The Hidden God

Pragmatism and Posthumanism in American Thought

Ryan White

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN:
  9780231539593
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: North American History

The Hidden God revisits the origins of American pragmatism and finds a nascent "posthumanist" critique shaping early modern thought. By reaching as far back as the Calvinist arguments of the American Puritans and their struggle to know a "hidden God," this book brings American pragmatism closer to contemporary critical theory.

Ryan White reads the writings of key American philosophers, including Jonathan Edwards, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William James, and Charles Sanders Peirce, against modern theoretical works by Niklas Luhmann, Richard Rorty, Jacques Derrida, Sharon Cameron, Cary Wolfe, and Gregory Bateson. This juxtaposition isolates the distinctly posthumanist form of pragmatism that began to arise in these early texts, challenging the accepted genealogy of pragmatic discourse and common definitions of posthumanist critique. Its rigorously theoretical perspective has wide implications for humanities research, enriching investigations into literature, history, politics, and art.

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Observing Modernity in America
• 1. The Double Consciousness: American Thought and the Theory of Theory
• 2. Inside-Out: Pragmatism and the Meaning of America
• 3. On True Virtue: Jonathan Edwards and the Ethics of Self-Reference
• 4. Neither Here nor There: Grief and Absence in Emerson’s “Experience”
• 5. Every Language Is Foreign: Self and Cybernetics in the Event-Machine
• 6. The Cybernetic Imaginary: Musement and the Unsaying of Theory
• Notes
• Index