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righteousness. An exorcism of innocence, of analytic clarity, of every dogmatism that ever tried to trap experience and confine it, such an exorcism has just been performed. Of course no court reporter could have etched McDermott’s words today; however, one could turn to a passage from his latest book: “No doubt our past experiences should remain alive in our consciousness and should be stirred and restirred so that they envelop and enrich our present experiences. But it is to the future that we wend. We cannot stand still. If we do, atrophy awaits us. Our deepest personal need, then, is to grow, for personal growth is the only sure sign that we are not yet dead. And by growth we mean here the capacity to convert our environment into sources of personal nutrition, to eat experience, as it were. The deeper meaning of growth is not an increase of size, length, height, or any other quantitative measure. Rather, it has to do with fructification, enriching, enhancing, and the pregnant provision for still further growth.” Having finished his “version of a 20th Century Whitman poem,” McDermott steps down. When the applause subsides, Paul Thompson, Texas A&M professor of philosophy, whose job it is to make several housekeeping announcements, confesses, “I feel like a warm beer at a wine tasting.” Thompson arrived at Texas A&M five years ago, one of a group of scholars freshly minted out of the State University of New York at Stony Brook who were attracted to American philosophy under the influence of Justus Buehler. Thompson was recruited to direct a program initiated by the College of Agriculture, and he spends much of his scholarly energies on problems of applied ethics. In a recent manuscript on “The Philosophical Underpinnings of U.S. Agricultural Policy,” Thompson treats author Wendell Berry and Texas Agriculture Commissioner Jim Hightower as modern voices in the Jeffersonian tradition. Like Jefferson, Berry and Hightower understand how farming is valuable as a way of life: “A democracy in which economic opportunities are only open to the wealthy and well-educated is intolerable to Hightower. In this view, it is essential for a democracy to have a place where the little guy can make it. A society without such an outlet becomes vulnerable to radicalism, anarchy, and revolution.” Thompson finds that the entrepreneurial emphasis of Hightower’s populism “provides a way of reconciling the rhetoric of the deep agrarianism advocated by Berry with the realities of farm life. Laying stress on entrepreneurship, rather than backbreaking sweat and toil, allows the majority of American farmers on the agrarian bandwagon and provides a point of focus against the corporate middlemen and suppliers who have been traditionally portrayed as enemies of the farmer.” The welcome complete, the mission of pluralism invoked, and this room full of travelers having been brought to see how there is a there here, the conference gets going. For three days the proceedings and celebrations continue until some presentations have been completed and several reputations celebrated. The texts of the American classical period have never had such a workout. The pace is too furious for deep reflection, and there are rare opportunities to ask questions. This is a time for thinking on one’s feet, for sampling some of the standards, and for opening intellectual byways. In a session on “Social Critiques,” Kenneth W. Stikkers of Seattle University presents a selection of social commentaries from the writings of Peirce, the logical yeoman of the American classical period. It is the irascible and irrepressible Peirce owe the central insights of Pragmatism, and the range of his genius will not be exhausted by scholars in our lifetime. His groundworks in semiotics, logic, and mathematics have yet to find comprehensive appreciation. And Carolyn Eisele of Hunter College reminds us, after 35 years of collecting and editing his works in math and science, that Peirce was the first human to attempt to chart the shape of our own galaxy, the Milky Way. But Peirce as a social critic? Stikkers brings up a panful of nuggets. Developing alongside Darwinisms of every kind, Pragmatism in its sophisticated form was always more appalled than approving of the rampant ideology of the survival of the fittest. What Andrew Carnegie was fond of calling the “Gospel of Wealth,” Peirce redubbed the “Gospel of Greed.” For Peirce, the consummate logician, to be logical was to be social, to ask after problems which exceed one’s own, to settle issues of the community through communal inquiry; this to Peirce was the spirit of science and the salvation it promised. “He who would not sacrifice his own soul to save the whole world, he is the one who is illogical,” writes Peirce. For logical error is metaphysically bound up in love of the individual, says Peirce, noting how the Latin sin has its root in the singular, unshared, unredeemed individual. The ideology of the marketplace, with its emphasis on private profit, is thus anathema to logic and science. The methods of greed and secrecy are not conducive to enlightenment; rather, Peirce sees in our popular ideology the honoring of things \(we don’t to “systematic destruction of human society.” When will we stop learning from Peirce? A new critical edition of his writings, arranged in chronological order, is in the early stages of publication, only just now reaching into the 1877 essays which laid the foundation of Pragmatist thought. Charles Hartshorne, professor emeritus at the University of Texas at Austin co-edited several volumes of Peirce’s work \(though and it is the current standard of the trade. Kenneth L. Ketner of Texas Tech University operates a Peirce center in Lubbock, complete with the best collection of papers outside Boston. And one doesn’t want to forget A&M professor Robert Burch who with the flick of a pen and in three minutes time can introduce the novice to the logical form of the existential graphs, Peirce’s proudest achievement. When one asks where is Texas with respect to Peirce, there is a long answer in the making. Yet one cannot take leave of the paradigmatic Peirce without noting the tragic outline of his career. Following decades of distinguished fieldwork in science and about five years of teaching at Johns Hopkins University, Peirce was ostracized by the academic community and relegated to a life of solitude and penury. His condition placed damaging constraints on his work, yet he continued to create prescient frontiers of thought until he died of cancer in 1914. It is an excersize in somber tragedy to read the pathetic complaints of his later correspondence from Milford, Pennsylvania. “But,” as he wrote to his famous corespondent, Lady Welby, “living in the country on this side of the Atlantic, unless one is a multimillionaire, is attended with great friction.” From a certain point of view all talk of philosophy during the American classical period is by way of preface or footnote to the work of John Dewey. Such was the case with Lynne M. Adrian’s treatment of “Emma Goldman and the Spirit of Artful Living.” Adrian, of the University of Alabama, is engaged in a sorely needed affirmative action campaign, calling on the keepers of intellectual history to include Goldman among what is now a male pantheon of thinkers. The reason to take Goldman seriously stems from her theory of “artful living,” which seems to prefigure by a matter of decades what Dewey would work out with his special brand of thoroughness in Art as Experience. Yet, as Adrian notes, for all the biographies of Goldman, there isn’t a book that treats her intellect in the way that others treat Peirce, James, or Dewey. The irony of Goldman’s neglect is a profound one for Pragmatism. That Goldman should be shunted off into the realm of action rather than thought is a puzzling state of affairs for a movement that contributed so much to the deconstruction of thought vs. action. To grasp the Pragmatic insight is to have a respect for knowhow, to see with Goldman into the intelligence of the mechanic, to experience art as a process of human production rather than as an artifact of idle enjoyment. She rejected the “beautiful living” of Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman because it suggested passive appreciation rather than active engagement. 12 JULY 1, 1988