Getting to the roots of American thought Archived article from Feb 2, 2001 By Douglas Frank   When he joined the philosophy department 31 years ago, Bruce Wilshire never imagined he would write a book interweaving American pragmatism and phenomenology with something few in his field have ever considered -- the basic tenets of Native American thought. "I was well acquainted with pragmatism and phenomenology, having gone through the New York University doctoral program, a magnificent, pluralistic, panoramic study of the history of philosophy. But not once was indigenous thought and philosophy mentioned by anyone," the New Brunswick professor recalled recently. Bruce Wilshire connects the philosophy of American pragmatists such as Thoreau, Emerson and James with that of the Lakota medicine man Black Elk, who believed, among other tenets, that the sound of the drum "arouses the mind and makes men feel the mystery and power of things." Photo by Nick Romanenko "I might have, back then, seen a convergence between those Euro-American philosophies and Native American, indigenous philosophy, if I had known to look for something to converge with, but it was just off the screen." Wilshire now has put such thinking on the screen in his new book, "The Primal Roots of American Philosophy: Pragmatism, Phenomenology, and Native American Thought," written for the American and European Philosophy Series published by the Pennsylvania State University Press. The study shows how the thinking of American pragmatic philosophers such as Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William James and others connects with indigenous American thought of the kind articulated by Black Elk, a Lakota holy man and thinker. Wilshire's approach is well out of the mainstream. Indeed, in the foreword to the book, Edward S. Casey, a professor at SUNY-Stony Brook, says: "It takes courage to reconceive philosophy in this way, thereby broadening its horizons to reflect those of the actual landscape of an immense continent. ... To follow this unaccustomed path is to rediscover what is truly a matter of native genius -- the genius loci of a terrain whose first inhabitants, still and for the first time, have a great deal to teach us philosophically about what it is to be, and finally become, American." Wilshire became aware of indigenous thought 10 years ago when he read "Black Elk Speaks," a compilation of interviews about the medicine man's early life conducted by visionary and poet John Neihardt in 1931. "What you find in that book is a different world from European thought," Wilshire attests. For instance, Black Elk, from within the circle of his tepee, looks out at a world that is all of one piece. "Birds," he says, "make their nests in circles for theirs is the same religion as ours." He then extends and repeats this image of the circle in his notion of the "whole hoop of the world," and comes to see that the "sacred hoop of my people was one of many hoops that made one circle." Within this great circle, Wakan Tanka, the Great Mystery, intended the Lakota to raise their children in integrity with the whole, Wilshire points out. In this and other examples, Black Elk speaks of a communal world in which, Wilshire writes, "The spiritual is not the nonphysical. It is the earth, the sky, our bodily selves in the surprisingly full amplitude of their ensemble. It is the hidden centrality of the earth." The 19th-century American thinkers whom Wilshire discusses in his book often echo this sense of the world. They rejected the kind of European philosophical modernism epitomized by René Descartes, the 17th-century French mechanistic-mathematical physicist dubbed the father of modern philosophy, who posited a dualism that separates the mind from the body. "We are supposed to be minds attached somehow to mechanical bodies. In contrast, our American-pragmatist philosophical thinkers of the nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries are organismic to the core: the world is like an organism and we organisms are most mindful and most spiritual when most involved ecstatically in the world-whole. They are pragmatic and primal. They begin turning back toward indigenous life," writes Wilshire. "All the American pragmatists believe that we must begin with where we actually find ourselves, not lost in the abstraction, 'the mind,' and in paper doubts about the 'external world,' but enmeshed as organisms in the world, the world of living and nonliving things that has evolved and formed us out of the depths of time." These philosophers "connect unmistakably with the orientation of Black Elk. They and their ancestors had interacted with this continent and its native populations for hundreds of years and are distinctly American," Wilshire maintains. They were also decidedly anti-Cartesian. Philosopher Charles Peirce, for example, "asserted that the first order of business was to discard Descartes and to start thinking afresh." And James had so completely broken loose from Descartes' thinking that, according to Wilshire, he "stood on the brink" of becoming a shamanistic healer. Like Black Elk, the Americans shared a perception of the oneness of the world. Emerson, for example, "resonates to vegetables, plants and trees." And Wilshire quotes him as saying, "The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister is the suggestion of an occult relation between man and the vegetable. I am not alone and unacknowledged. They nod to me, and I to them." Likewise Thoreau feels himself in the community of all beings when he hears the "sound of Heywood's Brook falling into Fair Haven Pond," and writes, "What is it I hear but the pure water falls within me, in the circulation of my blood -- the streams that fall into my heart." And James believed that we are not only in the environment; we are of it, adds Wilshire. "Thoreau's, Emerson's and James's work should be seen as converging with deep patterns of indigenous thought and action. It is difficult for this to happen, for segmenting the world-experienced is built into our Western languages," writes Wilshire. Nevertheless, he declares that "psychophysical dualism is finished," and later adds, "There is no mirror-lined mental domain in which we can sequester ourselves." These thinkers, he says, are "converging to what primordial peoples such as the Oglala Lakota knew before contact with Europeans began to shred it. That is, a world of kinship, of spiritual sharpness and keenness, in which the very substance, the energic reality, of things permeate and become part of our lives." To show how we fit in the world, Wilshire describes a common practice of many North American indigenous peoples to sing the sun up at dawn. To believe that the sun is only a globe of gas and doesn't need our help in rising, he says, obscures an older truth: "that our lives, evolved over millions of years in nature, have taken shape with the sun, and if we are to rise with the power of its rising, we must celebrate that rising. We must do our part."

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