| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

From Nature to Experience: The American Search for Cultural Authority. By Roger Lundin. (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005. xiv, 263 pp. $39.95, ISBN 0-7425-2174-5.)

Roger Lundin's From Nature to Experience might have been titled "From Bad to Worse." Working in intellectual and literary history, and writing from a Christian perspective, Lundin describes American romanticism and its pragmatist legacy as a tragedy stretching from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, disenchanted day. For Lundin, Ralph Waldo Emerson's Nature (1836) is bad enough in its idealist denial of sin, but his essay "Experience" (1844) is worse in portending a skeptical modernity represented by Richard Rorty, Stanley Fish, and Jeffrey Stout. The truth-claims that such pragmatists valorize are anathema to Lundin, who takes their pluralism as relativism, liberalism as egoism, open-endedness as despair, and secularism as death. As an alternative, Lundin offers a hermeneutic drawn from Karl Barth and Hans-Georg Gadamer that attempts to "counter both pluralism and reductionism" by limiting textual interpretation under the authority of a variously incarnated Christian God (p. 153).

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