American Evasion of Philosophy

The title of this post is not mine: it was the title of Cornel West's dissertation on the philosophy of pragmatism.  But just as I have been mocking the Lebanese cultural tendency to apply the label of philosopher to many writers, including--bizarrely Kahlil Gibran (or as we call him Jubran Khalil Jubran), there is such a tendency in the US.  Benjamin Franklin (the least boring of the founding fathers although he himself was rather uninteresting but was semi-intellectually curious) has been called a philosopher and headed the American Philosophical Society.  I mean, Nietzsche had his aphorisms and so did Franklin.  But Franklin's never amounted to philosophy or even reflection: they were along the lines of "go to sleep early and rise early" or "honesty is the best policy" and various other silly sayings that were plagiarized often from sayings known since ancient times (just as Mark Twain's most famous saying ("the news of my death are greatly exaggerated") were said before him more elegantly by Voltaire in his last years).  Nevertheless, Franklin had to be commended in starting a long American tradition: that science and invention are crucial and motivated only by the desire for convenience and profit (later, the US added another motive, that of facilitating wars and conquest).   Franklin's autobiography is greatly uninspiring (Isaacson's fawning biography of the man is a good read though).