Self Evidence
From Nature to Experience: The American Search for Cultural Authority
by Roger
Lundin
Rowman & Littlefield, 2005
(280 pages, $26.95, paperback)
reviewed by John Harmon McElroy
From Nature to Experience: The American Search for Cultural Authority by Roger Lundin, a professor of English at Wheaton College, is a thoroughly documented, closely reasoned critique of the religious and literary temperament of Europe and the United States during the last two centuries. But despite its subtitle, the nature of cultural authority and whether Americans have sought it in distinctive ways are not analyzed.
What Lundin does furnish, and it is much, is an analysis of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature (Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau, Melville, Dickinson, Adams, Crane, Frost, Faulkner, DeLillo), European and American literary theorists (Foucault, Rieff, Derrida, MacIntyre, Ricoeur, Hirsch, Bakhtin, Poirier, Fish), and Western theologians and philosophers (Kant, Coleridge, Schleiermacher, Hegel, Nietzsche, James, Dewey, Gadamer, Hauerwas, Bonhoeffer, Tillich, Thielicke, Rorty, and especially Barth, whom he calls “the foremost Protestant theologian of the past two centuries”) in regard to religious and literary trends since the Enlightenment.
He summarizes their essential ideas, compares their thought, and summarizes other commentators’ opinions with a mastery of his complex sources and an extraordinary expository skill. The sensitivity of the creative writers in anticipating shifts in collective thought makes Lundin’s juxtaposition of them with the theorists and philosophers especially noteworthy and attractive.
This book is particularly concerned with “key differences” between Christian belief and “contemporary pragmatism,” the philosophy that gained ascendancy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as received religious beliefs declined among Western thinkers.
Pragmatic Authority
Emerson provides the paradigm for this development. When he resigned his Boston pulpit three years after his ordination as a Unitarian minister, and embraced a new career as a lecturer-essayist with the publication of “Nature” (1836), he still regarded nature as manifesting design and Spirit.
But this vestigial Christian view of nature, the view that it reveals a hierarchy of transcendent authority that can stimulate man’s intellectual maturation, morality, and spiritual growth, was soon replaced by the subjectivist views he expressed in “Experience” (1844). In this essay he extolled each individual’s inner experience as the only imperative for the conduct of life.
Lundin shows how James, Dewey, and others followed Emerson’s lead in relocating the practical source of truth within each person’s varying experiences. He also indicates how this relocation became a problematic new basis of authority.
Among the effects he described are four I will mention here (this is only a sampling):
John Harmon McElroy is Professor Emeritus of the University of Arizona. As a Fulbright Professor of American Studies he taught at universities in Brazil and Spain. He is the author of Divided We Stand: The Rejection of American Culture Since the 1960s (Rowman & Littlefield), published earlier this year. He and his wife have four children and ten grandchildren. Because of his experience in Poland, he says, he has been a communicant of the Roman Catholic Church since 1983.
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