Does America take philosophy seriously? One might as well ask whether America takes monarchy seriously. Joking about philosophy in the United States or just ignoring it comes with the territory, like learning the Pledge of Allegiance. Hard-boiled, concrete-minded descendants of everyone from the Pilgrims to the slaves to the boat people, we pick it up along the way, like mistrusting politicians, refinancing mortgages, or choosing whiz-bang smartphones.
It's the way we're supposed to think about a discipline described by Ambrose Bierce (who promptly disappeared into the desert) as ''a route of many roads, leading from nowhere to nothing,'' and by historian Henry Adams as a field that offers "unintelligible answers to insoluble problems.''
Tocqueville, that touchstone for all synoptic thinking about America, thought the peculiar attitude of its residents toward philosophy so obvious that he began the second volume of Democracy in America by noting it: ''I think that in no country in the civilized world is less attention paid to philosophy than in the United States. The Americans have no philosophical school of their own, and they care but little for all the schools into which Europe is divided."
Even Tocqueville, however, nodded. For all his general insight into the fledgling United States, he, like many French intellectuals, saw American thought through the prism of European assumptions. The conclusion he drew from that putative intellectual state of affairs—that ''in most of the operations of the mind each American appeals only to the individual effort of his own understanding''—was false then and is even more false now. His misstep came in using the word "only." He should have written that each American "also" appeals "to the individual effort of his own understanding."
For the surprising little secret of our ardently capitalist, famously materialist, heavily iPodded, iPadded, and iPhoned society is that America in the early 21st century towers as the most philosophical culture in the history of the world, an unprecedented marketplace of truth and argument that far surpasses ancient Greece, Cartesian France, 19th-century Germany, or any other place one can name over the past three millennia. The openness of its dialogue, the quantity of its arguments, the diversity of its viewpoints, the cockiness with which its citizens express their opinions, the vastness of its First Amendment freedoms, the intensity of its hunt for evidence and information, the widespread rejection of truths imposed by authority or tradition alone, the resistance to false claims of justification and legitimacy, the embrace of Net communication with an alacrity that intimidates the world: All corroborate that fact.
Please explain..please
