In ‘America the Philosophical’ We Learn That America Is to Philosophy What Italy Is to Art — Really

Adapted from the Introduction from America the Philosophical by Carlin Romano. Reprinted by arrangement with Knopf Doubleday. Copyright © 2012. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or printed without permission in writing from the publisher.

America the Philosophical? It sounds like Canada the Exhibitionist or France the Unassuming: a mental miscue, a delusional academic tic. Everyone knows that Americans don’t take philosophy seriously, don’t pay any attention to it, and couldn’t name a contemporary academic philosopher if their passports depended on it. As historian Richard Hofstadter drily observed in his Pulitzer-Prize-winning Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1963), “In the United States the play of the mind is perhaps the only form of play that is not looked upon with the most tender indulgence.”

But if the title phenomenon of Hofstadter’s classic indeed boasts “a long, historical background,” the peculiar attitude directed at philosophy in America is more quizzical than hostile, closer to good-humored wariness than contempt. Philosophy doesn’t threaten or bother the practical on-the-go American. The American middle manager confronted with a devoted philosophy type is most likely to yank out the old cliché, “What are you going to do, open a philosophy store?”, and leave it at that. If, of course, the information has been accurately downloaded. Tell your seatmate on a short-haul flight that you’re “in philosophy” and the reply is likely to be, “Oh, that’s great. My niece is in psychology too.”

The infrequent philosophy blips on America’s media screens suggest that philosophy doesn’t register on the American psyche with the gravitas professors in the field deem warranted. Occasional mentions drive that impression only deeper.

When a wrestler named Nick Baines declared, upon entering the University of Northern Iowa to get his B.A., that he planned to become a professor of philosophy, the Des Moines Register treated him as an oddity. Local philosophers, historically wiser, noted the traditional lore that Plato, ne Aristocles, actually pulled a similar career move–he adopted his better-known name, which meant “broad shoulders,” while competing in the Isthmian Games. And when the University of Chicago, in October, 2011, simultaneously hosted a conference on British philosophical giant Bernard Williams and another on the hit reality show Jersey Shore, guess which one got the front-page New York Times coverage?

Summing up the American media mindset, it seems, was a publicity release from a New York publishing house, hyping a two-book deal with Dennis Rodman, America’s faded, body-pierced, ex-basketball badboy. It offered a sweeping historical perspective on its previously unheralded new thinker in ascending font:

Socrates

Confucius

Chopra

RODMAN!!!

Does America take philosophy seriously? One might as well ask whether America takes monarchy seriously. Joking about philosophy in the United States, or just ignoring it, comes with the territory. Hardboiled, concrete-minded descendants of everyone from the Pilgrims to the slaves to the boat people, we pick it up along the way, like mistrusting politicians.

It’s the way we’re supposed to think about a discipline described by journalist Ambrose Bierce as “a route of many roads, leading from nowhere to nothing.”

Tocqueville, that touchstone for all synoptic thinking about America, thought the peculiar attitude of its residents toward philosophy so obvious that he began the second volume of Democracy in America by noting it: “I think that in no country in the civilized world is less attention paid to philosophy than in the United States.”

Even Tocqueville, however, nodded. For all his general insight into the fledgling United States, he saw American thought through the prism of European assumptions. His belief that “in most of the operations of the mind each American appeals only to the individual effort of his own understanding” was false then, and is even more false now. Tocqueville’s misstep came in using the word “only.” He should have written that each American “also” appeals “to the individual effort of his own understanding.”

For the surprising little secret of our ardently capitalist, famously materialist, heavily i-Podded, i-Padded and i-Phoned society is that America in the early 21st century towers as the most philosophical culture in the history of the world, an unprecedented marketplace of truth and argument that far surpasses ancient Greece, 19th-century Germany or any other place one can name. The openness of its dialogue, the quantity of its arguments, the diversity of its viewpoints, the cockiness with which its citizens express their opinions, the vastness of its First Amendment freedoms, the intensity of its hunt for evidence and information, the widespread rejection of truths imposed by authority or tradition alone, the resistance to false claims of justification and legitimacy, the embrace of Net communication with an alacrity that intimidates the world: all corroborate that fact.

To exalt America as the world’s philosophical culture par excellence is not just to argue that American philosophers have occasionally swayed everyday society, though a few examples are worth repeating. Emerson, we know, spurred American intellectual independence, and John Dewey co-founded the American Civil Liberties Union, with huge consequences for the republic. We recognize that William James catalyzed psychology into a full-fledged discipline, and that Alain Locke helped spark the Harlem Renaissance that began the explosion of black artistic self-expression in the 20th century. Closer to the present, the theory of justice of John Rawls, the economics-accented jurisprudence of Richard Posner, the “end-of-art-history” musings of aesthetician and critic Arthur Danto, affect politics, judicial reasoning and curatorial practice, respectively.

America the Philosophical means more than that.

It is similarly more than the boom in so-called “applied ethics,” which over the past 30 years has seen American philosophers taking jobs in corporations, hospitals, prisons and other places outside the academy to bring fresh thinking to the moral dilemmas of those institutions. It is more than the effort of individual academic philosophers, such as gay social critic Richard Mohr, or complicated feminist figures such as Martha Nussbaum, to draw attention to terrain traditionally bypassed by the discipline’s establishment, and to extend their philosophical work to activism on issues, as Nussbaum has done in regard to poor women in India.

Finally, America the Philosophical is more than a phenomenon it encompasses, but to which it cannot be reduced: the transformation by which America has become a net exporter rather than importer of professional academic philosophy, an intellectual bank whose bottom line is in the black. The development is not new. As far back as the mid-1980s, The Economist observed that “British philosophy now consists of sophisticated commentary on the bright ideas of Americans.” In Germany, leading philosophers such as Jurgen Habermas direct their theorizing toward ideas developed by the American pragmatists. In France, Jacques Bouveresse, best-known for his maverick promotion of Anglo-American analytic philosophy in the land of sometimes murky “masters of thought,” was elected to the prestigious philosophy chair at the College de France. In Scandinavia, in Southeast Asia, in South America, professors evoke the names of American giants–Rorty, Danto, Quine, Rawls, Nussbaum–as they once did those of the French, English and Germans.

No, more than all that, acquiesing to America the Philosophical requires seeing America in the new millennium as directly, ebulliently and ordinarily philosophical in a way that remains unappreciated by philosophers, media and the general public alike. It is to see Americans as almost uniquely able, given their rude independence of mind, to pierce through the chief metaphorical scam of moribund yet still breathing Socratic philosophy: the “justification language-game” of academic epistemologists that purports to tell the rest of us the precise meaning of concepts (e.g., “knowledge”) by reasoning through a pocketful of examples. It is to see the United States as the exemplar of a new paradigm of philosophy–albeit one with roots in the pragmatically accented view of the ancient Greek thinker Isocrates (436 B.C.-338 B.C.)–suited to the 21st century.

America, the New Athens?

This is not an easy picture to accept, either within our borders or without. To promote America at home as the world’s preeminent philosophical culture is to clash with almost every cliché of American intellectual history. To exalt it overseas is not only revisionary, but offensive, sure to be received as one more example of American cultural jingoism and imperialism. Moreover, it appears to ignore significant evidence for the traditional image of America the Unphilosophical. Consider some.

In the world of American politics, philosophers play almost no part. A few who did, such as drive-time radio jock and former Secretary of Education William J. Bennett, shed their togas fairly early for bare-knuckled politics. Some, like neo-conservative icon Leo Strauss, get counted as players only on an extended trickle-down theory, because critics insist that they’re beyond-the-grave influences on contemporary figures such as Bush-era neocons.

Elsewhere in the world, by contrast, philosophers more directly influence and enter politics, sometimes dominating it. In Italy, philosopher Massimo Cacciari, twice the mayor of Venice, looms large on the political scene, and philosopher, novelist and journalist Umberto Eco serves as cultural touchstone of the nation. In England, philosopher Roger Scruton, who played consultant to Margaret Thatcher, still loudly voices Tory concerns. In France, the likes of Bernard-Henri Levy, Alain Finkielkraut and Alain Badiou follow in the media-provocateur footsteps of Sartre and Foucault.

Is America more philosophical than these lands? Comparisons to America often seem embarrassing rather supportive of the U.S. as a powerhouse philosophical culture. And attention to rival educational systems further challenges the notion of America the Philosophical.

In the United States, philosophy remains, despite its image as a bedrock of the Western humanistic tradition, a subject required of almost no one before college, a major whose popularity is often thought eclipsed by business and computer-studies options. In the early 1990s, City College of New York came close to eliminating its philosophy department altogether as insufficiently ‘‘vocational,’’ and philosophy departments remain under siege wherever bean counters gather. While pro-philosophy counterexamples exist in the world of education—for instance, the healthy support given the subject by committed philanthropists such as George Soros, Laurance Rockefeller and Sir John Templeton–philosophy largely lives hand to mouth. By contrast, in France, all high school students study philosophy and take a nationwide exam in it, forever familiarizing them with the basics. As for Germany, the country in which philosophy has traditionally enjoyed its greatest academic prestige, it even names Intercity trains for philosophers: On a clear or unclear day, you can see the “Hannah Arendt” or “Theodor Adorno” pull out of Frankfurt.

Finally, the views of some of our own intellectuals and authors threaten to drive the last nail into the coffin of America the Philosophical. Richard Feynman, the feisty Nobel Laureate in Physics, regularly attacked philosophy as “low-level baloney” and derided philosophers for always “making stupid remarks” about science. Books trumpeting the low intellectual quality of American culture now constitute a genre of their own.

In Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free, Charles Pierce argued that we live in the land of his title, in “the best country ever in which to peddle complete public lunacy.” In Unscientific America: How Scientific Iliteracy Threatens Our Future, authors Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum warned that America is “home to a populace that, to an alarming extent, ignores scientific advances or outright rejects scientific principles,” as well as a culture that “all too often questions the value of intellect and even glorifies dumbness.”

All these misgivings provide a sorry counterimage to any picture of a New Athens flourishing between the Atlantic and Pacific. Could it be that the only philosophy books right for Americans are Tom Morris’ Philosophy for Dummies and Jay Stevenson’s The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Philosophy? How can America the Philosophical make sense?

It does, I submit, if one emulates what philosophers ideally do–subject preconceptions to ongoing analysis, and use one’s imagination. The traditional clichés get it wrong. Examples that run counter to the vision of America the Philosophical prop up the clichés because they imply a musty view of philosophy. They depend too much on activities christened “philosophy” according to antiquated academic criteria, and pay too little mind to what honest intellectuals recognize as philosophy today.

For whether one prefers the view of Habermas, Germany’s foremost philosopher, that truth issues only from deliberation conducted under maximum conditions of openness and freedom, or the view of Rorty, America’s most important recent philosopher, that better conceptual vocabularies rather than firmer truths should be our aim, it’s plain that America’s philosophical landscape–pluralistic, quantitatively huge, all potential criticisms available–provides a more conducive arena, or agora, than any other. If we take the best contemporary thinkers at their word and think of philosophy as an ever-expanding practice of persuasion, rather than a cut-and-dried discipline that hunts down eternal verities, America the Philosophical–a far larger entity than the roughly 11,000 members of the American Philosophical Association—not only looks more likely, but clearly outstrips any rival as the paramount philosophical culture.

Some evidence of that comes in the very cultural areas that naysayers mock. Just as the United Kingdom has its independent philosophical writers, so America still produces descendants of Will Durant, whose The Story of Philosophy (1926) sold millions of copies, launched Simon & Schuster as a publishing power, and introduced more Americans to philosophy than any other work.

More recently, Christopher Phillips, an ethnically Greek graduate of the College of William and Mary (Class of `81), transformed his student love of conversations about Socrates into “Symposium” gatherings around the country that he called “Socrates Cafes.” They caught on. And three books that followed–Socrates Café, Six Questions of Socrates and Socrates in Love–drew the praise of no less than Robert Coles, who found in them “ancient wisdom in all its complexity brought vividly to life.”

At the same time, no fewer than three U.S. publishers–Open Court, Wiley-Blackwell and the University of Kentucky Press—regularly tap into a bustling market with series that connect philosophy to popular culture, knocking out, at an amazing pace, titles such as Facebook and Philosophy and Twilight and Philosophy. All contain freshly written essays, mainly by professional philosophers who double as rabid enthusiasts of the pop-culture subject in play. They’ve proved extremely popular. According to David Ramsay Steele, Open Court’s editorial director, his all-time best-seller in the series, The Simpsons and Philosophy, has sold more than 500,000 copies.

In fact, philosophy books and objects that don’t abandon their down-to-earth American sense of humor–or even flaunt it–often turn into hits. In 2007, two middle-aged Harvard alumni who became pals as philosophy undergrads, Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein, co-wrote a book, Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar, on their shared enthusiasm for “philogags,” jokes that make a philosophical point. Aristotle and an Aardvark Go to Washington followed the next year, and Heidegger and a Hippo Walk through Those Pearly Gates in 2009. More than a few people were laughing–and learning.

The same people, possibly, who bought Foucault and Kierkegaard dolls from The Unemployed Philosophers Guild (www.philosophersguild.com), or who submitted questions to www.askphilosophers.org, a website on which philosophers answer queries “about love, nothingness, and everything else.” When the New York Times added a philosophy blog called “The Stone” to its menu in 2010, the site, edited by New School philosopher Simon Critchley, drew thousands of comments and six-million page views.

America’s formidable strength as a philosophical culture, in short, deserves long overdue recognition. In the early years of the 21st century, America is to philosophy what Italy is to art, or Norway to skiing: a perfectly designed environment for the practice.