Thinking in Search of a Language : Essays on American Intellect and Intuition

"Thinking in Search of a Language explores American literary and philosophical traditions, and their intimate connections, by focusing on two defining strands in the intellectual history of the United States. The first half of the book offers a multifaceted interpretation of Emerson's constantly shifting early-modernist thought - "I liked everything by turns and nothing long," he said memorably - and its legacy in American writing. The second half turns to the modernists themselves and the pluralistic and radical-empiricist ways in which they engaged the world philosophically. Herwig Friedl's broad and deep examination of American thought, which also incorporates the international context and response, illuminates the global significance of the American intellectual tradition. Tying together all of these essays is the persistent question and problem of an adequate language or terminological framework as one kind of interpretive leitmotif. This reflects the fact that Friedl's sensibility is steeped in a cross-pollination of continental and American thought, a combination that recalls - and is as revelatory as - the work of Stanley Cavell."--Bloomsbury Publishing. Cover Contents Acknowledgments Introduction Part One Philosophical Proteus: Varieties of Emerson’s Thinking 1 Emerson among the Presocratics 2 Emerson; or, the Neopyrrhonist Skeptic 3 Mysticism and Thinking 4 Hosting Sa’di 5 Resisting Hegel 6 Nature/Poetry 7 Transgressive Manners 8 Nietzsche’s Emerson 9 Emerson’s and Dewey’s America Part Two American Pragmatism: Thinking Modernism 10 American Thinking Out of Bounds 11 William James: Ontology and Imagery 12 William James: Ontological Skepticism 13 Kitaro Nishida and William James 14 The Necessity of the Lost Middle Voice 15 Polite Disagreements: James and Bergson 16 Congruences and Divergences: James, Bergson, Dewey 17 William James and Charles Taylor 18 The New Index "A preeminent scholar of American studies explores the American literary and philosophical traditions, and the connections between them, by investigating, first, Emerson's thought and its influence on American writing and, second, the pluralistic and radical ways in which American modernists engaged the world"-- Provided by publisher