To Philosophize is to Revise, Or, How German Idealism Became Historical in the Work of One Secluded American Thinker

Abstract

In the works of relatively unknown twentieth century American thinker, John William Miller, Kantian idealism is both utilized and transformed into a historical, linguistically focused philosophy of symbolic action. I argue that Miller’s system should be understood as native to the detranscendentalizing project of philosophical modernity as well as to concerns about German idealism that typify early American philosophy. I link Miller’s methodology to a metacritical assessment of Kant’s work that is nearly as old as the first Critique; I also link Miller’s approach to concerns about human action and agency that characterize the pragmatist tradition. I make the case that Miller revises the Kantian project, and the notion of regulative ideality in particular, with his presentation of a “midworld of functioning objects”. The Millerian midworld, I maintain, demonstrates the historically and linguistically contextual establishment of cognitive categories, including the Kantian forms of intuition. In so doing, Miller demonstrates what a genuinely critical philosophy must look like and he sidesteps difficulties regarding fallibilism and finitude, which continue to reappear in contemporary theorizing. Miller sees philosophy as an utterly historical, ongoing work of revision; he also shows how other forms of human endeavoring do well to return to philosophy to address the problems that have come to define them. Miller’s system aptly demonstrates both the historicity of critical philosophy and the practical application of a working philosophical methodology to contemporary dilemmas.