Thinking in Search of a Language: Essays on American Intellect and Intuition

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Thinking in Search of a Language explores American literary and philosophical traditions, and their intimate connections, by focusing on two defining strands in the intellectual history of the United States. The first half of the book offers a multifaceted interpretation of Emersons constantly shifting early-modernist thoughtI liked everything by turns and nothing long, he said memorablyand its legacy in American writing. The second half turns to the modernists themselves and the pluralistic and radical-empiricist ways in which they engaged the world philosophically. Herwig Friedls broad and deep examination of American thought, which also incorporates the international context and response, illuminates the global significance of the American intellectual tradition. Tying together all of these essays is the persistent question and problem of an adequate language or terminological framework as one kind of interpretive leitmotif. This reflects the fact that Friedls sensibility is steeped in a cross-pollination of continental and American thought, a combination that recallsand is as revelatory asthe work of Stanley Cavell.

Reviews

Friedl has now brought these essays together in an impressive volume, arranging his work into a discerning case for Emersons innovative philosophical influence, and providing a fresh analysis of the American pragmatists and their pre-linguistic turn in modern thinking. * New Technologies in American Studies *
Informed by Continental as well as American thought, these essays, shaped into a connected argument, provide a scholarly exploration of American philosophy and pragmatism Overall this window into the conversation between European and American philosophers of experience is quite exhilarating. Orienting Emerson by his influence on Nietzsche and defending James against Charles Taylor provides the clearest indication of the authors intention of preferring a dynamic flux to static or traditional conclusions. Summing Up: Recommended. * Choice *
Never has the importance of Emerson and William James to the modernization of philosophic thought been unfolded with greater subtlety, boldness, and erudition as in Herwig Friedl's Thinking in Search of a Language, the product of a scholarly lifetime of research by one of the leading interpreters of the interrelations between American and Continental traditions from Transcendentalism to Pragmatism. * Lawrence Buell, Powell M. Cabot Research Professor of American Literature Emeritus, Harvard University, USA, and author of Literary Transcendentalism (1973) and Emerson (2003) *
Herwig Friedls essays on American Transcendentalism and Pragmatism have long enjoyed cult status among insiders. Reading them cover to cover is no less than a revelation. In interpretations that are original, surprising, and strikingly lucid, he pursues the perennially shape-shifting force of Being as it runs through the thought of Ralph Waldo Emerson, William James, Emily Dickinson, John Dewey, John Cage, and many others. The American preoccupation with the new, he shows, grows out of an orientation to that undercurrent of existence that can be sensed but not spoken. As Friedl elucidates in comparative readings unmatched in breadth and detail, this is an orientation American writers share with kindred spirits across space and time, including the Presocratics, Sadi, Nishida Kitaro, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Henri Bergson. Written over 35 years, yet comprising a remarkably coherent whole, Thinking in Search of a Language is the book readers devoted to American thought have been waiting for. * Johannes Voelz, Heisenberg-Professor of American Studies, Democracy, and Aesthetics, Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany *
Herwig Friedls collection, Thinking in Search of a Language: Essays on American Intellect and Intuition is the essential, indispensable companion to studying Americas philosophical engagement as it begins with Ralph Waldo Emersons crucial experiments in thinking and moves into William Jamess radical reconceiving of what we understand as "experience" in unfolding his variety of American pragmatism. Friedl, himself steeped from early on in the pre-Socratics and informed later by extended encounters with the teaching of Gadamer and Heidegger, guides us superbly with and in his exquisite sentences, prcising instruments that disclose what we have always seen but never seen before. Reading the Introduction alone is an education in how to read, what to do. The chapters following are perfectly parsed into two sections that work together in the manner of a Renaissance diptych, each part, in this case, textured by detail and scrupulous scholarship in the foreground set against a sweeping survey of the landscape from which modernism evolved. Friedls volume is a brilliant achievement! * Joan Richardson, Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature, The Graduate Center CUNY, USA *
Friedls volume is the fruit of a careers worth of careful study and patient attention to what Emerson and [William] James made possible. * American Literary History *

Author Bio

Herwig Friedl is Professor Emeritus of American Literature and History of Ideas at Heinrich-Heine-Universitt Dsseldorf, Germany. His book publications include a study of Henry James aesthetic theory and, as editor, essay collections on E.L. Doctorow, on women studies as cultural studies, and on gender and conceptions of space.