The American Evasion of Philosophy

The American Evasion is the major contemporary intellectual history of pragmatism and the principal statement of West's own prophetic-pragmatist position.

"Pragmatism is the distinctively American philosophical tradition — distinctive in its refusal of the European epistemological problematic and in its insistence on the cultural-political situatedness of philosophical inquiry." (The American Evasion, Introduction)

West's "prophetic pragmatism" explicitly incorporates theological resources — Niebuhr's neo-orthodoxy, the Black Christian prophetic tradition — that secular pragmatism (Rorty) refuses.

"Prophetic pragmatism is pragmatism enriched by the religious resources that secular pragmatism, in its anxiety to escape religion, has prematurely set aside." (The American Evasion, ch. 8)

West identifies the underlying generative structures of American intellectual culture — the religious-political-cultural conditions that produced the pragmatist evasion — in a critical-realist mode.

"The American evasion of philosophy is no accident of national temperament; it is the philosophical expression of the particular religious, political, and economic conditions of American intellectual life." (The American Evasion, ch. 1)

The recovery of W.E.B. Du Bois as central to the pragmatist tradition — and the framing of prophetic pragmatism as serving justice — connects West to liberation-theological themes.

"Du Bois is the great pragmatist who has been written out of the standard genealogy; the recovery of Du Bois's pragmatism is the recovery of pragmatism's relation to justice." (The American Evasion, ch. 5)

West's pragmatism incorporates existentialist resources — Kierkegaard, Sartre, Camus — that mainstream pragmatism has been less comfortable with.

"What I call prophetic pragmatism takes seriously the existentialist insistence on the irreducibility of personal commitment and the tragic dimensions of historical struggle." (The American Evasion, ch. 8)

The mainstream pragmatist tradition (Dewey, Quine) is naturalist; West's prophetic pragmatism adds theological resources without rejecting the broad naturalist framework.

"Naturalism without religion is not yet adequate to actual American intellectual life; the religious resources are not merely vestigial but constitutive." (The American Evasion, Conclusion)

West engages and partially adopts postmodern critiques of foundationalism while maintaining the prophetic-ethical commitments that postmodernism often softens.

"The postmodern critique of foundations is largely right; what is missing is the prophetic ethical commitment that makes the post-foundational stance more than nihilism." (The American Evasion, ch. 7)