exclusion of Spanish, especially in our culture, was more sin than mistake. Not only did we overlook the significant work of Unamuno and Ortega y Gasset, but we completely ignored and, for the most part, continue to ignore a wealth of aesthetic and political writings from Central and South America. Moreover, a large part of Hispanic thought and experience in the United States was rendered invisible to philosophy in America. For philosophy Americana, Spanish must become a required subject. We need to learn Spanish just as we need to learn rural and urban vernacular speech to grasp more of the breadth and depth of our cultural outlooks—our various autochthonous responses to this land. We learn these languages, again, because someone lives in them and is at home in them—they are the bearers of experience even if language itself is not fully adequate to experience. “By the end of this [the twentieth] century, Spanish speakers will comprise the biggest minority group in the U.S.,” says Anzaldúa, “a country whose students in high schools and colleges are encouraged to take French classes because French is considered more ‘cultured.’”12 The force of Anzaldúa’s argument is grounded in the experiences she has suffered. Bringing one’s own experience into philosophical reflection nevertheless bears several dangers. It can easily become self-engrossed, self-serving, or even maudlin. It can distract our focus from argumentation and structure in such a way as to become merely descriptive, to be uninstructive. Moreover, as we know, it can become exclusionary, suggesting that the personal version of experience has a corner on the market of ideal experiences. Such were common complaints against pragmatism at the outset of the twentieth century. What those who complained failed to recognize was the cultural embeddedness of and their personal commitment to their own versions of philosophy. As Dewey notes, “It is an old story that philosophers, in common with theologians and social theorists, are as sure that personal habits and interests shape their opponents’ doctrines as they are that their own beliefs are ‘absolutely’ universal and objective in quality” (MW, 4:113). Personal experience does not validate or invalidate beliefs, but it is the place from which they arise and the place to which they return. Though I hope to avoid these failures of hubris and reductionism, I remain fallible and fallibilistic. My hope is to build out from experience; to be inclusive, not exclusive. But inclusion itself must be launched from somewhere—to try to be neutral or to try to repress one’s experiential origins strikes me as an exercise in bad faith, the very thing that will undermine any philosophical outlook. No particular experience can include all other experiences, but in establishing one’s angle of vision, one establishes the premises for reaching out toward others’ experiences, for creating communication. Not a casual conversation but a thick exchange of thought and feeling.

Philosophy Americana: Making Philosophy at Home in American Culture (American Philosophy Book 18)" by Douglas R. Anderson: https://a.co/1FTNF1g