The Music in the Heart, the Way of Water, and the Light of a Thousand Suns:
A Response to Richard Shusterman, Crispin Sartwell, and Scott Stroud

by Thomas Alexander

In organizing this discussion, Scott Stroud has opened up an important topic that, I hope, will be further seriously explored. We are at the beginning of a potentially significant dialogue between "East(s) and West(s)," in which even our misunderstandings may be illuminating. Aside from whatever views of "pragmatism" there may be outside of the West, it is not very well understood even on its home ground. And the aesthetic dimension of "pragmatism"—its living heart, I maintain—is not well understood by those who comprehend it as utilitarianism or even as enlightened technology. That its aesthetic side might be where it is actually most open to Asian schools of "the art of life" is further indication of the need to rethink pragmatism itself. And this also means being able to see pragmatism itself within the Western tradition, in terms of themes it reacts against as well as those upon which it draws. But more important is the general issue of Western philosophy of whatever stripe breaking out of its cultural parochialism to engage in world philosophy.