Pluralism in American Philosophy: McKenna and Pratt
Diverse
American philosophies—transcendentalist, pragmatist, feminist, and indigenous,
for example—begin with lived experience. They arise from the real questions, uncertainties,
problems, and hesitations that are felt and lived by actual people in their
biological, social, political, and economic environments. Then they turn to
inquiry, reflection, and theorizing in search of intelligent responses to those
uncertainties. After reflection and deliberation, they again attempt to guide purposeful action.
These
American philosophies are fallible and experimentalist—they essay intelligent
responses that may or may not work, and they are willing to revise and transform
their beliefs and habits of action. In short, American philosophies tread a
path from experience and action, to inquiry and reflection, and back to
intelligent, purposeful experience and action.
Lived
experience is plural because differences between persons and groups are real.
Two persons, for example, confront different resistances and difficulties in
their environments. Biologically, two people may have different food allergies
that constrain the ways they seek for food. Socio-politically, people of
different ethnic groups, socioeconomic classes, or genders may confront
different obstacles at work or in family life, for instance. A woman may face different
demands to balance work and family life; a brown person in a white-dominated
society may face harder obstacles to succeed in pursuing his education or
advancing in her profession. Since people’s experiences are irreducibly plural,
the philosophical perspectives that arise from their experiences are also
plural.
Pluralist
philosophies, then, reflect and respond to the irreducible plurality of
experience. But they do not condemn different persons or groups to isolation
and separation from each other. Rather they take affinities, borders, and
boundaries as places of connection from which to cultivate cooperation. As
I wrote before, this is the philosophical pluralism that McKenna and Pratt
trace in their book, American Philosophy. In their words:
Our interest here
is in the philosophical effort that stands on the other side of assimilation
and exclusion: the transformative thinking that rejects settled truth, fixed
goals, and endless progress [through social Darwinist competition]. Instead
thought is situated, fallible, and committed to the idea that liberation [of
oppressed peoples from hegemonic powers and worldviews] is a placed and shared
experience. (p. 6)
Next
I want to illustrate with some examples my own interpretation on how this
philosophical pluralism can guide reasonable and sensible experience in
America.
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