AWESOME VIEWS

 

With an overall summary distinguishing federalism and natural rights – provided in the last posting of this blog – one is set to consider the historical context in which a dialectic struggle has transpired in America since practically its beginning.  Most of the history of the US has been one bedeviled by the evolution of this struggle about how the federalist perspective had been implemented, changed, and eventually overcome by the natural rights perspective as the nation’s dominant view of governance, politics, and of other cultural concerns.

          By sketching that history regarding this evolution, an understanding emerges about the importance of federalism and the dialectical relation that perspective has had with its antithesis.  And a source that gives one an important historical approach to this struggle is the philosopher, George Santayana.[1]  In the earlier part of the last century, he wrote an insightful overview of the philosophical development of Americans until that time.

          He characterized the early phases of that development as a two-sided Christian view:  one was the harsh fire and brimstone Calvinism that emphasized the dangers of sin and the expression of an “agonized conscience,” and the other, a gentler view, was social transcendentalism (more formally developed during the 18^th century).

          Social transcendentalism, a European based philosophy, was quite sophisticated given the inexperience of the new nation.  But the nation – and this is not part of Santayana’s argument – had already incorporated to a meaningful degree another philosophic import from Europe, that being the ideas of the Enlightenment.  That adoption was not as demanding as this newer one.  Why?  Because the Enlightenment, while questioning the spiritual elements of Calvinism, was an argument for reason, and it simply extolled the reasonableness of communal bonding.

          That bonding, as it so happened, was central to the covenantal arrangements – in setting up their polities – that the early colonists employed.  But transcendentalism was a different message.  Santayana points out that Calvinism provided the necessary discipline to prosper in the frontier environment.  But after more than a century, in the first half of the 1800s, Americans succumbed to the very prosperity that Calvinism helped produce.  But before its diminished status, the Calvinist, Puritanical perspective left a strong congregational tradition.

          In that, that tradition was characterized by communities which were developed through covenants, with God as their witness and consequently, these settlers established strong communal ties among themselves.[2]  As pointed out in a previous posting, this covenantal arrangement repeats itself in the separate English settlements throughout the North American colonies.

That approach was maintained as colonies and then states were formed (the qualifier being the covenantal agreements became secularized as compacts).  Through transcendentalism, though, as the Calvinist influence waned, the “genteel tradition” of transcendentalism remained as a prominent view.  The transcendentalists, especially as defined in the writings and speeches of Ralph Waldo Emerson, became a prevalent American perspective. 

Emerson captured for American taste this Kantian tradition of systematic subjectivism.  Here, one can see the beginnings of extreme individualism taking hold.  Under an honestly expressed self-initiative, romanticized in old Yankee lore, the transcendentalists emphasized present needs and the function of will over intellect.  With that, there was a certain blindness to evil and an upbeat flavor in Emerson’s call for “self-trust.” 

In terms of looking inward, reality is the source of individual man/woman transcending to what is self-defined and intuitive:  “the perspective of knowledge as they radiate from the self.”[3] But without Calvinism – or some self-disciplining line of motivation or rationale – this form of individualism operated minus any internal check and balance. 

But this challenge was not met by a unified view as to what Calvinism should be.  And this gets at why many people are drawn to religious thoughts and experiences.  In this, a Second Great Awakening became prominent among Americans in the time frame these developments took place.  As with the First Great Awakening, a reaction to reason took hold and a call for emotions became front and center.  People simply felt that pure reason and religious belief based on it was simply too shallow.

Picking up on the First Awakening and one of its prominent spokespersons, Jonathan Edwards, his was an early voice of this reaction.  Allen C. Guelzo describes,

 

Jonathan Edwards had hoped to resist the flattening of religious authority by appealing to the “religious affections” as a sufficiently valid justification for Protestant Calvinism.  As did Kant, Edwards would have deplored any connection of his critique of reason with Romanticism’s wholesale revolt against it.  But the ongoing influence of evangelical revivalism, set by the pattern of the Great Awakening, certainly gave instant credit to anyone proposing on religious grounds to criticize or diminish the supremacy of reason in knowledge and giving pride of place to the will.  That old problem comes back amongst us [in the early 1800s].[4]

         

In that time and to the mid nineteenth century, the person to espouse a concern for emotional needs among religious advocates was Emerson.

This blog has highlighted Emerson in the past – e.g., see “An Overall American Construct, Part II” February 9, 2021.  Here, the attempt will be to situate his contribution in historical terms as it relates to the dialectic struggle between federalism and natural rights.  And one particular source, written by Emerson, helps in gaining how he saw this tension between Romantics and the advocates of enlightened reason.  That would be his book, Nature, a short overview of how he approached the criticism Romanticism leveled against the Enlightenment.

A bit of further context: Emerson in this book uses epistemological language instead of ontological language.  Epistemology zeroes in on the ways one knows things while ontology concerns itself with the nature of social reality.  The first, therefore, is more procedural and the second is more into what is.  By adopting Kantian epistemological view, this blogger believes that Emerson left a door open for compromise – see if the reader agrees.

Emerson’s book makes, according to Guelzo, three main arguments.  They are:

·      In distinction to Calvinism – which views nature as a background and source of temptations and in which individuals struggle for redemption – and the Enlightenment’s view – seeing nature as a source of puzzling realities that humans can study for knowledge’s sake or profit – there is transcendentalism.  This third view serves as “the counterpart and mate of the Soul.”  According to this other view, nature offers humans three positive gifts, those being beauty, an environment of virtue, and a form of spiritual, as opposed to corporeal, goodness.

·      Nature provides its benefits and gifts without a word-based language, but more of a spiritual form of communication.  One is well-served to understand this attribute by recalling a time when one is confronted with a beautiful landscape and being profoundly awed.  This blogger can make such a recollection and understands what Emerson is getting at with his “observation.”

·      And Emerson, in reviewing the nature of religion and ethics, determined that religion tends to degrade nature.  How?  First, by claiming goodness depends on grace, and religion separates nature from grace, diminishing the role of nature.  He expresses hostility at that message.  Instead, he feels and promotes an innocent, child-like love for nature.  Through nature, God does not communicate or argue in the form of propositions – His message is holistic and solicits a compatible form of worship.

This posting ends with this summary of Emerson’s three prone argument and points out that the next posting will comment on what these claims mean to the dialectical struggle, that being between communalistic federalism and individualistic natural rights.

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[1] George Santayana, “The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy,” The Annals of America, vol. 13 (Chicago, IL:  Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc, 1968), 277-288.

[2] Daniel J. Elazar, “Federal Models of (Civil) Authority,” Journal of Church and State, 33, (Spring, 1991), 231-254 AND Andrew C. McLaughlin, The Foundations of American Constitutionalism (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1972).

[3] Santayana, “The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy,” The Annals of America, 281.

[4] Allen C. Guelzo, The American Mind, Part 2 of 3 – a transcript book – (Chantilly, VA:  The Teaching Company/The Great Courses, 2005), 24-25.