Lost Intimacy In American Thought

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This title offers a critique of rationalism in contemporary American thought by recovering a lost tradition of intimacy in the writings of Thoreau, Bugbee, James, Arendt, Dickinson, Fuller, Wilshire and Cavell. The Loss of Intimacy in American Thought focuses on a number of American philosophers whose work overlaps the religious and the literary.

Henry David Thoreau, Henry Bugbee, Hannah Arendt, Bruce Wilshire and Stanley Cavell are included, as well as Henry James, whose novels are treated as presenting an implicit moral philosophy. The chapters are linked by a concern for lost intimacy with the natural world and others. The early Marx would see this as the alienations in industrial societies of persons from nature, from the processes of work, from each other, and from themselves.

Weber might call it the disenchantment of the world. In any case, it is a condition that forms a focus of concern for Thoreau, Bugbee, Arendt, Cavell and Wilshire as well as writers such Henry James, Dickinson and Margaret Fuller. These writers hold out a hope for closing the gaps that sustain alienations of multiple sorts and Mooney brings them into critical discourse with the secularised and constricted rationalism of contemporary analytic philosophy.

The latter exalts 'objectivity' and encourages the approach that one should adopt a third person view on everything, dividing the world into rigid binary oppositions: self/other; mind/matter; human/animal; religious/secular; fact/value; rational/irrational; and, enlightened/indigenous. By contrast, each of the thinkers that Mooney discusses see writing as a way of saving the object of attention from neglect or misplaced appropriation, outright attack, or occlusion.

His aim is to recognise the importance of non-argumentative forms of address in these American thinkers. The method he employs is analysis of particular texts and passages that exhibit a generous, often poetic or lyrical discernment of worth in the world. It is not meant to be an exhaustive treatment of any one thinker or theme, but a set of case studies, as it were, or a set of particular explorations, each self-sufficient yet resonating with its companion pieces.

Mooney's objective is to spark interest in those who are ready to recover Thoreau and Emerson and Bugbee for the sort of American tradition that Cavell has sought to discover and rejuvenate; the tradition, as Mooney puts it, of 'American Intimates'. Review: This book is a work of love, in which a group of extraordinary thinkers are defended as exemplars of authentic philosophy and united as part of an alternative canon.

True to the spirit of his epigraph from Ortega, Edward Mooney devotes careful attention to these American philosophers and their ideas, unveiling and thus demonstrating their significance. Lost Intimacy In American Thought subverts the myth of impersonal reflection, the assumption that philosophers should write books without being writers, and 'the apathetic fallacy, ' as Mooney aptly terms it, which arises from the belief that reality is factual but not valuable.

In fact, as Mooney shows, the world is a place that overflows with meaning in ways that our best philosophers have sought to understand and account for - and to develop a significant philosophical vision of reality, as Mooney convincingly argues, is nothing less than a sacred task. Apart from Alphonso Lingis, no one other than Mooney has done so much to bring a lyric voice to contemporary philosophy.

Readers who are just discovering Mooney's work will be in for a delightful surprise, and those who have admired his writings on the existential tradition will enjoy a new and distinctive addition to his corpus. This is truly an essential text. Rick Anthony Furtak, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Colorado College, USA