Lecture Notes

Week 1: Edwards, Santayana and American Philosophy

Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758)

1.     Edwards was

·        educated at Yale College,

·        assumed pastorate in 1729 of his grandfather’s church in Northampton, Massachusetts,

·        and named President of the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University) in 1757 but died of small pox before assuming post.

2.      His thinking is

·        pre-modern: tradition is authoritative

·        Calvinist: God is sovereign

·        idealist (reality is immaterial and theistic)

·        empiricist: one should be able to see evidence of sanctification in the religious affections

·        and the dominant thinker for a hundred years or more

3.     It proved difficult to maintain this synthesis over the next 150 years. 

(See Flower and Murphey, A History of Philosophy in America [Putnams, 1977; p. xvff], on the general point of the relation of religion, science and philosophy.)

4.     Edwards significance for American philosophy:

·        Bruce Kuklick says: “Edwards bequeathed the central question to succeeding generations of American thinkers: how is the lone believer, at the mercy of a cosmos that was spiritually enigmatic, to assert a moral freedom?” (A History of Philosophy in America: 1720-2000; p. 25)

·        I think Edwards provides us with a model of the rigorous thinker/actor trying to reconstruct his tradition to account for new intellectual/social developments.

·        Keep in mind: Edwards was a deeply religious intellectual.  Today such a person is unusual; but for much of American history he was the norm.

Santayana (1863–1952) and the "Genteel Tradition"

George Santayana was a Spanish-American

• who came to the United States (Boston) as a boy (1872)

• educated there, including Harvard College (graduated 1886), where he became a member of one of the greatest philosophy departments in the history of America, according to some

• left in 1912, and spent the rest of his life traveling and living for periods of time in various places in Europe and writing.

•  

Notes on "Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy

1.      America is a young country with two old mentalities, which, collectively,
form the genteel tradition, and a new one (187).

2.      The genteel tradition is symbolized by colonial mansions and femininity.

3.      The new one is reflective of aggressive enterprise (skyscraper/masculine).

4.      The first source of the genteel tradition is Calvinism (sin exists, sin is
punished and it is beautiful that sin should be punished).

5.      But people prospered (thanks to the Calvinist work ethic) and ceased to be
agonized; they became victorious and blameless (190).

6.      The second source is transcendentalism (or systematic subjectivism; 191ff).

7.      The humorists, such as Mark Twain, have not completely escaped the
genteel tradition (201f).

8.      Walt Whitman, with his Bohemianism, has left it entirely; but America is
not Bohemian.

9.      The real challenge to the GT is from Wm. James, for he truly represents
the new America with his pragmatism (206), which is something genuinely new in the history of thought (209).

10.  Henry James overcame the GT by understanding it (204).

11.  William James "eluded the genteel tradition in the romantic way, by continuing it into its opposite. . . . [He] has completely reversed its old judgment under cover of expanding them" (204). 

12.  How did he do this: by representing the marginalized and by "recasting" what the educated have "to offer" (205).

13.  Specifically: pragmatism (206), which puts intellect to work.

14.  The third thing he did: he anthropomorphized nature but as a materialist (207).

15.  Summary paragraph (212).

16.  NOTE: in historicizing American thinking Santayana makes a pragmatic move.