Walt Whitman Writes: “The Americans of all nations at any time upon the earth have probably the fullest poetical nature” (5). Naoko Saito is an American philosopher and something of a Whitmanesque philosophical poet. Saito's book is “the product of many years spent reading and studying American philosophy” (Saito xi). She further indicates: “Mostly I have done this from a remote part of the world—far from America across the Pacific Ocean—and, like so many others, in a language that is not my own” (xi). Saito is a scholar in and of translation.
Saito states that the “tensioned relationship between Dewey and Emerson, and more broadly pragmatism and American transcendentalism . . . is carried forward into the present text, and with a new focus on translation“ (xi–xii). Her text resolves the tension in favor of transcendentalism approached through her teacher, the late Stanley Cavell...
