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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 June 2018
Stephen Whicher has suggested about Emerson in particular that the “dogmatic” optimism he vaunted publicly was something of a makeshift cover for the void he felt in private, a too-much-protested (and therefore sometimes callous) faith thrust upon him by “the ghastly reality of things.”
Sacvan BercovitchAt the same time there was in [William] James an awful loneliness. He lived in terrible personal isolation, believing that only individuality counted and that even its joys were fleeting. Much of his optimism was bravado.
Bruce Kuklick1. Bercovitch, Sacvan, The American Jeremiad (Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978), 190.Google Scholar
2. Kuklick, Bruce, Introduction to Pragmatism, by James, William (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1981), xv.Google Scholar
3. Jacoby, Russell, The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1987), 8–9.Google Scholar
4. Ibid., 6.
5. The reconsideration of these divisions should not be explained in terms of postmodern reasons alone, for it had begun before postmodernism became fashionable. See, e.g., Higham, John, Introduction to New Directions in American Intellectual History, ed. Higham, John and Conkin, Paul K. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), xi–xix.Google Scholar
6. Noble, David W., The End of American History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 3–4.Google Scholar
7. Noble, David W., Historians Against History: The Frontier Thesis and the National Covenant in American Historical Writing since 1830 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1965), Chapter 1.Google Scholar
8. Throughout this paper I use the old conventional narrative of American religious-intellectual development (from the Puritans, to the Enlightenment liberals, to the Romantics and their cohorts, to William James) rather than the new conventional narrative of American intellectual development (from the Puritans, Edwards particularly, to the several generations of Calvinist scholarship, up to and including the Andover Liberals, to John Dewey) that is most prominently set forth in Kuklick, Bruce, Churchmen and Philosophers: From Jonathan Edwards to John Dewey (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985).Google Scholar While I continue to find the old narrative more useful, my argument here is only slightly affected by this choice, for the Calvinists (while they did not so distinctly confine their God to history) were exceptionalists and monists just as much as those emphasized by the old conventional narrative.
9. Bercovitch's claim has been disputed as too simple. For example, Denning, Michael in Mechanic Accents (London: Verso, 1987)Google Scholar argues that “Bercovitch tends to reduce the concepts of ‘hegemony’ and ‘dominant culture'— which connote in [Antonio] Gramsci and [Raymond] Williams unstable and historically conditioned balances of forces between dasses and social groups—to the timeless Konsensus’ of American exceptionalism.” Denning also argues that Bercovitch tends to “deduce social meaning from formal analysis,” that is, that Bercovitch argues improperly from rhetoric to social reality (223).
10. Bercovitch, American Jeremiad, 7-8.
11. David W. Noble, The End of American History, \\2.
12. de Tocqueville, Alexis, Democracy in America (New York: Vintage Books, 1945), 1:30. 13.Google Scholar
13. This is a theme Jeffrey Stout echoes and amplifies over a decade later in “The Voice of Theology in Contemporary Culture/’ in Religion and America: Spiritual Life in a Secular Age, ed. Mary Douglas and Steven Tipton (Boston: Beacon Press, 1983), 249-261.
14. Cherry, Conrad, Introduction to God's New Israel: Religious Interpretations of American Destiny, ed. Conrad Cherry, (Englewood Cliffe, N.J.: Prentice Hall,Inc.,1971),24.Google Scholar
15. David M. Kennedy, Professor of History and American Studies, Stanford University, speaking before the Commonwealth Club of California in the summer of 1988 on the topic, “How American History Will Judge the Reagan Presidency,” said: “As he [Reagan] told his biographer Lou Cannon in 1981, 'What I'd really like to do is go down in history as the president who made Americans believe in themselves again'… [This Statement] is premised on the assumption that Americans did, in fact, disbelieve in themselves before his election, a consideration on which Jimmy Carter dwelled at length in his famous malaise speech in July of 1979.”
16. “According to a recent Congressional Research Service study, the United States now has the lowest rate of voter participation of any democracy in the world.” Curtis B. Gans, Director, Committee for the Study of the American Electorate, New York Times, Section 2, p. 24, July 3, 1988. According to the same committee, voter participation dropped further in the 1988 elections, from 53.1 percent in 1984 to 50.16 percent in 1988 (New York Times, Section 1, p. 18, December 18,1988.)
17. Gunn, Giles, Preface to New World Metaphysics: Readings on the Religious Meaning of the American Experience, ed. Gunn, Giles (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), xi.Google Scholar
18. Lippmann, Walter, Essays in the Public Philosophy (Boston: little, Brown and Company, 1955), 100–101.Google Scholar
19. See, e.g., Gilkey, Langdon, Society and the Sacred: Toward a Theology of Culture in Decline (New York: Crossroad, 1981), 22–25.Google Scholar
20. See the epigraphs above. James's pessimism is well known. Perry Miller argues that Emerson's ostensibly European and Hindu idealism is better understood as of a piece with Jonathan Edwards’ empiricism, thus making Emerson, so far as I can see, unexpectedly susceptible to the pessimism that might ensue from emptying the absolute into the empirical. See Miller, Perry, “From Edwards to Emerson,” in Errand into the Wilderness (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1981), Chapter 8.Google Scholar
21. Noble, End of American History, 67.
22. E.g., Niebuhr, Reinhold, The Irony of American History (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1952), 4.Google Scholar
23. Ibid., 155.
24. Ibid., 168-169.
25. Religion and the American Public Philosophy 71 25. Ibid., 174; emphasis added. This is the religious prerequisite behind The Irony of American History, a book written after, not before, Niebuhr had abandoned, supposedly, the Barthian God-world dualisms of the 1930's.
26. Saiving, Valerie, ‘The Human Situation: A Feminine View’” in Womanspirit Rising: A Feminist Reader in Religion, ed. Christ, Carol P. and Plaskow, Judith (New York: Harper&Row, 1979), 25–42.Google Scholar
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28. Stout, Jeffrey, Ethics After Babel: The Languages ofMorals and Their Discontents (Boston: Beacon Press, 1988).Google Scholar
29. Wheeler, John Archibald, “Beyond the Black Hole,” in Some Strangeness in Proportion: A Centennial Symposium to Celebrate Achievements of Albert Einstein, ed. Woolf, Harry (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., 1980), 341–375.Google Scholar
30. Lovelock, James E., Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979);Google Scholar Lovelock, James E., “Gaia: A Model for Planetary and Cellular Dynamics,” in Gaia: A Way of Knowing: Political Implications of the New Biology, ed. Thompson, William Irwin (Great Barrington, Mass.: Lindisfarne Press, 1987), 83–97;Google Scholar and Lovelock, James E., Ages of Gais: A Biography of Our Living Earth (New York: W. W. Norton&Company, 1988).Google Scholar
31. See, e.g., Heisenberg, Werner, Physics and Philosophy (New York: Harper and Row, 1958);Google Scholar Kuhn, Thomas, The Structure ofScientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970);Google Scholar Feyerabend, Paul, Against Method (London: Verso, 1984);Google Scholar Prigogine, flya and Stengers, Isabelle, Out of Chaos: Maris New Dialogue with Nature (New York: Bantam Books, 1984);Google Scholar Dyson, Freeman J., Infinite in All Directions (New York: Harper&Row, 1988).Google Scholar
32. See especially Lentricchia, Frank, “History of the Abyss: Poststructuralism,” in After the New Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980)Google Scholar, Criticism and Social Change (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), and Ariel and the Police: Michel Foucault, William James, Waliace Stevens (Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988); J. Hillis Miller, “The Critic as Host,” Paul de Man, “Shelley Dishgured,” and Hartman, Geoffrey H., “Words, Wish, Worth: Wördsworth,” all in Bloom, Harold and others, Deconstruction and Criticism (New York: Seabury Press, 1979);Google Scholar and Hartman, Geoffrey, “Literary Criticism and its Discontents,” Critical Inquiry 3 (Winter 1976): 203–220.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
33. See especially Rorty, Richard, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979)Google Scholar, Consequences ofPragmatism (Essays: 1972-1980) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), Contingency, irony, solidarity; Bernstein, Richard J., Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983);Google Scholar Goodman, Nelson, Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Co., 1978);Google Scholar Putnam, Hilary, Reason, Truth and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). 34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
34. See especially, Kaufman, Gordon, The Theological Imagination: Constructing the Concept of God (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1981)Google Scholar and Theology for a Nudear Age (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1985); Taylor, Mark C., Erring: A Postmodern A/theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984)Google Scholar and Tears (New Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1990); Stout, Jeffrey, The Flight from Authority: Religion, Morality, and the Quest for Autonomy (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981)Google Scholar and Ethics afler Babel; West, Cornel, Prophesy Deliverance: An Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1985)Google Scholar, Prophetic Fragments (Grand Rapids: William Eerdmans; and Trenton, N.J.: African World Press, 1988), and The American Evasion of Philosophy (Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989).
35. Wills, Garry, Nixon Agonistes: The Crisis of a Self-Made Man (New York: New American Library, 1969), 39.Google Scholar
36. I briefly define what I call the “interpreting historian” in my American Religious Empiricism (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1986); and in a very preliminary way I attempt to embody that role in my History Making History: The New Historkism in American Religious Thought (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1988).
37. Whitehead, Alfred North, Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect (New York: Capricorn Books, 1959), 74.Google Scholar Chapter 3 of this book is Whitehead's highly suggestive discussion of the role of Symbols in creating social identity. For futher discussion of Whitehead's notion of symbolism see Symbolism as well as Process and Reality: Corrected Edition, ed. David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne (New York: The Free Press, 1978), Chapter 8.
38. I have set out in greater detail a similar recommendation in “Fireflies in a Quagmire,” Journal of Religion 48 (October 1968): 376-395.