Cornel West's The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism

Jacoby, Russell

THE AMERICAN EVASION OF PHILOSOPHY: A GENEALOGY OF PRAGMATISM, by Cornel West. University of Wisconsin Press, 1989. 279 pp. paper. Cornel West is a smart fellow who has written a difficult but...

...for starters, in West's own account Mills rejected a tragic ethos...
...His conclusions about this group hardly follow from the previous chapters...
...He relentlessly proposes, makes points, judges commentators, evaluates secondary literature, spins theories, and more...
...A love for the working classes...
...A comparison like this does not illuminate...
...For this reason a contradiction runs through his study...
...After Peirce, West takes up James and Dewey, expending many pages on Dewey, whom he calls the American "Marx and Hegel" —although Dewey "failed to grapple" with Marxism...
...He calls his book a "political act" addressing "the crisis of the American left...
...While Peirce's "penchant for rigor and exactness in logical reasoning is alien" to Emerson, West argues that the philosopher elaborates the Emersonian "evasion" within a professional context...
...The examples of intellectuals like John Dewey, W. E. B. Du Bois, Sheldon Wolin, Stuart Hall, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, and Edward Said must be followed...
...West wants a new "prophetic" and political pragmatism committed to cultural and social change...
...He continues: "The time is now past for empty academic theoreticism, professional antitheoreticism and complacent 'radical' antiprofessionalism...
...and insofar as professional philosophy has long ignored American pragmatism, West's project of retrieval is both necessary and praiseworthy...
...The personal empowerment proposition seems unjustified...
...No matter what it means, it seems doubtful that American and European "progressive" intellectuals are presently drawn to a Deweyan or Gramscian romanticism...
...By this yardstick, however, West does not measure up...
...Often the references seem pointless...
...His title misleads, for in West's lexicon the "evasion of philosophy" is positive...
...Moreover what do Dewey and Gramsci or Emerson and Marx share...
...Cornel West is a smart fellow who has written a difficult but challenging book...
...It is sometimes difficult to follow West...
...West's project of reclaiming American pragmatism is salutary but incomplete...
...West does not ask, but also doesn't explain why it is not important to ask...
...the new pragmatism must ground theory in "social movements" and "efficacious strategies and tactics for fundamental social change...
...What do they represent...
...Forty years ago Morton White, the historian, concluded that the pragmatists enriched America with fundamental ideas—instrumentalism, progressive education, legal realism, a new history and politics, institutional economics, and political liberalism...
...He wants to do too much, make too many points, allude to too much literature, cover too many bases...
...Like Emerson's moralism, Dewey's culturalism was relatively impotent...
...Emerson's evasion "sits at the core of his rhetorical strategies and the tools he deploys to create himself as an organic intellectual and to constitute a constituency over which he exercises ideological and moral leadership...
...The last chapter pursues "prophetic pragmatism," or what West calls "the best chance of promoting an Emersonian culture of creative democracy by means of critical intelligence and social action...
...Did he have an inferiority complex...
...His very reach may be his undoing, however...
...Said exemplifies a type of activist intellectual, but does Elizabeth Fox-Genovese or Sheldon Wolin or Stuart Hall...
...Beginning with Emerson an American pragmatism evaded an "epistemology-centered philosophy" for a more moral, plebeian, and progressive approach that West commends...
...To get at this pragmatism, West examines the work of Roberto Ungar...
...The material runs away from him—perhaps from anyone...
...Again West is most lucid on biographical and social issues...
...Or he writes that "much like Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947) Trilling's Sincerity and Authenticity traces the decline of reason and the rise of irrationality...
...West just throws it out, but it could equally be argued that all intellectuals write to overcome inferiority complexes...
...West is a generous critic who seems at home everywhere...
...One hundred pages later Dewey is the model...
...Peirce was "the most profound philosophical thinker produced in America," not to be confused with Dewey, "the greatest American pragmatist...
...much is technical and jargon-ridden...
...Niebuhr was "the most influential cultural critic in mid-century America...
...Dewey leads West to what he calls "the dilemma of the Mid-Century Pragmatic Intellectual," a loose collection of thinkers—Hook, Trilling, Mills, Niebuhr, Du Bois—who mined an Emersonian pragmatism in an era of dwindling possibilities...
...West's book almost suffers from overambition...
...To compare Trilling's casual lectures to The Dialectic of Enlightenment hardly seems justified...
...Several of these points seem dubious...
...In Emerson he detects a philosophic and laudable "evasion" that colors all American pragmatism...
...Unfortunately this passage is typical...
...Pervasive in their writings are a sense of the tragic, a need for irony, a recognition of limits and constraints, and a stress on paradox, ambiguity and difficulty...
...West loves to pile it on: references, lists, and honor rolls...
...West is not finished defining prophetic pragmatism...
...The last chapters take up an even looser collection of thinkers: Quine, Putnam, Rorty, Roberto Ungar, Foucault, and Gramsci...
...he preferred "tentative strategies, contingent functions, enabling tactics, and useful devices...
...In the last paragraph of the penultimate chapter, West builds toward a lyrical conclusion...
...These concepts are hardly exhausted...
...there is little here about Emersonian pragmatism...
...These five figures all SUMMER • 1990 • 403 Books "display varying degrees of suspicion of workingand lower-class people," employ some notion of tragedy, and "are themselves personally empowered by pragmatism to overcome marginality or inferiority complexes by means of their own acts of intellectual will, i.e., writing...
...Unlike European philosophers Emerson spurned talk of timeless substances and transcendental qualities...
...With social and biographical materials, West is lucid and fast paced, but vast quotes and dreary tracts of academese slow things to a crawl...
...Dewey and Gramsci represent the second wave, Emerson and Marx the first wave...
...It is impossible to read The American Evasion of Philosophy without recognizing his gifts: intelligence, wide reading, and basic—is this word still allowed?—humanism...
...To be sure, Emerson is not usually identified as a pragmatist...
...Quine is "now the world's most distinguished Englishspeaking philosopher and professor emeritus at Harvard...
...alas, he homogenizes pragmatism and postmodernist theories rather than rethinking America's classic philosophy...
...West routinely states what and who are the most profound, the most sophisticated, the most important...
...West, who teaches at Princeton, seems obsessed by Harvard professors...
...West has many valuable things to say, but the ills of The American Evasion are more than stylistic infelicities...
...Moreover, West has not offered a word about the others...
...I don't think so, and one is left wondering what West is up to...
...Finally, these categories are only introduced in the last pages of the book...
...He describes them in terms applicable to virtually any modern intellectuals...
...Peirce remained committed to the "Emersonian theodicy that promotes human progress, betterment and moral development...
...again, his thoughts are worthwhile, but the claims, jargon, and pedantry make for rough going...
...He viewed knowledge not as something to be "grounded or privileged" but as "instrumental effects of human will...
...Following the pioneering work of Hans-Georg Gadamer and Edward Shils [West's only mention of Gadamer and Shils], prophetic pragmatism acknowledges the inescapable and inexpungible character of tradition, the burden and buoyancy of that which is transmitted from the past to the present...
...West constantly invokes political action, the poor, the outcasts...
...If not a Wunderkind, he is a wonder...
...the relationship between detail and concept, name and argument, is skewed...
...West argues that Emerson's themes of individuality, voluntarism, and amelioration "prefigure" pragmatism...
...Perhaps, but note that West slides into the lumpy prose of postmodern academic theorizing...
...The perpetual name-dropping more than distracts...
...West is often incisive about these thinkers, but the assortment is too random, the links to pragmatism too lax...
...he offers thoughts about Foucault and postmodernism...
...From this list only Dewey and Du Bois have been discussed—and criticized...
...Again the pot boils over, and it is hard to know if it is because the pot is too full or the heat too high...
...His Politics harbors "deep elective affinities" to pragmatism...
...these burning issues hardly inform his book...
...Du Bois was "the greatest" American intellectual of African descent...
...West explores the prospects for a new pragmatism by surveying thinkers from Emerson to Gramsci and Foucault...
...Similar to Alasdair McIntyre in his influential book After Virtue (1981), Mills believes he resides in the new Dark Ages...
...As with so much of this book some paragraphs sparkle—for instance, West makes many salient points about Rorty—but the larger argument is shunted aside...
...Fro m Emerson, West turns to Charles Peirce...
...Prophetic pragmatism affirms the Niebuhrian strenuous mood, never giving up on new possibilities for human agency—both individual and collective—in the present, yet situating them in light of Du Bois's social structural analyses...
...more likely they lean toward a new skepticism or sobriety...
...Fine, but his book is also for the philosophical cognoscenti and academic intellectuals...
...Shining with intelligence, The American Evasion of Philosophy is embedded in the lava of scholasticism...
...Even when bucking the fashions to discuss a philosopher not at Harvard—Wilfred Sellars at the University of Pittsburgh—West explains that "after Harvard Pittsburgh has the finest philosophy department in the country...
...SUMMER • 1990 • 405...
...Dewey's project," West writes earlier in the book, "never 404 • DISSENT Books really got off the ground...
...he criticizes a Harvard professor for ignoring "the burning cultural and political issues in the everyday lives of ordinary people .. . escalating racial and sexual violence, pervasive drug addiction and alcoholism, breakdowns in the nuclear family...
...Ungar's work also participates in a "third wave of left romanticism" now sweeping through "first-world progressive intelligentsia...
...after highlighting the political, social, and personal inadequacies of the "mid-century pragmatic intellectuals," West discusses Quine, where none of this is pursued...
...Mills had little patience with the 'tragic-sense-of-life' perspective...
...If they are important why didn't West allude to these romantic waves earlier...
...it suggests that despite regular appeals to political action and working people, West writes mostly for professional colleagues...
...Quine is a "genius," who intervened "in the most sophisticated discourses of symbolic logicians...
...This is bizarre...
...This means Peirce highlights "the centrality of contingent and revisable social practices in acquiring knowledge...
...The point, really, is not whether they do or do not but whether their commitments and writings are so familiar that West need only list them...

Vol. 37 • July 1990 • No. 3


 
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