An American Philosophical Contribution

Pragmatism, America's foremost theoretical distillation to date, has never quite enjoyed hegemonic status within the Western academic community. Even within the cloistered confines of North Atlantic learning centers -- specifically among the professional philosophic elite that people these institutions -- pragmatism's influence has been somewhat marginalized. Its discursive significance and critical methodology have been truncated by the more glamorous and relatively consolidated disciplines and personalities of the 20th century.

At the end of this decade, pragmatism, with its tacit themes of instrumentality, provocation, purposeful human agency, and power, celebrates its centennial year. Principally the offering of C.S. Pierce, pragmatism matured in the midst of transformation and addendum, from Pierce's rejection of Cartesian knowledge systems and the subsequent embrace of scientific experimentalism to William James' construction that truth is defined in direct context to its explicitly helpful functions, and to John Dewey's preoccupation with concepts of individuality, community, and the social application of critical intelligence.

In recent years pragmatism has gained in popularity. C.G. Prado's work on Richard Rorty and John Murphy's evaluation of the Pierce, Dewey, and James triumvirate have attracted more than a little attention. But one of the most ambitious treatments of pragmatism in recent years is undoubtedly The American Evasion of Philosophy by Cornel West. In this genealogy West attempts to give a full vision of pragmatism's roots, transformations, and integrative possibilities.

THE RESULT IS a book that affords an interesting and engaging encounter with an emerging African-American intellectual equipped with protean, multivariant capabilities but somehow unable to use them in all their force and pointed energies. West writes a good book, one which will, no doubt, serve as a conversation piece for years to come.

West represents a "New Jack" intellectual showing; he can do a little of everything. He can rap with the deconstructionist, swing with the literary critics, boogie with the post-modernist, jive and croon with the postliberals, and, of course, rock with the pragmatist. He can even give us a soft-shoe of old- and new-world Marxist theory with almost effortless aplomb!

The problem with the book, however, is that it suffers -- if we can continue with the musical metaphors -- from a rhythmic self-abortive tendency that beats as its perpetual motific. In so many cases throughout Evasion, West advocates compelling theories and propositions only to discard them prematurely. This tendency to leap from one theme to another without fully elaborating on them first is nerve-racking at worst, disconcerting at best.

In Evasion West traverses a great deal of territory in such a short period of time; the book is only 238 pages. This is somewhat remarkable because during his exegesis, West not only attempts to establish Ralph Waldo Emerson as pragmatism's progenitor, but he also seeks to grapple with issues of racism, feminism, liberation theology, Marxism, and academic closure, while also taking on deconstruction, literary, and postmodernist theories.

In the introduction to the book, West says, "I write as one who has to deepen and enrich American pragmatism while bringing trenchant critique to bear on it." This is admirable and entirely within West's abilities. But while he optimistically announces that a "small-scale intellectual renaissance is occurring under the broad banner of pragmatism," West pays little attention to this impending revival.

Evasion can essentially be divided into three major components. The first begins West's attempt to replace the common assumption that pragmatism began with the formulations of C.S. Pierce. West is straightforward and entirely convincing with this argument, proving his intellectual formidability. He contends that Emerson's perspective "enact[ed] an intellectual style of cultural criticism that permits and encourages American pragmatism to swerve from European philosophy."

West believes the "swerve from" Eurocentric epistemologies is fortuitous, marking the critical disengagement through which social, political, and cultural practices are rendered flexible or open to interminable revisability. The point is that Emerson, through sparkling rhetorical fiat, rejected the straitjacketing coordinates of foundationalist and representational knowledge systems. These systems had anchored societies in patterns of rigid immobility.

In the second part of the book, West explains the Piercian, Jamesean, and Deweian variants of pragmatism as they are refracted through the Emersonian looking glass he has constructed. West credits Pierce with consolidating pragmatism and acknowledges James as the "popularizer and proselytizer" of the discipline. And John Dewey is cited for bringing pragmatism to "its highest level of sophisticated articulation."

From this juncture West embarks on a mission to deal with such figures as C. Wright Mill, W.E.B. Du Bois, Reinhold Niebuhr, Lionel Trilling, and Sidney Hook. Here West seeks to establish these 20th-century intellectuals as members in the pragmatist tradition while also addressing their respective pragmatist inadequacies.

The final part of Evasion deals with prophetic pragmatism, a conception that West uses to define the intellectual's interaction and commitment to the "wretched of the earth." Here the author weaves theories of Gramscian political praxis, the Emersonian "theocity" and postmodernist themes of "otherness, marginality, and disruption" into a comforting quilt of a socially engaged American philosophy. This section is brief, but it renders, in raised relief, West's potential as a brilliant synthesizer of complex themes.

But West leaves his readers on a note of ambiguity. In his attempt to place prophetic pragmatism in a real institutional encasement, the author quibbles over where it should be grounded. First West says, in a somewhat confessorial tone, that his pragmatist commitment is grounded in the "Christian tradition." But then he goes on to say that prophetic pragmatism can be realized in several other institutionalized forms such as "trade unions" or "political parties." If this is so, West does not really explain why or how. In other words, what is so unique about prophetic pragmatism that it can be appropriated by secular and theological institutions alike?

Kevin Charles Peterson was a legislative aide for Bruce C. Bolling, Boston city council member, and a staff reporter for the Bay State Banner, Boston's black newspaper living in Roxbury, Massachusetts at the time this review appeared.

The American Evasion of Philosophy. By Cornel West. University of Wisconsin Press, 1989. $16.95 (paper).