Foundations and Antecedents of American Pragmatism

What do we think of when we see or hear the terms “American Philosophy?” For some,

one might think back to the Transcendentalist movement of the nineteenth century. Notions of

rugged individualism and a sense of Romanticism may be invoked. Otherwise, we may look

towards the Anglo-American analytic tradition, whose ideological roots may be diametrically

opposed to those of the Transcendentalist movement or American variants of Romanticism.

Somewhere in the midst of this stands a group of philosophers who seemed to have been heavily

influenced the Transcendentalist movement, yet took its influence in new directions. Perhaps

these post-Transcendentalist thinkers were able to transport some of the perspectives and

methodologies of their forebears from a mostly literary milieu and into a more philosophical one,

albeit engaging across disciplines in the arts and sciences.

To disregard the philosophical inputs of Emerson in particular, however, may be short

sighted. Philosopher Cornel West, for example, argues that Emerson’s body of work should be

considered alongside continental philosophers of the same time period such as Nietzsche who

himself was a great admirer of Emerson.1 Nietzsche and Emerson’s writing share in common a

marked divergence from the philosophers of both their historical antecedents and their 


1Cornel West. The American Evasion of Philosophy, a Genealogy of Pragmatism (Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1989), 1, https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=EDkdjUUVLCIC&pg=GBS.PA9.w.2.0.0 .
!1
 2!
contemporaries. One could say that even the basic starting point of their thought was located in a

different place from other theorists, as rather than aiming for a deductive investigation of

“reality” and “truth,” Friedrich Nietzsche and Ralph Waldo Emerson brought into consciousness

the notion of the “philosopher-as-cultural critic.”2 Emerging from the alleged abstraction of both

the English Analytic and the German Idealist tradition, Nietzsche and Emerson commented in an

often rogue and freewheeling manner about the cultural, social, and political phenomena of their

time.

This would come to have a distinct influence on the philosophical milieu native to late

nineteenth and early twentieth century America known as Pragmatism. Arguably a phrase coined

by the theorist Charles S. Peirce, who would come to be known as one of the key thinkers of the

American Pragmatist tradition, Pragmatism eluded the Cartesian skepticism and certainty

characteristic of much philosophy of their time and sought to engage with concepts based on

how they could be applied to the “here and now.” Following Peirce, theorists William James and

John Dewey came to define what would come to be known as the American Pragmatist tradition.

All three of these thinkers are known for their contributions to disciplines outside of

philosophy. In addition to that, all three are different from one another with respect to their main

areas of focus. Charles Peirce, for instance, was heavily enmeshed in hard scientific inquiry.

William James, on the other hand, was still trained in sciences such as anatomy and physiology,

and came to be known for his contributions to the fields of psychology and religion. John Dewey,

following both Peirce and James chronologically, focused on education and politics. All three are

2Ibid., 2.
 !3
united in their unwavering belief, however, that the United States of America stood as the stage

upon which human thought and inquiry could culminate into its highest potential, especially with

regard to its practical applications. While determining the “fundamental nature of reality” was

not central to their collective project, they believed contingency to be fundamental to our

everyday reality. Thus, this supported their idea of the American “experiment,” seeing the

country as a unique project with a malleable trajectory. This commonality binds their respective

bodies of thought and inquiry together, in spite of the divergent areas of focus and stylistic

qualities respective to each of the three.

Peirce, James, and Dewey

Charles S. Peirce was a man of many hats. As a scholar, the physical and natural sciences

were his main focuses. However, semiotics and ethics were part of his scope as well; perhaps,

especially in the realm of ethics, he had a different approach and perspective from the one he

employed in the hard sciences. However, this does not diminish his identity as a game changer in

the course of American philosophy.

Peirce was of the mind that both the skepticism and certainty introduced into

philosophical inquiry by Rene Descartes had diverted the efficacy and relevance of philosophy as

a discipline. Looking towards scientific thought, which held much more ground in the late

nineteenth century than philosophy, Peirce noted that rather than being bound to rigid notions of

truth and falsity, the sciences rode a wave towards a majority consensus that, while for all
 4!
practical purposes was supposed to be the “truth,” was still open to revision. Peirce felt as though

this move towards consensus, as opposed to the Cartesian model, should be applied in many

other areas of inquiry, including philosophy.This movement towards a revisable consensus would

make for a philosophy that, in evading Cartesian abstraction, would bear more concrete

application to everyday life. Not only this, but the element of contingency in the thought could

be reflected in its effect on the world, the future being, according to Peirce and his successors,

yet to be determined. As such, the Pragmatist movement would come to be defined by its belief

in potential and possibility. It was stressed by Peirce, however, that the “ideal” would have to be

made from the materials of the “real.”

One peculiar element of Peirce’s is his insistence that, in the realm of ethics, a Pauline

conception of love was to be the building block of all values. 3 He simply did not believe that a

scientific spirit of revisable consensus could pertain to certain ethical and moral matters. Perhaps

this was useful in his advocacy for communitarianism among individuals. This would be needed,

of course, for something like consensus amongst individuals to be reached, or at least striven for.

While the emphasis on the communal as opposed to the individual may distinguish Peirce from

Emerson, who greatly inspired him, the community as an entity was similar to Emerson’s

conception of the individual as an agent of change and discovery.

What currency, one might ask, did any idea have in the both individual and communal

life. William James, often considered the second in the lineage of the “founding fathers” of

American pragmatism, stressed this question again and again in his lectures that discussed the

3Ibid., 38.
 !5
nature of pragmatism. Specifically, he posited that the truth of any theory or concept was to be

weighted on its “cash value” in concrete experience in the world. This use of a marketplace

oriented term has long been a source of contention for many scholars, as it makes Pragmatism

seem like a philosophy which narrowly defines the validity of anything based on the level of its

use or value.

James was living a time, specifically the later parts of the nineteenth century, when the

notions of capitalism and its manifestations in personal character were beginning to be regarded

differently in popular literature . While Transcendentalist forebears of American Pragmatism

such as Emerson, Thoreau, and Melville opposed the blatant materialism that seemed to emanate

from commerce and its most zealous participants, there was a turn in the last decades of the

nineteenth century towards a conception of the “capitalist as hero.”4 James saw the frivolousness

of a capitalist concept such as “cash value” as a gauge for something’s inherent worth or value,

but he did not see, due to the marketplace having been driven to an extent by both individual and

communal need, “cash value” as being devoid of relevance in regard to something’s

philosophical truth. Hence, the metaphor of “cash value” stuck and became one of the more well

known features of William James’ contributions to American philosophy.

Like Peirce, James was acquainted with the natural sciences, particularly through his

advanced study of anatomy and physiology. However, also akin to Peirce, James was known for

his contributions to several disciplines. James is perhaps most well known for his lectures on the

psychology and philosophy of religion. This made James akin as well to Emerson, in that he

4George Cotkin. “WILLIAM JAMES AND THE CASH VALUE METAPHOR” ETC: A Review of General
Semantics 42, no. 1 (1985): 37-46. http://www.jstor.org.ezproxy.piedmont.edu/stable/42576722.
 !6
focused on matters commonly relegated to the “inner life.” However, he felt as though the ways

in which this inner life was approached should be utilized in public life, or the political sphere.

This would induce, he felt, the transcending of partisanship and the courage of the individual to

be in the “moral minority.”

This focus on public life, however, was much more in the scope of James’ successor John

Dewey. Dewey focused on institutional matters in realms such as government and education.

Still valuing the potential of the individual, Dewey was heavily invested in exploring the

possible institutional reforms that would allow the individual to thrive and realize his or her

potential; this, for Dewey, would be the basis of what he called “creative democracy.” What

Dewey held in common with Peirce and James was his cross-disciplinary and communal

application of Emerson’s thought. This, however, was firmly situated in conjunction with an

almost Hegelian emphasis on historical consciousness. 5 Dewey came of age in the nineteenth

century, a time when the conditions of industrial capitalist society were at a historical low.

Obviously this mitigated the potential of the individual, even though it allowed for civilization to

to thrive in certain respects.

Dewey, a great admirer of Emerson, was the pragmatist who identified within Emerson’s

body of work what Cornel West refers to as an “evasion of philosophy.”6 This is a way of saying

that in Emerson’s work, Dewey thought there to to be a contestation of philosophy as a

discipline. The limitations of empiricism and rationalism were evaded, but in doing so Emerson

5Cornel West, 62.

6Ibid., 78.
 !7
was able to be a philosopher of everyday life while developing grand, widely sweeping ideas

about that everyday life of Americans. Essentially, Dewey illuminated in Emerson’s work and

attempted in his own work to embody the notion of “the philosopher as cultural critic.” Indeed,

as yet another polymath, Dewey traversed the broad sweep of disciplines from psychology and

philosophy to aesthetics and natural sciences. Dewey believed that the goal of philosophy was

not to dwell in abstract propositions but to learn from life through creative experimentation.

It may be the case that the Pragmatist thinkers that preceded him, along with antecedents

such as Emerson, all had something to say about the state of the country. However, Dewey

bridged the public and private in a way that was more critical and constructive in addressing just

how America was an experiment and its contingent future hinged upon how we educated

ourselves and our children. This was accompanied by a unique vision of how classroom

dynamics would enfold. Dewey offered the perspective that each child came from a specific

cultural and social background and this was to be taken into account in how each child is

educated.

Dewey, valuing experience, sought to encourage the natural creativity of each child; he

did, however, believe that certain ideas and values were to be transferred from the adult teachers,

who had more life experience. This allowed him, as in many other debates that Dewey and his

Pragmatist predecessors were situated amongst, to transcend the clashes between different

schools of thought at the time. There were the Romantics, who, like Jean Jacques Rousseau,

believed that the child’s natural instincts were to be encouraged in the early stages of education.

On the other hand, there were the Traditionalists who believed in rote instruction and
 !8
memorization. Honoring both the perspectives and experiences of both children and adults,

Dewey did not completely agree with either side. As in all other disciplines, Dewey saw the

classroom in which multiple factors informed each other, in contingent and variant ways from

one context to another. Such was an elucidation of the multidisciplinary focus of Dewey’s

forebears.

It could be argued that in focusing on these three thinkers, one leaves out the broad

history of a more culturally diverse palette of thinkers who have been affiliated with Pragmatist

thought. There is a strong case for this, particularly with regard to the ways in which American

Pragmatism informed other, more contemporary strands of thought. However, for the purpose of

singling out three founding thinkers who exemplified a broad range of focuses and approaches

that the Pragmatist tradition was and is able to harness, this approach may provide a doorway

into the exploration of thinkers who are not the proverbial “dead white men” of our past. Such is

the case with finding commonalities between the American Pragmatist tradition and the more

recently emerging school of thought known as Intersectionality, which, like Pragmatism, has

seeped its way into many different fields of inquiry and emphasizes a focus on the concrete

implications of various ideologies, bridging the modes of thought and action.

Intersectionality: Its Roots and Origins

One might not be hyperbolic in calling “intersectionality” a buzzword of the 2010s. A

term commonly believed to have been coined by legal scholar Kimberlie Crenshaw in 1991,
 !9
intersectionality was originally a movement within legal studies towards addressing racism,

classism, and sexism, not as monoliths, but as intersecting systems of power and oppression.7 Yet

this narrative of origin, states Patricia Hill Collins, paints intersectionality as a discipline that

only emerged by way of institutional legitimization.8 This, according to Collins, overlooks the

genesis of intersectional thought in not only the Black Feminist thought that developed over the

preceding century but also the networks of Latina and Asian-American women who advocated

for the inclusion of gender into the male-dominated race and class analysis given forth within

activist enclaves they encountered within their communities.

The 1960s and 1970s were characterized, in a general sense, as fertile ground for social

movements in the United States and across the world. However, it was often the case that these

social movements, focused on forms of oppression, i.e. racism, sexism, and classism, separately.

This perpetuated a disconnection between different communities. Women of color felt excluded

from both the women’s liberation movement, which was centered around middle to upper class

white women, and the social movements that engaged with race and class, which seemed to be

driven by a patriarchal nationalism.9 By the 1980’s, the prominence of social movements seemed

to be waning. However, this was also a time when feminists of color were beginning to form

networks outside of academia to form politics that sought to take into account the ways

7Patricia
Hill Collins, “Piecing Together a Genealogical Puzzle”, European Journal of Pragmatism and
American Philosophy, 3-2 http://ejpap.revues.org/822011, accessed on July 23, 2017.

8Ibid.

9Patricia Hill Collins, 3.

 !10
multitudinous combinations of identity accounted for different experiences, particularly with

regard to privilege and oppression.

Eventually this crystallized enough to be brought forth in Crenshaw’s much-cited 1991

essay. Black Feminist thought certainly is seen to have been a major influence on what would

come to be known as intersectional studies, but again, Black Feminism has its origins long

before the social movements of the mid-twentieth century. At the turn of the twentieth century,

well-educated African American women in the Jim Crow South such as Anna Julia Cooper and

Ida Wells Barnett put forth the necessity of black women’s freedom, as it was to them a

bellwether for the state of freedom in general and anyone’s access to it. Nevertheless, the idea

that intersectionality as a practice is itself an intersection of thought and action prevails.

Beginning with the emerging field of Women’s Studies, intersectional thought has been adapted

across many disciplines as a prominent source of insight into the potential myopia that occurs

when an academic field, which includes virtually the lot of academia, is dominated by white

men.

Diversity Within Pragmatism

There are, however, figures conversely associated with Pragmatism who addressed these

types of inequalities. One such figure is W.E.B. Dubois, one of the pre-eminent African

American thinkers of the early twentieth century. W.E.B. Dubois studied under William James at

Harvard University after transferring from the historically black Fisk University. Dubois then
 1! 1
moved on to do graduate studies in history and political science. His interests gravitated towards

inquiries most commonly found in the field of sociology, but this had not developed into an

actual academic field at the time of Dubois’ graduate studies. Therefore, history and political

science gave him the foundation for what would become his life’s work. 10

Dubois’ influences were wide ranging. While obviously impressed and thereby

influenced by his mentor William James, Dubois also included emerging Africana philosophy

into his approaches to analyzing social and historical phenomena.11 In addition to this, he

appeared to have been inspired by the dialectical thought of Hegel, even though his Pragmatist

influences might have indicated an opposition to Hegelian idealism. In his early lecture, “The

Individual and Social Conscience,” Dubois lays out an assertion of the need for interpersonal

engagement with different communities that white scholars, even in professing to know a lot

about said communities, seemed to avoid all too much. Early in the lecture, Dubois debunks the

solidity of some scholars’ egalitarian attitudes, saying that having such an attitude is not enough

if they want to understand the experiences of people of backgrounds different from their own.

Through an interaction with an “other,” Dubois asserts, there is a dialectical process by which

common ground is found, followed by the recognition of difference, and culminating in the

eventual synthesis of these two acknowledged realities.

10 Cornel West, 132

11Robert W. Williams and W. E. B. Du Bois. ""The Sacred Unity in All the Diversity": The Text and a
Thematic Analysis of W.E.B. Du Bois' "The Individual and Social Conscience" (1905)." Journal of African
American Studies 16, no. 3, p.460 (2012. http://www.jstor.org.ezproxy.piedmont.edu/stable/43525429.
 1! 2
This follows somewhat of a Hegelian framework in its dialectical narrative. However, as

is the case with his utilization of Pragmatism, Dubois uses the abstract conceptual material as a

tool to analyze the problems of and potential solutions to racial disparities that existed across

America at the time. The influences of Africana philosophy, combined perhaps with his own

experience of being African-American, allowed him to touch upon issues that Pragmatist and

Hegelian thought may have skimmed past or even treated in the prejudiced way characteristic of

schools of thought contemporary to them. It is worth noting, however, that both the Pragmatists

and the forerunners of twentieth century Black feminism which would crystallize into

intersectional thought opposed the eugenics movement popular in their time, along with the

biological determinism that infused the practices and theories of eugenics.12 There was, to be

sure, an acknowledgment of social inequality and mass suffering in the age of industrialization in

the works of James and Dewey. However, their outlook, for obvious reasons, was more general

than that of Dubois’ lifelong focus on racial inequality, among other societal issues.

Again, though, there were abstract conceptual frameworks amongst James and Dewey

which could at least be said to nicely complement Dubois’ areas of emphasis. A focal point of

William James’ body of work is his development of “Radical Empiricism,” a form of empiricism

that blurred the subjective and the objective. It challenged the duality between thought and thing,

or mind and matter.13 What James referred to as “pure experience” was the reality that everything

that exists is perpetually being experienced. However, humans see things through their own

12Patricia Hill Collins, 9.

13John E. Smith. "Radical Empiricism." Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, New Series, 65 (1964):
205-18. http://www.jstor.org.ezproxy.piedmont.edu/stable/4544712.
 !13
subjective lenses, often leading them to project ideas onto reality that could thereby change the

objects of experience themselves. Also important in the idea of radical empiricism was the

emphasis of relational dynamics between things, as opposed to the treatment of reality as an

atomistic scope of the individual facts. These spaces of relation, whether they were conjunctive

or disjunctive, were to James the real meat and bones of the universe. Experience and the objects

of experience were intertwined, between and amongst themselves. Perhaps the co-existing

realities of how everyone experiences the world through a subjective lens and the dynamic by

which everything that exists is experienced mirrors Dubois’ outlook on the dialectical tension

between difference and sameness, which is needed to form a synthesis that could produce

empathy and understanding between people.

While the Pragmatists focused more on the idea of community than their forebear

Emerson did, thinkers like James and Dewey still stressed, as Emerson did, the importance of the

making of the self. In the case of Dewey, there appeared to be a conception of the self both as a

receptive and adaptive organism and an individual agent of change.14 While these notions of self

may seem self-contradictory, it may also fit in nicely with Dubois’ vision.

The Postmodern Era

If one is to contextualize the current state of both Pragmatism and Intersectional thought

and how they are regarded in academia, one may look towards the greater trends of the current

14Vincent A. Colapietro.. “Embodied, Enculturated Angels” in Dewey Reconfigured: Essays on Deweyan

Pragmatism ed. Casey Haskins and David Seiple (Albany: SUNY, 1999), 63-95.
 !14
epoch and the state of academia itself. In his book, The Postmodern Condition, Jean Francois

Lyotard outlines some of these trends. Characterizing the contemporary era as “postmodernity,”

he argues that in postmodernity, and the resultant intellectual tendencies of postmodernism, there

is a distrust of grand narratives. Globalization, the two World Wars, and the advancements of

technology have fragmented the world. Through exposure to other cultures and their subsequent

transformation resulting from factors such as colonialism, intellectuals in the West no longer had

such a singular faith in the totalizing, often universalizing narratives of history that were

characteristic of early and late modernity. Smaller scale narratives and fragments of information

were more the currency. This has affected academia, steering the focus away from the liberal

arts to the absorption of information as a commodity, which in turn perpetuates the flow of the

production of commodities themselves15. In the realm of philosophy, Lyotard observed how the

focus had shifted to the study of language, which in turn mirrored the rise of the information

economy, with the latter’s focus on things like data analytics and coding.

Also, the advent of multinational corporations were, to Lyotard, a factor in the

destabilization of the relationship between governments and economies. All of this points

towards a predicament where the future, as envisioned by Lyotard, was one in which any

information that was not quantifiable was treated as unimportant. This does not mean, as we have

seen, that the humanities are extinct, but rather that their subordination by STEM, or Science,

Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics has increased. This does not appear to be the future

desired by American Pragmatists. While it is true that in the information economy the disciplines

15Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Manchester: Manchester

University, 1984, 4.
 1! 5
that may be considered “practical” may have concrete ties to the world, Pragmatists, particularly

Dewey, would lament the disconnect between the arts and sciences. Indeed, neopragmatist

philosopher Roberto Mangabeira Unger sees the present state of the Humanities in academia to

be one in which their main purpose is escapism, alongside other disciplines that are set up to

legitimate the way the world currently functions.16

However, postmodern thought itself is not altogether detached from certain

characteristics of the Pragmatism of the early twentieth century. The Pragmatists’ emphasis on

contingency and flux, which made them opponents of the doctrine of determinism, bears some

resemblance to the very same distrust that Postmodern thought casts upon determinism. This

allows for a malleable future, characterized by pluralism and multiple possibilities. The crucial

distinction between Pragmatism and Postmodernism, however, is that the latter is distrustful of

the Humanist thought that animated the Modern era. Prominent Neopragmatist Richard Rorty, in

his book Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth Century America, pronounces this

development to have had immensely negative consequences. He makes clear his inclination that

this deep distrust in humanism, and thereby optimism, relegated the role of the humanities from

that of an active participant to that of a mere spectator in both academia and the greater society.17

However, as American Pragmatism did with Dubois, postmodernism has a vocal but

sympathetic critic in a major voice that defies Eurocentric influences all too familiar in both

pragmatism and postmodernism. bell hooks, who is known for her contributions to the study of

16Roberto Mangabeira Unger, The Left Alternative, 2nd Ed.. New York: Verso Books, 2009, 13-16.

17Rorty, Richard. Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth Century America, Cambridge:
Harvard University, 1998.
 !16
how race, class, and gender interact in both subjective and collective experience, is one such

source. She testifies that there is an upside to postmodernity and subsequent postmodern thought.

The essentialization of different identity groups was traded in for both pluralism and a fertile

ground for creativity overall. Seeing how postmodern thought emphasized “the other,” bell

hooks noted that she had a different view from where she was standing; she, indeed was that

“other.”18 She also noted how postmodernist thinkers critiqued identity politics as being

inherently essentialist right when different marginalized groups began to assert themselves as

political subjects utilizing the politics of identity. She suggested a form of postmodern thought

that related to social inequalities based on race, class, and gender that did not essentialize the

different permutations or even combinations of said factors of identity.

hooks is a Buddhist, and Leah Kalmanson, in her article “Buddhism and bell hooks:

Liberatory Aesthetics and the Radical Subjectivity of No-Self” manages to tie certain Zen

Buddhist concepts in with the concept of Radical Subjectivity found in hooks’ 1990 essay

“Postmodern Blackness.” This is a subjectivity that not only attempts to evade essentialism but

skirts around the confines of the individualistic idea of the subject that pervaded European and

American philosophy. With a focus on the impermanence that is a theme across many forms of

Buddhism, Kalmanson asserts, there is a kind of self-actualization that would would be “radical”

even if the world were suddenly rid of oppression. 19 It is not only oppositional, but also

liberatory, in a way that encourages creativity. hooks herself deems this the “artistry of everyday

18 hooks, bell. “Postmodern Blackness”, Postmodern Culture vol. 1, no. 1 (Sep. 1990).

19Leah Kalmanson. "Buddhism and bell hooks: Liberatory Aesthetics and the Radical Subjectivity of No-
Self." Hypatia 27, no. 4 (2012): 816. http://www.jstor.org.ezproxy.piedmont.edu/stable/23352296.
 1! 7
life.”20 This is much like Dewey’s definition of art; it is one in which art and experience overlap

greatly.

Working Together: Ways that American Pragmatism and Intersectional Thought Can

Inform Each Other

We have seen the ways in which the emphasis on lived experience, the malleability of the

future, and focuses on social problems are elements of both American Pragmatism and

Intersectional thought. We have also seen distinctions between them with regard to how these

themes are handled, both in a theoretical sense and their relationship with academia in its current

state. To engage with both fields and their relations and disjunctions is, perhaps, a process in

which one finds oneself wrestling with the questions explored in the attempt to do justice to these

fields as they stand unto themselves and in relation to one another. Such questions may include

ones of representation, with respect to how we acknowledge a diverse array of perspectives.

Obviously, many people, both inside and outside of academia, have different perspectives on

what led us to where we stand at present. We may also explore the question of how both

Pragmatism and Intersectionality, in both thought and praxis, may approach the future.

Richard Rorty seems to believe that a certain humanist optimism was lost when

postmodernist thinkers such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida became popular reference

in the humanities and social sciences. Rorty argues that this led to a paralyzing cynicism, which

20Leah Kalmanson, 818.

 !18
has coincided with the splintering between organized labor and academia that began in the

1960s. (c) Writing in the 1990s, it is understandable how Rorty could make this conclusion.

Firstly, it was indeed the case that many social movements that were active in the 1960s and

1970s had dwindled in activity over the course of the following two decades. Secondly, Rorty

may have been blind-sided by his own brackets of identity; perhaps as a white male in academia

he overlooked or misunderstood the efforts of contemporaries and colleagues of color to reform

various academic disciplines. Perhaps it was simply the case that in the wake of the continued

social crises of the postmodern era, these developments were occurring on more of a theoretical

level than in the sixties and seventies. Whatever the reason, Rorty falls into an all too familiar

error: labeling anything that does not concern “the white working class” and “everyday

Americans” as being reductive identity politics. This is something that is being contested at the

present moment, that being the year 2019, by certain public figures.

We have seen Intersectionality become a method of hermeneutics that, previously steeped

in academia, has made its way into popular culture. Race, class, and gender and how the

intersections of these identities affect lived experience are discussed much more in across

different spheres in public and private life than they have ever been. With increased popularity

and acceptance into the practices of various institutions, academic or otherwise, naturally there

have been developments that make Intersectional thought have different approaches and focuses

than it had when the very term Intersectionality was coined. Patricia Hill Collins argues that

Intersectional thought has focused, in recent years, more on the construction of individual
 1! 9
identities than group experiences.21 Due to that, in placing Pragmatism and Intersectionality side

by side, she sees how some of American Pragmatism’s valuing of the relationship between self

and community could help Intersectional thought be utilized in a manner closer to the way it was

intended originally. Furthermore, she believes that Intersectionality could provide new insight

into Pragmatic methods and not just how, but where they may be applied. She asserted that

Pragmatism neglected the focus on inequalities as they related specifically to categories such as

race, class and gender.

Indeed, for Cornel West, newer Pragmatists or thinkers affiliated with Neopragmatism

tend to overlook these factors or skim past them all too much. West characterizes Roberto

Unger’s work as being a third-wave manifestation of Leftist Romanticism.22 The first wave,

according to West, was comprised of people like Jean Jacques Rousseau and Thomas Jefferson.

The second was comprised of people like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Karl Marx. West calls this

problematic. All of these thinkers were important in the development of the ideals of what he

calls creative democracy, perhaps a public, collective version of hooks’ Radical Subjectivity.

However, both ignored or stoked the flames of mass subjugation of certain parts of the

population.23 It seemed as though Romanticism, especially in its nostalgic elements, could easily

be a reactionary force. Unger, in stressing the self-making of the Romantic Subject as a theme

that needs a revival in the political projects of the present an future, is to West all too thin in

21Patricia Hill Collins,16.

22West, Cornel. 207.

23Ibid., 206.
 2! 0
substance when it comes to talking about the everyday lives of people he seems to advocate for

in his support for institutional change and experimentation.24 Yet there has to be creativity in

democracy and subjectivity, otherwise, say West and hooks, humanity’s potential would be

unexplored, and thereby unfulfilled.

The present day brings us hope, though many consider the world to have fallen overall on

increasingly dark times. Politicians such as former Georgia State Representative Stacey Abrams

and current New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez have challenged the dismissal

by some of identity politics in the project of addressing the economic disparities that exist today.

They assert that the policies that they advocate for are not elitist, and call to attention the

possibility that when politicians say phrases like “everyday Americans” they leave out

populations like the predominantly African American city of Flint, which still cannot safely drink

its own tap water due to the possibility of lead poisoning.25 A Green New Deal has been

advocated for, in order to combat the increasing effects of climate change by shifting to

renewable energy sources and paying attention to how racial and environmental issues intersect.

It seems as though this counters Rorty’s reduction of the politics of identity to postmodern

cynicism, as these two women, whether one agrees with their views or not, could hardly be seen

as mere spectators lacking in hope.

24Ibid., 214.

25“Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez Mentions Flint Water During Hearing, Trump Rally Chants ‘AOC

Sucks.’ ”, Mar. 29, 2019 https://www.mlive.com/news/flint/2019/03/rep-alexandria-ocasio-cortez-mentions-flint-

water-during-hearing-trump-rally-chants-aoc-sucks.html.
 2! 1
These examples are important to bring up in conjunction with American Pragmatism and

Intersectionality because, in approaching the issues that are being addressed, we are dealing with

both public and private life, perhaps in a way that highlights the intersection or blurs the

boundaries between these two spheres. Proposals such as the Green New Deal will be all the

more improved, if they are infused with an undercurrent of the valuing of creative expression

that we see from thinkers ranging from John Dewey to bell hooks. These aforementioned

politicians seem to run counter to the apocalyptic fatalism that seems to underlie those who think

that things are just going according to schedule when they hear about environmental changes and

turmoil in the Middle East. A sliver of hope is still in the room, perhaps shining brighter than it

has in awhile.

!1