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Book
Review |
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Natural History of Pragmatism: The Fact of Feeling from Jonathan Edwards
to Gertrude Stein. By Joan Richardson. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2007. Pp. ix, 327. $28.99. |
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Joan Richardson's A Natural History of Pragmatism
will come as a revelation for many contemporary readers whose only acquaintance
with Pragmatism stems from tracing its early course through the natural
science inclinations of Pierce, James, and Dewey. Richardson centers
her text on the reciprocal relationship of language and perception for American
thinkers from Jonathan Edwards and Ralph Waldo Emerson to William and Henry
James to Wallace Stevens and Gertrude Stein. She places this lineage in
a doubly unsettling context of the untamed American landscape and the on-going
scientific advances that impelled these thinkers to invent a new relationship
between language and perception. These authors explore the new territory
of their eras through experiments in speaking and writing aimed at finding
ways to illuminate "the fact of feeling" as a vibratory membrane between
embodied persons in the new world and the legacy of linguistically encoded
meanings.
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She examines selected works of each of these explorers
of human experience, and drawing on some recent discussions in cognitive
science, provocatively demonstrates the sense in which they worked the pragmatic
vein. Central to her argument is the Vygotskian-inspired view that language,
in addition to being a means for social exchange, is critical as a tool
for thinking. The artist, at his or her best, gives form to dimly perceived
structures in experience, and through linguistic devices (in case of the
writers) brings those structures within reach of our conceptual grasp. In
this way, language becomes a tool for perceiving and thinking. The authors
Richardson examines take the scientific theories of their days, which have
made the world strange to received modes of being, and they transmute them
through imaginative language into ways of apprehending and living in that
world.
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Richardson proposes that the challenge of engagement
with the structures of experience became particularly pressing for early
settlers of the New World. The Old World categories of thought proved to
be less than adequate to capture the novelties, change, and palpable uncertainties
they confronted in North America. In this respect, Richardson views Jonathan
Edwards' writings as a concerted effort personally to come to grips with
this discontinuity between old and new, while also attempting to develop
forms of expression that would bind a community in the face of new beginnings.
She shows that in his searching examination of experience in the New World,
Edwards drew on Newton's experiments with light as a model for "making
the invisible visible." Newton's shuttered room admitting only a ray
of light, which after passing through a prism reveals previously hidden
properties, serves as a metaphor for Edwards who creates conceptually a
"room of the idea" permitting close scrutiny of experience. This
infusing of science, language, and aesthetics is seen simultaneously as
an effort to take account of the natural order, while also serving a ministerial
function for communities taking root in their new land. These dual purposes,
to varying degrees, will mark the writings of all of the individuals examined.
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Richardson describes Emerson as turning his focus
outward to experiences of nature. From the opening line of his essay "Experience"
("Where do we find ourselves?"), Emerson is presented as trying
to naturalize religion by transforming regnant categories of thought through
new forms of expression. In this undertaking, he was inspired in part by
discoveries in science, such as Faraday's notions of electromagnetic fields,
as signs of an underlying, undulating reality. His explorations were also
leavened with a Swedenborgian aesthetic, which "gave to science a beating
heart" inspired by the wonder and beauty of crystals, whose complexities
and varieties arise from the repetitive, iterative growth from simpler structures. |
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Richer understanding of self and world require forms
of expression that incorporate the scientific imagination and in turn enable
a fuller human experience of the world in which neither man nor god is the
center. At the same time, language as a device for rendering experience
more concrete can itself highlight subtler aspects of experience. In The
Principles of Psychology, William James's attention to language and
to the stream of thought, and specifically, to the transitions between objects
of experience, laid bare the foundational place of feelings in experience. |
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"There is not a conjunction or a preposition,
and hardly an adverbial phrase, syntactic form, or inflection of voice,
in human speech that does not express some shading or other of relation
which we at some moment actually feel to exist between the larger objects
of our thoughts. . . . We ought to say a feeling of and, a feeling
of if, a feeling of but, and a feeling of by, quite
as readily as we say a feeling of blue or a feeling of cold."
(James, 1890, p. 238)
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James's insistence on the significance of the relations
between objects of experience, developed more fully in his radical empiricism,
critically contributes to the abandonment of old object and image-centered
categories of thinking that are bleached of activity and feeling. While
our concepts provide us with a second-hand, detached assessment of the world,
immediate experience is of a world of dynamic structure, aesthetics,
and feelings. The Varieties of Religious Experience is James's exploration
of the fact of feeling, and with that he carries forward the Emersonian
project of naturalizing religion. The structure and style of his writing
itself, Richardson argues, embodied his ideas as much as described them
by involving the reader in the affect-laden work of having a particular
thought, a project later taken up and vastly expanded by Gertrude Stein.
Richardson's analysis of language as a tool for exploration and discovery
within experience gathers momentum in her treatment of Henry James, Wallace
Stevens, and Gertrude Stein. The thread linking all of these individuals
is the use of linguistic forms as a tool for rendering what is invisible
in experience visible. Richardson's principle focus in her treatment of
Henry James is his novel, The Ambassadors, which he considered to
be among his best. Her explication of the book's title, that she suggests
was inspired by Holbein's painting of the same name, is intriguing. This
painting is perhaps best known today for its exemplary use of anamorphic
representation, which appears as a blurred image from a conventional viewing
point and is only recognizable as a memento mori after adopting an
eccentric angle to the canvas. Typically, the language and plot of Henry
James's fiction leads the reader to the proper elliptical vantage point
from which narrative events can be understood. In doing so, James opens
up new ways of comprehension in times of ever-emerging complexity in the
face of modernity.
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Wallace Steven's often opaque and challenging poetry
is understood as a linguistic effort to apprehend and convey the unstable
and barely imaginable reality described by the physics of Einstein's relativity
principle, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, and other early 20th
quantum physicists. Stevens' use of language in part mirrors this unfamiliar
realm and the feelings it engenders "to provide satisfactions of belief
within paradox and perplexity" (p. 213). Gertrude Stein's early exposure
to biological thought, first at Harvard, where she encountered William James,
and later at Johns Hopkins investigating morphological structure and the
transmission of inherited traits, sensitized her to replicating processes
and repetitive structures that underlay the variety and unity of life. The
recursive, iterative quality of natural processes is mirrored by a prose
style intended to capture the feeling of thinking -- linguistic form as
an homology of nature's process of becoming. The result, as Richardson puts
it referring to all three of these writers, "a new vulgate for experience
in a post-Darwinian creation (p. 166)."
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What is new and exciting about this work then is
Richardson's tracing out of a different path for pragmatism that leads the
reader through the humanities rather than philosophy. In the process, the
influence of the shifting scientific ground on the literary imaginations
of these artists cannot be overstated. These connections between the sciences
and the humanities have the effect of narrowing the gulf between them that
was anticipated and lamented by William James. Richardson too is inspired
by contemporary developments in cognitive and neuro-science; and those connections
are vital for understanding why this study indeed is a "natural history
of pragmatism." Acts of writing, more than devices for communicating, are
practices of exploration and discovery, the fruits of which may provide
the reader with a temporary foothold for structures of reality as they become
revealed and transformed in each age. |
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On a slightly critical note, Richardson occasionally
draws connections that without elaboration seem rather speculative, such
as Edwards' recursive style resembling the structure of Bach's Art of the
Fugue, and in turn anticipating the coding and transmission processes of
RNA molecules. Her interdisciplinarity sometimes leads her to borrow ideas
from fields when, within these fields, some of those ideas function at odds
to her point. For example, when she borrows from recent psychology she uncritically
uses language that splits apart cognition and feeling, vision and the other
senses, and reinforces a sort of parsed and isolated version of psychological
processes. Yet the gist of her argument unites them. As psychologists, we
also found it jarring for her to cite the influence of James on evolutionary
psychologists such as Tooby and Cosmides who seem influenced only by James'
chapter on instincts in The Principles, and little else. In general, she
does not place her use and understanding of science in the empirical but
anti-positivist tradition pioneered by the James, Peirce, and Dewey. However,
she takes great pains to substantiate the influence of particular scientific
theories on each of the authors she examines in detail. Here, the case for
the role of specific scientific advances in "the natural history of pragmatism"
is convincingly made. |
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In many places, the writing seems to be unnecessarily
dense and convoluted. Too many references to too many sources often impede
rather than ground the development of an idea. In spite of this, we urge
readers to push ahead, for many very worthwhile insights await them. Much
in the spirit of William James, Richardson reminds us "that we feel things
before we think them, and that following the complicated harmony that we
make of what we think, back to what we feel, gives pleasure, the strain
of being" (p. 231). |
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Harry
Heft
Department of Psychology
Denison University
heft@denison.edu
Susan Saegert
Center for Human Environments
Graduate Center, CUNY
SSaegert@gc.cuny.edu |
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