Joan Richardson's _A Natural History of Pragmatism_

Joan Richardson's _A Natural History of Pragmatism_ is absolutely sensational. It's not just how she links Edwards, Emerson, Williams, Dewey, James, Stevens, and Stein together with philosophy, natural history, and Darwin's theory of evolution (wherein Darwin was able to rethink bio development in terms of his theory of evolution by reimagining the grammar of science in ways that drew on the power of literature, culture, and the imagination, and how this theory of dynamic systems in ecology and biology shared in an 18th and 19th century intellectual culture that was interpolated by the field of aesthetics, manifesting in literary grammars like Emerson's, whose writing mimics, according to Richardson, complex processes in evolutionary biology); no, it's not just that; it's also how Richardson writes. Her sentences are adventurous in their syntax, performing the arguments they make. One gem of an observation is that Emerson reverses a common Romantic terrain of the imagination: "The lamp turned inward by the first generation of romantic poets Emerson turned outward, now to project its light through the multiple prisms offered by the various sciences as they were evolving" (77). The idea of "correspondence" isn't new; Lawrence Buell's _Literary Transcendentalism_, published in I believe 1979, richly develops, in an almost scientistically rigorous way, the notion that for Emerson each object in nature stands for some object of the soul or the universal mind. But what's interesting about Richardson's approach (as well as Laura Dassow Walls's and Lee Rust Brown's) is not the dusty idea of correspondence but instead the still very fresh idea of the connections between 19th century science complimented 19th century Romanticism through a conception of aesthetics, and more particularly language-as-vehicle for the (barely containable) movements of the mind, as organic. Thought, like nature, became an organic process, one built to a large extent on contingency over linear progression: "In place of linear progress to the closing 'Truth' of an argument premised on the rules of the classical logic, Emerson allowed his perceptions to deposit themselves according to their specific gravities" (Richardson uses scientistic verbal metaphors like "deposit" because Emerson shows us that metaphors and tropes don't _stand_ for an idea, a concept, a meaning but rather _are_that idea, that concept, that meaning). Thus, Emerson's prose resembles Darwin's aesthetic-grammatical choices in _Origin of the Species_. In Origin, Darwin made his language mimic "not the teleology implicit in the great-chain-of-being model but the very opposite, the absence of design, chance, which he had uncovered to be the method of nature" (81). I am refreshed to read Richardson writing that "the grammatical and syntactic confusion of [Emerson's] style was created deliberately," so Emerson could, like Edwards, create "a template of the mind's activity" (79). Of course the idea of language showing or revealing or documenting the development of a thought rather than the pre-fabbed conclusion of a thought (deliberate linguistic opacity instead of the pretense of signifier-signified transparency) is a tenet at the heart of American Pragmatism. Pragmatism looks at language as both a prison and the only viable means of expression: a prison because the individual becomes at worst misrepresented, partitioned, and foreclosed upon, or at best circumscribed to partial, incomplete, and unsatisfactory Truth; the only viable means because Truth isn't "out there" but is instead created and maintained within the maze of language. (The differences between poststructuralism and pragmatism start to seem significant, even though both philosophies look to language in constitutive and vital ways.) But Richardson takes pragmatism into a new context: that of vital, American and European 18th and 19th century intellectual cultures. What specifically interests me about all this is how these ideas shed new light on traditions of reading Emerson. A prominent wave of criticism has maintained that Emerson was a neo-platonist. My current project argues that his vocabulary was neo-plantonic at times, but his grammar was quite resistant to linear, transparent (platonic) logics. Instead, I am thinking, it pre-figures and anticipates modes of experimental poetics and prose.   A Natural History of Pragmatism