From Nature To Experience

Introduction

The Preferences Of Eden

Delivered To The Dream: Emerson And The Pathways Of Pragmatism

Reading The Blooming Confusion: William James And The Theology Of Experience

Diminished Things: Literature And The Disenchantment Of The World

Divining Lives

Intentional Ironies

The Truth Beyond Method: Fiction At The Limits Of Experience

Conclusion

Additional Info
In his first major work, Nature, Ralph Waldo Emerson hymned the praises of nature as an enduring source of spiritual tonic and moral power. Yet as he later expressed in his essay, “Experience”, Emerson came to doubt that evil would disappear or that nature could provide solid ground for the spirit’s dwelling. Emerson and other nineteenth-century thinkers turned to experience to provide anchors for values and paths to God. In the decades after the Civil War, divining value from utility became the premise and the promise of pragmatism, the one genuinely indigenous philosophical movement America has ever produced.

Roger Lundin explores this shift from nature to experience as the source of American moral and cultural authority. Drawing on contemporary Protestant theology for guidance, he examines one of America’s central intellectual traditions and shows the crucial possibilities it puts forth as well as the vexing problems it confronts. In the end, where the pragmatic tradition concludes that experience must generate the very light that will lead us out of its own darkness, From Nature to Experience returns to religion for illumination and truth.

A story of nineteenth-century sources and twenty-first century consequences, this magisterial work brings together literature, history, philosophy, and theology to form a truly original critique of American culture