Paul J. Nagy Pragmatism and American Pietism 1. Cultural vs. Intellectual Ovigins of Pragmatism An encouraging sign that the resurgence of interest in American ptagmatic philosophy is more than a passing intellectual curiosity may be read in the recent appearance of critical and comprehensive histories of pragmatism. Three noteworthy successes are worth mentioning: H. S. ‘Thayer, Meaning and Action: A Critical History of Pragmatism, C. W. Morris, The Pragmatic Movement in American Philosophy, and to a fesser extent Morton White, Sczence and Sentiment in America! The publication of these works indicates that the ideas of Peirce, James, Dewey and Mead are taken with enough seriousness that their origins, development, and meaning must be given an appropriate place within the history of philosophy. It also indicates that the question has been raised about a distinct school or movement of pragmatism along with its legacy for the future development of philosophy. Any attempt, however, at a critical definition and interpretation of ptagmatism as an historical entity must come to grips with the primary question of origins. But it is quite evident that the origins sought by ‘most writers are intellectual and that the histories of pragmatism to date are for the most part intellectual histories. Hardly any effort has been made to seek out cultural origins in the social, political, religious or aesthetic experience of America, A cultural history of pragmatism remains to be written, When it is it will mark a major breakthrough toward a more complete understanding of its meaning as a native American philosophy, and toward a fuller appreciation of the interplay between philosophic thought and cultural experience in America.? Until then a deficiency will continue to exist in this particular area of the history of philosophy. And in the meantime we can no longer take lightly the caution of Whitehead that when considering any kind of intellectual history, the “notion of ‘mere knowledge’ is a high abstraction which we should dismiss from our minds.” Knowledge, he tells us, “is always accompanied with accessories of emotion and purpose.”3 It is,Pragmatism and American Pietism 167 then, the accessories of emotion and purpose residing in the subsoil of American culture to which we must turn in our endeavor to give full account of the history of pragmatism. I suspect that ‘Thayer senses this when he discusses “Pragmatism and American Life.” His intention in this section of the book is to disabuse anyone of the notion that “pragmatism is the characteristic expression of American life, its civilization, and its mind,” when American life is taken in the narrowest sense of a culture rooted in the business ethic of making and spending money. But this intention goes awry in the overstatement that “the origins of American pragmatism are not pri- marily to be looked for in America,"4 because American culture in origin “is a European import — diverse, heterogeneous, and necessarily modi- fied to adapt to rather un-European circumstances and experience.”s When we look behind the obvious fact being stated here, I think we sun hesd-on into an implied fallacy which Constance Rourke labels the imitation concept of culture. This persistent fallacy, first formulated by John Fiske as the “transit of civilization,” is described by her in the following manner. Culture would be achieved by means of “carriers” — artists, writers, musicians were all “cartiers” — both those who went to Europe to study and came back and those who migrated from Europe here.§ It is through a tacit acceptance of this fallacy that Thayer is led to the misguided assertion that ‘The main problem of American philosophical thought . . . is how to bend and exploit its European heritage to the condi- tions of American culture. This is a problem, of course, only insofar as American philosophers are interested in influencing social and political life. His first statement implies that American culture has little or nothing of its own to contribute to philosophy, while the second seems to assume two distinct brands of philosophy, one speculative and the other Prac- tical. These themes are more explicit in his description of the dilemma that proceeds from the problem:168 Paut J. Nacy The dilemma confronting American philosophy is that the mote systematically philosophical it becomes, the less peculiarly ‘American it is; and the more it concerns itself with the idioms, currents, and events peculiar to American life, the less philo- sophical in a technical sense it becomes.” It is apparent that systematic, technical philosophy is something quite different from philosophy which concerns itself with American life. The former is characteristically European in its broad view of philosophy, and the latter peculiarly American in its limited concern with the idioms, currents, and events of American life. Thayer seems not to have grasped one of the fundamental messages of every important American philo- sopher from Edwards to Dewey, namely that philosophy, whether we call it speculative or practical, systematic or idiomatic, must have the most intimate working connection with life or it adds up to naught. Furthermore, we are told that this problem and this dilemma are of passing historical interest only. In the final analysis culture is utterly ierelevant to philosophy. In no ultimate sense is a philosophy typical of a time or a nation, Climate, locale, and national boundaries are utterly irtelevant to philosophic truth. Indeed, these are mere artifices which, insofar as they affect a philosopher's vision and pechaps his language, are distractions and encumbrances that he is best rid of or made impervious to if possible.® Thayer himself is regretably impervious to one of the most pervasive fallacies in all philosophy — the complete disregard and neglect of the importance of context which Dewey roundly condemns as “the greatest single disaster philosophic thinking can incur.”? Unfortunately most histories of pragmatism have fallen victim to this fallacy to some degree, But my purpose here is not to demonstrate this beyond what I have attempted to state in the preceding paragraphs. Rather it is to take one important element of American culture and to suggest its influence on and presence within pragmatism and specifically the philosophy of John Dewey. In this way I shall hope to make a small but persuasive case for the importance of cultural history in the future work of interpreting and evaluating all facets of pragmatism,Pragmatism and American Pietism 169 2. American Pietism: Its Chief Characteristics Any attempt to define pictism presents problems because it is a move- ment or process within Christianity which assumes many different forms of expression. It represents an aspect of the Reformation which desig- nates the moral law, for example the Sermon on the Mount, rather than the institutional church, as the instrument of salvation. Hence, the sect as a gathering of people into a holy community or an exclusive fellowship replaces the church as the structural social unit of seligion.0 Pictism, then, insists upon the primacy of the moral life and, in opposition to the church as an eternal and fixed institution, sees the kingdom of God in the form of the holy community as the dynamic vehicle for the regenera- tion of human life. ‘The origins of American pietism are found in the religious practices of Puritans, Quakers, Baptists, Methodists and other sects. [i empha- sizes, in contrast with its European counterpart, the importance of action and practice whereby the head and the heart, the body and the soul, intellect and will are all united. Both Jonathan Edwards and William James interpret religious experience from a pictistic point of view. Edwards calls Christian practice “the chief of all the signs of grace,” adding that “men's deeds ate better and more faithful interpreters of their minds than their words.”!2 He also steesses the “sense of the heart” as the mode of spiritual perception which involves a most intimate co-operation between the understanding and the will, James’s Varieties of Religious Experience may be read as a pietistic document from several standpoints. For example, he consciously ignotes institutional religion in favor of “the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude” as the subject-matter of his stady,33 thereby focusing attention on the interior life so essential to the pietist. And like Edwards he also places'2 high value on. the active life,4 But American pietism reaches far beyond teligion and constitutes a shaping force in many other aspects of our national life: in our political, social and economic history as well as in our literature, art, architecture and music.19 It becomes evident upon a closer look that many of these secular forms of pietism share a common set of characteristics which, while still defying any, precise definition, allows us to describe pietism as a cultural phenomenon with a certain degree of sharpness, ‘The first trait, I have already suggested, is the high value placed on action, The pietist is essentially an activist who is futuristic in the whole170 Paut J. Nacy orientation of his thinking and in the thrust of his life. The end and goal of life is not to be found in a transcendent order but in the coming Kingdom of this world.!7 Santayana detected a perfectionism connected with this activism when he observed that in America thete is only one way of being saved, a way not peculiar to any single religion but affirmed in a “national faith and morality.” The only way to salvation is through “the gospel of work and the belief in progress.”19 It is a characteristic of this faith that only through action can one create the conditions of one’s own salvation. Moreover, the American pietist exhibits a strident kind of individual- ism. The cteative action taken must be genuinely one’s own. And such action ultimately involves the building up of a one-to-one relationship between the individual and his God. No institution can be allowed to interfere with this relationship. A generally healthy (and sometimes not so healthy) suspicion of all institutions permeates political and social pietism in America. This instinctive mistrust increases propor- tionately to the size, the remoteness and the disinterest of massive bureaucracies from the creative center of action in the individual. With the rise of the technocratic state, we have witnessed a wide range of militant reaction from every segment of the sociopolitical spectrum — from blacks and women and students to those on the left who move into communes and those in the middle who seck some semblance of a simpler life in suburbia — all imbued with the spirit of pietism. ‘Another characteristic is a profound sense of the community as the redeemed form of mankind. While salvation is attained by the indi- vidual, it is nevertheless attained in and through the social order. HL Richard Niebuhr speaks for an. entire tradition of American social thought from Edwards to Royce and Dewey in the following: In the United States . . . the dominant religion is probably the social faith, for which society itself is the great cause to be served, and the source whence men hope to draw whatever significance they have. Democtacy for this religious attitude is not a way of government; it is a way of life and a way of salvation.9 For pietism the kingdom of God, ie, the social democratic order, is ocated inside the temporal and physical world, and so American social history can be tead largely from the point of view of utopian, millenarian,Pragmatism and Ameyvican Pietism 171. and prophetic themes. There is something American as well as pietistic in the idea that a community is a voluntary association, a gathering of people, at the most local and practicably effective level for the purpose ‘of achieving some short-range, immediately realizable goal. We ate a nation of joiners with a pietistic impulse, for we see salvation as attainable not only through the temporal but through the social order as well. Individualist though we be, we are also a people with a collective compulsion to form ourselves into efficient groups working toward specific goals, For it is our abiding faith that meaning is ultimately disclosed through the intentional community. Dewey reflected these thoughts when he wrote: Our faith is ultimately in individuals and their potentialities. - IT mean . . . an individuality that operates in and through voluntary associations. If our outward scene is one of externally imposed organization, behind and beneath there is working the force of liberated individualities, experimenting in their own ways to find and realize their own ends. The testimony of history is that in the end such a force, however scattered and inchoate, ultimately prevails over all set institutionalized forms, however firmly established the latter may be.20 ‘The final and in many ways most distinctive element of American pictism is its moral sense of viewing everything from the perspective of right and wrong, Santayana said that “to be an American is of itself almost a moral condition.”21 Americans automatically think in moral categories and yet it is more important to note that these categories reside in and ate the responsibility of the individual. As the author of action and in Dewey's words the “catrier of creative thought,"2? the individual bears the burden of living in a universe saturated with moral values. In a typically pietistic way it is he and not the church or the state who must form 2 moral conscience that is so basic to a meaningful life. ‘There is abundant evidence of a pictistic morality in many aspects of our national life. Americans for example view politics in moral terms as being inherently dirty and cotrupt, and reformist movements ate almost always moral crusades. Ani yet, as much as they love to listen to theic politicians sail in fine pietistic fashion. against wickedness, they have ironically exhibited a consistent reluctance to surrender or compromise172 Paut J. Nacy individual moral-conscience to any civil authority. The Presidential campaign of 1964 is the clearest demonstration of this in recent times,?3 3. Pietism and Pragmatism I have already suggested that any attempt to write a cultural history of American philosophy cannot successfully ignore the role of pietism in shaping some of its more important and original ideas. This statement holds as much ttuth for the pragmatism of Peirce, James, Dewey, and Mead as it does for the transcendentalism of Emerson or the enlightened Calvinism of Edwards. In any broad assessment of the basic principles of pragmatism and its contribution to the history of philosophy, one must invariably be struck by the pietistic way in which ideas were originally framed by their authors. Foremost among these is a fierce resistance, almost religious in its intensity, to any sort of dualism. In an autobio- graphical sketch Dewey confesses that The sense of divisions and separations that were, I suppose, borne in upon me as a consequence of a heritage of New England culture, divisions by way of isolation of self from the world, of soul from body, of nature from God, brought a painful oppression — or, rather, they were an inward laceration.24 He saw clearly that these divisions and the lacerations they caused con- stituted a serious obstacle to achieving an interior life that would be integral with God and with the natural and social orders. We are accustomed to associate pragmatism with an emphasis upon the primacy of experience and process as opposed to reason and fixity. As a corollary to its rejection of dualism we therefore find an equally decisive anti-rationalism that lashes out against every attempt to differ- entiate reason from experience in a way that would endow the former with an exclusive power by which access is gained to a trans-empitical order of fixed, eternal reality. The pragmatist affirms but a single natural order characterized generally by the becoming aspect of things, and views both permanence and change, reason and experience as func- tions of this world of process. When one gains this view he also grasps the concomitant insight that experience possesses directive powers of its own that convey meaning for mankind. The ultimate faith upon whichPragmatism and American Pietism 173 the pragmatist takes his stand is the thoroughly pietistic faith that these directive powers are there, and that God’s purposes are inchoately present in the immediate order of every man’s experience. Another broad feature of pragmatism can be described by relating it to the humanistic impact of the Copernican Revolution.2s A fundamental uprooting and relocation of man’s place in the cosmos began to occur in the 16th century when Copernicus initiated the epochal transition from a closed world to an infinite universe. But this process did not approach completion until the 20th century when the second phase of this relocation, from a finished to an unfinished world, occurred. And ptagmatism played no minor role in contributing to this change in man’s thinking about his place in the total scheme of things.2° ‘The great question for the pragmatic philosopher is this: how can meaning be derived from a universe essentially incomplete and “still in the making.” in James’ happy phrase? More specifically, what kind of moral and social order can we expect to construct from a perspective wholly within time? Most of us are, perhaps, best acquainted with pragmatism as a theory of truth in which truth is conceived as an adequation of the knower to a future reality largely not given and consequently largely unknown. ‘This is in marked contrast to the rationalist conception of truth as the agree- ment of the knower with an antecedently given and permanent reality, and also to the classical empiricist for whom truth is mostly agreement with an immediately perceived reality, hence restricted to the given present. But the pragmatic theory is incomplete and of little or no consequence when posed only in this way and with, these contrasts. For the questions of truth and of meaning are raised by Peirce, Jarnes and the others in the context of an utterly different view of the cosmos from that of classical rationalism and erapiticism, both of which assumed it to be ready-made and eternally complete save for accidental modifications occusting from time to time. Two ckucial points must be stressed here, The first is that pragmatism is an effort to construct a cosmic theory of truth which would in turn allow it to create new possibilities for the moral and'social life of man within 2 universe which is unfenced, unfinished, and in large measure unpredictable, James makes this point with great emphasis: The alternative between pragmatism and rationalism, in the shape in which we now have it before us, is no longer a174 Paut J. Nacy question in the theory of knowledge, it concerns the structure of the universe itself. On the ptagmatist side we have only one edition of the universe, unfinished, growing in all sorts of places, especially in the places where thinking beings are at work,27 ‘The second point is that truth, when cosmically conceived, is more than an intellectual property of the knower. It is a meoral property of man as a moral creature. In other words truth is far more than intellectual agreement; it is the moral harmony of the whole person with a universe in which he has a vital stake as to questions of value and meaning. Man stands in relation to a processive and ongoing cosmic drama as_ one who is capable of engendering meaning and adding to the overall fund of truth, and by this, creating a universe morally congenial to human needs, Nowhere in the Pragmatism is James mote pietistic than in his identification of truth as a species of good. “Truth is one species of good, and not, as is usually supposed, a category distinct from good, and co-ordinate with it. The true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief, and good, too, for definite, assignable reasons,”28 ‘The general traits of pragmatism — its anti-dualism and its anti- rationalism, the strong commitment to an open and unfinished universe, and most of all the moral conception of truth and meaning — are not only compatible with the principal themes of American pictism; more than that, they represent a philosophical articulation of these themes. I would venture to say that pragmatism as a whole may be appropriately called American philosophical pietism. 4, Dewey and the Pietistic Tradition For the remainder of this essay I shall focus on the work of Dewey, specifically his unique conception of the role of philosophy in life and his ideas about the nature of community. Dewey merits selection over the other pragmatists because the circumstances of his life are more directly connected with those forces in American culture that can be attributed in a substantial way to pietism. Unlike Peirce who was the son of an acclaimed Harvard mathematician or James whose family wealth and standing permitted him a genteel upbringing, Dewey was born in Burlington, Vermont to middle-class parents.Pragmatism and American Pietism 175 His mother “had been won over to the evangelical pietism which had taken hold in many parts of the country, . . . and her deepest concern was the moral and spiritual welfare of her sons.”2° As he grew, the young Dewey rejected the narrowness and excessiveness of his mother's pictism, but he was exposed to a more enlightened version at church and especially at the University of Vermont which affirmed an intelligent approach to the interpretation of Scripture by emphasizing the importance of experience and common sense. This enlightened religious pietism “came to Dewey during some of the most impressionable years of his life, and sank deeply into his mind and conscience where they were to remain for a long time.”30 By the time Dewey had arrived at the University of Michigan early in his philosophical career, there is strong evidence that these influences became a residual part of his intellectual maturity. Consider this opinion he ventured on the subject of religious truth. The evangelist, ignorant though he is, who is in constant contact with the needs, the sins, the desires and the aspirations of actual nature is a better judge of religious truth than the man of science, if a truly speculative life has shut him off from sympathy and living intimacy with the fundamental truths of the common nature of man.3! A brief glance at the entire philosophical career of Dewey, which spans an incredible period of about 70 years, and one cannot help being strudk by the immense living sympathy he had for the common nature’ of man. Such a sympathy is most dramatically illustrated in the fact that his life is essentially characterized by a tireless activism of which his philo- sophical work was a most important function. From the establishment of the Laboratory School and his friendship with Jane Addams at the tarn of the century to his involvement with third party politics and the defense of academic freedom during the New Deal and beyond, his life is a breathtaking record of continuous active dedication to political, social, and educational reform. It took him outside the hemisphere to such places es Japan, China, Turkey, and the U.S.S.R., and it would not be an exaggeration to describe his influence as global. Dewey stands alone in the history of philosophy in his unique effort to validate his ideas by direct involvement in their application to social problems, No thinker, perhaps since Aristotle, has bad such a direct and widespread impact on176 Paut J. Nacy his times, For no thinker felt as strongly or as religiously that questions of ultimate meaning were intimately bound up with the active way in which the conditions of their realization were to be brought forth by human initiative. Dewey's activism, however, was anything but a mindless rush toward action for its own sake, Nor did he seck to present pragmatism as emphasizing the primacy of action taken by itself. On the contrary, far from glorifying action as the sammum bonum, he takes every oppor- tunity to point to its role as “that of an intermediary” within a process “whereby the existent becomes . . . a body of rational tendencies or of habits generalized as much as possible.”3? Action is the mediating agency for intelligence so that intelligence can prevail over a precarious situation and render it secure for human life, especially for human growth. So he insists that pragmatism maintains “that action should be intelligent and reflective, and that thought should occupy a central position in life.”33 It is not at all an exaggeration to suggest that Dewey describes a con- templative side to pragmatism working in closest association with its active side, without which the whole theory of pragmatism would collapse. ‘The presence of inference and reflection “is native and constant” in all experience.3 This leads as one might expect to the question of Dewey's conception of philosophy itself. Just as a pietistic influence may be detected in his notion of a reflective ot contemplative side to pragmatism, so also may a similar influence be discerned in his view of the general role of philosophy. ‘This question was a favorite subject of inquiry, and he turned to it several times in his life to refine his thinking. Essentially he conceives philosophy as having the most intimate work- ing connection with culture. It originates not out of some ethereal intellectual stuff but out of concrete “emotional and social material.”3> Philosophy, “like politics, literature and the plastic arts, is itself a phenomenon of human culture.”“3¢ The artificiality of a great deal of philosophizing results from a fatal misunderstanding that philosophic thinking is as contextual as any other type of thinking, Because it is ordinarily quite removed “from the active urgency of concrete situations,” the philosopher tends to become oblivious to the importance of cultural context in his work. Dewey would not think of philosophy as being an accident of culture but rather as bearing an intrinsic relation to it, one element of culture interacting with all other elements. Its specific functions are that ofPragmatism and Amevican Pietism \77 criticizing, clarifying, and organizing “the influential beliefs that underlie culture.” Ultimately these beliefs involve a set of broad generalizations and ways of interpreting man’s place in the cosmos, and the office of Philosophy is to test their intemal coherence and the consequences to which they lead.3? These thoughts are reiterated in a little known address Dewey pre- sented at the University of Vermont. Philosophy, he told his audience, “is a language in which the deepest social problems and aspirations of a given time and a given people are expressed in intellectual and impersonal tecms.”5® Invariably these problems and aspirations are bound up with the struggle of every nation and every race of people to create a viable definition of the community. The reason why the problem of the relationship between the individual and the universal is one of the oldest philosophical problems is that it is but an abstract and non-contextual way of formulating the problem of defining the community. In America there is no theoretical problem apart from the practical histotical effort to develop a meaningful idea of community within the context of our own version of democracy. Hence the centra] problem of both American philosophy and American national life is that of creating a democratic community in which the demands of the individual are reconcilable with those of society. Dewey's own effort toward defining the community in terms of a democratic social order constitutes a major phase of his career. One writer ventures to say that his commitment to democracy was ultimate and religious in the sense that it was the single guiding idea of his whole life3? Democracy is no mete formal political arrangement or type of government, Dewey never tired of telling his readers. It is nothing less than an ethical conception, a moral way of life firmly, anchored in “the idea that personality is the one thing of permanent and abiding worth.” The pietistic flavoring in his interpretation of democracy is most clearly demonstrated in an essay on “The Ethics of Democracy” which concludes with this text: Democracy and the one, the ultiméte, ethical ideal of humanity are to my mind synonyms. ‘The idea of democracy, the ideas of liberty, equality, and fraternity, represent a society in which the distinction between the spititual and the secular has ceased, and as in Greek theory, as in the Christian theory of178 Paut J. Nacy the Kingdom of God, the church and the state, the divine and the human organization of society are one.40 ‘The moral order converges with the social and political orders because the metaphysical foundation upon which democracy stands is the principle of shated expetience. Dewey expressed a sense of awe and wonder with what he called the miracle of shared life ceeated through the instru- mentality of language, communication, discourse. It is only within the social situation that language occurs, and it is only through language that meaning finally emerges. So that as “the cherishing mother of all significance,” language or communication belongs to man’s social nature. But at the same time that language is uniquely instrumental in eliciting meaning from an otherwise indifferent world, it is also consummatory “as a sharing in the objects and arts precious to a community, a sharing whereby meanings are enhanced, deepened and solidified in the sense of communion.”4! As an end in itself as well as the means for producing that end, Dewey declares that “shared experience is the greatest of human goods.” It should be noted that the ultimate worth of the individual which pietism stresses is not compromised in this identification of the moral ideal with the community. The individual person is the first and final reality in whom the moral goal of shared life resides. At the heart of Dewey's notion of community lies a moral and religious individualism which holds every person to be an end in himself, He asctibes this individualism historically to Protestantism as its most significant contri- bution to the modern world. It dealt a fatal blow to every doctrine which holds the person in subordination to ecclesiastical and political institutions. Dewey clearly saw that pietistic forces within the Reforma- tion’ were responsible for the removal of any intermediary between the individual and God, ‘The drama of redémption was enacted within “the innermost soul of individuals,” and it was through this drama that the shared experience of community life was to be achieved. Finally, the inherent pietism in Dewey's social and moral thought is most forcefully exhibited in the culminating idea of God as he developed it in A Common Faith, The whole thrust of his argument in this book is toward the establishment of the community as the human abode of the divine. God is simply that active force within the community whereby values are brought into being through the interaction between what isPragmatism and American Pietism 179 actual and what is ideal.4 By specifically identifying God with the creative relationship between what is and what ought to be in any given historical community, Dewey has reworked the traditional Christian doctrine of the Real Presence as the Holy Commonwealth, making it the equivalent of the social democratic order dynamically conceived. The common faith of all men should be placed in this social order and in their cooperative ability to discover truth enabling them to bring to realization the ideals and aspirations, collective and individual, of mankind. Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis NOTES 1. H. S. Thayer, Meaning and Action: A Crisscal History of Pragmatism (indianapolis: Bobbs-Mertill, 1968); Chatles W. Morris, The Pragmatic Movement in Amencan Philosophy (New Yotk: George Brazilier, 1970); Morton White, Science and Sentument im America (New York; Oxford University, 1972). Pre- vious works dealing with the history of pragmatism are: Philip Wiener, Evolution and the Founders of Pragmatism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1949); C. Wright Mills, Sociology and Pragmatism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966); Darnell Rucker, The Chicago Pragmatists (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1960); Edward C. Moore, American Pragmatism: Pesrce, James, and Dewey (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961). A most important essay which no reader should omit was authored by John Dewey, “The Develop- ment of American Pragmatism,” Philosophy and Civilization (New York: Capri- corn, 1963). The hest general histories of American philosophy are: Herbert Schneider, A, History of American Philosophy, 2nd ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963); Joseph Blau, Men end Movements in American Philoso- bby (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1952). 2. This field of study is far from barren, however. In dealing with the history of American thought, a number of writers have attempted to treat prag- matism in the contest of cultutal history with varying degrees of success. A collection of significant essays may be found in Pragmatism aed American Culture, ed. Gail Kennedy (Boston: Heath, 1950). Another noteworthy contri- bution to this effort is John J. McDermott, The American Angle of Vision (West Nyack: Cross Currents, 1966). 3. A. N. Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas (New York: Macmillan, 1933), p 4. 4, Meaning and Action, p. 432. 5, Ibid, p. 433. 6 Constance Rourke, The Roots of American Culture and Other Bssays (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1942), pp. 45-46. Her statement that180 Paux J. Nacy “art has always taken on a special native Sbre before it assumes the greater breadth” may be equally applied to philosophy. 3. Meaning and Action, p. 434. 8. Ibid., pp. 434-35. 9. On Experience, Nature, and Freedom, ed. R, Bernstein (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1960), p. 98. 10. Ernst Troeltsch, The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches, trans. Olive Wyon (2 vols. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1960), I, p. 347. 11. Ibid., Ul, p. 715. 12. Religious Affections, ed. John E Smith (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), p. 406, 410. 13. The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Collier, 1961), p. 42. 14, “Knowledge about life is one thing; effective occupation of a place in life, with its dynamic currents passing through your being, is another.” Ibid., P. 380, 15. For an excellent study of this subject, see William G. McLoughlin, “Pietism and the American Character,” The American Experience, ed. Hennig Cohen (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1968), pp. 39-63. 16. McLoughlin offers this defini ‘American pietism is the belief that every individual is himself responsible for deciding the rightness or wrongness of every issue (large ot small) in terms of a higher moral law; that he must make this decision the moment he is confronted with any question in order to prevent any complicity with evil; and having made his decision, he must commit himself to act upon it at once, taking every opportunity and utilizing every possible method to implement his decision not only for himself and in his own ‘home or community, but thtoughout the nation and the world.” Idid., p. 49. 17. H. Richard Niebuhr, The Kingdom of God in America (New York: Harper and Row, 1937), passim., pp. 127-163. 18. George Santayana, Character and Opinion in the United States (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1920), p. 211. 19. “The Protestant Movement and Democracy in the United States,” The Shaping of American Religion, eds. James Ward Smith and A. Leland Jamison (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University ‘Press, 1961), p. 58. Italics mine. 20. John Dewey, “A Critique of American Civilization,” Recent Gains in American Civilization, ed. Kirby Page (Chautauqua, N.Y.: Chautauqua Press, 1928), p. 275. 21. Op. Cit, p. 168. 22. Philosophy and Civilization (New York: Capricorn, 1963), p. 33. 23, Moral and ideological issues were made the focus of the campaign by Goldwater who articulated a strong and important segment of pietistic sentiment. But the great majority of voters were faithful to an even deeper level of pietism in repudiating the effort to confuse public politics and private morality. 24. On Experience, Nature, and Freedom, p. 10. 25, John Herman Randall argues persuasively that “the whole impact . . . of the Copernican revolution was humanistic, and pointed to a new glory of man in this world.” The Career of Philosophy from the Middle Ages to the Enlighten.Pragmatism and American Pietism 181 ment (New York: Columbia University, 1962), pp. 309-10. The same point is also made by A. Koyre, From she Closed World to she Infinite Universe (New York: Harper, 1957), p. 43; and by Matjorie Hope Nicolson, The Breaking of the Circle (New York: Columbia University, 1960), p. 194. 26, The clearest account of this is given by Robert C. Pollock in “Process and Experience,” John Dewey: His Thought and Influence, ed. John Blewett (New York: Fordham University, 1960), pp. 161-197. . ‘the Writings of William James, ed Jobn J. McDermott (New York: Random House, 1967), p. 457. 28. Lbid., p. 388. 29. George Dykbuizen, “John Dewey: The Vermont Years,” Journal of the History of Ideas, XX (1950), p. 521. 1 rely ptimarily upon this excellent study for material about Dewey's childhood and youth, See especially pp, 521-325. 30. Ibid., pp. 523-24. 31, Ibid., p. 524, 32. Philosophy and Civilization, pp. 15-16. 33, Ibid., p. 33. Italics mine. 34, On Experience, Nature, and Freedom, p. 23. 35. Reconstruction in Philosaphy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957), p. 25. 36. Philosophy and Civilizaton, p. 3. 37. On Experience, Nature, and Freedom, pp. 106-107. 38. “Philosophy and American National Life,” University of Vermont, Cen- sennial Anniversary of the Gradsation of the First Class, July Third to Seventh, 1904 (Buslington, 1905), p. 106. 39. John Blewett, $.J., “Democracy as Religion: Unity in Human Relations,” John Dewey: His Thought and Influence, p. 37. 40. Jobn Dewey, The Early Works, Vol 1: 1882-1888 (Carbondale; Southern Illinois University, 1969), p. 248. 41. Experience and Nature (LaSalle: Open Court, 1961), p. 169. 42. Ibid., p. 167. 43, Reconstruction in Philosophy, pp. 46-47. 44, A Common Paith (New Havent: Yale University, 1934), p. 51.Copyright © 2003 EBSCO Publishing