Pragmatism: America's first philosophy and the art of living deliberately
The article traces the roots of American pragmatism — the philosophy holding that beliefs matter only insofar as they guide real action. Thinkers such as William James and Henry David Thoreau urged people to "live deliberately" rather than drift through life unthinkingly. The author weaves the history of the movement with personal childhood memories to show how these ideas shape everyday decisions.
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My dad called it a “Spanish omelette.” In reality, it was an excuse to clean out the fridge. Anything not-quite-rotting was fair game. Throw it in. To be fair, they were mostly delicious, but a generous flood of ketchup can hide a lot of things.
Every Saturday morning, as he whisked up our eggs, my dad would listen to Any Questions? , a weekly BBC Radio 4 panel show where host Jonathan Dimbleby asked politicians, business leaders, and the occasional celebrity questions from the audience: “In light of the recent intervention in Iraq, do the panel think we need to double down or withdraw our commitment to NATO?” So little changes.
As Dimbleby tried to referee the point-scoring and playground screeching, my dad would invariably chime in.
“Oh, he’s a bloody arsehole,” he’d grumble. Stir the onions. “The last government tried that and look how it turned out!” In go the crusty green olives. “Yeah, but of course she would say that, wouldn’t she?!” A garnish of wilted rocket.
As much as we might hate the idea, many of our values are inherited rather than consciously chosen.
I didn’t know it, of course, but as I ate my Spanish omelettes, I was digesting my dad’s ideas. His gripes became my gripes. His loyalties became my loyalties.
As much as we might hate the idea, many of our values are inherited rather than consciously chosen. Our beliefs — especially in our younger years — are a response to our primary caregivers’ beliefs. And so, “He’s an arsehole” ran through my head as I cast my first vote.
The world is a collection of individuals, and what is true for the molded youth is true for society. How we collectively think starts out as a reaction to the way our forefathers thought. We inherit the beliefs we learn to question.
In 1929, the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead wrote that the history of Western philosophy is “a series of footnotes to Plato.” Plato set the rules of the game. He threw down the first philosophical gauntlet and challenged his toga-clad friends to a wrestling match: “The world is divided into spirit and body! FIGHT ME!”
Platonism birthed Aristotelianism, which birthed the “eudaimonic schools” such as Stoicism and Epicureanism. Scholasticism led to Rationalism. On it goes, in an overly simplistic but broadly true progression of thought.
It wasn’t until my 30s that I properly felt I had stepped out from the shadow of my dad’s Saturday rants, and it’s often not until quite later that a nation steps out of the shadow of its founding fathers. So, when did America step out from the shadow of its European birthplace? When did a distinctly American philosophy start to emerge?
Before the end of the 18th century, two major figures came to define America’s zeitgeist.
While there is no such thing as a perfectly “pure” nation-state marching in the uniform of a cultural monotone, the U.S. is truly a Spanish omelette of a country. It feels appropriate, then, that the earliest philosophy courses taught in America were just as hodgepodge, with formal establishments like Yale, Harvard, and William & Mary home to a kind of intellectual bricolage.
Teachers of philosophy, in general, can be reluctant to “identify [themselves] wholly with a particular philosopher or philosophical school,” writes historian Norman Fiering, but colonial thinkers were particularly so — fearful that they might discard ideas that “the light of history” would prove were worthy of consideration, they taught everything. Fiering attributes this to a lack of confidence caused by “the pervasive sense of intellectual inferiority that came with provincial status.”
Among all the ideas they were teaching, none came from what could be considered American philosophers. Like young Jonny voting for the first time, the earliest American thinkers still had the voices of their intellectual forefathers in their heads. At this point in the nation’s history, they were merely “tinkering with received ideas from overseas and looking forward to the day when various institutions — social, economic, educational — would exist here in sufficient strength to sustain independent work,” writes Fiering.
It’s hard to identify when the first strands of “American philosophy” emerge, but it’s easier to identify uniquely American philosophers. Before the end of the 18th century, two major figures came to define the nation’s zeitgeist: Jonathan Edwards and Benjamin Franklin.
American culture celebrates the self-taught hustler and the side-door entrant.
I feel a great affinity with Edwards and Franklin — a strange thing to hear from someone schooled in the British university system — because I never enrolled in a postgraduate philosophy program. I do not have a PhD. In some European circles, that’s a badge of shame. “Dr. Thomson” would open doors — often centuries-old and bolted with medieval iron — that “Mr. Thomson” cannot. And yet, here I am as the “lead philosopher” of Big Think, writing for a successful and prestigious American company. It doesn’t matter that I don’t have a 50,000-word thesis on late Wittgenstein on my bookshelf. It matters that I can write about philosophy well and get it (mostly) right.
This is for good reason. American culture celebrates the self-taught hustler and the side-door entrant, from the self-made men of the early republic to the college-dropout CEOs of Silicon Valley, and the two dominant figures in 18th-century American philosophy lived, wrote, and excelled outside of formal academia.
Edwards went to Yale but did his most famous philosophical work outside its gates. He was the great theologian-philosopher of British colonial America and the leading voice of the “First Great Awakening.” Working from a pulpit in Massachusetts, he wrote treatises on free will and original sin. He argued that true virtue was not mere kindness or civic decency but a kind of cosmic affection that reached beyond family, tribe, or nation. He sought to marry the clockwork universe of Newton’s Principia with the inward fire of Puritan conviction, and the result was a theology that was as rigorous as it was strange.
Even Edwards is dwarfed by the titan that is Franklin. Called “the first philosopher” of America by David Hume , a leading philosopher of the Scottish Enlightenment, Franklin was born to a family that was too poor to send him to school past the age of 10, and so he retained a kind of frosty ambivalence towards the collegians dominating New England high society. Yet he wrote beautifully, with incredible wit, and covered a range of deep, philosophical issues, approaching them from a position of practicality and experimentation — setting him apart from the more abstract European philosophers of his time.
Nature is transcendentalism’s scripture, solitude is its method, and self-reliance is its golden rule.
By 1830, the U.S. had developed the idea of the power of the individual over institutions — as exemplified by men like Franklin — into its first full-blown philosophical movement: transcendentalism.
If the U.S. is the opt-out nation, transcendentalism is the opt-out philosophy. It espouses a belief that each individual carries within them a direct line to a spiritual, unifying truth. They don’t need the mediation of a church, government, or system of philosophy to encounter the divine. Nature is transcendentalism’s scripture, solitude is its method, and self-reliance is its golden rule. Henry David Thoreau — a father of transcendentalism, along with Ralph Waldo Emerson — took the idea to its extremes, leaving behind society for the solitude of Walden Pond.
“The indescribable innocence and beneficence of Nature — of sun and wind and rain, of summer and winter — such health, such cheer, they afford forever! … Shall I not have intelligence with the earth? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself?” Thoreau writes in Walden .
Just as I eventually broke free from my father’s political beliefs to develop my own, new philosophies eventually branched off from transcendentalism. Still, as Whitehead pointed out, each new idea is in response to those that came before it — continuing a tradition that dates back to Plato.
And, on a more personal level, to some very questionable Saturday-morning breakfasts.
This article “Live deliberately”: The origin of America’s first philosophy is featured on Big Think .
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