Wilshire enlarges the history of American Pragmatism by reclaiming the Native American influence of Black Elk; rereading the work of Thoreau, Emerson, and William James in order to show the affinity between Shamanic spirituality and the phenomenology of these thinkers. He shows how Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century American Pragmatism meets a need for “a deep level of description and analysis. Before we build ourselves, we are built. Before anything can belong to us, we belong to Nature. Our nervous systems evolved and took shape through adaptation over thousands of millennia in the enwombing pulse of Nature’s matter” [16]. And this deeper level of description and analysis is the method of phenomenology developed first by 19th century German philosopher Edmund Husserl but also in America by Pierce and James. Edward Casey says in the book’s foreword that not only does Wilshire boldly claim “classical pragmatism is an original and unfettered strain of American thought but that … it is more original than we have ever allowed ourselves to imagine. It is original because it is also aboriginal” [ix].

By “going Native,” American Philosophy might meet “the greatest challenge to the integrating and involving powers of the humanities … the ecological crisis”[170].
Without a community of learners concerned about the community of all communities, Nature, the crisis will certainly be intractable and all human life and institutions may collapse. As we have seen, in the deft but broad strokes John Dewey located us better than most philosophers have in our century: Human cultures are transformations of Nature wrought by us unusual organisms, but always within Nature (despite our pretensions to transcend it). Amid the turbulence of ever-expanding scientific, technological, and commercial advance, and the evident need to appropriate if we can the ancient Earth wisdom of indigenous peoples, how can we knowers involve ourselves so as to better locate ourselves [170-171]?

Western science needs supplementing because it is just one way of knowing through which humans make sense of the world—others are the humanities and arts. Without supplements we are dehumanized. Wilshire states that the power of Western science and technology depends on a certain narrowed involvement in Nature. The ability to disclose hidden forces of Nature and to harness them to satisfy immediate aims and desires requires that only one aspect of Nature be considered: what in it is orderable and predictable and quantifiable. We must then appear to ourselves as those who order, predict, quantify, manage, control.

One might think that this scientific venture entails emotional detachment. But this is only half-true. For the narrower the involvement the more intense the emotions generated. And effective scientists and technologists counter this emotional involvement with a desire not to be duped which is equally intense and narrow. Western science and technology bore into the world. As Francis Bacon put it famously, we put Nature on the rack and force her to answer our questions [16].

For Wilshire “even when [science is] marvelously revealing certain sectors of the universe, [its] intercourse with the world is so narrow and self-involved that the full gamut of emotions and instinctual adjustments that enliven indigenous peoples’ habitual involvement with the world are masked-out and suppressed.”

The feeling of belonging to the land and of being cared for by it—cared for if we are sufficiently aware and skilled, reverent, careful, fortunate.
For indigenous populations, feelings of being enlarged, enlivened, and oriented stand and resonate in direct ratio to the breadth and depth of their care and celebration within the sensuously evident world. They feel this power that many of us no longer imagine. If we could, it would drive out mere abstractions, high-flown projects, as well as paper doubts, as Charles Peirce put it—doubts and inhibitions that clutter and trip-up our rampaging modern world [16-17].

A long quote follows, which I won’t reproduce here, that exemplifies the unrestrained richly enlarged visionary experience of North American Holy man Black Elk who heals a young boy by channeling the regenerative powers of Nature; the boy lived to age thirty. The healing took place through a shamanic ritual in which the boy felt his connection to the seven positions: the four points of North, South, East, and West, the sky above and earth below, and the central place of the tree of wisdom that originates with the location of each person.
Not until the end of Wilshire’s book do we learn of the personal meaning of these stories and explorations in the phenomenology of our body-selves: his daughter Rebekah died in 1997 at age thirty-one. Wilshire struck with the loss and tragedy of Bekah’s early death, meditates on her life. His confession made all the strands of his text display a wondrous pattern of intellectual development. Though he meant to criticize Western science for its narrowness, he seems in the end to exemplify how shamanism, phenomenology, and science cohere in the strange experiences of ghostly appearances of Wilshire’s beloved daughter to several relatives and friends after her death. In musing about the possibility and meaning of these appearances of Bekah he connects the work of mathematician Roger Penrose and physicist John Bell whose theorem suggests that two electrons having once shared close proximity will display later on changes in a mathematical property of spin that coincides with alterations in the one resonated in changes in the other even when these electrons are at opposite ends of the universe and there is no causal connections between them.

I have long held that thought about one area of intellectual concern may serve as tools for solving problems in another area. In other words, concepts in one area may develop patterned relationships that map onto another level of concepts; experience is aided in the correspondence of these two levels such that unconscious problem solving is achieved even though we are not self-consciously attending to the problems in this other symbolically related area of concern. In the case of Wilshire, I would argue that his philosophical project of enlarging Western science by going Native in American philosophy corresponded to his emotional struggle in dealing with the loss of his daughter. Freud might put it this way: Wilshire uses his intellectual project to defensively manage (sublimate) the pain of the loss of a loved one. But that is too negative. I believe that all intellectual inquiry must have some emotional salience. Thus concerns in one area no matter how abstract are related through emotional valence and vectors with other areas. Perhaps the entire project of returning us to our embedded and dependent place in Nature is achieved by the emotional connection and embodied nurturance derived from things of the earth. Thus, Culture (Dewey’s Experience) develops from Nature and is ultimately always dependent upon it.
Although Dewey was criticized as a tragic figure especially in the time period of 1910-1929 Wilshire does indeed return to draw from him as the first indented quotation reveals. But in setting up the problematic between phenomenology and science Wilshire contrasts Dewey with a lesser known philosophy—The Meaning of God in Human Experience (1912) by William Ernest Hocking. Dewey though recognized as a central figure in American pragmatism by Wilshire, serves as whipping post for his appeal to the method of scientific inquiry in political and moral areas of social life. Wilshire’s one failing to my mind is his lack of appreciation of the beauty of Dewey’s bringing us down to earth in arguing for the extension of experimental inquiry to the realms of social, political, and moral life. Lesser known figures—Hocking and Henry Bugbee—are used by Wilshire to usher in the metaphysical talk of Realism, God, and Spirituality that I would rather do without.

By entertaining these thinkers and the traditional discourse of metaphysics, Wilshire doesn’t see that the apparitions of his daughter might be better understood in neuroscientific ways: The phenomena of phantom limbs help us understand these appearances. Loss of an arm is often accompanied by experiences of pain even though the arm is gone, because our brains have grown or developed in connection with the arm’s activity. Even though it is physically gone the connections in our brains are not. One further step is necessary: our brains are really not separate from other brains even though our bodies seem to be encased within our own skins. Our bodies and brains are connected because our patterns of movement and all of our physical, emotional, cognitive and social changes are interconnected and interdependent within a world of mutually developing Experience and Nature. The last three words are in fact the title of Dewey’s work published in 1925. And it emerged out of a period of intense body work with F. M. Alexander begun in 1916. But this is described in Wilshire. For further elaboration and enlargement of understanding of what it means to be “going Native” I recommend turning to Wilshire.

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