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AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY |
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Select: Henry David Thoreau - Walt Whitman - William Torrey Harris |
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Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) Henry David Thoreau (picture), writer and naturalist, was born in Concord, Massachusetts on July 12, 1817 and is best known for Walden, an account of his experiment in simple living, and for the essay Civil Disobedience (1849). His doctrine of passive resistance influenced Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. Essentially a philosopher of individualism, Thoreau placed nature above materialism in private life and ethics above conformity in politics. Raised in genteel poverty, Thoreau graduated from Harvard in 1837 and returned to Concord, there becoming a close friend of Ralph Waldo Emerson and other transcendentalists. With Emerson's encouragement, Thoreau continued with a journal that he had begun in 1834. It was conceived as a literary notebook, but it gradually developed into a work of art in its own right, serving as a record of the author's thoughts and discoveries about nature and containing his comments on the culture of his time. Eventually reaching more than 2 million words, it ran to 14 volumes when published in 1906. Having worked briefly as a teacher in Concord and as a tutor to the children of Emerson's brother in New York, Thoreau much preferred the literary career urged on him by Emerson. He published essays, poems, and reviews in various magazines, including Emerson's The Dial, whose editorship Thoreau assumed briefly in 1843 when Emerson was away. Now permanently established in the neighborhood of Concord, Thoreau built a small cabin in 1845 on Emerson's land near Walden Pond and lived there for 2 years. His purpose in going to the pond was to simplify his life, reduce his expenses, and devote his time to writing and observing nature. Out of his experiment came two books, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849), the description of a rowboat excursion he had taken with his brother in 1839, and Walden (1854). The former was a complete failure, selling only 219 copies in 4 years; but the latter, received more favorably, laid the foundation for Thoreau's reputation. In July 1846, a year after moving into his cabin, Thoreau refused to pay his poll tax as a protest against American slavery and went to jail. Freed the next morning when an aunt, over his objections, paid the tax, he wrote Resistance to Civil Government, later better known as Civil Disobedience. In it he emphasized personal ethics and responsibility, urging the individual to follow the dictates of conscience in any conflict between it and the civil law and to violate unjust laws to effect their repeal. Thoreau continued his protests against slavery by lecturing, by aiding escaped slaves in their flight to freedom in Canada, and by publicly defending John Brown when he attacked Harpers Ferry in 1859. Thoreau was not satisfied merely to entertain an opinion and to enjoy it; he was resolved to live it. For himself and for any individual he claimed the right of revolution against bad government, and he regarded the authority of good government still an impure one, defended civil disobedience, and refused to pay taxes after facing and suffering imprisonment. "Under a government," Thoreau wrote, "which imprisons unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison." The spirit of revolt, the impulse to isolation, the desire to live alone with thought, nature and God, as well as practical considerations, caused him to retreat to Walden Pond where he contemplated nature and meditated upon it. Thoreau was a scholar and poet, an eccentric and a shrewd realist. His Walden, the work of a great naturalist and an even greater poet of nature, has been translated into many languages. "To be a philosopher," says Thoreau, "is not merely to have subtle thought, or even to found a school but so to love wisdom as to live, according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity and trust." No serene sage, Thoreau's ferocity often disturbed his most faithful friends, and estranged from him Emerson with whom he had been, for a time, closely associated. His temperament committed him to action, his faith to contemplation. Until 1850, Thoreau was an enthusiast of community life. Thereafter he became a staunch opponent of popular movements. The essential life meant to him life in nature. To him, the burden of the civilization of his age was not cause by mere defects in industrial organization and distribution, but rather by the domination of industry itself over human interests. Against a cultural evolution which he condemned as resulting in the neglect of human values, Thoreau was resolved to live his own time by his own terms. His political beliefs tended to be anarchistic. He resented governments' martial spirit causing recurrent wars; he distrusted not only monarchies with their injustice by the few, but also democracies with their injustice by the many. All acts of government, all laws, he contended, were rules of oppression by standardization. These ideas assumed the form of a definite philosophy of life, concisely expressed in his Civil Disobedience. He long disapproved of slavery, but the precipitating motive for writing the essay was the Mexican War of 1846. Feeling that the war was a matter of coercing a weak neighbor by a stronger one, Thoreau refused as a matter of principle to pay taxes, and landed in jail. Thoreau eventually became well known, especially as the author of Walden, and while his lecture engagements became numerous, he had to supplement his earnings by working as a plain surveyor. But he was no longer well. He died of tuberculosis on May 6, 1862. In his lifetime often dismissed as an imitator of Emerson, Thoreau has since won a reputation as one of America's greatest prose stylists; as a naturalist, pioneer ecologist, and conservationist; as an advocate of the simple life; and as a proponent of democratic individualism. A visionary humanist, he gave perhaps the best summary of his thought in Walden's injunction, "Simplify, simplify." In The Radical Academy
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The greatest of 19th-century American poets, Walt Whitman (picture) was born in West Hill, Long Island on May 31, 1819. He abandoned his given name "Walter" when he published his first book of poetry, Leaves of Grass, in 1855, which must be counted among the seminal works of American literature. From then on he became "Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos," a poet who sought a personal relationship with his readers. The third of eight children, he was born on a small farm that the family left in 1824 when they moved to Brooklyn, where his father was an unsuccessful builder, and where Walt attended public schools. At the age of 11 he began to learn printing, a trade with which he remained associated for many years as printer, journalist, and newspaper editor. Although his formal education was limited, he was teaching school in Long Island by the time he was 17 years of age. In 1838-39 he edited a weekly newspaper, The Long Islander, which is still in existence. For the next 10 years Walt drifted from one job to another, often losing newspaper posts because of his political views. He occasionally taught school, wrote short stories and poems for magazines, and edited such newspapers as the New York Aurora and Evening Tatler and the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. As a contributor to the New Orleans Crescent, he made a trip to the South, his first exposure to the vastness of the "States" that he later extolled in his poetry. There he suffered a severe mental disturbance, as a result of which his personality underwent a marked change, and he began to spend much time wandering about, associating and conversing with a great variety of simple people. As an individual, he became lonesome, keeping company with few men and hardly any women at all. But as a poet and thinker, he matured and deepened. About 1850 he returned to his family in Brooklyn and, until the death of his failing father in 1855, assisted him in the building business. Paid for, and in part typeset, by Whitman himself, Leaves of Grass (1855), including the famous "Song of Myself," launched his career as a poet. The book did not win universal acclaim, however, because his irregular poetry as well as his candid anatomical references antagonized many early readers. Until the beginning of the Civil War, while revising and expanding Leaves of Grass, Whitman supported himself by freelance journalism. During the War Between the States, Whitman came to Washington, D.C., as a war correspondent and stayed to live in the national capital as a government clerk. In his spare time he worked on his book of social philosophy, Democratic Vistas (1871), in which he eloquently expressed his pride in the American past and hope for the American future. In 1873 Whitman suffered a paralytic stroke, which left him increasingly incapacitated, and the death of his mother, whom he adored, was a further painful blow. The remaining years of his life were spent in Camden, New Jersey, where he died on March 26, 1892. Robert Green Ingersoll delivered a funeral oration at his grave. The central point of Whitman's philosophy lay in his faith in the powers of Man. Man is the source of all potential goodness, beauty and truth; indeed, he and God partake of the same nature. But to develop his creative inclinations, man needs freedom, freedom open to all, built on equality, tolerance, and self-respect. Each individual should be given a full opportunity to use freedom and prepared for it by the public acting in collaboration with the forces of law. This, in essence, was Whitman's idea of democracy. The function of poetry was conceived by Whitman as not only enjoying but leading and teaching mankind, and in many of his poems he attempted to answer philosophical questions. Whitman also dealt with philosophical problems in his notebooks. In 1847 he did not believe himself to have become a great philosopher, and in 1860 he wrote, in a similar mood, that he had not founded a philosophical school. In a way, he even repudiated philosophy as a bond of thinking, and exclaimed: "I leave all free, I charge you to leave all free." But he also claimed that the poet of the cosmos "advances through all interpositions, coverings and turmoils and stratagems to first principles." In Passage to India he declared that the poet fuses nature and man who were diffused before. In fact, Whitman was devoted to a philosophy which combined pantheism with a strong belief in human action, which unites the human soul with cosmic life but stresses the uniqueness of human personality and human relations. His civil, democratic, human consciousness was rooted in an all-embracing feeling of cosmic solidarity, and he was anxious to avoid any attenuation, and not to be deterred by psychic transmigration to the remotest objects. There is a tension between Whitman's firmness of conviction and his universal receptivity for impressions, sensations, ideas and phenomena, between his feelings of being a missionary of democracy and his mythical imagination. But this same tension strengthened his poetical power and did not endanger the unity of his character. From cosmic vagaries he always found the way back to simple truth and common sense. Having set himself a difficult task -- to create a poetry that would reflect the American melting pot of races and nationalities, the democratic aspirations of the people, and the physical vastness of the United States -- to accomplish his goals Whitman replaced traditional English form and meter with a rhythmic unit based on the meaning and natural flow of the lines. The subject matter, like the rhythm, was intended to be as free as the people and included topics usually avoided by the era's poets--commonplace experiences, labor, sexuality. He remains the nation's great celebrator and affirmer of democracy, freedom, the self, and the joys of living. In The Radical Academy
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William Torrey Harris (1835-1909) William Torrey Harris (picture), born on September 10, 1835, was an American philosopher and educator, known for his innovations in public schools. As superintendent of schools in St. Louis, Missouri, from 1868 to 1880, he introduced the first American public kindergarten and subjects such as art, music, and science. He advocated training teachers in educational philosophy and psychology and promoted the development of the high school. Harris was an effective U.S. commissioner of education, serving from 1889 to 1906. When passions ran high at the beginning of the War Between the States, a group met together in St. Louis and calmly interpreted the events as part of a universal plan, the working out of an eternal dialectic which Hegel had explained in all his works, particularly his Philosophy of History. William Torrey Harris was one of the key men of that philosophical society. Harris's philosophy was Hegelian. He might be termed the idealist in education in that he organized all phases of it on the principles of a philosophical pedagogy in which the German idealist Hegel, Kant, Fichte and Goethe were his principal teachers, apart from Friebel, Pestalozzi and the rest. When a magazine editor rejected an article he had written, saying it was "the mere dry husk of Hegelianism," Harris helped found The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, the first regular American philosophy journal. He edited it from 1867 to 1893, introducing translations of the work of German philosophers and early works of the American pragmatists. He initiated, with Brokmeyer, the St. Louis Movement in Philosophy which had far-reaching influence. Together with Amos Bronson Alcott and with the support of Emerson, he revived New England transcendentalism but gave it a more logical, metaphysical twist. Lecturing from coast to coast as one of America's most popular educators, he made his hearers realize the importance of philosophy, of having objectives in an education for democracy, and of viewing things in their whole. Far from being a dreamer, he was practical in his activities. He expanded the functions of the Bureau of Education, represented the United States in graphic exhibits at many an international exposition, incorporated the first kindergarten into an American school system, and was responsible for introducing the reindeer into Alaska as a condition for educating the natives who were thus supplied with an industry and a livelihood which the whalers and trappers had brought to the verge of extinction. The author of hundreds of articles, Harris also edited Webster's New International Dictionary and Appleton's International Education series. He died on November 5, 1909. To Page 1 of American Transcendentalism Enrich Your Life With a Philosophy Book... Enrich Your Life With a Philosophy Magazine...
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Introduction & Directory |
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