Ryan Johnson is Associate Professor and Chair of the Philosophy Department at Elon University. Ryan’s books include Deleuze, A Stoic, Phenomenology of Black Spirit (co-written with Biko Mandela Gray), and Contemporary Encounters with Ancient Practice. He is currently writing a pair of books that improvise John Coltrane—The John Brown Suite, and A Love Spinoza. All his classes occur outside, and he loves trains. In this Recently Published Book Spotlight, Johnson discusses Hegel’s influence within the American philosophical tradition, his works’ links to Frederick Douglass and Angela Davis, and his habit of writing books in pairs.
What is your work about?
Three American Hegels explores the influence of 19th century German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel on three seminal yet overlooked American philosophers: Henry C. Brokmeyer, the frontier translator of Hegel; Horace Williams, the sower of Southern Hegelianism; and John William Miller, Hegelian teacher of democracy.
When scholars think about who counts as classical American Philosophers, they typically think of Pierce, James, Dewey, hopefully Du Bois, ideally some women. If one is more familiar with Pragmatism, one likely knows that Hegel inspired the whole tradition. Yet fewer people know how and why Hegel became integral to American philosophy. I think the answer has something to do with the distinct yet overlapping influence of Brokmeyer, Williams, and Miller. In their stories, I try to show that, as one William H. Goetzmann puts it, “American Hegelianism was an electric symbol of American dynamism.”
Who are these three?
Henry C. Brokmeyer helped bring Hegel to America after immigrating at sixteen. Until his death in 1906, he was a mechanic, tanner, welder, state senator, lieutenant governor, and state governor of Missouri, as well as co-founded the St. Louis Hegelians, which launched the first philosophy journal in North America: Journal of Speculative Philosophy (1867–1893). Importantly for Hegelianism, Brokmeyer was the first person to translate Hegel’s magnum opus, Science of Logic [Wissenschaft der Logik], into English. Translating in a secluded cabin amidst the wilderness of the American West, Brokmeyer infused Hegel with the frontier life he later felt living among indigenous peoples. As his friend Denton Snider put it, Brokmeyer could “re-create Hegel, could even poetize the latter’s dry, colorless abstractions in a many-tinted display of metaphysical scintillations.” Yet over 150 years later, this English translation remains unpublished. In “Brokmeyer’s frontier thinking and living” lies a rugged Hegelianism, a phenomenology of American spirit.
The second American Hegel is Henry Horace Williams, the first philosophy professor at the first public university in the United States, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC)—and arguably its most influential early teacher. As such, Horace Williams might be America’s first public philosophy professor. From classroom debates to encounters on the streets of Chapel Hill, Horace provoked critical reflection in the middle of everyday life—hence his nickname, “the gadfly of Chapel Hill.” Yet herein lies the challenge: Horace’s adaptation of Hegel’s “encyclopedic logic” into a “logic for living” underemphasized his own writings. My three Chapters depict a honeysuckle Hegel that articulates dialectics with a drawl.
The third American Hegel is John William Miller. For Miller, Hegel offered the perfect pedagogy for modern American life. Miller saw philosophy as a way of living and speaking wherein one expresses oneself and takes responsibility for one’s expression. He was reluctant to publish partly because he saw philosophy as an “act” that can occur only amidst the concrete dialectics of the actual world. I show how Miller formulated his thinking into a distinctly Hegelian philosophical system he called “historical or naturalistic idealism,” partially in response to Walt Whitman’s “metaphysics of democracy.” Inspired by Hegel’s historicization of truth, Miller articulates a temporal, historical, and revisable metaphysics through American education (or bildung). Despite producing waves of devotees to this metaphysics of democracy, Miller’s Hegel-inspired philosophy has not yet been fully considered, so my final chapters aim to correct this so that these Millerian-Hegelian insights can help us address many political problems in contemporary American life.
Telling this forgotten story of Hegel in Early America through the lives and musings of these extraordinary figures might help fulfill Whitman’s proclamation: “only Hegel is fit for America—is large enough and free enough.”
How does it fit in with your larger research project?
Without intending to, I’ve found I write books in pairs. My first two, The Deleuze-Lucretius Encounter and Deleuze, A Stoic, focused on the 20th century French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and his relationship to Hellenistic philosophy. My second two are on Hegel—or at least Hegelian.
The first, Phenomenology of Black Spirit, which I co-wrote with my dear friend Biko Mandela Gray, stages a dialectical parallelism between Hegel’s classic text and prominent 19th–20th century Black thinkers from Frederick Douglass to Angela Davis. We argued that placing Hegelianism in apposition to Black Thought reveals a phenomenology of North America whose spirit is Black.
Emerging from that book, Three American Hegels was seeded by one idea: that I make myself the organizing factor of another strange story of American Hegelianism. I was okay with this because, by working as a white man studying and loving Black Thought, I found new ways to enact that defining philosophical activity: self-examination. Three American Hegels is my attempt to examine myself as a white, male American philosopher and to grapple with a problematic history of such weighty inheritance.
My next pair of books center on John Coltrane—one on the radical abolitionist John Brown, the other on Spinoza. But more on that later.
Did you encounter any problems getting yourself published and, if so, how did you overcome them?
Surprisingly, this book received the most support I’ve ever had to write, although I encountered new kinds of resistance to get it published.
The biggest support came from the extremely generous folks at the John William Miller Society, especially Katie Terezakis, Peter Fosl, Gary Steiner, and Michael McGandy—although I still don’t know why they trusted a madman (as I’ve been called) like me! I also want to say that the North Caroliniana Society, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and Elon University also provided generous funding. With such support, I was able to take a full-year tenure sabbatical to write most of this, which I did as a visiting professor at the University of Toronto (big thanks to Rebecca Comay and Martin Pickavé for making that happen). So, I’m deeply grateful to all of them for that.
Most of all, however, Katie Terezakis has been my biggest supporter. Way back in 2015–2016, when I was a visiting professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology, Katie invited me to join her, Peter, and Gary in the Miller archives. I was—and am still—so humbled and flattered by what she has done for me. I am deeply in her debt. Thank you, Katie, thank you so, so much.
Even with such generous support, there were strange resistances to getting it published. Two presses to which I sent it returned two pairs of nearly identical reviews—one review said it was great and wholeheartedly advised publication, but the other review seemed to hate it, to the point of malice. Fortunately, Rowman & Littlefield thought differently!
The reasons for such resistance were, I think, threefold: (i) they thought there was too much of me in it, (ii) there was the usual dismissal of Continental philosophy, and (iii) there was my emphasis on what I called a “practice-oriented Hegelianism.” Brokmeyer, Horace, and Miller convinced me that practice is the highest form of Hegelianism, which many contemporary Hegelians must find ridiculous. But I’m sticking to it!
Given that I am the book’s unifying factor, I should probably add this: two literal earthquakes shaped my philosophical career before this book.
The first earthquake occurred in the last year of my doctoral program at Duquesne University. Just minutes into the first day of a class on Hegel’s Science of Logic taught by the wonderful Jennifer Bates, an earthquake hit. The ground, walls, and everything solid instantaneously liquified. Although no one was hurt, I never forgot that sense of the world melting away because it was precisely how it felt to read Hegel’s Logic. Reading that book with Dr. Bates set off philosophical tectonic tremors that still reverberate within me. Writing Three American Hegels, I tried to retain that sense of the world melting as the ground gives way under geological and conceptual seismic shifts.
Tremors of a second earthquake also began at Duquesne, during a conversation with the incredible George Yancy. While discussing Frantz Fanon, Dr. Yancy unsettled nearly all my presumptions about what philosophy was, is, and could be. The longer we spoke, the stronger the tremors shook. Later, during my first semester at Elon University, I brought Dr. Yancy to campus, allowing me to collaborate with colleagues in the African and African American Studies Program, as well as the Center for Race, Ethnicity, and Diversity Education. Quickly, I realized how personally precarious, philosophically gripping, and deeply humbling it was to teach about race and racism in the American South as a white man. Around this time, my spouse immigrated to the United States, forcing me to grapple with American history and my subject-position in philosophy.
Experiencing these two earthquakes was, as the recently passed Robert Paul Wolff writes, equally “exhilarating and humbling: exhilarating because on this journey I have learned much that before was closed to me; humbling, because on this journey I discovered how naïve I had been to a world that I thought I understood.” Three American Hegels is a snapshot of those two earthquakes’ radiating, overlapping tremors.
What writing practices, methods, or routines do you use, and which have been the most helpful?
This was the first time I really hung out in archives—and now I’m hooked! I spent days, sometimes weeks, in the Missouri Historical Society Library and Research Center in St. Louis, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Wilson Special Collections, Williams College Archives and Special Collections, the William Torrey Harris Papers at the Library of Congress, and others.
I also want to share that my partner is a librarian, and she is quite the information-finding sleuth. I dedicated the Three American Hegels to her because, while she has always supported me, this book brought this to a new level. I want everyone to know how important she was to this book—I want to shout it out! From discovering unknown copies of Brokmeyer’s translations at Illinois College to locating many, many resources for Horace or Miller and so much more, our lives coaligned more than ever before with this book.
What’s next for you?
Most immediately, Edinburgh University Press will publish my co-translation (with Jared C. Bly) of Émile Bréhier’s Theory of Incorporeals in Ancient Stoicism in June, and I’m in the early stages of co-editing (with Norman Ajari) a book on “Deleuze, Guattari, and Blackness.” Thinking further ahead, Three American Hegels leads directly into my next project: the first philosophy book on John Brown. I can explain how.
Three American Hegels is a record of me grappling with my subject-position as an American Philosopher in a Hegelian tradition. Echoing the earthquakes mentioned above, the book ends with what is (for me) a seismic promise: This will be the last time I write on only white male philosophers. This may sound strange, given that my next book project is on the abolitionist John Brown, but I think I can explain what I mean.
To write what I call The John Brown Suite, I will use a strategy that is an inversion of what we did in Phenomenology of Black Spirit. As that book reads twelve Black thinkers through one white author (Hegel), my John Brown book will invert that strategy by writing a literary jazz suite about the life of a single white man (John Brown) through many Black thinkers. If Three American Hegels is an act of self-examination as a version of what the Germans call Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung, The John Brown Suite is the intensification of that same project. I should also say that there will be a corresponding album of original music that four musicians are currently composing in response to the four chapters of that book.
I want to philosophically engage John Brown because I am seeking concrete strategies to break forms of white solidarity, undermine male authority, call out liberal complacency, and help move the question of race, class, and gender to the center of philosophical attention. All of these questions flow through Three American Hegels, so my John Brown book fulfills that seismic promise. To be sure, I know this promise does not mean much to anyone but me. As clearly and distinctly as I proclaim my complicity and seek to become an accomplice (like John Brown), I’m not deluding myself into thinking that small acts of defection will do much to dismantle white supremacy. But I still wonder: How many others would it take to make a difference? How many other white and male philosophers would it take to decenter the discipline’s focus so that we might collectively and creatively critique the canon and thereby make the future of philosophy richer, more diverse, and more welcoming than its past?
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