AN OVERALL AMERICAN CONSTRUCT, PART III

 

The last posting gives the reader a ranging view of how Americans have developed in terms of their philosophical ideas.  Just stating that, it sounds pompous to American ears.  And the fact that it does brings one back to Allen C. Guelzo’s[1] claim as to the pragmatic bias this nation has exhibited for being doers not thinkers.  And yet the academic history of the nation stretches back almost to its very beginning.

          And for this, one can cite the founding of Harvard just six years after the settlement of Boston in 1630.  One can further credit the religious enterprise, in this case that of the Puritans, to seek answers to the more metaphysical questions of life.  While this tradition is noted today for its very strict, moralistic theology, it attempted to discover reality that is not readily observable in the material world. 

Now all of this development was a complex mix of views and biases; for example, thrown into this was the common-sense philosophy of Scottish thought in the eighteenth century (more on this below).  But central in the beginning there was Puritanism that along with its fire-and-brimstone sermons was a strong commitment to congregational arrangements and their covenantal origins.

          Puritanism represents the stoic side of American thinking and one name that emerges as one studies these various influences is that of Jonathan Edwards who was a leader of the Great Awakening, a reemergence of Puritanical allegiance that was reestablished in the mid to late 1700s.  That movement was a sincere effort to bolster Puritanical morals after some slippage due to initial successes in the colonial settlements. 

This is not to claim this historical figure was some great thinker, but a thinker he was and was later designated as president of Princeton (he died as he was about to assume that office in 1758).  But even in the midst of the Great Awakening, the practical side of American thought did not go away.

          On the other side of this dual personality, the next contributor, one that overlaps in time with Edwards and his ilk, is Benjamin Franklin who published his Poor Richards Almanac in 1732 and his Autobiography in 1791 (he died in 1790).  Here one finds the practical tradition of Americans being extolled.  Uplifted were qualities of business acumen and common sense.  And in addition, as alluded to above, was the Scottish philosophic bent of Thomas Reid (1710-1796) and others who if not affecting Franklin, did have an effect on Thomas Jefferson.

Reid wrote the following:

Man was destined for society.  His morality, therefore, was to be formed to this object.  He was endowed with a sense of right and wrong, merely relative to this.  This sense is as much a part of his nature as the sense of hearing, seeing, feeling; it is the true foundation of morality, and not the kalon, truth, etc., as fanciful writers have imagined.  The moral sense, or conscience, is as much a part of man as his leg or arm.  It is given to all human beings in a stronger or weaker degree, as force of members is given them in a greater or less degree.  It may be strengthened by exercise, as may any particular limb of the body.  This sense is submitted, indeed, in some degree, to the guidance of reason; but it is a small stock which is required for this; even a less one than what we call common sense.  State a moral case to a ploughman and a professor.  The former will decide it as well and often better than the latter because he has not been led astray by artificial rules.[2]

This statement gives more philosophical language to the very down-to-earth perspective that was common among Americans not only of those days but throughout the nation’s history. 

And this sort of leaning can readily be seen as feeding another movement that would turn out to have a profound influence that this blog highlighted in its last posting.  That is the movement known as Transcendentalism.  And these lesser religious notions or themes are picked up through the 1800s and one can cite the fictional works of Herman Melville (Moby Dick) and Nathanial Hawthorne (The Scarlet Letter).  Their novels directly attack the Puritanical thinking that was judged in these works to be too inhuman in its expectations.

          One can than trace this other tradition to the development, years later, of Pragmaticism and the works of William James and John Dewey.  And that brings a student of this tradition into the twentieth century – Dewey died in 1952.  But how philosophical was this tradition and, for that matter, the Puritanical tradition?  Admittedly, not very.  Even the more well thought out tradition of Pragmaticism could boast of only a relatively few top-notch thinkers such as Dewey and James.[3]  But then again, its emphasis, even as a philosophy, was on doing, not thinking.

          And perhaps this lack of theorizing helped those who opposed these voices influenced by the Enlightenment.  Inspired by the Great Awakening in an around about way, and the work of Edwards, was the influence exerted by the Romantics.  While this Romanticism, as expressed in Transcendentalism, was mostly anti-religious, it was pro sentiment and emotion and reactive against pure reason and objectivism – and as such was a mixture of anti-religious dogma, but pro-religious fervor.

Antagonistic to the ideas emanating from science, from Descartes to Newton, these religiously inspired ideas and emotions became part of the American story.  In more current days, the remnants of the Romantics can be found in Born Again messaging that one can find among Evangelicals of today.  Heavily reliant on the Bible, its literal interpretation of that book provides much of what its adherents consider truthful accounts of the physical world. 

And why are these views taken as truth?  Because it feels true.  Passion, not reason, for Romantics is the essential guide.  And here, even Transcendentalism can be viewed not as a movement toward reason, but toward emotionalism, at least as it is represented by Ralph Waldo Emerson.  All this will be described and explained in later postings.  Links to such characters as John C. Calhoun and his representation of southern agrarianism will be pointed out.  Here, the aim is to give the reader the warning that all of this, while it can be analyzed and of which sense can be made, is not an account of a single-minded people.

One can detect the two traditions, Puritanism and the Enlightenment.  How both affect Transcendentalism and its effects, given Santayana’s overview (see previous posting), all of these combined and co-existed under an organizational and political arrangement defined by federalist principles. 

Organizational principles are not handed down from above.  They instead have to stand free with enough supportive ideals and ideas which have to be thought of, implemented, and defended to survive various challenges such as those facing the Civil War generation, and many think, the present generation.

They are the product of the human mind and are implemented through complex mixtures as those found in this nation’s past.  More will be shared in upcoming postings including a more detailed accounts of what this and the last two postings introduce and describe to the reader. 

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[1] Allen C. Guelzo, The American Mind, Part I – a transcript book – (Chantilly, VA:  The Teaching Company/The Great Courses, 2005).  Unless otherwise indicated, factual information found in this posting is derived from this source.

[2] As quoted in Gary Wills, Inventing America:  Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence (New York, NY:  Vintage Books, 1978/2018), 202-203.  This quotation was utilized in a previous posting.

[3] This claim is belied by Louis Menand’s account of Pragmaticism.  See Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club (New York, NY:  Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2001).

AN OVERALL AMERICAN CONSTRUCT, PART II

 

In tracing American theoretical, philosophic thinking, this blog in its last posting describes the lack of such thinking among them.  It reports a general judgement; that is, it pointed out American reputation of being doers, not thinkers.  It ended its reporting by citing Tocqueville on that account. 

One can add many voices to that of the Frenchman all throughout the 1800s and into the 1900s including that of James Fennimore Cooper, Supreme Court justice Joseph Story, psychologist G. Stanley Hall, and philosopher George Santayana among others.  But it is with Santayana that this posting wants to remind long time readers of this blog, what this blogger had to offer some years ago.[1]

          The nation, during the 1800s, drifted away from the communal nature of American politicking that Tocqueville describes.  Why?  One writer who sheds some light on this question is George Santayana.  Santayana was a Spanish American philosopher who is credited with this famous quote: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” In 1911, Santayana published an address, “The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy,”[2] which offered a historical analysis as to why Americans had become less communal.

To begin with, Santayana points out that since the earliest days of the nation there has been a two-sided Christian view which has molded a lot of our social and political thought. On the one side, there is a fire-and-brimstone Calvinist view which bolstered concern for the ravages of sin and expressed itself as an “agonized conscience.” The other side promotes a gentler message, a social transcendentalism, developed more formally in the eighteenth century. Each encouraged its own social philosophy.

Calvinism pushed Americans to be disciplined. Hard work took on a moral status under this view. The discipline it inspired became very necessary as early Americans had to tame a frontier environment. Its harsh conditions with its dangers were met by a people armed with a view of life and morality suited to meet its challenges.

So successful was this mental and emotional framework that it became victimized by the success it allowed these settlers to achieve. Americans soon began to develop a prosperous economy and consequently, with more material security, they began to have available the finer things in life. They found it difficult to maintain their Calvinistic perspective, at least to the levels they endured earlier.

Calvinism did not disappear, but it lost its more stringent character. In the wake of a strong disciplinarian religious outlook, a strong congregational tradition survived.  Here it is useful to highlight a reference to the development of congregations.

From its earliest settlements, this form of social arrangement, the congregational model, characterized how Americans organized themselves. Key to this was organizing agreements among settlers through the utilization of covenants. According to Daniel Elazar, [3] covenants were sets of communal commitments by the settlers which established the basic social and political arrangements of the group.

The agreements were formalized as written agreements in the form of a charter or a constitution. To solidify this important promise to each other, the settlers called on God to witness the agreement. This form of organizing was repeated in the separate and isolated American colonies. The model continued into the development of state governments with the only difference being that the covenants eventually became compacts in which the initial agreements were established without calling on God as witness.

As referred to above, with a diminishing harshness of a stricter Calvinism, the “genteel tradition” or transcendentalism, an imported philosophy from Europe, became prominent. Leading this effort, Ralph Waldo Emerson helped define transcendentalism for Americans.  He, utilizing Kantian tradition of systemic subjectivism, formulated a system of thought that can be credited with initiating Americans' thinking along more individualistic lines.

Emerson strongly promoted self-initiative which was highly valued in a mostly frontier nation. The quality was easily integrated into a romanticized version of Yankee lore.  Two characteristics were emphasized in this vision: emphasis on present needs and the importance of will over intellect.

As opposed to the earlier Calvinist focus on evil, transcendental thought seemed to have a blind eye for it and rhapsodized an “up-beat-ness” and optimism. To Emerson, these dispositions translated themselves into confidence or trust in oneself, in one's ability. Along with confidence came a positive self-definition and a faith in intuition: “the perspective of knowledge as they radiate from the self.”[4] 

At the risk of being too much of a synopsis, one can see the Calvinist influence as stoic and transcendentalism as being epicurean.  The Americans’ version of federalism, if one describes it with the use of a Venn diagram, was situated in the overlap of the two traditions.  However, an imbalance seemed to emerge.

Without the previous prevalent Calvinistic source of humility, there turned out to be no internal check on the exuberance that transcendentalism promoted. Among the turmoil associated with an emerging nation, two competing social perspectives emerge, that of a marketplace and that of a commonweal.

One, the marketplace view takes hold. Two, the commonweal view competes. The marketplace view defines citizens by their role in the bargaining processes of the market. In this view, each person seeks his or her own self-interest.  One can view this development as the first meaningful challenge to a federalist perspective as the nation’s prominent view of governance and politics. 

It initiated and encouraged a transactional view to politics.  Yet, in the commonweal view, which was retained as a viscerally felt, idealistic espoused theory, citizens have undivided interests.  To this day people give it lip service.  This, according to Elazar, led to the evolution of three distinct political subcultures in America.[5]  

They are the moralistic, the individualistic, and the traditional.  While each maintained a federalist base, at least at an idealistic level, one can readily sense the origins of its demise.  But this account still has more to describe before this eventual evolvement took place.  Future postings will seek to do that.

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[1] Robert Gutierrez, “From Brimstone to Gentleness” and “Individualistic Political Subculture,” posting numbered 90 and 91 respectively (n.d.), Gravitas:  A Voice for Civics (a blog), no longer posted.  This rendering is further edited to meet the blog’s current editorial style.

[2]George Santayana, “The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy,” in The Annals of America, Vol. 13 (Chicago, IL: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1968/1911), 277-288.

[3] Daniel J. Elazar, “Federal Models of (Civil)Aauthority,” Journal of Church and State 33 (Spring 1991):  231-254.  Also, for supportive argument see Andrew C. McLaughlin, The Foundations of American Constitutionalism (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1972).

[4] Santayana, “The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy,” 281.

[5]Daniel J. Elazar, American Federalism: A View from the States (New York, NY: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1966).