CARLYLE AND COLERIDGE

 

In the attempt to describe how Romanticism affected American political views in the early to mid-eighteen hundreds, this blog next looks at two British writers who had significant influence on those Americans.  They were Thomas Carlyle and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.  The first is primarily remembered as an influential historian and essayist and the second as a poet.

         Carlyle’s writing has been judged as reflecting a recurring balance between the Romantic thrust for both emotions, such as a love for freedom, and what was known to be historical and political fact.  But within that general aim, he was drawn to the heroic struggle.  This admiration for struggle, per se, seemed to take priority over any of the issues that such struggles represented. 

In that, the “great man” seemed to be his main topic for analysis.  One of his most famous pieces betrays this emphasis, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History.  That was a book that shared a series of lectures about how important heroic leadership was to history.[1]  One can sense in Carlyle an anti-democratic bent and that his ideas – not necessarily his writings – lent to the march toward dictatorial leadership in the twentieth century.

Along with this level of hero-worshipping, he also promoted a nationalism.  He is thought of as a strong protagonist of Anglo-Saxonism – Carlyle saw the Anglo-Saxon “race” as being superior to all others.  “Thomas Carlyle was perhaps the first notable Englishman to enunciate a belief in Anglo-Saxon racial superiority, and, as he told [Ralph Waldo] Emerson, among the members of this select race he counted the Americans.”[2] 

Apparently, this sense of kinship, albeit reserved (Americans were seen as formless in their Saxon character), served to solidify whatever affinity he and Emerson shared.  Carlyle’s nationalism had some complexity in that it ascribed a role to the Norman invaders of the eleventh century.  The Normans added order to the English national structure in Carlyle’s thesis.

Added to his unfortunate – in that they were anti-democratic – views was his antisemitism.  He refused to support the extension of the franchise to Jews in 1848.  He argued that Jews were two-faced in seeking the vote when their true homeland was Palestine where they should go.  Of course, he also expressed common stereotypical attributes to Jews, such as being excessively materialistic and using their wealth to lead to corrupt practices.  To varying degrees, his thoughts and biases had their effects on those Americans who extended him credulity.

As for Coleridge, he is most known for his literary masterpieces.  The titles, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan are well entrenched in the British literary canon.  He left readers a timeless instruction that when they are reading literature, to engage in a “suspension of disbelief.”  Considered by current biographers as a bipolar person, he suffered from recurring physical challenges which originated with a serious case of rheumatic fever and other diseases as a child.

Unfortunately, during his time he was treated with laudanum which led to a lifelong addiction to opium.  All of this, it is believed, set the stage for his constant suffering from anxiety and depression.  This fits convincingly with his best-known metaphor, the albatross around the neck featured in the The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

He also knew and had an effect on Emerson, the American essayist.  Along with many early supporters of the French Revolution who would eventually become a critic of that disruption.  Eventually, he became politically a conservative more in the line of thoughts expressed by Edmund Burke.  Today, he is credited with influencing John Stuart Mill.  His political thinking centered on three themes.  They are:

1.     “The idea” or function of institutions as opposed to shortcomings being central to how institutions should be judged.[3]

2.    Social stability or “Permanence” as Coleridge stated this concern in that what he emphasized was community and national education.[4]

3.    British history depicted as organic, natural growth with an emphasis on common law as exemplifying this growth.[5]

In these studies, Coleridge took on an internal – inside the social matrix – vantage point instead of an external, unfamiliar, objective view.[6]

          As one can see with these two British writers, Emerson, in America, takes on a central role in the popularization of Romantic sentiments.  As in Europe, it was a many-sided belief system and highly individualistic although through various angles.  Also mimicking the Romantics from across the ocean, Americans had intense levels of moral excitement, support for individualism, and the promotion for the importance of intuitive thinking or perception.  They also adopted that Romantic attraction to nature as a source of goodness while seeing society as the source of corruption.

          Within these broader themes, American Romantics sought a bit of freedom from strict religious dogma and practices as it reinvigorated their rebellious spirit from the previous generation.  They tended to reject Calvinistic beliefs in predestination and a more liberalized view of what humans’ relationship to God should be.

          For example, people could and should have less restrictive religious sanctions put on them.  All of this was philosophically in tune with the transcendentalism the last posting reviewed.  In that, reason is at least diminished, and intuitiveness enhanced.  Also, customs and traditions came under scrutiny as their value was questioned relative to the more modern conditions of those days.

          Generally, on the political front, Romanticism encouraged Americans to spur a level of concern for the poor and those considered oppressed.  This was further emphasized by expounding ideals supporting freedom – extending to the relief of exploited people – and the promotion of social progress along equalitarian grounds.  And here one finds its most pro-federation message.  That is, it prized the federalist sense of civic responsibility for fellow-citizens and that was even extended, among many transcendentalists, to the slave population. 

          Now, this story is ready to focus on Emerson, the topic of the next posting.  He was not the ideal Romantic, but he employed many of their assumptions.  If he accomplished anything along Romantic lines, he gave definitional substance to individual integrity, a central concern of federation theory.

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[1] Eric Bentley, The Cult of the Superman:  A Study of the Idea of Heroism in Carlyle and Nietzsche, with Notes on Other Hero-Worshippers of Modern Times (London, UK:  Robert Hale, 1969).

[2] Robert Frankel, Observing America:  The Commentary of British Visitors to the United States, 1890-1950 (Studies in American Thought and Culture) (Madison, WI:  University of Wisconsin Press, 2007), 54.

[3] Andy Hamilton, “Coleridge, Mill, and Conservatism:  Contemplation of an Idea,” in Coleridge and Contemplation, ed. by Peter Cheyne (Oxford, UK:  Oxford University Press, 2017), 143 (source did not have total pages).

[4] Alan Ryan, J S Mill (London, UK:  Routledge, 1974).

[5] Pamela Edwards, The Statesman’s Science (New York, NY:  Columbia University Press, 2004).

[6] John Skorupski, Why Read Mill Today (London, UK:  Routledge, 2006).

KANT BE SO

 

Yes, a cheesy title, but in its way, it hits the point of this posting.  This blog, after rendering a cursory description of how Romanticism got started in Europe, now begins describing its introduction into the US.  And in that, one comes across familiar titles:  “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” by Washington Irving along with his “Rip Van Winkle.”  There’s James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans and the depiction of Puritanical morals in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter and Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. 

But of direct interest to this blog are the essays and other non-fiction works of Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson.  And with these efforts, one can see that many Americans readily took up the themes their European counterparts had been expounding.  That included a high dose of moral judgement, an emphasis on individualism – from a more psychological perspective – and the importance of intuition, more on this in a bit.

They also promoted an almost reverence for nature – especially in the case of Thoreau – in which the message was it was “naturally” good while society was indulgent and corrupt.  Of course, as the last posting described and explained, these themes were recurring in Romantic offerings in Europe as those artists and writers took aim at the Enlightenment’s reliance on reason.  And to underline this divorce from Enlightened thought, American Romantics hit upon a term that they felt emboldened their disdain, that being transcendentalism. 

Why?  That question takes one back to Europe.  There, the origin of this anti-reason strain gets an initial upstart not from an anti-reason argument, but one that placed certain restraints found in the works of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke.  In their works – to use a Lockean term – the mind at birth was a tabula rasa, a blank slate. 

It, then through experience, perhaps resulting from the succession of rewards and costs that one encounters, one “learns” to see those things that one should pursue and what one should avoid among what all those encounters teach a person.  In that one learns, from observing how one’s mind works, to reason since reasoning increases the probability of success.  To that argument, Immanuel Kant sought to qualify it.

He did not argue that reason and the ability to reason were not important aspects of learning and decision-making, but he claimed there was more going on in the mind and those processes of sorts were inborn abilities.  And that needs to be explained.  To begin, yes, at birth one experiences and/or observes isolated things out in one’s surroundings, but that is all a subject can do that relates to his/her reasoning ability. 

That is, each encounter is merely observing a sensation.  At that stage, reason could not do anything with each sensation or, to use the jargon, each thing-in-itself.  As such, each is phenomenal, or datum and one cannot pass any judgement about it.  To this point, there is agreement with David Hume in that Hume’s skepticism questioned the human ability to draw any conclusions even if colliding billiard balls then move away from each other. 

But, Kant adds, that upon that pure information, one has built-in a mental capacity – not based on experience – that allows one to make judgements of what underlies or constitutes those experiences.  And that is what Kant called with the unfortunate term, noumenal (roughly pronounced new-ou-min-al).

This noumenal is a totally different realm of knowledge into which the mind can tap.  It is through this element that the mind can investigate the nature of things or to pass judgement as to its ultimate truthfulness, its functionality, its morality, and other qualities that transcend its physical qualities, i.e., beyond one’s observation of the things-in-themselves.  And here, according to Kant, one does not use reason – reason only deals in the phenomenal.[1]

All of this review reminds this blogger of what he reads concerning contemporary psychological study of these human, mental abilities and processes.  For example, Nobel prize winner, Daniel Kahneman, writes:

 

Our everyday intuitive abilities are no less marvelous than the striking insights of an experienced firefighter or physician – only more common …

[quoting Herbert Simon] “The situation has provided a cue; this cue has given the expert access to information stored in memory, and the information provides the answer.  Intuition is nothing more and nothing less than recognition.” …

          An important advance is that emotion now looms much larger in our understanding of intuitive judgements and choices than it did in the past.  [An] executive’s decision would today be described as an example of the affect heuristic, where judgements and decisions are guided directly by feelings of liking and disliking, with little deliberation or reasoning.[2]

 

All this gets heavier as one plunges into Kant, and the purpose here is not to do so – even if this writer could – but to give the reader a sense of why Romantic Americans adopted the term transcendentalism.  In doing so, they probably extended Kant’s purposes, but it did fit into what they wished to promote.  As with their European counterparts, they had an attitude against reason and Kant’s transcendent argument fit their designs.  Allen Guelzo explains:

 

There were, Kant said, two things which amazed him – the starry heavens above, which were phenomenal, and the moral law within which belonged to the noumenal.  Never the twain would meet, at least methodologically.  Philosophy could not become transcendent.  But, through the gift of the noumenal, it could become transcendental.  Reason, and all of its limitations, half heartedness, and sterility, could retire off the stage and minds could rejoice in knowing the certainty of external phenomena and the intuition of transcendental wonder.[3]

 

And wonder seems to be what many Americans were searching to find in the 1820s and 1830s.

As with the Great Awakening, the first signs of this transcending that is Transcendentalism appears in the Boston area.  It devolved from Unitarianism, a Protestant sect springing from the days of the Great Awakening, on the Harvard campus.  By the early 1800s, it had become the most prominent religion in the Boston area.

Upon the election of Henry Ware as a professor of divinity as early as 1805 and the ascension of John Thornton Kirkland as president of that college in 1810, a certain natural evolution from Unitarian beliefs took hold, an outgrowth or sort of rebellious thinking that promoted free consciousness and initially valued intellectual reasoning. 

But this view moved on and began to question such Unitarian biases of mildness, sobriety, and cool rationalism.  They, the self-anointed Transcendentalists, sought more intensity.   Parallel to otherwise Unitarian beliefs, they went looking for more visceral spirituality in their beliefs and in the religious experiences that they encountered.[4]  These notions took root and led to the eventual founding of the Transcendental Club in Cambridge in 1836 under the leadership of George Putnam, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Frederick Henry Hedge.

The club had female members and of note, Thoreau was also a member.  It published a journal, The Dial.  But the club and its movement did not enjoy widespread influence during the 1840s.  As a matter of fact, it did not hit its stride until later in the mid-nineteenth century.  At that time, Transcendentalism influenced a growing movement known as the “Mental Sciences.”  Later, it took on the name “New Thought.”  It considered Emerson its intellectual father as well as depending on a long list of influential British writers of those years.[5]

It turns out that these Americans had little direct exposure to European Romantics and most of what they understood or knew of them came to them through the works of Thomas Carlyle and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.  It is through their presentation of Romantic ideas that this blog will next look at and report on their influence.

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[1] Henry E. Allison, “Kant, Immanuel,” in The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, edited by Ted Honderich (New York:  Oxford University Press, 1995), 435-438.

[2] Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow, (New York, NY:  Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2011), 11-12.

[3] Allen C. Guelzo, The American Mind, Part II – a transcript book – (Chantilly, VA:  The Teaching Company/The Great Courses, 2005), 23-24.

[4] Ian Frederick, “The Emergence of Transcendentalism,” American Studies at The University of Virginia, University of Virginia (November 2014), accessed September 13, 2021, Rise of Transcendentalism (virginia.edu) .

[5] “New Thought,” MSN Encarta, Microsoft (November 11, 2002), accessed September 13, 2021, New Thought - MSN Encarta (archive.org) .