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PHILOSOPHY

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American philosophy in the early nineteenth century was an enterprise shaped by beliefs in common sense, moral feeling, and self-culture. In addition to being decisively influenced by democratic values, however, philosophy in antebellum America was also divided by controversies about the roles science and faith would play in constituting knowledge. Scientific empiricism, Protestant theology, and Romantic literary theory contended with one another for the philosophical high ground in the colleges, churches, intellectual societies, and debate clubs of 1830s and 1840s. In this period of intellectual generalism, almost all philosophical debates were by nature interdisciplinary affairs. As a result, early American philosophy sometimes seems like an incoherent negotiation between irreconcilable ideas. Further complicating matters, philosophy was often voiced in the common tongue of the ordinary, self-taught citizen instead of the recondite language of the elite professor or minister. Ralph Waldo Emerson's (1803–1882) assertion in "The American Scholar" (1837) that the creative mind of the self-taught individual would matter much more than the trained thinking of highly educated bookworms in the creation of a more intellectual American culture suggests not only Emerson's radical individualism but also something of the reality on the ground. With an ear listening, then, to the philosophy of the street and of the classroom; an eye focused on the philosophical debates among religious reformers and political activists; and a mind attuned to the Scottish, English, and German thinkers who most influenced their American counterparts, this essay explores three central features of the philosophical landscape of antebellum America: (1) the role of Lockean empiricism and Scottish common sense realism in American debates about science and faith; (2) the significance of international Romanticism to New England transcendentalism and New England transcendentalism to modern and contemporary American and international philosophy; and (3) the impact of the problem of slavery and the cause of abolitionism on antebellum American philosophy.

ORIGINS OF AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY

Like all things American, philosophy went through a creative process of democratization in the nineteenth-century United States. Readers in the antebellum literary marketplace wanted their philosophy to be useful in helping them to manage themselves and to cultivate self-trust in the emerging marketplace culture. This need for democracy and practicality in part accounts for the popularity among Americans of ideas adapted from the Scottish Enlightenment. While ordinary Americans did not read the works of Scottish common sense philosophers such as Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746) and Thomas Reid (1710–1796), these philosophers contributed profoundly to the developing American moral philosophy by charting a middle way between the Calvinist legacy of the Anglo-American, puritanical past and the eighteenth-century taste for scientific empiricism.

Reacting against Calvinistic beliefs in predetermined fate and innate human depravity at the time of the Puritan Revolution in England, John Locke (1632–1704)—the most important influence on both Scottish common sense and early American philosophy—conceives of the human mind as a blank slate on which impressions are written by experiences. According to Lockean psychology, human beings have no ideas that are innately their own. Sense impressions mark the mind, which in turn forms these impressions into simple but accurate ideas. Humans are consequently free agents who have a large say in how their understanding of the world is composed: they are neither predetermined nor depraved. But, according to Locke, the mind needs a rigorous education into an empirical method. Without such education, the mind tends to combine simple ideas into complex ones. Complex ideas, in turn, engage the memory and the imagination, which often cloud subsequent perception and comprehension. Thus, to retain a clear sense of things, the world must be grasped through a strictly empirical method.

Only when addressing the miracles of the Bible does Locke equivocate about empiricism. But where Locke seeks to retain a place in empirical philosophy for religious faith, David Hume (1711–1776) takes empiricism to a logical and skeptical extreme. Many philosophers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries felt that Lockean psychology and Humean skepticism worked together. To defenders of religious faith, the empiricism of Locke and Hume rendered problematic the notion that ideas of good and bad are derived from objective, universal moral laws. They seemed to suggest that all knowledge is based in sense, and what is sensed about God or anything else is both subjective and probabilistic—anything but objective and absolute.

In response to such doubts about the moral design of the universe, Francis Hutcheson—a Scotsman who more fully theorized ideas already proposed by the third Earl of Shaftesbury, Antony Ashley Cooper, in England—postulated that moral absolutes could be found within the self as a faculty of human sense. Hutcheson's idea is not that human beings have godlike intelligence, but, as Barbara Packer suggests, that "the same deity who has endowed us with bodily senses acute enough to preserve our lives has also instilled in us a moral sense whose operation . . . is as ineluctable as gravity" (p. 342). More than a feeling in the work of most common sense thinkers, the moral sense is a kind of mental function, which as Thomas Reid clarified, comes to human beings through intuitions or "immediate beliefs." In other words, according to Scottish common sense realism, the knowledge of right and wrong, of good and bad, is a part of human existence. The only thing needed to make use of common sense is an education into the higher, sociable impulses, which these thinkers variously called "benevolence," "gregariousness," or "sympathy."

Among professional philosophers in America influenced by common sense theorists, James McCosh (1811–1894)—who was appointed president of The College of New Jersey, later Princeton University, in 1868 and wrote the influential history The Scottish Philosophy (1875)—was probably most important. But across the wider culture in the nineteenth century, the idea that there exists a moral sense—like the senses of taste, touch, sight, hearing, and smell—endowed by a benevolent creator in humankind was widely accepted. Some have argued that Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence (1776) and his confidence in the ability of ordinary people to govern themselves owes nearly as much to a Scottish faith in human nature as to a Lockean political calculus. A dyed-in-the-wool empiricist, Jefferson takes it as a universal that "Reason and free inquiry are the only effectual agents against error" (p. 211). But he also admits in an 1814 letter to a friend that "I sincerely . . . believe with you in the general existence of a moral instinct" (p. 543). Even slaves—whom Jefferson otherwise demeans through purportedly empirical observation in Notes on the State of Virginia (1787)—have a fully formed moral sense in his account.

The Protestant Unitarians who held office at Harvard College in the early nineteenth century also combined a Lockean pedagogy demanding strenuous efforts at self-culture through memorization and drills with a generally sunny belief in the innate goodness of individuals and a benevolent God. In the 1830s and 1840s Emerson and other transcendentalists would repudiate the empiricism of Harvard Unitarians while retaining their prevailing healthy-minded faith that human beings can know themselves, nature, and the ways of God. And although Herman Melville (1819–1891), who had a very stern vision of nature and God, would scoff in his darkly metaphysical fiction at the childishness and ignorance about evil he attributed to the evasive northern intellectual culture, other genteel cultural leaders besides Emerson—including Harriet Beecher Stowe and Frederick Douglass—readily deployed Scottish philosophical ideals and metaphysics as part of their literary and philosophical arsenal against slavery. Indeed, a majority of the antebellum public intellectuals who are still read today subscribed to a democratically republican belief that everyone has access to the laws of the conscience and, thus, to universal moral truth.

All of this suggests that common sense philosophy had its greatest significance in antebellum America in the way it informed popular understandings of democratic ethics and cultural pedagogy. In the emerging marketplace society, where social mobility and capitalistic competition destroyed aristocratic forms of social cohesion, moral ideas derived from common sense philosophy helped to assure individuals and communities that they still lived in a morally accountable universe. As Thomas Augst in particular has shown, in the lyceums and lecture halls, debate societies and libraries where people spent their leisure hours, common sense moral philosophy helped to shape an emerging cultural pedagogy about the ethical and spiritual care of the self. By writing letters to family members, reflecting on their lives in their journals, reading useful literature, participating in polite conversation, and listening to oratorical performance, ordinary antebellum citizens sought to develop "character," to account for their actions, and to socialize themselves into democracy. Moral philosophy, thus, was a widespread social practice of literate citizenship; it had civic appeal in early America.

TRANSCENDENTALISM

Transcendentalism grew up as a generational movement in the 1830s and 1840s. Many of the transcendentalists were Harvard-educated divinity students who fought against the religious historicism and empiricism of their Unitarian predecessors. Influenced by international and especially German Romanticism, they championed individual intuition and spiritual self-trust over Christian dogma and religious institutionalism. Becoming a kind of antiestablishment avant-garde, the transcendentalists—including Emerson, Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862), Margaret Fuller (1810–1850), Amos Bronson Alcott (1799–1888), Theodore Parker (1810–1860), and others—were not philosophers in any strict sense of the vocation. However, they wove together theology, philosophy, literature, pedagogy, and political activism with genuine originality in their essays and treatises.

As the evangelical revivalism of the Second Great Awakening inspired an array of iconoclastic spiritual movements across the northeastern United States, transcendentalism emerged as the most philosophically subtle and intellectually cosmopolitan of these. The transcendentalists essentially fashioned a more Romantic Unitarian theology. While validating the Unitarian impulses toward self-culture, self-trust, and the humanization of Christ, the transcendentalists tended to repudiate the Unitarian appeal to "facts" to buttress their form of liberal Christianity. Christianity for the transcendentalists would not be sustained through Lockean powers of observation or exacting scholarship about the miracles of the Gospels. Instead, the way to universal godly truth for transcendentalists was through the portal of the inviolate self. Self-reliance—cultivated through intuitive experiences of solitary, often emotional revelation to the divinity within the self—became the guiding Romantic and spiritual ethos of transcendentalism. In addition, since the transcendentalists, as Lawrence Buell and others have shown, conceived of self-reliance as a process that involved freeing themselves from provincial intellectual entanglements as much as anything else, they helped to bring into being a more cosmopolitan philosophical culture in the United States. At a most basic level, the transcendentalists read fewer British and Scottish philosophical sources and more German ones.

In the 1820s and 1830s German philosophy arrived in the United States indirectly, through the works of translators and interpreters including Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Madame de Staël, and Thomas Carlyle. James Marsh (1794–1842), the leading figure among Vermont transcendentalists and the president of the University of Vermont, published the first American edition of Coleridge's Aids to Reflections in 1829. Marsh's edition of Coleridge, perhaps more than any other single text, helped to spark American transcendentalism. For Marsh, Emerson, and many others, Coleridge's engagement with German philosophy offered a way to diffuse the Enlightenment-era rage for empiricism by retheorizing the mind so as to elevate individual intuition as a means for discovering truth. Coleridge freely (and often inaccurately) adapted the terminology of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) to his own purposes. What Coleridge gained from a creative reading of Kant was the idea that knowledge is immanent in experience and not simply derived from it. Coleridge and Marsh were both philosophically and religiously conservative, whereas Emerson and many other Boston transcendentalists were radically progressive or anarchic. Whatever their persuasion, however, the transcendentalists were fascinated by the distinction Coleridge made between "understand-ing"—the faculty of mind that derives knowledge from sense perceptions and methodical rationation—and "reason"—the higher faculty of mind that enables people to apprehend divinity and universal law through revelation.

As Emerson argues in Nature (1836), his provocative, essayistic reckoning with philosophical idealism, this specific distinction between understanding and reason enables transcendentalists to account for nature and the mind "by other principles than those of carpentry and chemistry" (p. 508). Emerson's claim is that, in moments of insight, "spirit does not act upon us from without . . . but . . . through ourselves" (pp. 508–509), bringing about "delicious awakenings of the higher powers, and the reverential withdrawing of nature before its God" (p. 503). Emerson also draws inspiration from Carlyle's heated, mystic responses to German philosophy, and both Emerson and Walt Whitman (1819–1892) endorse Carlyle's sense—inspired by J. G. Fichte and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe—of the poet's heroic, philosophic role: to perceive and seize the Universal idea and clothe it in an inspiring and accessible language.

Although professional philosophers often discount Emerson's writing for its lack of logic and consistency, its refusal to engage in reasoned argument, its aphorisms and flighty idiosyncrasies, Emerson's influence has nevertheless been profound on a range of important modern and contemporary philosophers, including William James, Frederich Nietzsche, Stanley Cavell, and Richard Rorty. Many literary critics interested in philosophy have found in Emerson's thought the origins of American pragmatism, and philosophers from around the globe who value the active mind more than systemic philosophical exposition continue to respond enthusiastically to the two sides of Emerson that Buell identifies: the democratic idealist and the anarchic provocateur. In addition, Thoreau's philosophy of civil disobedience, which hangs on a transcendental understanding of self-reliance, helped to inspire the movements of peaceful revolution set in motion by Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. Futhermore, Whitman's radically cosmic belief in the unique grandeur of every self and every mind—his Romantic vision of a universal oversoul connecting slave, whore, president, and preacher all alike through a daily sharing in the erotics of experience, as expressed in Leaves of Grass (1855)—amounts to the first philosophically significant statement of tolerance and multicultural acceptance in American letters.

This is not to say that the transcendentalists dominated academic philosophical debate in the United States of their day; they did not because they were not academics. More formally trained, establishment figures of Unitarian theology and philosophy like Harvard's Francis Bowen (1811–1890) sought to stem the revolution in American ideas that the transcendentalists helped to initiate. According to one widely respected history of American philosophy, Harvard establishmentarians like Bowen "consistently outmaneuvered the Transcendentalists philosophically" (Kuklick, p. 10). Still, while Bowen and his circle have been largely forgotten, Emerson and his peers discovered and inspired an American philosophical movement that was more dynamic, democratic, and cosmopolitan than anything that came before it.

ABOLITIONISM, LITERATURE, AND MODERN CONSCIOUSNESS

In the broadest sense, many American abolitionists argued that common sense made it transcendentally apparent that slavery—whether conceived of as a sin against a Christian God, a violation of nature, or some combination of the two—was immoral. Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896), for instance, felt that slavery violated the common sense that every woman in the Republic could derive from her experience of sympathetic, maternal feelings. In Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), the most influential antislavery novel ever written, Stowe repudiates reason as an unreliable male faculty for assessing moral truths—reason enables marketplace sophistries that allow the selling of humanity as chattel—in order to champion the bedrock truth value of women's tears and affections. Organizing her entire antislavery philosophy around the relationship between mother and child, Stowe, like other philosophers of the domestic hearth, including her sister Catharine Beecher, genders common sense. She elevates women above men as intuitive philosophers and conceives of slavery as a patriarchal institution that the mothers of America needed to repudiate for the sake of children and motherhood itself. Frederick Douglass (1818–1895), by contrast, rationalizes his rage at being denied his right to manhood into an emphatically virile antislavery philosophy. The philosophy of masculine emancipation he elaborates in Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845) still has considerable influence in the African American protest tradition. Gender differences aside, however, both Stowe and Douglass draw from a Lockean emphasis on the importance of personal liberty combined with universalized appeals to familial affection and human rights in their antislavery writings. Both also suggest the central role literary culture played in popularizing philosophical ideas during the period and in linking philosophy to activist politics and the ethics of social life.

Douglass's Narrative is not often thought of as a landmark philosophical work, because philosophy is not often conceived of as an expressive, autobiographical project among Europeans, as it frequently has been among African Americans. Arguing that literacy is the pathway from slavery to modern democratic consciousness, Douglass shows his mastery of republican political discourse; he crafts an intellectually balanced, concise, straight-talking style that embodies his claim to reason and the rights of humankind. Yet, Douglass's narrative, as Paul Gilroy suggests, is more significant from the perspective of philosophy because it uses the philosophical methods and the ideals of the Enlightenment to subvert the "scientific racism" afflicting works by thinkers as various as Hume, Jefferson, Kant, and G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831).

In particular, Douglass's Narrative shows that he was conversant with the German idealist tradition out of which Hegel's thinking emerged. Like Hegel, Douglass conceives of the Ideal as something that can be expressed only through a historical process of progressive development. Both also work dialectically, by setting up dichotomies and then attempting to resolve them through philosophical or narrative exposition. In The Phenomenology of Mind (1807), Hegel presents an allegory of lordship and bondage. In the Narrative, Douglass uses more immediate language and imagery to deconstruct the dichotomies of nineteenth-century American society—white/black, free/slave, literate/ illiterate, mind/body—in order to advance human history. Like Hegel, Douglass also asserts that there comes a time when one must fight in a life-and-death struggle in order to claim a fully modern consciousness. But here too Douglass ultimately theorizes a more cosmopolitan understanding of modern consciousness than does Hegel; Douglass himself, through his struggle with a white slave breaker, gains the empowered, autonomous sense of "the consciousness that exists for itself " (Hegel, p. 234) that is reserved for the white European in Hegel's account. "It was a glorious resurrection" (p. 113), Douglass states of his experience putting down the slave breaker, thereby writing himself into modern history in a way Hegel would have deemed impossible for a black man. Whereas Hegel arrives at a theory of power, Douglass conceives of a philosophy of emancipation.

CONCLUSION

Herman Melville in "Benito Cereno" (1855) presents a more strictly Hegelian allegory of lordship and bondage, in that no one escapes the encounter between slave and master without disillusioning self-consciousness, except for the naive New Englander, Amasa Delano, a believer in common sense and beneficent nature. Delano's worldview, which fuses anti-intellectual parochialism and an arrogant sense of Manifest Destiny, is based according to Melville on the fundamental misconception of the Scottish Enlightenment: that the senses are reliable and human perception is direct and comprehensive. In Melville's modern world, none of this is true. Melville's descent into skepticism suggests how common sense philosophy met its demise as the antebellum aura of confidence, faith, and certainty wore off after the Civil War. In the new, post–Civil War era of intellectual specialization, as industrialization increasingly alienated human beings from the products of their labor, and urbanization separated them from nature, the certainty of common sense gave way to philosophic uncertainty, doubt, and provisionalism. Although William James and most other pragmatists attempted to resist the pull of amorality, determinism, and pessimism in post-Darwinian philosophical conversations, this pull was very real, as the realist and naturalist fiction of the late nineteenth century suggests.

A forward-looking belief system shaped by notions about the common sense and the potential to experience divinity found within everyone, American philosophy was forged in the first half of the nineteenth century as a more accessible and practical response to European philosophies. Debated, democratized, and deified, philosophy found its largely optimistic American temper in the efforts of several generations of thinkers to modernize religion, humanize science, and repudiate slavery. While Darwinian science and the social fragmentation and modernization of the Gilded Age would challenge that temper, American pragmatists like William James, John Dewey, and Jane Addams sought to adapt the foundational healthy-mindedness they inherited as cultural baggage from the earlier era to the less confident, more complicated, social, cultural, and intellectual contexts in which they thought and wrote.

See also "The American Scholar"; "Benito Cereno"; German Scholarship; Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass; Nature; Romanticism; Transcendentalism

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Works

Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. 1845. New York: Penguin, 1986.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Nature. 1836. In The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 6th ed., edited by Nina Baym, et al., pp. 486–514. New York: Norton, 2003.

Hegel, G. W. F. The Phenomenology of Mind. 1807. Translated by J. B. Baillie. London: Allen and Unwin, 1964.

Jefferson, Thomas. The Portable Thomas Jefferson. 1975. Edited by Merrill D. Peterson. New York: Viking Penguin, 1977.

Secondary Works

Augst, Thomas. The Clerk's Tale: Young Men and Moral Life in Nineteenth-Century America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.

Buell, Lawrence. Emerson. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003.

Camfield, Gregg. Sentimental Twain: Samuel Clemens in the Maze of Moral Philosophy. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994.

Fox, Richard Wrightman, and James T. Kloppenberg, eds. A Companion to American Thought. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1995.

Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993.

Kloppenberg, James. Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870–1920. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.

Kuklick, Bruce. The Rise of American Philosophy: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1860–1930. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1977.

Menand, Louis. The Metaphysical Club. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001.

Packer, Barbara L. "The Transcendentalists." In The Cambridge History of American Literature, vol. 2, Prose Writing 1820–1865, edited by Sacvan Bercovitch, pp. 329–604. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

William M. Morgan