Table Of ContentLANGUAGE, DISCOURSE, SOCIETY
General Editors: Stephen Heath, Colin MacCabe and Denise Riley
Published titles
Stanley Aronowitz
1HE CRISIS IN HISTORICAL MATERIALISM
SCIENCE AS POWER: Discourse and Ideology in Modern Society
Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen
THE FREUDIAN SUBJEcr
Norman Bryson
VISION AND PAINTING: The Logic of the Gaze
Teresa de Lauretis
AUCE DOESN'T: Feminism, Semiotics and Cinema
FEMINISf SfUDIES/CRITICAL SfUDIES (editor)
TECHNOLOGIES OF GENDER: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction
Mary Ann Doane
1HE DESIRE TO DESIRE: The Woman's Film of the 1940s
Alan Durant
CONDmONS OF MUSIC
Jane Gallop
FEMINISM AND PSYCHOANALYSIS: The Daughter's Seduction
Peter Gidal
UNDERSTANDING BECKETT: A Study of Monologue and Gesture in Works of Samuel
Beckett
Peter Goodrich
LEGAL DISCOURSE: Studies in Linguistics, Rhetoric and Legal Analysis
Paul Hirst
ON LAW AND IDEOLOGY
Ian Hunter
CULTURE AND GOVERNMENT: The Emergence of Literary Education
Andreas Huyssen
AFTER 1HE GREAT DMDE: Modernism, Mass Culture and Postmodernism
Nigel Leask
1HE POUTICS OF IMAGINATION IN COLERIDGE'S CRITICAL THOUGHT
Michael Lynn-George
EPOS: WORD, NARRATIVE AND 1HE IUAD
Colin MacCabe
JAMES JOYCE AND 1HE REVOLUTION OF 1HE WORD
1HE TALKING CURE: Essays on Psychoanalysis and Language (editor)
Louis Marin
PORTRAIT OF 1HE KING
Christian Metz
PSYCHOANALYSIS AND CINEMA: The Imaginary Signifier
Jean-Ciaude Milner
FOR THE LOVE OF LANGUAGE
Jeffrey Minson
GENEALOGIES OF MORALS: Nietzsche, Foucault, Donzelot and the Eccentricity of
Ethics
Laura Mulvey
VISUAL AND OTHER PLEASURES
Douglas Oliver
POETRY AND NARRATIVE IN PERFORMANCE
Michel P@cheux
LANGUAGE, SEMANTICS AND IDEOLOGY
Jean-Michel Rabate
LANGUAGE, SEXUALITY AND IDEOLOGY IN EZRA POUND'S CANTOS
Denise Riley
'AM I mAT NAME?': Feminism and the Category of Women' in History
Jacqueline Rose
THE CASE OF PETER PAN or THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF CHILDREN'S FICTION
Brian Rotman
SIGNIFYING NOTHING: The Semiotics of Zero
Michael Ryan
POLITICS AND CULTURE: Working Hypotheses for a Post-Revolutionary Society
James A. Snead and Cornel West
SEEING BLACK: A Semiotics of Black Culture in America
Raymond Tallis
NOT SAUSSURE: A Critique of Post-Saussurean Literary Theory
David Trotter
CIRCULATION: Defoe, Dickens and the Economies of the Novel
THE MAKING OF THE READER: Language and Subjectivity in Modem American,
English and Irish Poetry
Cornel West
THE AMERICAN EVASION OF PHILOSOPHY: A Genealogy of Pragmatism
Peter Womack
IMPROVEMENT AND ROMANCE: Constructing the Myth of the Highlands
Some forthcoming titles
Stephen Heath
FILM ANALYSIS: 'Touch of Evil'
Rod Mengham
CONTEMPORARY BRITISH POETICS
Jeffrey Minson
PERSONAL POLITICS AND ETHICAL STYLE
Denise Riley
POETS ON POETICS
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The American Evasion
of Philosophy
A Genealogy of Pragmatism
Cornel West
Professor of Religion, Director of
Afro American Studies, Princeton Umversity
M
MACMILLAN
C The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System, 1989
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission
of this publication may be made without written permission.
No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied
or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance
with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1956 (as amended),
or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying
issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 33 - 4 Alfred Place,
London WCIE 7DP.
Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to
this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and
civil claims for damages.
FtrSt published 1989
Published by
TIlE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD
Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire R021 2XS
and London
Companies and representatives
throughout the world
The Camelot Press Ltd, Southampton
British Ubrary Cataloguing in Publication Data
West, Cornel
The American evasion of philosophy: a geneology of pragmatism. - (Language,
discourse, society).
1. American philosophy
I. Title II. Series
191
ISBN 978-0-333-52569-2 ISBN 978-1-349-20415-1 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-20415-1
To
my beloved brother
CLIrrON L. WEST III
who sticks closer than a brother
If one must philosophize, then one must philosophize; and if one must
not philosophize, then one must philosophize; in any case, therefore,
one must philosophize. For if one must, then, given that Philosophy
exists, we are in every way obliged to philosophize. And if one must
not, in this case too we are obliged to inquire how it is possible for there
to be no philosophy; and in inquiring we philosophize, for inquiry is
the cause of Philosophy.
-Aristotle
Pragmatists keep trying to find ways of making anti-philosophical points
in non philosophical language.
- Richard Rorty
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Xl
Introduction 3
1 The Emersonian Prehistory of American Pragmatism 9
Emerson on Power (and Tradition) 11
Emerson on Provocation (and the Market) 25
Emerson on Personality (and Race) 28
Emerson as Organic Intellectual 35
2 The Historic Emergence of American Pragmatism 42
Peirce on Scientific Method, Community, and Christian Love 43
James on Individuality, Reconciliation, and Heroic Energies 54
3 The Coming-of-Age of American
Pragmatism: John Dewey 69
Dewey on Historical Consciousness, Critical
Intelligence, and Creative Democracy 71
4 The Dilemma of the Mid-Century
Pragmatic Intellectual 112
Sidney Hook: The Deweyan Political Intellectual 114
C. Wright Mills: The Neo-Deweyan Radical Social Critic 124
W. E. B. Du Bois: The Jamesian Organic Intellectual 138
Reinhold Niebuhr: The Jamesian Cultural Critic 150
Lionel Trilling: The Pragmatist as Arnoldian Literary Critic 164
5 The Decline and Resurgence of American Pragmatism:
W. V. Quine and Richard Rorty 182
6 Prophetic Pragmatism: Cultural Criticism
and Political Engagement 211
Roberto Unger and Third-Wave Left Romanticism 214
The Challenge of Michel Foucault 223
Tragedy, Tradition, and Political Praxis 226
Prophetic Pragmatism and Postmodemity 235
Notes 243
Index 273
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book was made possible-as are all my writings-by my loving family
and friends: my inimitable parents, Clifton L. West, Jr., and Irene Bias
West; my steadfast brother, Clifton L. West III; my supportive sisters,
Cynthia West Cole and Cheryl West; my close confidant, James Melvin
Washington, Professor of Church History at Union Theological Seminary
in New York City; and my wonderful son, Clifton Louis West. I benefited
greatly from critical readings of the manuscript by Richard Rorty, Frank
Lentricchia, and Stanley Aronowitz. I also am grateful to Allen Fitchen
for his patience and support. And lastly, without the presence and
inspiration of my lovely companion, this book might have never been
completed.
The American Evasion of Philosophy
