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Representation and Objects of Thought in Medieval Philosophy Ashgate Studies in Medieval Philosophy 1st Edition Henrik Lagerlund
Philosophy in the American West explores the physical, ecological, cultural, and narrative environments associated with the western United States, reflecting on the relationship between people and the places that sustain them.
The American West has long been recognized as having significance. From Crèvecoeur’s early observations in Letters from an American Farmer (1782), to Thoreau’s reflections in Walden (1854), to twentieth-century thoughts on the legacy of a vanishing frontier, “the West” has played a pivotal role in the Ameri can narrative and in the American sense of self. But while the nature of “west ernness” has been touched on by historians, sociologists, and, especially, novelists and poets, this collection represents the first attempt to think philosoph ically about the nature of “the West” and its influence on us. The contributors take up thinkers that have been associated with Continental Philosophy and pair them with writers, poets, and artists of “the West”. And while this collection seeks to loosen the cords that tie philosophy to Europe, the traditions of “contin ental” philosophy—phenomenology, hermeneutics, deconstruction, and others— offer deep resources for thinking through the particularity of place.
This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of Philosophy, as well as those working in Ecocriticism and the Environmental Humanities more broadly.
Josh Hayes is Associate Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Humani ties at Alvernia University, USA.
Gerard Kuperus is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of San Francisco, USA.
Brian Treanor is Charles S. Casassa Chair and Professor of Philosophy at Loyola Marymount University, USA.
Routledge Environmental Ethics
Series Editor
Benjamin Hale
University of Colorado, Boulder
The Routledge Environmental Ethics series aims to gather novel work on ques tions that fall at the intersection of the normative and the practical, with an eye toward conceptual issues that bear on environmental policy and environmental science. Recognizing the growing need for input from academic philosophers and political theorists in the broader environmental discourse, but also acknow ledging that moral responsibilities for environmental alteration cannot be under stood without rooting themselves in the practical and descriptive details, this series aims to unify contributions from within the environmental literature. Books in this series can cover topics in a range of environmental contexts, including individual responsibility for climate change, conceptual matters affect ing climate policy, the moral underpinnings of endangered species protection, complications facing wildlife management, the nature of extinction, the ethics of reintroduction and assisted migration, reparative responsibilities to restore, among many others.
For more information on the series, please visit www.routledge.com/Routledge-Environmental-Ethics/book-series/ENVE
Sustainable Action and Motivation
Pathways for Individuals, Institutions and Humanity
Roland Mees
Climate Justice and Non-State Actors
Corporations, Regions, Cities, and Individuals
Edited by Jeremy Moss and Lachlan Umbers
Philosophy in the American West
A Geography of Thought
Edited by Josh Hayes, Gerard Kuperus, and Brian Treanor
Philosophy in the American West
A Geography of Thought
Edited by Josh Hayes, Gerard Kuperus, and Brian Treanor
First published 2020 by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge
The right of Josh Hayes, Gerard Kuperus, and Brian Treanor to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record has been requested for this book
ISBN: 978-0-367-48950-2 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-04362-1 (ebk)
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Contributors
Russell J. Duvernoy is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at King’s Univer sity College. His articles have appeared in Southern Journal of Philosophy, Transactions of Charles S. Peirce Society, Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Metaphilosophy, Deleuze and Guattari Studies, and others. His work draws on continental philosophy and process philosophies to engage with environ mental problems and climate crisis.
Josh Hayes is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Alvernia University. He is a founding member of the Pacific Association of the Continental Tradition (PACT) and currently serves as coeditor for the Journal of the Pacific Association for the Continental Tradition (JPACT).
Andrew Jussaume teaches philosophy at Boston College and Providence College. His research centers on questions relating to the intersection of meta physics and ethics, examining how free persons best express themselves through a life lived in service to, and with compassion towards, their com munity, the environment, and each other.
Gerard Kuperus is an Associate professor in philosophy at the University of San Francisco. He has published on the significance of place. He is the author of Ecopolitical Homelessness: Defining Place in an Unsettled World and coeditor (with Marjolein Oele) of Ontologies of Nature
Christopher Lauer grew up in Texas and Kansas and now teaches philosophy at the University of Hawai‘i at Hilo. He is the author of The Suspension of Reason in Hegel and Schelling and Intimacy: A Dialectical Study
Shannon M. Mussett is Professor of Philosophy at Utah Valley University. She specializes in Existentialism, German Idealism, Feminist Theory, and Aes thetics. She publishes widely on Simone de Beauvoir, French Existentialism, and Hegelian philosophy.
Marjolein Oele is Professor of Philosophy at the University of San Francisco Her research intertwines Ancient Philosophy, Continental Philosophy and Environ mental Philosophy. She is the author of E-Co-Affectivity: Exploring Pathos at Life’s Material Interfaces (SUNY, 2020) and co-editor of Ontologies of Nature: Continental Perspectives and Environmental Reorientations (Springer, 2017).
viii Contributors
Amanda Parris earned her PhD from DePaul University and currently teaches as an Adjunct Professor at the University of San Francisco. Her research interests include the history of seventeenth-century philosophy, especially the philosophy of Spinoza, contemporary political philosophy, and the fiction of Samuel Beckett, Thomas Bernhard, W.G. Sebald, and Cormac McCarthy.
Thomas Thorp is Professor of Philosophy at Saint Xavier University. He is the author (with Brian Seitz) of The Iroquois and the Athenians: A Political Ontology. This chapter is the third in a series—“Eating Wolves” (2014), “Moving Wolves” (2019)—that draw upon fieldwork in areas where wolves have returned: Yellowstone Park and Parc Vanoise in France.
Brian Treanor is Professor of Philosophy and Charles S. Casassa Chair of Social Values at Loyola Marymount University. He is the author or editor of Emplotting Virtue (SUNY 2014), Carnal Hermeneutics (Fordham 2015), Being-in-Creation (Fordham, 2015), and Interpreting Nature (Fordham 2013), among others.
Jason M. Wirth is Professor of Philosophy at Seattle University. His recent books include Mountains, Rivers, and the Great Earth: Reading Gary Snyder and Dogen in an Age of Ecological Crisis (SUNY 2017) and Nietzsche and Other Buddhas (Indiana 2019).
Acknowledgments
This book is the product of a particular place; but it is also, of course, the product of a group of people who helped in various ways during various stages of its development. The editors wish to express their deep gratitude to the following.
Philosophy in the American West is the result of many years of conversa tions begun at meetings of the Pacific Association for the Continental Tradi tion (PACT), a community of thinkers committed to thinking interdisciplinarily and cross-culturally about what wisdom looks like in the West, as well as in the area more broadly encompassed by the Pacific This book is in many ways the result of this organization, which has been the main gathering place for Continental Philosophy in the American West. Over the course of its existence PACT has explored a variety of themes from “The Question of Nature” to “Colony and Resistance,” and from “The Elemental” to “The Feast.” Place, and in particular the American West as a place of thinking, has been central, reflected in gatherings occurring in some of the great cities of the West—Seat tle, San Francisco, Hilo, Los Angeles as well as on the slopes of Kilauea and Mauna Loa, the Salish Sea, Baranof Island, Point Reyes, and Yosemite Valley We are not able to list all the people (and places) who have contributed indi rectly through their collegial engagement over the years, but you know who you are: thank you for your philosophical friendship!
Many of the chapters that follow first developed as papers presented at the 10th annual meeting of PACT, which was held in Yosemite Valley on the theme of “Thinking in the West.” Meeting in that location was made possible by the generous support of the Charles S. Casassa Chair in Social Values at Loyola Marymount University, and by Dean Robbin Crabtree of the Bellarm ine College of Liberal Arts. We are grateful for this support. Our thanks as well to the people of Yosemite Valley, past and present, who have helped to preserve such a remarkable and distinctively ‘Western’ place, and to the place of Yosemite itself, for everything it has to show and to teach us We would also like to thank Maya Layton and Lauren Payne at the University of San Francisco for assisting in completing the formatting of the manuscript and USF’s Faculty Development Fund who generously provided funding for both these student assistants as well as for the indexer.
x Acknowledgments
Thanks are due to many people at Routledge, in particular Rebecca Brennan, Rosie Anderson, Ashleigh Phillips, and Eilidh McGregor. We are grateful to Ben Hale, Editor of the Routledge Environmental Ethics series, for helping us find a place to develop and communicate these collected projects, and to the anonymous reviewers who read the draft manuscript for Routledge.
Finally, our thanks to The Journal of the Pacific Association for the Continental Tradition for permission to reprint “Continental Philosophy Beyond ‘the’ Continent,” which first appeared in vol. 1 (2018) of that journal.
1 Thinking in the West
Josh Hayes, Gerard Kuperus, and Brian Treanor
I pledge allegiance to the soil of Turtle Island, and to the beings who thereon dwell one ecosystem in diversity under the sun
With joyful interpenetration for all.
(Gary Snyder, “For All”1)
In “For All,” American Zen poet Gary Snyder’s “pledge of allegiance” to Turtle Island, we find a stark reminder that “place matters,” and that places have an effect on those who dwell authentically within them. However, the significance of place has been unevenly recognized in scholarly work. Some fields—literature and poetry for example—have long appreciated the significance of place. We cannot think of Wordsworth without the Lake District, Joyce without Dublin, Blixen without Kenya, or Snyder without Kitkitdizze. These people and their thoughts, even if they speak with some degree of universality, would not be what they are, were they rooted in some other place. But other disciplines, including philosophy, have been slower to come to terms with the “placial” aspects of the questions they ask and the answers they venture. As with literary, poetic, and artistic modes of thinking, philosophy has been shaped by the places it inhabits and in which it developed. Would the account of “border life” that shapes all the various themes in Walden have been the same if Thoreau undertook his experiment in simplicity outside Cairo or Cork rather than Concord? Would Nietzsche’s “hardest thought,” that of eternal return, have come in the same form if he sought relief from his ailments onboard a P&O cruise ship rather than strolling the alpine topography of Sils Maria?
This volume is predicated on the belief that thinking does not develop independently of the places in which it takes place, and that different places will contribute different things to the thinking that takes place in them. It is born out of a decade of conversations concerned with thinking philosophically in, and from, “the West.” Here “the West” does not mean simply, or even primarily, the cultural traditions rooted in Europe and informed by Greek philosophy,
Josh Hayes et al.
Judeo-Christian religion, and the Enlightenment valorization of reason. It also refers to the physical, ecological, cultural, and narrative environments associated with the western North America and the Pacific Rim, as well as distinctive ways of being and thinking in dialogue with the places in it: diverse places, people, and phenomena from the Eastern Slope and Front Range of Colorado to the Central Coast of California, and from the high desert of the Mojave to the old growth forests of the Pacific Northwest. It is the region that Wallace Stegner famously referred to as part of “the geography of hope.”2 This emphasis on place explains the prominence of environmental themes in this volume, as well as the attention given to the relationship between people and the places that sustain them.
The places of the West are physical destinations that people flock to every year; but they are also destinations of the mind for many Americans, and not a few foreign nationals, including many who have never visited, and may never actually visit, the West. These places have become a central part of American culture, often thanks to Hollywood, which is both a Western place and perhaps the most influential propagandist of its special character. Consequently, the idea of the West—and, if our wager is correct, the physical reality of place that underlies and informs that idea—plays an outsized role in the American narrative and sense of self. Consider the influence of Yosemite, Yellowstone, or the Grand Canyon in what Roderick Nash called “the American Mind” (Nash 1967). These places are examples of what philosophers and poets call “the sublime,” and their overwhelming, inhuman scale and power remind us that the West is a place of extremes. The mighty Colorado, which wore through earth and rock to form the Grand Canyon en route to the Pacific. The grand monolithic walls of Yosemite, ground down and polished over hundreds of thousands of years by the incomprehensibly slow and patient power of glaciers. The earthquakes and volcanoes characteristic of the Pacific “ring of fire,” a constant reminder to residents of Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle that they live in a world that is still evolving, even at the geologic level. Although certain places in the West seem tailor-made for human flourishing, giving rise to wild hopes of an earthly paradise, in others we encounter an earth that seems hostile to human habitation. And to this volatile mix we have added the effects of anthropogenic climate change, which will include increasing unpredictability to the West: from prolonged droughts causing agricultural stress and explosive wildfires to powerful storms depositing too much precipitation too quickly with the resulting mudslides and floods to destructive tsunamis moving within hours from Japan to the Hawaiian islands and California.
But if the West is home to powerful “natural” phenomena, it is also the home to powerful “cultural” phenomena that took root and flourished in Western places: Hollywood (the historic center of gravity for film and television), Silicon Valley (the popularization of the Internet, social media, and virtual reality), and San Francisco (from the Gold Rush to the Beat Poets to LGBTQ+ activism), and others. Thus, the influence of the West, far from declining with the disappearance of the frontier, has continued and will continue to exert a profound influence on the American narrative It informs how
we understand ourselves retrospectively (e g , the reality and the myth of the frontier) and prospectively (e g , the democratization of knowledge via the Internet, the development of AI, etc.).
The rich natural and cultural resources of the West have helped it to become extremely powerful politically, economically, and socially. Seattle is home to some of the biggest corporations on earth, and the state of California constitutes the fifth largest economy of the world. However, this vast power and wealth flows from a place with a long and deep history, one with a depth of place-based wisdom that has largely, and tragically, been lost. The geographical and cultural character of the West taken up in the pages that follow is not merely the west of North America as settled by Europeans; it is connected to indigenous nations who for thousands of years lived in this place, adapted to the natural geography of its distinctive bioregions. Beginning with the groundbreaking scholarship of noted UC Berkeley anthropologist A.L. Kroeber, who first defined the major bioregions of North American indigenous populations in his magisterial Cultural and Natural Areas of North America (1947), the West became a testing ground for returning to and retrieving the old ways of indigenous inhabitation. Since the 1970s a notable movement towards reinhabitation has arisen in which people commit to specific places spurred by both environmental and political concerns. Among its most well-known advocates include the Pacific Rim activist, Peter Berg, the late founder of the Planet Drum Foundation, who first detected the potent seeds of the bioregional impulse in the waning years of the counterculture, and the poet Gary Snyder, who intentionally established a bioregional community inspired by the tenets of Zen Buddhism in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada.3 Up and down the Pacific coast of North America, bioregional awareness has gradually been cultivated whereby those who are reinhabiting a place begin to understand the salience of the old indigenous ways rooted in a local knowledge of the geography, flora, and fauna. In homage to this bioregional perspective, the editors remain acutely aware of the arbitrary and often violently imposed boundaries that constitute the Western United States and North America. As these political borders neglect the distinct biotic areas and ethnic zones of their indigenous inhabitants—human and non-human—we believe that one path to honoring the old ways of the West is to approach the term, “America” advisedly, as in some ways it represents a symptom of our persistent alienation and estrangement from local places. “The West” overlaps in many ways with the place of “Turtle Island,” an indigenous or First Nation’s name for the North American continent. Since the publication of Gary Snyder’s book of poems under the same name, Turtle Island has become, for certain thinkers, a name that attempts to communicate a different way—different, at least, to settlers and immigrants to the West—of being on this continent and in this world. We therefore take seriously Gary Snyder’s call to return North America to this name for the sake of honoring this living tradition, with roots extending to indigenous ways of inhabiting the West. Although the vast majority of those who inhabit the Western region of Turtle Island today are non-native, by attempting to retrieve or develop a bioregional
perspective, we might at last begin to consciously accept and affirm that who we are is inextricably connected to where we are. The distinctive geography and climate of the West constituting its own “placial” identity cannot be separated from how those who inhabit it come to understand themselves. Such a practice of self-understanding always summons us to examine the particular place in which we find ourselves. The place of the West, and those places constituting the West, remains a precondition for the philosophical methods and themes presented throughout our volume.
As “the West” is an “in between” connecting Europe and Asia, in philosophical, religious, cultural, and literary expressions and occupies many temporal and physical transition zones, it has been the site of conflict and violence, both metaphorical and literal, as well as creativity and inspiration. Its history is marked by opportunity, freedom, technological innovation, and flowering cultural expression; but those benefits have always been shared unequally, and they are haunted by the exploitation of workers (particularly agricultural workers), an ambivalent, often hostile, and sometimes violent relationship to immigration, and the annihilation of indigenous populations. Immigrants coming across the Pacific from “The East” (and, paradoxically, moving east rather than west) were treated very differently from their European counterparts moving west from the East Coast of North America. The history of the West also includes Japanese internment camps, Native American boarding schools, and the exploitation of immigrants from those fleeing the Great Dust Bowl in the 1930s to the “undocumented” workers of today.4
The settling and colonization of the West also met and meets resistance and counter-cultural movements. Native Hawaiians have always resisted the colonization of their sacred places—sometimes with success, such as with the current Thirty Meter Telescope protests. San Francisco became a mecca and example for establishing gay and queer rights, and a central city for the Beat and flower power movements. In addition, we also find a rich history of cultural exchange and enrichment. Zen Buddhism was introduced to the United States on the Pacific Coast and has contributed extensively to a place-based poetics as made evident by the pioneering work of Gary Snyder. Radical academics are found up and down the West Coast in places informed by their own history of cultural and political dissent ranging from Seattle and Eugene to Berkeley, San Francisco, and Boulder.
The overlapping chapters collected here take up a diverse range of issues representing a rich tapestry of themes connected to the West. What does it mean to think in and from the West? How are we to relate to the West as a physical environment, one still characterized by vast open spaces presenting us with a glimpse into wild sublimity and the inhuman scale of deep time? What is the relationship between “the West” and the edge of a continent that faces the Pacific rather than the Atlantic and, across that vast ocean, the cultures of Polynesia and East Asia rather than those of Europe? What political problems arise in the places of the West and among the beings, human and non-human, that call it home? What solutions are on offer? Are the non-human beings with whom we
Thinking in the West 5 share the West our distant kin and hence beings that possess their own forms of intelligence, wisdom, and language? Or do human rationality and language represent a sharp break with the non-human world, one that means our relationship with it can never be on equal footing? How does the bioregional particularity of the West—its topology, aridity, seasonal fires, and so on—inform and shape questions about the environment and our place in it? Why does the wildness and open space of the West—which exposes us to the “inhuman” realities of deep time and entropy—so often give rise to violence and conflict, nihilism, and apocalyptic visions? Might there be alternative responses to the inhuman experience of these phenomena?
The contributors to this volume make substantial engagements to these questions, by pairing, for the first time, thinkers who have been associated with “continental philosophy” with either distinct places in the West or with various writers, poets, and artists of the West Thus, while this collection seeks to loosen the cords that tie philosophy to Europe and its canon or tradition of philosophy, it does not abandon those traditions entirely. They are part of the rich, heterogeneous mix that makes up the West, and the traditions of “continental” philosophy—phenomenology, hermeneutics, deconstruction, and others—offer deep resources for thinking through the particularity of place because these traditions are committed to the idea that context shapes our experience and understanding.
Continental philosophy—one of the two major traditions of western philosophy in north America—is a contested term; and that contestation often takes the form of debates about what should count as “philosophy.” But there is a second ambiguity in the tradition, one that has received much less attention: the ongoing association of continental philosophy with Europe as “the” continent. Following Emerson’s exhortation for a distinctively American philosophical expression in “The American Scholar,” Brian Treanor’s “Continental Philosophy Beyond ‘the’ Continent” (Chapter 2) argues that, within continental philosophy, this hope has not yet been fully realized. This is odd, because the resources of “continental” philosophy (i.e., phenomenology, hermeneutics, etc.) should make it particularly receptive to the importance of “continental” philosophy (i.e., philosophy connected to continental Europe) pursued in and inspired by other geographic regions. If Emerson is correct, we should begin this project by paying particular attention to the specificity of place. And, in considering the distinctive characteristics of the United States, “the West” occupies a special place, both as an idea and a geographic reality. The open space of the territory west of the 100th meridian—the topographical openness of the prairie, the immensity of the Rockies and the Sierra Nevada, the arid expanse of the desert Southwest—has worked its way into the American character, mythology, and subconscious in ways that can, and should, make “continental” philosophy pursued on the western edge of this continent distinctive.
Marjolein Oele’s “Prometheus’ Gift of Fire and Technics: Contemplating the Meaning of Fire, Affect, and Californian Pyrophytes in the Pyrocene” (Chapter 3) takes as its point of departure the most recent devastating wildfires that have wreaked havoc on California, and addresses the question of the possibility of a new era beyond the anthropocene. Oele seeks theoretical guidance in the myth of Prometheus, and the interpretation of this myth through the eyes of Plato’s Protogoras and Bernard Stiegler’s Technics and Time. According to Stiegler, the myth of Prometheus indicates that humans are, originally, without qualities, and that the gifts of Prometheus are to compensate for this inherent lack. The gifts of fire and technics offer us an opportunity to invent and be, but may be dangerous and (self )destructive as well. Oele argues that the Promethean gift is ambiguous, both leading to the tragedy of the anthropocene and offering hope for a future beyond the anthropocene. To rethink the meaning of fire and technics for what Oele calls “the pyrocene,” she considers the meaning of fire and technics on the local scale of fire-adaptable Giant Sequoias and the pyrodiverse practices of the Miwok, as well as on the global scale where she argues that we must develop new forms of affect and habit. Following the myth of Prometheus once more, she argues that the divine gifts of shame and justice are pivotal to change our political-economic regimes and foster a broader community in solidarity with each other.
In his Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, Hegel famously warns that the failure to see a deeper rational order in the movement of history risks reducing it to a mere “slaughter-bench,” in which people’s lives, values, and wisdom are sacrificed for no greater purpose. However, in the American West we find ample reason to suspect that centuries of genocide portend no larger destiny. The stories we tell about ourselves in the West are punctuated less by revolutions than by meaningful slaughters: the Alamo, Wounded Knee, People’s Park. In each case the reckoning is not of which side is better, but of how much has been lost and what has persisted through the loss. Christopher Lauer’s “The West as Slaughter Bench: Thinking Without Revolutions in the American West” examines whether it is possible to build a form of solidarity out of such narratives of a community’s history and whether doing so can forestall the dangers of a countervailing narrative that sees every slaughter as a necessary sacrifice in a grand revolutionary march. David Treuer and Viet Thanh Nguyen each attempt to find their place in the contemporary American West by reflecting on it as a place of slaughter. It is the working hypothesis of this chapter that their accounts are richer for eschewing a complementary narrative of revolution.
With the Doomsday Clock moved closer to midnight by tweets fired across the Pacific, and the Pacific West scorched from fires in a seemingly endless incidence of natural disasters intensified by what many deem imminent climate catastrophe, it might seem prudent, if not exigent, to think of the West through an apocalyptic lens. Amanda Parris’ “The End(s) of the West: the Time of Apocalypse in the Westerns of Cormac McCarthy” (Chapter 5) seeks to resist the dominant apocalyptic ideology by examining the critical mode of apocalyptic thinking opened up by the Westerns of Cormac McCarthy. From Blood
Thinking in the West 7
Meridian’s titular Evening Redness in the West to the “dull rose glow in the windowglass” of The Road’s unnamed event, McCarthy reveals that the End is only one of many ends, or as Benjamin would have it, a long history of catastrophes in the history of the West’s “progress.” His Westerns further disclose the time of apocalypse as now; they are the revelation of our present as the result of and persistence through apocalypses, novels which, as Benjamin might say, “instruct us in remembrance.” Against the dominant mode of apocalyptic thinking according to which the End is futural and singular, then, McCarthy’s work asks us to countenance the brute and brutal history of the present of the West and to break with this present without hope, but also without despair, that is—as the refrain of both Blood Meridian and The Road demands of us—to go on.
In “The Trees of the West: Our Elders, Our Teachers” (Chapter 6), Andrew Jussaume explores the relationship between the trees of the American West and Bergson’s concept of love as it pertains to his philosophy of time. Given the exceptionally long life-spans of trees and their ability to flourish in severe, inhospitable climates, one could make the case that they are nature’s masters of time. This is especially true in the West, which is home to some of the oldest and—in the case of Pando, the ancient stand of quaking aspen trees in Utah—largest living organisms on the planet. Indeed, trees have much to teach us about the properties of long life and living in balance with the natural order of things. Those lessons—according to naturalists like John Muir, Peter Wohlleben, and Henry David Thoreau—include recognizing that the value of trees has less to do with what we glean from them, than what they inspire us to do, which is to love. Jussaume demonstrates how this notion of love coincides with Bergson’s philosophy of time, in which love is the act by which we afford ourselves a real present by engendering the future of another. This relationship between love and time also pertains to arboreal life as the trees of the West encourage us to envision how caring for the future of nature, apart from its usefulness, makes it more possible for us to thrive in conjunction with it.
Thomas Thorp’s “Thinking Wolves,” (Chapter 7) suggests that no single prejudice is more harmful to the work of philosophers as they address the multiple man-made environmental crises afflicting the American West, than the conviction that non-human animals think. Although cognitive ethology has concluded that a diverse range of animal species from primates to wolves, to ravens and even bees think, some of the best work in that field (Griffin 2009), alongside the work of a representative environmental philosopher (Abram 2011), demonstrates that when they want to discuss animal thought, the phenomenon these researchers investigate is animal communication. Thus, the conviction that animals think comes down to the claim that (1) human language is simply a complex and advanced form of information transfer; (2) animals do engage in information transfer and because conscious purposive information transfer is thinking, then (3) animals are doing what humans do when humans think. Thorp argues that both premises are importantly false. By focusing on one of the lesser known passages in Heidegger’s work where he juxtaposes humans to animals (his 1931 lectures on Aristotle’s Metaphysics “Theta”), Thorp offer an
alternative view that human thinking is unique precisely because it harbors the resources necessary to contest anthropocentric environmental destruction.
Shannon M Mussett’s “Robert Smithson, Entropic Art, and the West” (Chapter 8) engages Robert Smithson’s iconic work, Spiral Jetty (1972) as an example of land art that is, in many ways, quintessentially western. The massive spiral, composed of basalt rocks strikingly positioned in Utah’s Great Salt Lake, was conceived by the artist to be a substantial performance of the workings of entropy, a force which he believed to be more primary than reason, order, and permanence. The relationship to the specifics of the space it occupies, the sense of time it elicits, and the abundant traces of prehistoric life that it indexes, form the very ground of its meaning. This meaning is inextricably tied to the vastness of space and (pre) history evident in the Utah landscape itself Bringing together the themes of art, entropy, and the west, Mussett provides an overview of the science and metaphorics of entropy, as well as a discussion of Smithson’s unique approach to entropics She concludes with an examination of how the place of the west is a unique site for the artistic reconfiguration of entropy as a force of creation out of destruction.
On their trip to the Gulf of California, Steinbeck and Ricketts engage in a project that brings marine biology, literature, poetry, philosophy, and mysticism together. Steinbeck in an earlier work reflects on the idea of westering and uses the Pacific Ocean as a metaphorical barrier to otherness and the unknown. In The Log from the Sea of Cortez, Steinbeck and Ricketts break out of our human limited way of thinking Instead of defining our humanness as special and radically different from the rest of the natural world, they break through the barriers that divide us from others, from other species, and from the natural world They “break through,” partially through Darwinist theory, with the aid of mysticism, Daoism, and Zen Buddhism. Gerard Kuperus’ ‘“Westering’ and ‘Breaking Through:’ Zen Buddhism on Cannery Row,” (Chapter 9) argues that the boundaries they seek to step beyond are based on false understandings and perceptions of the world. Through these false understandings and perceptions we fail to see the ethical implications of our actions as we fail, for example, to grasp species and ecosystems as interrelated.
In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari propagate an image of the American West as a space of reinvention, freedom, and primordial connection to the wild that functions as an exemplary site of the distinction between “tree-thinking” and the rhizome Whereas tree-thinking is hierarchical, foundational, and infected with the “specifically European disease” of “transcendence,” rhizomes are nomadic, anarchic, and a-centered Although rhizomes are intended to subvert canonical European tradition, they also risk perpetuating romantic caricatures or erasure of indigenous realities localized in the West. With this in mind, Russell Duvernoy’s “Life in Interregnum: Deleuze, Guattari, and Atleo” (Chapter 10) examines how the thought of Deleuze and Guattarri can exceed the limitations of its rhetoric by staging an encounter with the work of contemporary Nuu-chah-nulth elder, hereditary chief, and philosopher E. Richard Atleo. Duvernoy presents three resonances: (i) attention to alinear temporality and the new old, (ii) heterogenous relationality as distinguished from monolithic holism, and (iii) oosumich or vision quest techniques in service of creative becoming Taken together, these resonances
Thinking in the West 9
offer what Atleo describes as “phase connectors,” conceptual tools for the birth of a new future from the vantage of a deeply dysfunctional present.
In commemoration of Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire, Josh Hayes’ “Monstrous Topologies: Edward Abbey, Reiner Schürmann, and the fate of the American West” (Chapter 11) endeavors to engage in a critical topology of the American West as defined by Wallace Stegner’s one-hundredth meridian. Beginning with climatological accounts documenting the increasing aridity of the American West, the chapter investigates the theme of desertification as its defining geographical and philosophical attribute. By retrieving Reiner Schürmann’s magnum opus, Broken Hegemonies, which traces the history of Western philosophy from the ancient Greeks through Martin Heidegger as series of epochal and anarchic displacements, the chapter addresses Abbey’s Desert Solitaire as a literary work that diagnoses the pervasive presence of planetary nihilism in the American West as the culmination of Western thinking. The rapid and relentless desertification of the American West calls for an anarchic dissensus, whereby we develop a new language of civil disobedience. Such a dissensus begins with an interior conversion that can only be inaugurated by losing oneself in the terra incognita of the terra deserta. By retrieving Schürmann’s description of the tragic trajectory of the West in this epochal movement from egology to topology, Abbey’s Desert Solitaire offers a unique horizon for thinking through nihilism as a problem endemic to both the place and fate of the American West.
Jason’s Wirth’s “Turtle Island Anarchy” (Chapter 12) engages both the ethos and the topos of Turtle Island with respect to its political economy. Turtle Island is Gary Snyder’s “new-old” retrieval of an indigenous and “native” mode of inhabiting the land that has been colonized and exploited as North America. Rather than the prevailing and ruinously alienated mode of inhabitation, Turtle Island is to “hark again to hear those roots, to see our ancient solidarity, and then to the work of being together on Turtle Island.” Wirth takes up a specific cluster of “reinhabited” bioregions along the Pacific coast, what William Everson memorably dubbed “archetype West,” namely, “a recovery of taproot, a quest for the mysterious force that makes a region recognizable as a distinct cultural entity: the mystery of place” before exploring this radical retrieval of place in a very particular respect, namely what Andrew Schelling identifies as its political economy: “anarchist pacifist politics.” How does thinking in, from, and as the West Coast of Turtle Island also manifest as a commitment to anarchist pacifist politics? And what does this political economy look like?
Notes
1 Gary Snyder’s poem, “For All” was composed after a mid-September hike in the Northern Rockies of Yellowstone National Park. It appeared in Snyder 1976a, Snyder 1976b, Snyder 1976c; and Snyder 1977. In the opening stanza of “For All” Snyder describes the experience of dipping his toes in a glacier-fed stream as inspiring his “pledge” to Turtle Island, an indigenous name for the North American continent prior to European colonization Jason Wirth has extensively addressed the theme of Turtle Island in Snyder’s poetry and essays, see especially Wirth 2017 and Chapter 12 of the current volume.
2 The subtitle of this volume, “a geography of thought,” is meant to be evocative of Stegner and his letter, calling attention to the particular influence of the landscape of “the West” on those who inhabit it. All places form and inform the thinking that takes place in them, and the American West is no different. Indeed, in the Wilderness Letter itself, Stenger argues that the West has “worked on us” even as we “worked on it,” and that, consequently, the West has “formed our character” (Stegner 2007).
3 Bioregionalism is a distinctive branch of environmentalism inspired by the “back to the land” philosophy of the North America countercultural movement. It addresses concerns coming from or related to particular, naturally defined places (e.g., a particular watershed, the aridity west of the 100th meridian, etc.) and the ecological, cultural, and political relationships within them. The term “bioregionalism” was first coined by Allen Van Newkirk, founder of the Institute for Bioregional Research in 1975, and was extensively promoted by the foremost proponent of bioregionalism, Peter Berg (see Berg 1978 and Berg 2009). Peter Berg’s legacy of bioregionalism has also been advocated by activists and writers ranging from David Haenke, Raymond Dasmann, and Kirkpatrick Sale, to Wendell Berry and Gary Snyder.
4 As Christopher Lauer suggests in Chapter 4, whatever else it is, the history of the West must be recognized as a “slaughter bench.”
References
Abram, David. 2011. “Excerpt from Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology ” Mythic Imagination 1; 1–6. http://mythicimagination.org/Magazine/Mii_Issue01/pdf/MII_ Issue1_2011_BecomingAnimal.pdf.
Berg, Peter. 1978. Reinhabiting A Separate Country: A Bioregional Anthology of Northern California. San Francisco: Planet Drum.
Berg, Peter. 2009. Envisioning Sustainability. San Francisco: Subculture Books.
Griffin, Donald. 2009. “Windows on nonhuman minds.” In Process Approaches to Consciousness in Psychology, Neuroscience, and Philosophy of Mind, edited by Michel Weber and Anderson Weekes, 219–231. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Kroeber, A.L. 1939. Cultural and Natural Areas of Native North America. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Nash, Roderick. 1967. Wilderness and the American Mind. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Snyder, Gary. 1976b. New York Times Magazine. July 4.
Snyder, Gary. 1976c. The Orchard. Vol. 1. No. 1.
Snyder, Gary. 1977. East West. Vol. 7. No. 7 (July).
Stegner, Wallace. 2007. “The Sound of Mountain Water/To: David Pesonen, December 3, 1960.” In: (Shoemaker and Hoard (Ed.). The Selected Letters of Wallace Stegner. 352–357.
Wirth, Jason. 2017. Mountains, Rivers, and the Great Earth: Reading Gary Snyder and Dōgen in an Age of Ecological Crisis. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
2
Continental philosophy beyond “the” continent
Brian Treanor
The AmeriCAn sCholAr
Why has America not expressed itself philosophically?
In 1837 Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered his famous oration, “The American Scholar,” to the Phi Beta Kappa Society in Cambridge, MA. The context of the address was one in which a new nation was still finding its bearings. In this moment of relative historical calm, Emerson reflected on the state of American independence, and found that while great strides had been made in political and economic independence, the same could not be said in cultural and intellectual spheres. America still looked East, to Europe, in matters cultural and intellectual; her innovations and inventions, such as they were, tended toward utilitarian and pragmatic concerns. But Emerson looked forward to the day when “the sluggard intellect of this continent will look from under its iron lids, and fill the postponed expectation of the world with something better than the exertions of mechanical skill” (Emerson 1983, 53). When, he wondered, would his fellow citizens express their philosophical, literary, and artistic life in a distinctively American idiom? By the time of the Phi Beta Kappa address, our political independence had been secured; our cultural and philosophical independence, Emerson thought, was still to be achieved. We had our Washington, our Jefferson, our Franklin1; it was time to give birth to our Homer, our Dante, our Shakespeare 2 Thus, he called for a philosophical and cultural revolution to fulfill the promise of our political revolution: “Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands,” he predicted, “draws to a close” (ibid.).
Walt Whitman is often cited as the first definitive response to Emerson’s call for a uniquely American voice; and, since Emerson’s time, the United States has indeed achieved distinctive greatness in poetry (not only Whitman, but Frost, Dickenson, Angelou, Snyder), literature (Melville, Steinbeck, Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Stegner, Maclean, Robinson), art (Stuart, Homer, Bierstadt, Sargent, Whistler, O’Keefe, Collins), music (American folk, jazz, R&B), and many other forms of cultural expression.3
But what of philosophy? “Why has America never expressed itself philosophically?” (Cavell 1992, 33).
The question, which jumps from the pages of Stanley Cavell’s celebrated Senses of Walden , is ultimately an ironic one, as Cavell believes that America has expressed itself in distinctive philosophies, and identifies transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau as two such thinkers. The problem is that Emerson and Thoreau—and, I would add, many other distinctively American thinkers are not readily identifiable as philosophers in the context of the contemporary academy, which recognizes and certifies as “philosophical” an astonishingly narrow set of topics and methodologies. Dominated more than ever by the demand to express itself in terms that are “correct, scientific, abstract, hygienically pallid,” and designed to produce a kind of “allpurpose solvent” for solving an increasingly narrow set of problems, contemporary academic philosophy excludes, quite artificially, a range of philosophical themes, questions, and modes of expression.4 Transcendentalism seems to Cavell and others to be a strong candidate for distinctively American philosophy; but it is not generally taught or taken seriously in modern departments of philosophy.
Pragmatism often offered as an example of homegrown American philosophy fares slightly better than transcendentalism in this regard, insofar as it is acknowledged, though not often embraced, in contemporary departments of philosophy. And something about pragmatism does seem distinctively American. We see something like the American faith in progress in Dewey’s optimistic meliorism, and Peirce’s belief that “the opinion that is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate is what we mean by the truth and the object represented by this is real” (Peirce 1998, 155). In James’ description of the “cashvalue” of ideas what difference they make in the world we hear an echo of America’s valuation of productivity, wealth, and results. But pragmatism while undeniably a living tradition (cf. Rorty, West, et al.) is sidelined in the academy and remains marginal as a philosophical position in larger cultural debates. And, in any case, naming it “the American philosophical expression” toonarrowly circumscribes what counts as a distinctively “American” perspective. American thinking is not univocal in its faith in progress, its emphasis on results, and so on. At best, pragmatism is, like transcendentalism, one distinctively American philosophy, or a philosophy distinctive of some American traits.
What of analytic philosophy, which is the dominant form of philosophy in North American academic departments? There are undoubtedly important American analytic philosophers; but it would be difficult to characterize these thinkers as distinctively American. Because analytic philosophy is pursued in a manner that tends to focus on abstract and disinterested rationality, it is prone to downplay the significance of history, language, culture, and place in a word: context. It matters little whether analytic philosophy is pursued in Oxford or Oklahoma, as disinterested reason functions similarly in either locale. Therefore, there is in principle nothing distinctively American about analytic philosophy pursued in America.
“Continental” philosophy?
What, then, about continental philosophy in America? In what way might it represent a distinctively American contribution to philosophy?
The question is complicated, no doubt, by the ambiguity of the term “continental philosophy,” which has become a catchall for a variety of fields, including German Idealism; Romanticism; the critique of metaphysics in Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud; existentialism; later Hegelianisms and Marxisms; phenomenology; hermeneutics; structuralism; poststructuralism; and postmodernism (Critchley 2001, 12–31). To which we should add a variety of contemporary areas influenced by the aforementioned fields (the influence of hermeneutics and post-structuralism is particularly significant), and which are often lumped in as part of “continental philosophy,” at least as that term is used critically: various contemporary feminisms, philosophies of race, sex, and gender, posthumanism, and similar fields. In general, tight definitions for what “counts” as continental philosophy are hard to come by. We are forced to apply Justice Stewart’s test for obscenity: “I shall not attempt to further define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description, and perhaps could never succeed in intelligibly doing so But I know it when I see it….”5
Nevertheless, in terms of common use, “continental philosophy” tends to be a label that coalesces around existentialism, phenomenology, hermeneutics, deconstruction, and similar traditions. Note that these sub-fields, the traditions that we identify most closely with continental philosophy, are those that emphasize the contextembeddedness of every knower: the idea that we can only see the truth from a certain perspective, and that every perspective reveals some things and conceals others. This implies that, from the perspective of continental philosophy, there certainly ought to be something distinctive about American philosophical expression. And that is why continental philosophy is, paradoxically, the tool for philosophizing beyond continental philosophy. For sake of clarity, let “Continental1” refer to the philosophical methods, techniques, forms, and styles that we’ve mentioned above: existentialism, phenomenology, hermeneutics, and so forth; and let “Continental2” refer to the content of Continental1 insofar as it is expressed in the “big names” of Francophone and Germanophone philosophy, and insofar as its content reflects particular contingencies associated with the languages, cultures, traditions, and history of Western Europe. The point is that Continental1 philosophy suggests that we should not be tied so closely to Continental2 philosophy. If, for example, the phenomenological method were, so to speak, emptied of its content and transplanted to Bhutan or Sri Lanka, the resulting questions, answers, themes, and foci would differ, perhaps radically, from those with which we are accustomed. What would it mean to do “continental” philosophy in a manner that was less constrained by fidelity to continental Europe? One more attentive to the very historical and cultural situatedness that is so often cited as a strength of continental philosophy visàvis analytic philosophy? And, more daringly, what would it mean to be attentive not only to the ways in which temporal,
linguistic, and cultural differences shape our hermeneutic horizons, but also spatial, carnal, and topographic differences?6
Growing up
Before considering what this might look like, a few points of clarification are in order.
First, this proposal has nothing to do with a blustering nativism. Obviously, the point is not to advocate for the wholesale superiority of North American thinkers. Nor to suggest a blind equivalence between any given nonEuropean thinker and the canonical figures of continental philosophy. At least some North American philosophers, authors, and poets are ignored for the simple reason that their work is poor, and others are relatively unknown because their work is merely good. And, while it is true that continental philosophy has a Eurocentric air about it, it is equally true that figures like Husserl, Heidegger, Gadamer, and Marion are read so carefully because their work is so rich and insightful.
Given the history of the United States, there is no escaping the intellectual legacy of Europe. There are no philosophical, artistic, or cultural blank slates. And whatever our individual histories and intellectual itineraries, those of us who are “continental” philosophers have been formed to an even greater degree by European traditions There is no escaping Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Locke, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, and the rest We cannot unread Homer, Dante, Milton, Proust, Dostoevsky, Joyce We cannot unsee Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Cezanne, Monet, Bernini, and Michelangelo. Those of us who have lived or studied in Europe cannot erase it from our personal history— Hemingway’s “moveable feast” and all.
And, in fact, there is no reason to do so. Emerson says, or hopes that, “our long apprenticeship” to Europe has come to an end. Of course, this implies that there has been a genuine apprenticeship. It is important to read—and to read well—the great figures of the Western European tradition. As Thoreau reminds us, “it is difficult to begin without borrowing”; and this is as true in philosophy as it is in cabinbuilding (Thoreau 2004, 40–41). But apprenticeship is not serfdom; the point of an apprenticeship is to master an art and then to make one’s own contribution. The goal is to improve what you have borrowed—for Thoreau, an axe, for us, a philosophical legacy—and to return it “sharper than [we] received it” (ibid., 40). And so, with respect to “continental” philosophy and continental Europe, what is called for is not an end to engagement, or dialogue, or even careful scholarship on European figures, but rather an end to dependence, mimicry, and hagiography.
new thinking
If we are going to follow Emerson’s exhortation toward a greater independence that will allow us to articulate distinctively American philosophies, he suggests several “influences” that might guide us in our efforts: the past, action, and nature.7
The past
As I’ve indicated, a “break with tradition” is never complete. And Emerson explicitly exhorts us to engage “the past,” the very seat of that tradition from which he hopes to declare a kind of independence. The “mind of the Past” is communicated to us in many forms: “literature,” “art,” and “institutions,” as well as, one presumes, all forms of material culture, from architecture to clothing and cuisine (Emerson 1983, 56). In the context of our concern here, the past would be the canon of “Continental2” philosophy.
Emerson maintains that books are the best and noblest means of transmitting truth, insight, and innovation to posterity. The scholar takes the world and life, and in them or through them finds some element of truth, which she records in a book (ibid.). But, in a very hermeneutic moment, Emerson maintains that no such distillation of truth is ever perfect, and no transmission without loss or error. Because every scholar is historically situated and because no scholar can ever fully transcend her time, each book, each expression of truth, remains influenced by what is “conventional” and “perishable”—that is, by the contingencies of the hermeneutic perspective and prejudices of the author, themselves shaped by her historical and cultural embeddedness. When we view books as pure distillations of truth—or when we view canonical figures of philosophy as dogmatically authoritative—they become poisonous: “the guide becomes a tyrant” (ibid., 57). Therefore, Emerson insists, “each age [and, here I will add, each place] must write its own books” (ibid., 56).
This is familiar territory for hermeneutics: no book, narrative, or philosophy offers us a complete or unambiguous account of the truth. “Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst,” writes Emerson. And a problem arises when
Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views, which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon, have given [to whom we might add Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida], forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries, when they wrote those books.
(Ibid., 57)
Great books, read well, can enlighten us and ennoble us. But the written word is not for imitation, veneration, or fetishization; it is for inspiration “The past” is an indispensable tool and ally in the quest for truth and wisdom; but for Emerson the past never trumps nature and action, never trumps the lived experience of the scholar, or the revelations of particular places in particular times.
Books are for the scholar’s idle times. When he can read God directly, the hour is too precious to be wasted in other men’s transcripts of their readings. But when intervals of darkness come, as they must, —when the sun is hid, and the stars withdraw their shining, —we repair to the lamps which were kindled by their ray, to guide our steps to the East again, where the dawn is.
(Ibid., 58)
Books will, and should, remain a rich source of knowledge, wisdom, and inspiration. But our philosophies should be more than mere exegesis or the history of ideas. The point of life is to live, not to read; and truth always requires an element of personal engagement.
Action
It is for this reason that Emerson also insists that action is necessary in moving past convention and expressing new truths. Although for the scholar action is subordinate to reflection, the scholar must be active in the world. Without action, a thought cannot “ripen into truth.” Here Emerson embraces something of the same spirit that fires Peirce and James, the idea that what really matters is how ideas affect the world:
There can be no difference anywhere that doesn’t make a difference elsewhere – no difference in abstract truth that doesn’t express itself in a difference in concrete fact and in conduct consequent upon that fact, imposed on somebody, somehow, somewhere and somewhen (James 1995, 20)
Thus, for Emerson, an action is the “perfection and publication” of thought (Emerson 1983, 30).
Thinking and action are to some degree coconstitutive; and the connection between thought and action means that actions are, in this particular sense, distinctive human capacities. “Actions” without thought are not, strictly speaking, actions at all. A mere gesture or operation might be brought about unreflectively, or instinctively, or as the result of some appetite; but an action in the proper sense flows from thought. Conversely, thoughts without actions are in some sense incomplete. Thinking, on its own, is at best a merely “partial” act; action completes thought, makes it real, actual. Not only does thinking manifest itself in life, it is based on life. To think, the scholar must have something on which to reflect. Life provides the raw material from which thought draws nourishment: “Only so much do I know, as I have lived,” writes Emerson (Emerson 1983, 60). So life provides both the raw material for thought and the arena in which thought can become manifest, which helps to explain the strong experiential, observational, and empirical bent of many of those influenced by Emerson (e.g., Thoreau, Muir).
Nature
Finally and perhaps most distinctive of the approach taken by Emerson and Thoreau, as well as their heirs in the American West we must remain attentive to nature. “Nature” should be taken in the full transcendentalist sense of the term. To be sure, it includes the forests, lakes, rivers, and mountains that people often associate with nature; but Emerson’s Nature is more comprehensive than the study of
Philosophy beyond “the” continent 17 biota. For him, Nature is the entire “web of God” (ibid., 56). In Nature we find both the transcendent (that which surpasses us) and the transcendental (that which provides the conditions of possibility for anything at all). Thus, transcendentalists insist that the laws of nature and the inner law of the human mind reflect and correspond to each other (the world is “a shadow of my soul,” “another me”) Here, as in Kant and in Kohák, the moral law within is a reflection of the starry sky above; the “law of nature” and the “law of spirit” mirror each other, reveal the same reality, speak the same truth (Kant 2015; Kohák 1984).
On this view, engaging nature does not require a trip to a national park or other area of preserved sublimity; but it does require careful attention to the particularity of place. Emerson finds nature in the local, the particular, and the ordinary: “I ask not for the great, the remote, the romantic; what is doing in Italy or Arabia; what is Greek art, or Provençal minstrelsy; I embrace the common, I explore and sit at the feet of the familiar, the low …” (Emerson 1983, 68–9).8 This focus is possible precisely because the grandeur of nature encompasses the spectacular and the common: “one design unites and animates the farthest pinnacle and the lowest trench” (ibid., 69). It is Thoreau who most strikingly develops Emerson’s transcendental view of nature in relation to particular, concrete places. Whether in Concord town or at Walden Pond or on the summit of Mount Ktaadn, Thoreau recognizes that particular places speak to us in particular ways, and so contribute to the shaping of our world.
What would it look like to pursue philosophy with some of the insights drawn from Continental1 without feeling constrained by the need to do so within the cultural and historical framework of Continental2? What would it look like for America to express itself philosophically?
If Emerson is right, a distinctively American contribution to philosophy—and this would apply, equally, to distinctive contributions from any other culture or place—would start from the local and the particular, from our experience, in the idiom of our poets and artists, attentive to the phenomena and the questions that arise from our place and our time. But that short answer proves rather complicated in the case of “America.” The United States is, famously, an immigrant country, the diversity of which complicates any characterization of “distinctively American” expression, taken in the singular. Any version of an American narrative—including the one we are about to consider—is, or ought to be, haunted by the voices of its others: for example, the First Nations of North America, which suffered genocide at the hands of colonial settlers, or the slaves brought to this continent against their will. There can be no easy synthesis of a singular “American experience,” and no totalizing “American expression” that sums up that experience in a neat unit. At best we are able to identify overlapping distinctively American expressions, in the plural; and we must recognize, hermeneutically, that all such expressions are partial and incomplete, and remain haunted by things that are unsaid, voices that are not included. Thus, in
Brian Treanor
what follows, I explore just one way in which the resources of continental philosophy—phenomenological description, hermeneutical interpretation—can help to shed light on a distinctively American experience of place: “the West.”
PhilosoPhy beGins in WAnder
D’où parlez-vouz?
Let’s begin, ironically enough, with a French question. Richard Kearney tells us that Paul Ricoeur would begin his graduate seminars by asking each student d’où parlez-vouz, that is, “from where do you speak?” (Kearney 2010, ix). The “where” with which Ricoeur was concerned included national identity, religious tradition, linguistic home, and the other sorts of cultural identifiers to which Kearney refers in his own response to the question; however, here I want to emphasize that the “where” from which we speak, the where that shapes our respective hermeneutic horizons, is also material, topographic, and placial. What, then, does it mean to speak “from the West”?
The West to which I refer is not first and foremost the West of European culture in the industrialized global north the West of Plato and Descartes, of Abraham and Jesus, of capitalism and democracy though this is also undoubtedly true in its way By “the West” I mean the West of the Montana bigsky country, the West of the Four Corners, the West of the central California coast and Pacific Ocean, the West of the Sierra Nevada. This is the West evoked by Wallace Stegner’s famous phrase “the geography of hope” (Stegner 2007, 352–7).
To know the West—or indeed, any other place—one must have a sense of “the lay of the land,” and this in a variety of senses. First, the lay evokes the physical reality of the land in its folded, variegated complexity, which constitutes its particular “directionality”: the strata of its geology, the talweg of its watershed, the prevailing winds which sweep it, the cycle of nutrients (e.g., salmon runs) that sustain it. Second, the lay of the land includes the lay—the lyric or narrative poem—of its history: the stories of its specific locales, of the flora and fauna that inhabit it, of the human cultures that people it, and of the interactions of these various communities. Finally, lay brings to mind the directionality and twists of rope strands, and so reminds us that topographic and narrative lays are part of one unified placescape. Reality is never composed of a single, unambiguous thread; it is always a complex, mixed, woven tapestry. And understanding it requires a nuanced hermeneutic sensitivity.
Distinctive “American,” “Western,” or “Pacific” contributions to “continental” philosophy would have to consider all this and more. In what follows I offer just one example, drawing on American figures who engage the idea and reality of the West, of the ways in which narratives or philosophies interact with topography to shape places (Nash 1967). My wager here, all too brief, is that reflecting on the experience of “the West” can give us some hermeneutical insight into dwelling more thoughtfully on the Earth.
Another random document with no related content on Scribd:
The Project Gutenberg eBook of Captains of adventure
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Title: Captains of adventure
Author: Roger Pocock
Release date: November 20, 2023 [eBook #72176]
Language: English
Original publication: United States: Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1913
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CAPTAINS OF ADVENTURE ***
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CAPTAINS OF ADVENTURE
CAPTAINS OF ADVENTURE
By
R O G E R P O C O C K
Author of A Man in the Open, etc
ILLUSTRATED WITH PORTRAITS
INDIANAPOLIS
THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY PUBLISHERS
C 1913
T B -M C
PRESS OF BRAUNWORTH & CO. BOOKBINDERS AND PRINTERS BROOKLYN, N. Y
ADVENTURERS
What is an adventurer? One who has adventures? Surely not. A person charged by a wild rhinoceros is having an adventure, yet however wild the animal, however wild the person, he is only somebody wishing himself at home, not an adventurer In dictionaries the adventurer is “one who seeks his fortune in new and hazardous or perilous enterprises.” But outside the pages of a dictionary, the man who seeks his fortune, who really cares for money and his own advantage, sits at some desk deriding the fools who take thousand-to-one chances in a gamble with Death. Did the patron saint of adventurers, Saint Paul, or did Saint Louis, or Francis Drake, or Livingstone, or Gordon seek their own fortune, think you? In real life the adventurer is one who seeks, not his fortune, but the new and hazardous or perilous enterprises. There are holy saints and scoundrels among adventurers, but all the thousands I have known were fools of the romantic temperament, dealing with life as an artist does with canvas, to color it with fierce and vivid feeling, deep shade and radiant light, exulting in the passions of the sea, the terrors of the wilderness, the splendors of sunshine and starlight, the exaltation of battle, fire and hurricane.
All nations have bred great adventurers, but the living nation remembers them sending the boys out into the world enriched with memories of valor, a heritage of national honor, an inspiration to ennoble their manhood. That is the only real wealth of men and of peoples. For such purposes this book is written, but so vast is the theme that this volume would outgrow all reasonable size unless we set some limit. A man in the regular standing forces of his native state is not dubbed adventurer. When, for example, the immortal heroes Tromp and De Ruyter fought the British generals at sea, Blake and Monk, they were no more adventurers than are the police constables who guard our homes at night. Were Clive and Warren
Hastings adventurers? They would turn in their graves if one brought such a charge. The true type of adventurer is the lone-hand pioneer.
It is not from any bias of mine that the worthies of Switzerland, the Teutonic empires and Russia, are shut out of this poor little record; but because it seems that the lone-hand oversea and overland pioneers come mainly from nations directly fronting upon the open sea. As far as I am prejudiced, it is in favor of old Norway, whose heroes have entranced me with the sheer glory of their perfect manhood. For the rest, our own English-speaking folk are easier for us to understand than any foreigners.
As to the manner of record, we must follow the stream of history if we would shoot the rapids of adventure.
Now as to the point of view: My literary pretensions are small and humble, but I claim the right of an adventurer, trained in thirtythree trades of the Lost Region, to absolute freedom of speech concerning frontiersmen. Let history bow down before Columbus, but as a foremast seaman, I hold he was not fit to command a ship. Let history ignore Captain John Smith, but as an ex-trooper, I worship him for a leader, the paladin of Anglo-Saxon chivalry, and very father of the United States. Literature admires the well advertised Stanley, but we frontiersmen prefer Commander Cameron, who walked across Africa without blaming others for his own defects, or losing his temper, or shedding needless blood. All the celebrities may go hang, but when we take the field, send us leaders like Patrick Forbes, who conquered Rhodesia without journalists in attendance to write puffs, or any actual deluge of public gratitude.
The historic and literary points of view are widely different from that of our dusty rankers.
When the Dutchmen were fighting Spain, they invented and built the first iron-clad war-ship—all honor to their seamanship for that! But when the winter came, a Spanish cavalry charge across the ice captured the ship—and there was fine adventure. Both sides had practical men.
In the same wars, a Spanish man-at-arms in the plundering of a city, took more gold than he could carry, so he had the metal beaten into a suit of armor, and painted black to hide its worth from thieves. From a literary standpoint, that was all very fine, but from our adventurer point of view, the man was a fool for wearing armor useless for defense, and so heavy he could not run. He was killed, and a good riddance.
We value most the man who knows his business, and the more practical the adventurer, the fewer his misadventures.
From that point of view, the book is attempted with all earnestness; and if the results appear bizarre, let the shocked reader turn to better written works, mention of which is made in notes.
As to the truthfulness of adventurers, perhaps we are all more or less truthful when we try to be good. But there are two kinds of adventurers who need sharply watching. The worst is F. C. Selous. Once he lectured to amuse the children at the Foundling Hospital, and when he came to single combats with a wounded lion, or a mad elephant he was forced to mention himself as one of the persons present. He blushed. Then he would race through a hair-lifting story of the fight, and in an apologetic manner, give all the praise to the elephant, or the lion lately deceased. Surely nobody could suspect him of any merit, yet all the children saw through him for a transparent fraud, and even we grown-ups felt the better for meeting so grand a gentleman.
The other sort of liar, who does not understate his own merits, is Jim Beckwourth. He told his story, quite truthfully at first, to a journalist who took it down in shorthand. But when the man gaped with admiration at the merest trifles, Jim was on his mettle, testing this person’s powers of belief, which were absolutely boundless. After that, of course he hit the high places, striking the facts about once in twenty-four hours, and as one reads the book, one can catch the thud whenever he hit the truth.
Let no man dream that adventure is a thing of the past or that adventurers are growing scarce. The only difficulty of this book was to squeeze the past in order to make-space for living men worthy as
their forerunners. The list is enormous, and I only dared to estimate such men of our own time as I have known by correspondence, acquaintance, friendship, enmity, or by serving under their leadership. Here again, I could only speak safely in cases where there were records, as with Lord Strathcona, Colonel S. B. Steele, Colonel Cody, Major Forbes, Captain Grogan, Captain Amundsen, Captain Hansen, Mr. John Boyes. Left out, among Americans, are M. H. de Hora who, in a Chilian campaign, with only a boat’s crew, cut out the battle-ship Huascar, plundered a British tramp of her bunker coal, and fought H. M. S. Shah on the high seas. Another American, Doctor Bodkin, was for some years prime minister of Makualand, an Arab sultanate. Among British adventurers, Caid Belton, is one of four successive British commanders-in-chief to the Moorish sultans. Colonel Tompkins was commander-in-chief to Johore. C. W. Mason was captured with a shipload of arms in an attempt to make himself emperor of China. Charles Rose rode from Mazatlan in Mexico to Corrientes in Paraguay. A. W. V. Crawley, a chief of scouts to Lord Roberts in South Africa, rode out of action after being seven times shot, and he rides now a little askew in consequence.
To sum up, if one circle of acquaintances includes such a group to-day, the adventurer is not quite an extinct species, and indeed, we seem not at the end, but at the beginning of the greatest of all adventurous eras, that of the adventurers of the air.
CAPTAINS OF ADVENTURE
CAPTAINS OF ADVENTURE
A. D. 984
THE VIKINGS IN AMERICA
A REVERENT study of heroes in novels, also in operas and melodramas, where one may see them for half-a-crown, has convinced me that they must be very trying to live with. They get on people’s nerves. Hence the villains.
Now Harold of the Fair Hair was a hero, and he fell in love with a lady, but she would not marry him unless he made himself king of Norway. So he made himself the first king of all Norway, and she had to marry him, which served her right.
But then there were the gentlemen of his majesty’s opposition who did not want him to be king, who felt that there was altogether too much Harold in Norway. They left, and went to Iceland to get away from the hero.
Iceland had been shown on the map since the year A. D. 115, and when the vikings arrived they found a colony of Irish monks who said they had come there “because they desired for the love of God to be in a state of pilgrimage, they recked not where.”
Perhaps the vikings sent them to Heaven. Later on it seems they found a little Irish settlement on the New England coast, and heard of great Ireland, a colony farther south. That is the first rumor we have about America.
The Norsemen settled down, pagans in Christian Iceland. They earned a living with fish and cattle, and made an honest penny raiding the Mediterranean. They had internecine sports of their own, and on the whole were reasonably happy. Then in course of trade Captain Gunbjorn sighted an unknown land two hundred fifty miles to the westward. That made the Icelanders restless, for there is always something which calls to Northern blood from beyond the sea line.
Most restless of all was Red Eric, hysterical because he hated a humdrum respectable life; indeed, he committed so many murders that he had to be deported as a public nuisance. He set off exultant to find Gunbjorn’s unknown land. So any natural born adventurer commits little errors of taste unless he can find an outlet. It is too much dog-chain that makes biting dogs.
When he found the new land it was all green, with swaths of wild flowers. I know that land and its bright lowlands, backed by sheer walled mountains, with splintered pinnacles robed in the splendors of the inland ice. The trees were knee high, no crops could possibly ripen, but Eric was so pleased that after two winters he went back to Iceland advertising for settlers to fill his colony. Greenland he called the place, because “Many will go there if the place has a fair name.” They did, and when the sea had wiped out most of the twenty-five ships, the surviving colonists found Greenland commodious and residential as the heart could wish.
They were not long gone from the port of Skalholt when young Captain Bjarni came in from the sea and asked for his father. But father Heljulf had sailed for Greenland, so the youngster set off in pursuit although nobody knew the way. Bjarni always spent alternate yuletides at his father’s hearth, so if the hearth-stone moved he had to find it somehow. These vikings are so human and natural that one can follow their thought quite easily. When, for instance, Bjarni, instead of coming to Greenland, found a low, well timbered country,
he knew he had made a mistake, so it was no use landing. Rediscovering the American mainland was a habit which persisted until the time of Columbus, and not a feat to make a fuss about. A northerly course and a pure stroke of luck carried Bjarni to Greenland and his father’s house.
Because they had no timber, and driftwood was scarce, the colonists were much excited when they heard of forests, and cursed Bjarni for not having landed. Anyway, here was a fine excuse for an expedition in search of fire-wood, so Leif, the son of Red Eric, bought Bjarni’s ship. Being tall and of commanding presence he rallied thirty-five of a crew, and, being young, expected that his father would take command. Eric indeed rode a distance of four hundred feet from his house against the rock, which was called Brattelid, to the shore of the inlet, but his pony fell and threw him, such a bad omen that he rode home again. Leif Ericsen, therefore, with winged helmet and glittering breastplate, mounted the steerboard, laid hands on the steer-oar and bade his men shove off. The colonists on rugged dun ponies lined the shore to cheer the adventurers, and the ladies waved their kerchiefs from the rock behind the house while the dragon ship, shield-lines ablaze in the sun, oars thrashing blue water, and painted square-sail set, took the fair wind on that famous voyage. She discovered Stoneland, which is the NewfoundlandLabrador coast, and Woodland, which is Nova Scotia. Then came the Further Strand, the long and wonderful beaches of Massachusetts, and beyond was Narragansett Bay, where they built winter houses, pastured their cattle, and found wild grapes. It was here that Tyrkir, the little old German man slave who was Leif’s nurse, made wine and got most gorgeously drunk. On the homeward passage Leif brought timber and raisins to Greenland.
Leif went away to Norway, where as a guest of King Olaf he became a Christian, and in his absence his brother Thorwald made the second voyage to what is now New England. After wintering at Leif’s house in Wineland the Good he went southward and, somewhere near the site of New York, met with savages. Nine of them lay under three upturned canoes on the beach, so the vikings killed eight just for fun, but were fools, letting the ninth escape to
raise the tribes for war So there was a battle, and Thorwald the Helpless was shot in the eye, which served him right. One of his brothers came afterward in search of the body, which may have been that same seated skeleton in bronze armor that nine hundred years later was dug up at Cross Point.
Two or three years after Thorwald’s death his widow married a visitor from Norway, Eric’s guest at Brattelid, the rich Thorfin Karlsefne. He also set out for Vinland, taking Mrs. Karlsefne and four other women, also a Scottish lad and lass (very savage) and an Irishman, besides a crew of sixty and some cattle. They built a fort where the natives came trading skins for strips of red cloth, or to fight a battle, or to be chased, shrieking with fright, by Thorfin’s big red bull. There Mrs. Karlsefne gave birth to Snorri the Firstborn, whose sons Thorlak and Brand became priests and were the first two bishops of Greenland.
After Karlsefne’s return to Greenland the next voyage was made by one of Eric’s daughters; and presently Leif the Fortunate came home from Norway to his father’s house, bringing a priest. Then Mrs. Leif built a church at Brattelid, old Eric the Red being thoroughly disgusted, and Greenland and Vinland became Christian, but Eric never.
As long as Norway traded with her American colonies Vinland exported timber and dried fruit, while Greenland sent sheepskins, ox hides, sealskins, walrus-skin rope and tusks to Iceland and Europe. In return they got iron and settlers. But then began a series of disasters, for when the Black Death swept Europe, the colonies were left to their fate, and some of the colonists in despair renounced their faith to turn Eskimo. In 1349 the last timber ship from Nova Scotia was lately returned to Europe when the plague struck Norway. There is a gap of fifty-two years in the record, and all we know of Greenland is that the western villages were destroyed by Eskimos who killed eighteen Norsemen and carried off the boys. Then the plague destroyed two-thirds of the people in Iceland, a bad winter killed nine tenths of all their cattle, and what remained of the hapless colony was ravaged by English fishermen. No longer could Iceland send any help to Greenland, but still there was intercourse because
