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Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how the two early American pragmatists Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) and Horace M. Kallen (1882-1974) developed a radically relational concept of “environment” almost a century before “relationality” became vogue.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores how two early American pragmatists Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) and Horace M. Kallen (1882-1974) developed a radically relational concept of “environment”. First, I will show how Peirce’s two strange texts “Evolutionary Love” (1893) and “The Concept of God” (1906) develop a cosmology in which the environment is a medium for growing and transforming substances. Peirce named this oneness in diversification “evolutionary love”, as a way of making distinctions between different modes through which to perceive of “environment”. The historical circumstances of this emerging naturalism were the reception of Darwin’s “The Origins of Species” (1859) as an “epochal” event expected to have revolutionary effects on human being in the world.

While Peirce laid the groundwork for a relational notion of “environment”, others, such as Horace M. Kallen, translated this groundwork into cultural and social thought prompted by experiences of living in times of change. Migration, urbanization, roaring furnaces, called forth an environment of transforming known substances into new ones. I discuss how Kallen contemplated the storyline of this “environment” and how he pondered the implications for cultural and social thought. In 1912, he sought to address the profound narrative of the environment as "the essence of tragedy" and in 1918 he presented the Jews as a social group embodying a "theory of life" that exemplified this relational conception of the environment. Finally, I will discuss how early pragmatism’s notion of “environment” can be a bridge to current and future sense-making across disciplines.