|
|
Is There an American Ideology?
| Article
# : |
12465 |
|
|
Section : |
BOOK WORLD
|
| Issue
Date : |
7 / 1987 |
2,562 Words |
| Author
: |
Charles L. Griswold, Jr.
|
IDEOLOGY AND AMERICAN EXPERIENCE
John K. Roth and Robert C. Whittemore, eds.
Washington Institute Press, 1986.
256 pp., $21.95
What does it mean to be an American? The Fourth of July, which the nation is about to celebrate, calls for an answer. The question might profitably be pursued by contrasting it with another, famously philosophical, query: What does it mean to be human?
At first glance, the second question has nothing to do with the first. For it would seem that we could speculate at length about what it means to be human without ever asking what it means to be American, or for that matter, a member of any other regime. Indeed, countless philosophers have, and no doubt always will, proceed by theorizing about human nature without worrying much about the forms humans assume when impressed by certain "ideologies." Philosophers proceed thus not because they ignore the fact that they reside in a particular place and time, but on the grounds that concrete historical experiences are not necessarily implied by universal truths. And in Plato's terminology, the love of wisdom is the desire to know the eternal "forms," or universal principles of intelligibility.
Similarly, at first glance the question of what it means to be an American seems to have nothing to do with the venerable philosophical question of what it means to be human. A number of the authors of Ideology and American Experience, for example, write profitably about topics such as America's foreign policy and the American economy without puzzling over questions of philosophical self-knowledge. We would probably wish to admit that all sorts of interesting things could be said about the "American experience" without unleashing philosophical perplexities. Appropriating several key similes from Book 6 of Plato's Republic, we might argue that just as a navigator can make his way across the open sea with an eye on the moon and a working knowledge of the currents, all the while remaining ignorant of astronomy and physics, so too a people can accomplish its odyssey while remaining ignorant of the theoretical principles that explain how truth differs from illusion, or the light of the sun from its reflections in moonshine.
Indeed, Alexis de Tocqueville suggests that part of what it means to be an American is precisely not to feel hounded by philosophy: "Less attention, I suppose, is paid to philosophy in the United States than in any other country of the civilized world. The Americans have no school of philosophy peculiar to themselves, and they pay very little attention to the rival European schools." One even hears it said that to the extent to which Americans have become obsessed with philosophizing about who they are, they have lost the sense of self-confidence and energy essential to a healthy body politic. To philosophize is to doubt; to doubt is to lack belief in the truth of an answer, and that - so the argument continues - is to lack resolve. If that line of reasoning holds, we ought not (at least not publicly) to avail ourselves of the Fourth of July to trace the meaning of the American experience back to questions about human experience as such. The occasion would better be used, we are told, to praise the American experience.
Is the prima facie alienation of political life and philosophy that I have
...
Read Full Article
|
|
