Native Pragmatism: Rethinking the Roots of American Philosophy. By Scott L. Pratt. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2002. 316 pages +xviii. $49.95 hardbound; $21.95 paper.
We=ve come far. Once characterizing a line of thought as primitive would have been an insult. In Pratt=s informative book, claiming that a line of thought originated in large part with Northeastern U.S. Indian tribes is supposed to reflect well on that line of thought or on those tribes or both. That line of thought is roughly the thought of John Dewey, taken here as a culmination and summary of American Pragmatism.
The characterization of pragmatism offered in the book is friendly toward it. Pragmatism, on Pratt=s view, consists of four commitments to principles. These put the American school of thought in opposition to standard tendencies in the traditions of Western philosophy.
1. Things are what they do; or, they are the interactions they have with other things, rather than being just, ever, self-contained entities for abstract contemplation removed from context.
2. There are many kinds of things, not just one or two; this pluralism is at the most basic level of experience but extends to affect and include the highest levels of politics and human endeavor.
3. Experience is not individual but is mediated by community; human beings are not most fundamentally individuals but instead our cultures and societies necessarily shape and limit our experiences, our knowledge, our identities, and our inquiries.
4. Progress: the universe does not stand still, and a description of how things are now will not be complete in the future. Change is real. Further, human reflective thought cannot help but prompt growth because of the restlessness that prompts it, the changes it brings about in itself, and its striving for more inclusive or better understanding.
A problem for every expositor of American pragmatism is how to summarize this view, whose authors sometimes disagree with each other and, regrettably, keep thinking throughout their lives (so sometimes they change their minds). Pratt=s summary is pretty good (especially regarding Dewey, whose thought upstages C.S. Peirce and William James) but he leaves out two things important to anyone considering trusting him as a guide to this large, complex territory. His account of commitments to those four principles leaves out pragmatism=s relations to the old-chestnut Western problems of philosophy, even though one fairly standard way to summarize pragmatism is by way of its rejections of European positions on those problems. It also leaves out the serious and ongoing critiques of pragmatist arguments. Some of those are more serious than those Pratt does mention, such as Russell=s objection to James= view of truth. James proposes that truth is something to be judged in relation to human interests at issue, and Russell objects to the opening for relativism if those interests are thought a legitimate part of appraising truth. But some Wittgensteinian critiques are targeted at assumptions shared both by the pragmatists and their opponents and are based on concerns much like some of those which motivate the pragmatists--suspicion of de-contextualized abstraction and of the lines of thought leading up to the posing of philosophical questions. These objections, then, start with motivations like the pragmatists, but wind up with accusations that the pragmatists= critiques are shallow and that the pragmatists wind up being driven by abstract pictures and lose track of examples. Because Pratt assumes throughout pragmatists are on the side of the angels, his book does not help those who might worry about that assumption.
A detailed critique of the arguments for tracing all four commitments to American Indian sources would be worthwhile, but let=s take a look at one for which the stakes are high.
Consider the argument that the Indians acquainted whites with what would become a commitment to pluralism among the pragmatists. Pratt makes a strong case that the American Indians with whom colonists interacted possessed similar ideas to the pragmatist conception. His case features Indian practices of wunnegin, hospitality and welcome toward strangers. The commitment to this practice shows in Indian accounts of cannibals and the proper reception even of them with welcome and kindness. The articulation of this practice of welcome made the practice known among some of the whites. Especially through Roger Williams and Benjamin Franklin, then, American thinkers could know about a commitment to pluralism as a thread in the nation=s history going back before European contact. Dewey confesses to being influenced by Franklin. Williams was no slouch at building a case such that people would be aware of it, even when he was being reviled by those in political and religious power. Suppose all this is true. To what extent, then, will we want to credit either the pragmatists with learning from the Indians or the Indians as a major source for this central idea among pragmatists? The justifiable answer could easily go like this: Well, maybe there=s something to this connection. That James does not always distinguish between his sources for his ideas and the arguments which support them is old news. The consistencies Pratt traces plainly support a possibility, the possibility that the pragmatists came to their commitment to pluralism in part based on Indian sources. Any stronger position, however, that in fact the Indian commitment to hospitality is the source for pragmatic pluralism, and the argument is a thin one. That Peirce and Dewey explicitly argue for pluralism in human experience and that Dewey=s pluralism is also a political pluralism does not show that their sources are to be found in political history even if the antecedents are there. Pratt finds very little in explicit acknowledgment of American Indian sources among the pragmatists--his main items of support involve working with sources at several removes.
The arguments, that is, feel like resourceful historical detective work which support only claims as to possibilities. If the idea of pluralism were really an odd idea, an anomaly in history rather than an idea featured in debates throughout the history of philosophy, then finding a possible explanation would have more force, would be more of an accomplishment. But the Greeks argued with each other over the problem of the One and the Many from before Socrates, and philosophers have continued ever after. Monotheisms vs. polytheisms were prominent concerns as Western traditions met other civilizations. The recognition that injustice and intolerance feed on conceptual rigidity and overly abstract theorizing is given as one of F. W. Maitland=s reasons why common law survived in England past the Renaissance, institutionalized as an emphasis in the Inns of Court on rulings based on attention to details of cases in practice rather than rulings based on theory. An awareness of Euro-American excesses fueled by narrow dogmatism might serve to raise issues for which pluralism seems an appropriate answer. It=s unclear, that is, that we need an explanation for why a school of philosophers would endorse a commitment to pluralism, and if we grant there is some such need James seems to supply it in the form of positions and arguments in several places, and Dewey in others. And none of those seems to point strongly toward Indian sources.
There is some overreaching in the book, then. Nevertheless, it is richly informative and provocative regarding the development of relationships between the whites and Indians during colonial times and during the first decades of the U.S. Some of those relationships may have been intellectual, even philosophical, and promising at the time; others are more grim and of course more permanent. Pratt offers us ways to think of Indian intellectuals with respect, and accounts of such white intellectuals as Roger Williams, Franklin, and Cadwallader Colden as they developed their own respect. These historical analyses have their own value even if separate from the main argument. Read this way--as essays rather than as a book, perhaps--his work=s importance is less problematic. Again, let=s take a piece, with a little more detail.
Pratt traces Franklin=s methodological sources in his scientific work (with implications for all his thinking, perhaps) to Cadwallader Colden=s being-is-as-being-does commitments and to Newton=s experimental (rather than his other mathematical or more broadly theoretical) work in the Opticks. Colden, Pratt asserts, helped legitimize a more problems-oriented approach (rather than one geared toward assembling larger and more inclusive theory). This is a theme later among the pragmatists. At the same time Colden helps propagate through Franklin a metaphysical and epistemological attitude toward a thing=s identity and its knowability as proceeding from its interactions with other things, a view which Pratt takes to be strikingly like the Haudenosaunee idea of Orenda, the voice or song of a thing=s expressing itself to others. It=s undeniably a beguiling idea--for songs, we are tempted to think, esse percipi est (Ato be is to be perceived,@ a line with pragmatist resonance but from Berkeley=s idealism, and a part in Berkeley of a line of thought leading to the rejection of the existence of physical objects)—that is, the song=s being knowable and its existence are the same thing. The cicadas= song exists as, and exists in, its interaction with the corn and the sun, a cause in the sense a request or a lullaby can be a cause. Further, such an interaction can be understood only by taking for granted the community of those who do interact and their practices. This means often that we also take for granted a place and a style which have crucial importance for defining, for example, the Delaware nation. ABy starting with something like Colden=s principle of interaction or the Iroquoian notion of orenda, Franklin is able to approach science free of the usual expectations about the importance of finding truths@ (p. 197--Pratt seems to be thinking here that Atruths@ only mean abstract theories, though it=s unclear that Franklin or Colden or Newton could agree or understand).
Pratt=s account follows Franklin as he gives up or at least reduces his racism regarding the Indians. His paper on population increase of 1751 does not take indigenous peoples seriously, but this attitude seems to be changing just two years later, when he offers an account of human nature which rejects the story that Indians are lazy in ways different from whites. By the end of the conference in 1756 on Indian claims to land and British responsibility for war in the Delaware valley, Franklin was clearly paying attention in a serious way to Indians= views. During the massacres by the Paxton Boys at Lancaster at the end of 1763, Franklin=s rhetorically polished and outraged account on behalf of the Indians both discredited the Paxton Boys and made so many enemies for Franklin that his political career in Pennsylvania was effectively finished. Pratt makes much of Franklin using diversity or pluralism as grounds for rejecting the claim that the Indians under Pontiac who had beseiged Detroit could be attacked by fighting these Indians in Pennsylvania. Franklin asks, in effect, Shall the Dutch take revenge on the English if the French injure them? Pratt notes that this is in contrast to an expected invocation of the Golden Rule: Athe argument might go, we are obliged not to kill others because we ourselves do not wish to be killed.@ (p.205) But Franklin understands more than Pratt that such an argument requires the audience identify with the Indians, whereas his argument may work better if the audience identifies with a nation among nations. (Earlier, p. 163 ff., Pratt gives the Delaware Teedyuscung’s response to a Quaker’s articulating the Golden Rule, that it cannot be followed unless the Great Spirit should give human beings a new heart, and Pratt reads this to mean one heart rather than the diversity we have, an interesting and possible reading, but again difficult to appraise as a stronger claim than possibility.) Pratt points out that thinking of the Conestoga Indians as the inhabitants of a place might help direct attention to particulars rather than to abstractions. Franklin goes on to speak of particular practices of hospitality in various places and times of history, by everyone apparently except for the Christian whites in the New World. Conspicuously, he does not attempt a justification for these practices based on philosophical abstractions. The practices (rather than any theory) of hospitality he enumerates are enough to reveal the behavior of the Paxton Boys--and the behavior of those who did not resist them and did not protect the 140 tribal members who had taken refuge in Philadelphia--as atrocities.
This work, then, has mixed success, but it is a worthwhile book for readers interested in possibilities of whites and Indians in relationships featuring real listening.
One editorial flaw: the style sheet does not call for dates of original composition as well as the dates of the standard editions of, e. g. Franklin’s works. Pratt often gives these in his first mentions of the works, but several go without. This is a poor choice for historically-based work.
J. W. Powell
Philosophy
Humboldt State University
jwp2@humboldt.edu