American antinomianisms from Anne Hutchinson to pragmatism.
Item
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Title
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American antinomianisms from Anne Hutchinson to pragmatism.
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Identifier
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AAI3103083
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identifier
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3103083
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Creator
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Bernstein, Jennifer.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Joan Richardson
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Date
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2003
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature, American | Philosophy | American Studies
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Abstract
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"American Antinomianisms from Anne Hutchinson to Pragmatism" examines the epistemological and stylistic dimensions of antinomianism. The Antinomian Controversy began as a dispute about whether or not sanctification (the performance of good works) was proof of justification (redemption by God). Though the terms over which the colonists were arguing had social and theological connotations, the crisis itself was epistemological: it was focused on how we know we are saved and how we can prove we know we are saved. In the first part of my study, I demonstrate how Hutchinson exposed the weaknesses of the magistrates' and ministers' logic and brought them uncomfortably close to having to acknowledge that they were placing their faith in human knowledge and language. The label antinomian (anti-, against + -nomos, the law) is not, I argue, completely inaccurate as a descriptive term since Hutchinson's obedience to God unsettled Puritan epistemology and its attempts to fix knowledge through systems of logic and language.;In the following chapters, I place antinomianism in the broader context of American literary and philosophical discourse. Jonathan Edwards, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Charles Sanders Peirce, and William James theorized the ideas Hutchinson was struggling to articulate before she was banished and excommunicated. Edwards recognized that living life in obedience to the divine mind meant living with the awareness that no epistemological system or single act of perception could grant the human mind a permanent grasp of the "precise and stable...idea in God's mind." Emerson and Thoreau composed antinomian manuals for thinking which reflect their conviction that obedience to the higher laws of existence necessitates submitting to the ongoing process of creation and dissolution and resisting our tendency to rest in past acts. The pragmatic method was born out of Peirce's and James' understanding that the laws we are able to perceive are not eternal verities in which we can rest but are only approximations of greater truths that are in the process of becoming. These five thinkers developed even more radical ways of resisting the tendency to privilege law, or that which is fixed and settled.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
