Emily Hawk responds to Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen’s The Ideas That Made America: A Brief History.
Moving US Intellectual History Forward
In The Ideas that Made America, Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen asserts that “the vibrancy of American thought lies in the movement of ideas.”[1] Motion is central to her conceptualization of intellectual history as a narrative of “crossings,” or the “movement of ideas” across geographies and chronology as well as within American culture. Ratner-Rosenhagen’s imagery also suggests that ideas have an independent, lived, embodied quality. They interact and converse with one another. They engage people’s emotions, morals, and spirits as well as their intellects. They change in response to external social factors and varied cultural settings. The human-like qualities of ideas are precisely why Ratner-Rosenhagen finds intellectual history so thrilling. Its approach becomes “a way to eavesdrop on the past,” she explains, to “awaken us to all the ways American have constructed their realities and made meaning in their lives.”[2]
Ratner-Rosenhagen’s metaphors of “crossings” and “eavesdropping” are exciting for intellectual history because of their implications of embodiment. Ideas may seem abstract, but they are ultimately generated, transmitted, and received by fully corporeal human beings. What Ratner-Rosenhagen calls “mental and moral worlds” are also physical ones.[3] By examining how ideas move between abstraction and embodiment, we can make better sense of social, political, and economic conditions across time and space.
Despite the centrality of movement and the conceptualization of ideas as having lives of their own in Ratner-Rosenhagen’s framing, the enactment of these metaphors is more limited than she perhaps intended. The Ideas that Made America retreats from exploring the full dynamic between physicality and the ideational, reverting mostly to ideas as they appeared in texts and “traditional sources,” which is to say as words.[4] There turns out to be very little engagement with an actual movement of ideas that includes the sensations accompanying thought or the implications of embodiment as a key aspect of intellectual history.
After all, the mind exists within the body. It is part of the body. Texts themselves are produced through human action. Many intellectuals were keenly aware of this reality. They thought seriously about the types of activities that would set their ideas to work in the real world of bodies, physical movements, and forces in motion. Moreover, as intellectual historians ourselves, we also experience embodied and sensory responses while reading and interpreting documents from the past. Eavesdropping, after all, needs ears.
Greater attention to embodiment as part of intellectual history can extend Ratner-Rosenhagen’s metaphors in potent ways. “Crossings” implies focused, unidirectional travel from one point to another. For instance, in the dance practice of compositional improvisation, “crossings” refers to exercises in which dancers explore a particular choreographic motif while traveling in a straight line across the studio space. Each dancer passed through a given lane and could not deviate from this pathway. The broader category of “movement,” by contrast, might be more productive for thinking about intellectual history. It is free from such spatial or directional constraints. This understanding more accurately accords with Ratner-Rosenhagen’s claim that ideas gain power not by having absolute meaning, but “because they are so fluid, so multivalent.”[5] What would happen to a survey of US intellectual history if we took this sentiment seriously, and tracked the literal movement of ideas in everyday life? Ideas do not only cross, but contract, expand, accelerate, halt, jump, shift, reverberate, and rebound.
Likewise, “eavesdropping” seems to suggest a hierarchy of historical hindsight, in which present-day researchers and students inherently possess the perspective to decode and make sense of the past. Eavesdropping, however, can only occur when the speaker remains unaware of their audience: it is a transgression, an inherent invasion of privacy. Ratner-Rosenhagen acknowledges that it is not her intent to “spy on the inner thoughts of unsuspecting dead people,” but rather to “come into contact with interesting people we might not otherwise know but for the records of their minds.”[6] What would happen, then, if we shift the metaphor from “eavesdropping” to “encountering,” and approach intellectual history as an interaction with people different than ourselves, engaging in dialogue across time and space? By encountering difference in this way, we flatten the hierarchy of knowledge across time and can change our way of thinking about the nature of ideas and the people who lived with them. We can listen to them, to be sure; but, they might also listen to us—and, more crucially, speak to us as equals in dialogue across history.
A Thicker Cuticle
It is not that the guiding metaphors in Ratner-Rosenhagen’s necessarily brief survey lead her entirely astray, but rather that they can be honed to make for a more powerful intellectual history of the United States. The metaphors of “movement” and “encounter” offer an enlivened and more accessible approach to some of the foundational texts in the field. For example, Ratner-Rosenhagen’s section on Transcendentalism features Ralph Waldo Emerson as its avatar, a figure both “enlivened and disturbed” by the quest to craft a distinctly American intellectual voice.[7] She notes Emerson’s concern that Americans of his day were “too busy [for] letters,” and too laudatory of “exertions of mechanical skill.”[8] Instead, Emerson advanced the concept of “self-reliance” on one’s original thoughts, in which “all truths are achieved, not inherited; they are prospective, never retrospective.”[9] In reading this account, it might seem as if the Transcendentalists pursued a “new style of thinking” only in a philosophical sense, grappling with the meanings of concepts such as “the individual and God,” and “independence and obligation” in the new nation.[10] Looking through the lens of “movement,” however, we see that Transcendentalism was not just about crafting an American “life of the mind,” but about articulating specific actions necessitated by this way of thinking.
In describing “self-reliance,” Emerson himself locates individual power in “the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim”—in action. Emerson’s most notable counterpart, Henry David Thoreau, also offers an instructive example. Like Emerson, Thoreau found inspiration in the natural world, as he discussed at length in Walden (1854). But nature was not simply a site of meditative complacency for Thoreau. He also emphasized the importance of literally moving through the natural world to encounter new perspectives and generate new ideas. As he described in the essay “Walking,” (1862), “I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits, unless I spend four hours a day at least, – and it is commonly more than that, – sauntering through the woods.”[11] While walking, Thoreau ponders several topics that Ratner-Rosenhagen describes as foundational to Transcendentalism, such as the meaning of the American frontier and the influence of Eastern religion and philosophy. But the physicality is not incidental to Thoreau’s process: it is essential for achieving holistic self-knowledge. As Thoreau explains, connecting the action of the mind to the sensations of the body:
Living much out of doors, in the sun and wind, will no doubt produce a certain roughness of character—will cause a thicker cuticle to grow over some of the finer qualities of our nature…The natural remedy is to be found in the proportion which the night bears to the day, the winter to the summer, thought to experience. There will be so much the more air and sunshine in our thoughts. The callous palms of the laborer are conversant with the finer tissues of self-respect and heroism, whose touch thrills the heart, than the languid fingers of idleness.
Thus, we find that Transcendentalism was not just about crossing the divide between Europe and America, or between religion and secularism, but also about moving through the world with thought and action in symbiosis. While Transcendentalists were concerned with knowledge of the self, we find that their focus on action brings their ideas into the real world, expanding their influence far beyond the individual intellectual. For instance, we see Thoreau’s ideas about action against the government in “Civil Disobedience” (1849) inspiring the embodied tactics of nonviolent protest in the Civil Rights Movement over a century later.
Frederick Douglass Looks Back
The lens of “encounter” helps to provide a more profound understanding of the intellectual history of enslavement, abolition, and emancipation. In particular, it directs attention to the intellectual creativity and essential humanity of figures such as Frederick Douglass, the most prominent African American intellectual of the nineteenth century. Ratner-Rosenhagen’s book, taking the approach of “eavesdropping,” considers only textual records of Douglass’s ideas: his Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845) and his speech “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” (1852). While important, these texts represent only one facet of Douglass’s intellectual contributions. In fact, by examining Douglass’s extensive repertoire of photographic portraiture, we find that his physical presence communicated just as much as his words. Subjected to racism based on physical appearance throughout his life, Douglass recognized the potency of his very body, which he consciously used as a channel for intellectual expression. By sitting for more portraits than any other American in the nineteenth century, and intentionally posing with poise, dignity, and a serious expression, Douglass literally embodied his ideas about Black beauty, refinement, and citizenship throughout the eras of slavery and Reconstruction. The mind and the body went together.
To see as well as read Douglass is not just to eavesdrop on the past, but also to encounter a person from it. He affects us even as we strive toward interpretation. This exchange is simultaneously physical and ideational. The two cannot be separated. When I look at these portraits of Douglass, I find myself humbled by the opportunity to look directly into his eyes. I notice myself sitting more upright in my chair, adopting a posture of reverence. And I realize that this reaction is exactly what Douglass set out to elicit when he sat for these portraits a century and a half ago: for the viewer to see him for his humanity, to encounter him on his own terms. The example of Douglass’s portraiture thus invites us to adopt a broader understanding of intellectual history, recognizing the many ways in which ideas are created and shared. It also allows us to engage with a more diverse range of people who lived in the past, transcending literacy, language, and legal status to encounter ideas generated through physicality, ritual, and everyday actions. After all, one did not have to be a published writer to think, to translate that thought into action, and to imprint those ideas into the historical record.
The Squirrel and the Corridor
In the modern period, few would debate the importance of William James’s pragmatism for understanding the evolution of American thought. Indeed, the rise of pragmatism marks a central hinge in Ratner-Rosenhagen’s survey. Born partly of James’s expertise in psychology and philosophy, pragmatism bridged religion and secularism with a pluralistic definition of truth, based in empiricism and connection to lived experience. Physicality is again central. In the essay “What Pragmatism Means” (1907), James describes pragmatism as “first, a method and second, a genetic theory of what is meant by truth.”[12] In The Ideas That Made America, Ratner-Rosenhagen focuses primarily on the latter, explaining that James’s “theory of truth was really just a logical extension” of his methodology.”[13]
With this framing in place, Ratner-Rosenhagen discusses James’s argument about a multivalent, flexible definition of truth: a mindset that constantly accounts for new evidence and engages in repeated testing of concrete claims against lived experiences. She takes “dynamism” as the principal keyword for explaining James’s pragmatism: focusing on the “dynamism of truth” in James’s conception, and the “impulse to lay bare the dynamic workings of the world” among thinkers of his generation.”[14] While the concept of pluralistic truth is essential to understanding pragmatism, to overlook James’s method is to keep pragmatism purely in the mind, instead of connecting this philosophy to the body, senses, and lived experience, as James demanded. James’s writing is saturated with multisensory metaphors and musings on embodied sensation. If Ratner-Rosenhagen’s keyword is “dynamism,” James’s is “action.” He is quick to point out that the word “pragmatism” itself derives from the Greek word for “action.” He declares that the true pragmatist “turns away from abstraction and insufficiency” and “towards action and power.”
Ratner-Rosenhagen acknowledges that the intellectual aspect of James’s pragmatism “was as hard to stick to as it was simple in conception,” yet James himself gives us instructive examples of how to do so, even in the simplest and smallest of moments: and it all has to do with embodiment and sensation. Indeed, James opens “What Pragmatism Means” with an anecdote about the pragmatic method in motion, concerning a debate among friends at a camping party. In this story, the men strain to observe a squirrel clung to the opposite side of a tree. Trying to catch a glimpse, they run around the tree themselves, weaving and diving, yet never quite fast enough to capture the squirrel in their eyeline. James concludes that this story exemplifies the pragmatic method, since it involves multiple meanings of “going round” the tree. All are true, all valid, and all made concrete by the actions of the men. By beginning the essay in this way, James gets the reader invested with both body and mind, thus modeling the principles of the pragmatic method by linking his philosophy to lived experience. We are all trying to see the squirrel.
James’s most effective metaphor for explaining pragmatism involves both “movement” and “encountering.” Following the Italian writer Giovanni Papini, James likens the pragmatic process to the “corridor in a hotel,” with “innumerable chambers” opening out. He continues:
In one [room] you may find a man writing an atheistic volume; in the next some one on his knees praying for faith and strength; in a third a chemist investigating a body’s properties. In a fourth a system of idealistic metaphysics is being excogitated; in a fifth the impossibility of metaphysics is being shown. But they all own the corridor, and all must pass through it if they want a practicable way of getting into or out of their respective rooms.[15]
The passage induces a physical response and perspective in the reader. When I read it, I adopt a bird’s-eye view of the action. Looking down through the roof of the hotel, I can see each figure hard at work in their individual chambers: pens scribbling, tugging at their hair, pacing the floor as they wrestle with ideas. As they proceed out of their rooms into the corridor of pragmatism, I can imagine them bumping into each other, coming into contact with opposing points of view and alternate truths. Yet each remains steadfast in their personal truth, in their very selves, as they pass through this corridor, strengthened and sustained by the assimilation of new information. I have also found this metaphor of pragmatism in motion to be useful in teaching intellectual history, as it enables students to encounter James’s ideas on a kinesthetic level, humanizing the pragmatic process.
Revelations in Motion
The metaphors of “movement” and “encounter” not only elicit new understandings of these foundational texts, they also suggest that new perspectives should be added to the canon of intellectual history. Specifically, this shift in framing compels us to consider the ideas expressed by artists and performers, and not only texts. Such additions are crucial for better understanding the aftermath of World War II, for instance, when the United States became a global force in the cultural realm, and the 1960s and 1970s, when the rise of youth culture, protest movements, and mass media technology changed how Americans thought and behaved.
In The Ideas that Made America, Ratner-Rosenhagen notes that voices of dissent had to “speak in a whisper or in code” due to the culture of conformity at midcentury – but adds that these voices “were, no doubt, audible in popular culture.”[16] Once again, she turns primarily to text for evidence of these ideas, citing themes of abandonment, restlessness, and alienation in novels such as J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951) and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1950) and in the poetry of figures such as Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. A closer look at popular culture of this period reveals that some salient ideas were simply not sayable in words. They could only find expression—and reception—beyond text.
Consider how, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, segregation was still legal throughout the United States and the nation witnessed mounting violence against African Americans who put their bodies on the line for integration and equality. Yet, in the same moment, a young Black choreographer named Alvin Ailey founded a dance company in New York City and began to create works that elevated the fundamental beauty, dignity, and humanity of African American culture. In 1958, Ailey created Blues Suite, a celebration of Black social life based on his childhood memories of the Dew Drop Inn, the social salvation of his African American community in Jim Crow Texas. Grooving to songs like “Good Morning Blues,” “Mean Ol’ Frisco,” and “House of the Rising Sun,” the dancers in Blues Suite embodied pure pleasure, abandon, and camaraderie. This evocation of Black social culture argued that African American life must not be reduced to sorrow and suffering: instead, African Americans must be praised for the resilience of their communities and insistence on cultivating joy.
In 1960, Ailey followed Blues Suite with its spiritual counterpart Revelations, the work that would become his masterpiece. In three parts, the piece explored African American religious life from enslavement through the present, set to a series of spirituals sung by Brother John Sellers. Yet even in moments depicting sorrow and strife, Ailey did not choreograph his dancers into postures of submission or degradation; he did not dress them in tatters and chains. In the first section, which represents the bondage of slavery, Ailey’s dancers look hopefully toward the sky, arms reaching to the heavens while their feet remain grounded in earthly reality. As the dancers reenact the ritual of baptism in the second section, they direct their gestures downstage, reaching out toward the audience as if to anoint with agency, to call them into collective understanding. During the concluding section, set at a contemporary church service, the dancers invite the audience to rise and clap in rhythm as they perform an encore, a participatory ritual that continues with performances of Revelations through the present day.
Taken together, Ailey’s earliest choreographic works addressed the central ideas and anxieties of American life at midcentury, including those identified by Ratner-Rosenhagen in The Ideas that Made America: the “longing for universals,” the “uptick” of interest in religion and religiosity, and the interrogation of human nature in an “anonymous, indifferent world.”[17] But by speaking with the embodied language of movement, Ailey also advanced important ideas about inclusion, justice, and citizenship for African Americans that ran ahead of political discourse of the time. His work was immediately popular with multiracial audiences within and beyond the United States, even as he communicated ideas of cross-racial empathy and solidarity that might have met resistance if expressed in verbal language. Other dimensions of American thought and culture come to life in Ailey’s dance theater. By looking beyond text, we find ourselves encountering a rich and underexamined spectrum of ideas that we might miss otherwise.
Kinesthetic Empathy
Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen states that The Ideas that Made America “seeks to demonstrate that thinking is where so much of the historical action is.”[18] Yet by shifting the central metaphors of the book to “movement” and “encounter,” we also find that action is where so much of the thinking is. The body cannot be divorced from the mind, so we can—and must—read gesture, posture, movement, and performance as seriously as we would read a text. We can notice how physicality and action matter within more traditional written sources. We can track the embodied responses that ideas, even in written form, engender. And we can notice how movement, such as that found in choreography and performance, also enacts powerful ideas. A greater sensitivity to movement is essential for moving the field of intellectual history forward.
Why? For one, it allows us to relate more dynamically to foundational figures of the canon, placing them on an equal plane instead of a pedestal. When we imagine ourselves walking alongside Thoreau, sitting with Douglass, or shuffling through James’s corridor, we are reminded that they were people with senses, emotions, and feelings, just like all of us. We encounter them rather than eavesdrop on them. From there, we can extend kinesthetic empathy to all kinds of people who lived in the past: to those who performed and entertained, to those who stood and marched in protest, to those who did not read or write, and to those who simply “made meaning” in the monotonous routine of daily life.
With greater attention paid to the movement of intellectual history, we encounter a wider range of ideas, as well as a wider range of people who set them to work in the world. In turn, we enliven our ongoing “conversation of American thought,” and energize the connection between past and present.[19]
About the Author
Emily Hawk is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in African American Studies at Princeton University. Her research interests span dance history, intellectual history, and African American history. Hawk’s current project examines how Black dancemakers of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s used the embodied language of movement to share new ideas about history, identity, and culture with the broader American public. She holds a PhD in United States History from Columbia University, and her scholarship has been published in the Journal of African American History, Journal of Urban History, and Journal of American Culture.
Notes
[1] Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, The Ideas That Made America: A Brief History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 6.
[2] Ratner-Rosenhagen, 2-3.
[3] Ratner-Rosenhagen, 3.
[4] Ratner-Rosenhagen, 3.
[5] Ratner-Rosenhagen, 5.
[6] Ratner-Rosenhagen, 2.
[7] Ratner-Rosenhagen, 63.
[8] Ratner-Rosenhagen, 64.
[9] Ratner-Rosenhagen, 65.
[10] Ratner-Rosenhagen, 67.
[11] Thoreau, “Walking,” https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/1022/pg1022-images.html.
[12] William James, “What Pragmatism Means.” https://www.gutenberg.org/files/5116/5116-h/5116-h.htm#link2H_4_0004
[13] Ratner-Rosenhagen, 106.
[14] Ratner-Rosenhagen, 103-104.
[15] James, “What Pragmatism Means.”
[16] Ratner-Rosenhagen, 141.
[17] Ratner-Rosenhagen, 143; 146-147.
[18] Ratner-Rosenhagen, 3.
[19] Ratner-Rosenhagen, 180.