Making Sense of Ourselves with Others: Review of American Philosophy in Translation by Naoko Saito
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Making Sense of Ourselves with Others: Review of American Philosophy in Translation by Naoko Saito Review of Naoko Saito, American Philosophy in Translation René V. Arcilla1 Accepted: 8 August 2020 / Published online: 19 September 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
What does it mean to do American philosophy? Not only has Naoko Saito saved this question from triviality and narcissism, but she has been developing a fruitful response from the unusual vantage point of a Japanese scholar. For her entire academic career, Saito has been studying the rich legacies of originary, nineteenth-century transcendentalists like Ralph Waldo Emerson and twentieth-century pragmatists such as John Dewey, and examining how their work was recently inherited, synthesized, and revitalized by their compatriot philosospher, Stanley Cavell. Early fruits of her scholarship were articulated in her 2005 text, The Gleam of Light: Moral Perfectionism and Education in Dewey and Emerson (New York: Fordham University Press). Fourteen years later, the publication of her current book represents a culminating, accomplished milestone in her ongoing inquiry. The title, American Philosophy in Translation, telegraphs to us the book’s rhetorical design and its main thesis. We are being invited to care about something called “American philosophy.” This designation and invitation comes from a seeming outsider: a Japanese philosopher. Evidently, Saito owes her appreciation of this philosophy to her sustained and cumulative work of translating it into her native language of thought. She accordingly affirms that the very capacity of the philosophy to stimulate such translation is precisely what it most has to offer us, natives and foreigners alike. American philosophy helps us understand that exercising this activity in the deepest sense strengthens the health of democratic societies. Although I admire this ingenious argument, which I shall sketch out in a little more detail below, I have to confess it leaves me at the end with some questions about its philosophical basis. Saito opens her discussion by identifying three contemporary, widely recognized kinds of anxiety that are undermining our confidence in our democracies. The initial set concerns social inclusion. As our societies become increasingly diverse, more and more heterogeneous groups ask to be included in decision-making and leadership. This can cause established groups to fear the loss of their dominance and to react contentiously, threatening social coherence and peace. As I write this, daily demonstrations in New York City and elsewhere in the US for racial justice, and the exploitation of these protests by a divisive * René V. Arcilla [email protected] 1
NYU Steinhardt School of Education, New York University, 246 Greene Street, 3rd Floor, New York, NY 10003, USA
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presidency attempting to extend its authority, are inflaming antagonism among various groups. It has rarely been more brutally clear to Americans that one possible way a democracy can die is at the
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