From Nature to Experience: The American Search for Cultural Authority (American Intellectual Culture) by Roger Lundin

From Nature to Experience: The American Search for Cultural Authority (American Intellectual Culture) Reviews

• 
  Bob

  Summary: Using two essays by Emerson, "Nature" and "Experience," traces the shift in American moral and cultural authority during the last two centuries.
  
  Roger Lundin was an English professor at Wheaton College until his death in 2015. In this work, he left us with a masterful literary and intellectual history of 19th and 20th century America. He structures this treatment around two essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Nature" and "Experience," tracing the shift in authority from Nature, that is the external world ranging from physical reality to Christian revelation to Experience, the perceptions of the individual know-er.
  
  Lundin traces this intellectual movement through the American pragmatism of Dewey to the post-modernism of Richard Rorty and Stanley Fish. Along the way he engages philosophers like Nietzsche and intellectuals like Henry Adams. He also traces this intellectual shift through the lives of literary figures like Emily Dickinson, of whom he wrote in a separate work, a short story of Stephen Crane, and William Faulkner. And he brings all these in dialogue with Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Karl Barth.
  
  The movement he traces is one from a nature that is enchanted, connected to a transcendent God, to disenchantment, and from a reality and truth rooted outside oneself to subjective glimpses of reality and truth reduced to what works. I've probably stated this summary far more polemically, and with less nuance than does Lundin, who shows a deep acquaintance with and respect for the intellectual and artistic power of each of these figures, with whom most of us, including this reviewer have a passing acquaintance. For that reason, his invoking of Christian sources, and the transcendent vision of authority they represent, comes off as careful scholarship and rigorous argument rather than polemics or proselytizing.
  
  What Lundin does instead is model Christian scholarship at its best, of engaging the minds of one's discipline with a thoughtful Christian mind. He also offers more. In a culture suspicious both of science and anyone else's claims of truth, and an academy witnessing the self-inflicted eclipse of the humanities, Lundin's discussion offers hope for the retrieval of the sources of authority lost to academy and society alike. Sadly, this work, still in print, does not enjoy the circulation it deserves. My own search to find the book in our state's libraries only turned up a single copy. Perhaps calling renewed attention to Lundin's work may both serve as fitting tribute to his scholarship, and invite a new generation to take up his work.
• 
  Steven Blann

  In the authors own words, the three major subjects of this book are “the history of American Pragmatism, the emergence of modern hermeneutics and literary theory, and the development of Protestant theology.” This already paints an eclectic picture, but Lundin is deft in handling dozens of sources, pulled from a wide swath of books, essays, theater, poems, songs, even a couple of movie scripts.
  
  In the front half of the book, he spends most of his time in the 19th century showing how bleak and materialistic reality shattered the romantic ideas of Nature, and left only Experience to stand as the supreme authority. He jumps back and forth from there to contemporary pragmatists and often will connect all of these dots, meeting in the middle as well by pulling on the poetry of Dickenson, or Auden, or some other unlikely sources, all of which I think help the reader understand how much of this may have been distilled and thus received by the masses (though the focus of this book is quite singularly the intellectual).
  
  Throughout all of this, Lundin pulls on his own Protestantism, and quotes regularly from the likes of Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer to inform the reader of theological developments throughout this entire history.
  
  The back half of the book is more focused on application of the ideas. How do all these threads affect us and what we do? How do we navigate the choppy waters between“hermeneutical certainty and interpretive license”? How is “authorial intent” really just secularized Modalism that draws from the same well as its opponents and also less satisfying? It’s all very thought provoking.
• 
  Mark Seeley

  This book is one of the finest examples of inter-disciplinary scholarship; literature, history, theology and philosophy blend to explain America's drift from nature and reality to subjective experience. Lundin's appreciation of Gadamer's phenomenology gave this reader a better understanding of the German philosopher. Reading this book takes time to absorb.
• 
  Alex Strohschein

  Another Goodreads member commented that this book requires two reads. That is true, as my first go-round left me thoroughly befuddled ("From Nature to Experience" joins "Being As Communion" as this year's "surely brilliant but I don't understand" reads). The reasons for this is because Roger Lundin sets out to accomplish an impressive feat - to demonstrate how America came to privilege pragmatism as the source of cultural authority, all while utilizing literature, philosophy, theology and history (I applaud such an interdisciplinary use of fields). I think Lundin is correct that pragmatism is the dominant mode of thought in the USA, even often in churches (especially seeker-sensitive ones), but I don't find his account so convincing because he doesn't really ground his argument in the concrete history of the masses; instead, this is more a history of ideas, reliant upon key thinkers and artists like Ralph Waldo Emerson, William James, Richard Rorty, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Karl Barth, Emily Dickinson, Don DeLillo and William Faulkner. Thus, this book largely comes across as a book of literary criticism and hermeneutics. He explains how these influential figures shifted away from "nature" and embraced "experience." One interesting thing that stood out to me is Lundin's discussion of the evolution of thinking about art. Whereas previously art was created to imitate nature, a different and newer understanding of art arose that made it want to move past nature, to NOT depict nature but our own vision or fantasy of it.
• 
  Charles

  I'm actually re-reading this. It's beautifully and forcefully written but requires at least two readings. It charts the move from idealism to pragmatism which begins with Emerson's disillusionment (brought on by family tragedy, perhaps)with his cheery optimism, a shift that can be traced between his celebrated essay, "Nature" (1838)and his later essay, "Experience" (1846). It passes through the early pragmatisms of James and Dewey and takes the story up to the present with the recent work of Jeffrey Stout, Richard Rorty, and other neo-pragmatists. A compelling critique of a philosophic tradition which, for all its appeal, may be a gigantic dead-end.