Ralph Waldo Emerson is usually credited as being the father of American literary and philosophical thought, laying the foundation for what Dewey and James would later call pragmatism, though it is worth noting that this discourse was in use as early as the signing of the American Constitution.  Pragmatism is generally characterized by an optimistic faith in the potential of the individual, whose perceptions and thoughts give him the power to shape the surrounding world at his whim.  Embraced by luminaries such as Whitman and Thoreau, it was carried through the Civil War by Mark Twain, given new life by Hemingway, rocketed into the 20^th Century by the Beatniks, and on to the space age with William S.  Burroughs in the 1980’s.  Curiously, it has fallen out of favor with American authors since that time, just as the structuralism / post-structuralism debate was coming to a head in Europe.

While studying English literature in college, I was often surprised by the degree to which both my professors and colleagues were content to rely upon the `ecrits of Foucault, Derrida, and Lacan in their analysis and criticism of contemporary American and British literature.  Joyce Carol Oates and Phil Roth, arguably the two most prominent American literary figures at current time, write in a noticeably European fashion, in which the agency of the subject is subjugated by the pressures and expectations of their surrounding societies.  The growing tendency to account for social factors such as race, gender, and class in the construction of character identity in literature points to an emerging social tendency that downplays the importance of egalitarianism in favor of ensuring something akin to the “greater good” of the collective, and is characteristic of a rupture in the almost 150-year continuum of pragmatic thought.

America’s current cultural situation is in some ways startlingly similar to the period of Eurocentric thought that was prevalent in the early days of the nation, from which Emerson’s historic “American Scholar” speech of 1837 marked a departure.  I refer to the period between this time and 1987, when Burroughs published The Western Lands—the last great work of American literature to unapologetically privilege the pragmatic discourse—as the golden age of pragmatism.  The literature produced during this period has been marked by its characteristic optimism and faith in the individual spirit—a celebration of what Emerson called the “divinity in disguise”[1] that lies dormant in each man’s soul.  In his essays, Emerson extoled the virtues of self-reliance and faith in the individual’s creative and joyful qualities, which bestowed upon him the power to transcend the systems of the natural and social worlds at will.

The pragmatism inspired by Emerson’s writing is characterized by many features, chief among which is the idea that practical consequences of individual experience and action are vital components of the discovery of meaning and truth.  This is not explicitly stated in Emerson’s writing, but it is certainly a logical consequence of his transcendental confidence.  In fact, it is possible to trace many of the great intellectual ideas of the 19^th and 20^th Centuries back to the writings of Emerson, from Nietzsche’s Will to Power to the post-structuralist notions of deconstruction and the fluid nature of subjectivity that are dominant in Europe at present, ironically pointing to a logical chain of continuity between the development of the modern American and European modes of intellectual discourse, despite the unwillingness of contemporary intellectuals to recognize or embrace these similarities.

The turning of American cultural and academic critics toward the so-called more modern European intellectual traditions of structuralism and post-structuralism strikes me as paradoxical, considering the many similarities between traditional American thought and European philosophy after modernism.  De Saussure is commonly credited as being the father of modern linguistics for his identification of the arbitrary relationship between the signifier and the signified in his Course in General Linguistics, though Emerson published a similar sentiment in his 1836 essay, “Nature” :

Language is a third use which Nature subserves to man. Nature is the vehicle, and threefold degree.

1. Words are signs of natural facts.

2. Particular natural facts are symbols of particular spiritual facts.

3. Nature is the symbol of spirit.

In this equation, Emerson states that language is located two degrees separate from spiritual fact, which is rarely, if ever, a part of our understanding.  Spiritual facts are not self evident but appear symbolically in nature.  Language, in turn, refers directly to the natural facts of human experience.  This idea is expanded in the 1841 essay “The Over Soul,” in which Emerson explains that “an answer in words is delusive; it is really no answer to the questions you ask.  Do not ask a description of the countries toward which you sail.  The description does not describe them to you, and to-morrow you arrive there, and know them by inhabiting them” (202).  This is structurally similar to Korzybski’s maxim that “the map is not the territory,”[2] although it predates the School of General Semantics by one hundred years.  Emerson can be said to have laid the groundwork for our current understanding of linguistic paradigms, in which words are incomplete vessels of communication, lacking any power of resonance beyond that which is imparted upon them by human agency.

Derrida’s deconstruction, which provided the counterbalance to Lacanian psychoanalysis in the second half of the 20^th Century, also owes homage to Emerson’s early writings.  Derrida based much of his modern writings on post-structuralism around deconstructions of Nietzsche’s work, in which allusions to Emersonian themes and iconography are commonplace.  Of chief importance to post-structuralism in general and deconstruction in particular is the rejection of the notion that the text—or any structured artifact or experience—can exist as a discrete whole, arguing that there are multiple possibilities of interpretation for any situation.  According to J. Hillis Miller, deconstruction is less a dismantling of the structure of a previously unified text, “but a demonstration that it has already dismantled itself. Its apparently-solid ground is no rock, but thin air.”[3] But this groundbreaking 20^th Century revelation would have come as no surprise to Emerson, who as early as 1841 had written that “nothing is so fleeting as form” (History, 11).

However, Emerson was quick to point out that man’s potential for creative expression and self-mastery have not always been celebrated or even apparent.  Writing in his 1841 essay, “Self Reliance,” that “Man is timid and apologetic.  He is no longer upright.  He dares not say ‘I think,’ ‘I am,’ but quotes some saint or sage.  He is ashamed before the blade of grass or the blowing rose” (50), he expanded upon his argument that it is man’s very tendency to insist upon the notion of objective meaning that causes him to humble his own will to discern subjective truth from experience: “Facts encumber them, tyrannize over them, and make the men of routine, the men of sense, in whom a literal obedience to facts has extinguished every spark of that light by which man is truly man” (History, 26).   We can use this passage, among others in his earlier essays, to point to a marked discontinuity between the period leading up to the late 1830’s and the time of Emerson’s most prolific publication.

Historically, the period between the 1830’s and 1980’s was the ideal time for the emergence of the pragmatic philosophy at the center of American discourse, as it coincides with an almost limitless sense of socio-political optimism in the capability of the American people.  Thinking in terms of periodization, the rise of pragmatism coincided with the period of frontier settlement and Manifest Destiny, when expansion fever dominated the popular discourse.  The Industrial Revolution also contributed to an overall sense of optimism in the minds of American citizens, when the presence of automated industry reinforced the faith in man to become master of the natural world.  It is telling then, that the waning days of pragmatism are dominated by a reversal of expectations for future growth.  Threats of a Malthusian population crisis under Nixon appeared to crack the veneer of optimism promised by the vast open spaces of the frontier; neoconservatism encouraged the rise of the police state, in which individual freedoms are increasingly restricted in order to better provide for the safety of the collective; and the Cold War rhetoric of “us and them” forced a more rigorous respect for the prominence of dualism into the forefront of the political arena.  From a historical perspective, it would seem as though pragmatism is most dominant in times of prosperity, the unflappable optimism being tempered by caution and group-consciousness when the future appears uncertain.

The optimistic temperament of pragmatism is something that is manifest in both the content and form of pragmatic discourse.  It is immediately obvious in Emerson’s choice of language, as well as the overall emotional experience of reading his texts.  However, Rutgers historian James Livingston also describes pragmatism as encouraging the projection of a comic frame upon the narrative continuum of history in his book, Pragmatism, Feminism, and Democracy: Rethinking the Politics of American History:

The comic vision permitted by pragmatism . . . demands serious study of the conflict between the world inherited from the immediate past and the world as it would conform to the “social claims” of the foreseeable future; but it does not assume or insist that these worlds merely collide, as if historical circumstances and ethical principles are incommensurable, as if facts and values are antithetical (12).

Livingston’s identification of the comic possibilities encouraged by pragmatism reinforces the association between philosophical and political optimism, but stops short of addressing the age old meta-paradox—the question of whether optimism in the American intellectual tradition was responsible for our “golden age” memories of history during the period in question, or vise versa.  This is because pragmatism is not a philosophy that relies heavily upon dangerous presuppositions, but one that assumes the existence of an immeasurably vast spectrum of interpretation and ontology.  It would seem that the comic frame of pragmatism is based not only toward the recognition of the conflicting nature of binary oppositions, but also in a tacit acceptance of their relativistic significance.

Historically, Americans are painted as being much less affected by paradoxical political decisions prior to the 20^th Century.  The Great Compromise satisfied the desire for both proportional and equal Congressional representation for each state, and was followed by the Three Fifths Compromise that exacerbated the already problematic social situation of slaves, counting them as three fifths of a person in census data that would determine the number of delegates from slave-holding states that would be sent to the House of Representatives.  This apparent sophistry was intensified when the Missouri Compromise forbade the spread of slavery into the unorganized territories just prior to the Civil War.  However, the logical discontinuity evidenced in these decisive policies did not until recently taint our historically high opinion of our nation as a beacon of freedom and equality for all.

Only in the past thirty years or so have we begun to reevaluate the popular perception of American exceptionalism as we are presented with the inconvenient truths of global conflict and climate change.  Such lofty problems seem beyond the capacity of the individual to assuage, casting doubt upon the future of egalitarian freedom removed from the parameters of contending forces from outside systems.  The power of one man to affect positive change when faced with such daunting obstacles is presumed to be less potent than the power of collective action.   The more focused theories of structuralism and post-structuralism are immediately viewed as bearing more relevance to our contemporary political situation, either by organizers bent on steering group-consciousness toward progressive goals, or nihilists content to bewail the inevitable apocalypse as human civilization is consumed by its own vices.

The irony associated with this shift in focus toward the opposed schools of structuralism and post-structuralism is that the assumptions of both are actually encompassed by the pragmatic philosophy.  Emerson and de Saussure both point to a disconnect between language and experience, but while pragmatism leaves open the possibility that a word or phrase could trigger a kind of transcendental resonance within a given individual, structuralism decries the relationship between words and their signified concepts as strictly arbitrary, in apparent denial of Emerson’s more complex interpretation of language bearing witness to facts of nature, which are in turn the “symbol of the spirit.”  The difference between the two points of view is subtle, but worth mentioning, as it is illustrative of the underlying schism between America’s optimistic recollection of its past and its more uncertain predictions about our future.

[2] Alfred Korzybski.  “A Non-Aristotelian System and its Necessity for Rigour in Mathematics and Physics,” Science and Sanity, 1933, p. 747–61

[3] “Stevens’ Rock and Criticism as Cure,” Georgia Review 30 (1976), p. 34.