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'.
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