Defining a New World Metaphysics: The Quest for American Independence
Analysis of 'American Renaissance' transcendentalist works in the context of a pioneering struggle for intellectual independence.
The American nation, and to a greater degree the imagined American ideal, are entities that are supported extensively by a globally unparalleled conception of independence. With Thomas Jefferson?s Declaration of Independence, a new world identity was founded upon the institution of freedom:
WE, therefore, the Representatives of the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, in GENERAL CONGRESS, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the World for the Rectitude of our Intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly Publish and Declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be, FREE AND INDEPENDENT STATES.
These famous and somewhat incendiary words perpetuated the Revolutionary War and expedited American colonists? immediate goal, the realization of governmental independence. But while America?s release from British authority came rapidly and violently, the nation?s complete independence, on both a national and individual level, did not materialize with near as much alacrity or visibility. Close to a century after the establishment of the political independence of the United States, many Americans still felt themselves unjustly inhibited in many elemental aspects of life. In an attempt to concretely catalogue and rectify such restrictions of American liberty, a number of literary scholars and artists developed an important and influential rhetoric, coined the ?New World Metaphysics? by Walt Whitman, in their essays, poems, and novels, many of which are now regarded as canonical masterpieces. Among these eminent independence-seeking writers are Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, and Henry Melville. Their collective works contain a fascinating evolution of the call for and implementation of complete independence, beginning with Emerson?s conception of America?s literary and philosophical regeneration and concluding with Melville?s allegorical meditations upon the possible consequences of unchecked independence.
Constituting the famed Melting Pot, the majority of early Americans were in fact recently relocated Europeans, and as such, were still tied to many ideological and philosophical concepts that had originated in the ?Old World?. Transnational literary critics often accused American thinkers of merely imitating their more time-honored European counterparts, and in doing so belittled the burgeoning intellectual identity of the young nation. In an attempt to both liberate America from the formidable shadows of Old World influence and authority as well as justify the creation of a new independent ideology, Ralph Waldo Emerson published numerous essays supporting a decisive break from an almost oppressive European tradition. ?Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?? he preached, calling for his compatriots to join him in a demand for their ?own works and laws and worship? (Nature, 23, 24).
?The use of literature is to afford us a platform whence we may command a view of our present life, a purchase by which we may move it,? said Emerson, and his influential essays were employed in doing just that ? illustrating the many undesired dependencies of American intellectual life in an effort to move the nation out from under the dominion of European persuasion (Circles, 120). His essays were a pioneering demand for American independence; his works were both a general manifestation of how to achieve independence (if somewhat problematic) and an example of his own accomplishment of such a feat. Through the medium of literature and the vehicle of a metaphysical construct of intellectual independence, Emerson conceived the origin of a new American philosophy.
In prescribing a successful model for the true independence he spoke of, Emerson extensively utilized the great expanse of open land exclusive to America as an immediate image, the likes of which could not be found in the smaller, more densely populated countries of Western Europe. In Nature, which in his specific rhetoric consisted of both the physical wilderness and of ?all that is separate from us,? (Nature, 24) Emerson envisioned a vigorous generation and regeneration ? ?in nature every moment is new; the past is always swallowed and forgotten; the coming only is sacred? (Circles, 123). Nature?s continuous evolution made it extremely applicable to Emerson?s notion of American thought transitioning from a history of European ideas to the sacred coming of a new, independent philosophy utterly unique to America. ?Nature,? he concisely puts it, ?is already, in its forms and tendencies, describing its own design? (Nature, 24); Emerson felt that American thinkers should likewise develop their own intellectual designs by creating a metaphysical ideology completely independent from the Old World, a philosophy that would allow the growing country to appreciate its full potential as a nation.
Emerson was asking for a complete regeneration of the American philosophy, a drastic implementation of true independence, which he conceded would be extremely taxing: ?the terror of reform is the discovery that we must cast away our virtues, or what we have always esteemed such, into the same pit that has consumed our grosser vices? (Circles, 122). In order to assuage his fellow Americans, he provided them with a pioneering example of an intellectually independent American through the numerous descriptions of his own reformation presented in his essays. ?I cast away in this new moment all my once hoarded knowledge, as vacant and vain. Now for the first time seem I to know any thing rightly,? he boldly states, encouraging his fellows to forget the traditions of the past and focus solely on new thoughts, because ?that which builds is better than that which is built? (Circles, 124, 116). ?I unsettle all things. No facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simply experiment, an endless seeker with no Past at my back? expounds Emerson, in an exultant outburst that seems clearly to have influenced one of his successors, Walt Whitman (Circles, 123). With these forceful words, which were highly provocative in the Puritan communities in which they were received, Emerson begins to develop a bold new American, one who is not shaped or limited by a Past but instead seeking new truths, building new ideas. Emerson was a preliminary independent, and his writings were an intrepid call for his fellow Americans to expand upon his still incomplete creation of an original and independent nation. Emerson was seeking new thinkers, looking for a ?new speaker? to ?strike a new light,? and ?emancipate us from the oppression of the last speaker,? in this case the country?s European ancestors, ?to oppress us with the greatness and exclusiveness of his own thought,? a truly independent and American thought (Circles, 119).
While Emerson was interested in freeing America from its predecessors, Henry David Thoreau desired to take American liberation one step further and so free Americans from their contemporaries, from themselves. ?Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them? (Walden, 48). Weary of a society in which men have ?no time to be anything but a machine,? (48) Thoreau sought refuge in the solitude and autonomy of the wilderness, a place in which the superfluous trivialities of society would not interfere with life.
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life ? (135)
Thoreau sought to be freed from social and economical confines, wishing to focus his attentions on living life deliberately; he was suspicious of any enterprise that would divide him from his life, which he believed to be the most fundamental and precious resource in existence. He saw in his peers a blind devotion to ultimately insignificant endeavors, a devotion so powerful it entrapped many Americans in a sort of socioeconomic prison. ?The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,? (50) he said, becoming the ?tools of their tools,? (80) frantically struggling, in frighteningly ?desperate haste to succeed ? in such desperate enterprises? as the mere accumulation of material wealth. Observing that ?it is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves,? (371) Thoreau intentionally and audaciously cut a new path through life in living and recording an existence of self-sufficiency and intense, unrestricted liberty as he literally made his home in the woods of Walden Pond.
A fierce individualist, Thoreau believed that ?no man ever followed his genius till it misled him,? (263) and so he embarked on a wondrous journey of self-exploration and examination, spending his hours of solitude in meditation and observation, fascinated with the abundant vitality of life that generally went unnoticed or ignored by his harried American peers. It was in nature?s primitive, energy-exuding environment that Thoreau could suck out all the marrow of life; in the vicious, vivacious throes of the wilderness that he could satisfy his primordial need to witness his ?own limits transgressed,? to know ?some life pasturing freely where we never wander? (366). It was in the intense appreciation of life and liveliness that Thoreau found an antidote to the dull, half-awake stupor, induced by an excessive dependence upon inconsequential human constructs, which he abhorred in his fellow countrymen:
The first sparrow of spring! The year beginning with younger hope than ever! The faint silvery warblings heard over the partially bare and moist fields from the blue-bird, the song-sparrow, and the red-wing, as if the last flakes of winter tinkled as they fell! What at such a time are histories, chronologies, traditions, and all written revelations? (358)
While Thoreau was involved in the creation of a New World Metaphysics, his goal was not to provide a commanding, semi-religious dogma similar to many historical philosophies ? in the construction of a new American ideology, Thoreau wished only to provide room for Americans to live unhindered by any artificial restraints and so fully realize the potential splendor of their lives.
Thoreau?s Walden is more than just a description of self-sufficient living; it is a symbol of liberty and self-realization, attainable by any thinking man or woman. Thoreau made great use of poetic license in deliberately and precisely shaping the narration of his own specific independent life, expanding his somewhat fictionalized identity in Walden into a more general and widely achievable symbol of New World liberation. Is it necessary to follow in Thoreau?s footsteps exactly to obtain the freedom he so passionately illustrates in Walden? No ? ?If I were confined to a corner of a garret all my days, like a spider, the world would be just as large to me while I had my thoughts about me? (377); in fact, Thoreau specifically renounces the idea that any person should imitate his own life, as that would be the creation of yet another dependency rather than a liberation: ?I would not have any one adopt my mode of living on any account? (114). As Thoreau was able to find significant parallels to life in the seemingly minute aspects of nature, he would have others discover the finer fruits of life in their own environments. Thus it is not necessary to live in solitude in the wilderness to front only the essential facts of life; all that is required from the reader is a conscious effort to know and experience the ?tonic of wildness? (365) without submitting to an oppressive dependence upon society or the economy.
Emerson and Thoreau?s conception and realization of intellectual and individual independence were revolutionary, but due to the nature of their erudite manifestations, they were perhaps a little intimidating or pedantic to the average American, the demographic perhaps most affected by America?s unwelcome dependence. Walt Whitman, a self-proclaimed ?rough,? brought the idea of American independence to the masses of America with Leaves of Grass. Enamored with the pristine expansiveness of the American continent, Whitman saw power and genius in vast plains of America and its common inhabitants. Fascinated by the rolling hills of the Central and Midwestern United States, Whitman employed a completely unprecedented and unconventional, symbolically unrestrained and rambling aesthetic to escape any stereotypes of pretentiousness and rigidity previously associated with poets and philosophers:
The pure breath, primitiveness, boundless prodigality and amplitude, strange mixture of delicacy and power, of continence, of real and ideal, and of all original and first-class elements, of these prairies, the Rocky Mountains, and the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers ? will they ever appear in, and in some sort form a standard for our poetry and art? (Specimen Days, 206)
Whitman held dear the average American, and as such labored to develop a New World Metaphysics that would permit, and in fact celebrate, the reverence of the unspectacular American, in essence creating an atmosphere that would allow common Americans to meet the indispensable requirements of their ordinary lives while simultaneously filling the heroic mould of a true independent cast earlier by Emerson and Thoreau. Whitman was utmost an egalitarian, pointedly affirming his utter lack of discrimination frequently in his works, going so far as to even show affection for, and more importantly, association with the wicked, the foolish, the savage, the weak ? in short, all living beings. ?I will not have a single person slighted or left away,? (Leaves of Grass, 374) he states, and again: ?By God! I will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart of on the same terms.? (508) ?I seize the descending man ?. I raise him with resistless will?; (1006) ?All that a person does or thinks is of consequence?? (introduction, 19). Such indiscriminate praise was globally unprecedented in literature but perfectly and entirely relevant to the American ideology and identity of multiculturalism and tolerance. Whitman?s optimism and exuberance were so well suited to the image of a free America that the poet has remained inseparably linked to independence and liberty, exalted as a beacon and icon of New World free will.
Leaves of Grass is a flowing approbation of America and its citizens, but more significantly, it is a construction of the essential, independent New World icon needed to convert the cerebral universe depicted in earlier texts to a tangible, fully realized cosmos; Leaves of Grass gave flesh to the theretofore doctrinal conception of the New World. ?Re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book,? (pg. 11) Whitman warns readers in his introduction ? ?my words are words of a questioning, and to indicate reality? (1082). Whitman?s transition from Walter the newspaper editor to Walt the kosmos, and his literary erection of a celebrate-able American symbol in fact produced a widespread reality of American independence and freedom, placing the previously insignificant common laborer upon a magnificent pedestal, and so creating the embodiment of his New World Metaphysics.
In constructing a New World Metaphysics, the aforementioned American writers developed a powerful image of independence and liberty, focusing their energies on developing an original being of utter free will. Their immense and jubilant exultations challenged the world in a flurry of optimistic revolution, confronting the status quo with a formidable energy and novelty, and succeeding in garnering much support for their ideology. However, some of the more subtle details of this exuberant and vast philosophy were considered problematic, even by fellow Americans similarly involved in observing and creating a significant American identity. Herman Melville, always the attentive and polemical spectator, brought many of the less obvious potential dangers of Whitman?s New World Metaphysics to light in a somewhat romanticized drama of unchecked independence. ?Not ignoring what is good, I am quick to perceive a horror,? Melville?s narrator and vessel Ishmael confides early in Moby-Dick (22). In ?subtilizing? his mind and paying sharp attention to the details of Whitman?s boundless and admittedly contradictive philosophy, Melville helped to check the perhaps overenthusiastic exultations of Leaves of Grass and so create a complex, intellectually and emotionally valid ideology.
Melville, like Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman before him, could find an appreciable energy and value in the impressive American continent and people, but he did not share Whitman?s unconquerable faith in the masses of men: ?Seat thyself sultanically among the moons of Saturn, and take high abstracted man alone; and he seems a wonder, a grandeur, and a woe. But from the same point, take mankind in mass, and for the most part, they seem a mob of unnecessary duplicates, both contemporary and hereditary? (356). Melville portrays his discomfort of the masses even more crudely in the half-joking musings of Peter Coffin: ?Ain?t there too many heads in the world?? (31). With these and similar queries, Melville subtly implies that the sheer number of Americans will, by statistical probability alone, render Whitman?s idealized conception of an entire nation of ?roughs? problematic or impossible. Perhaps Melville felt that some revolutionary thinkers were letting their optimism blind them from reality when he voiced through Ishmael that ?when a man suspects any wrong, it sometimes happens that if he be already involved in the matter, he insensibly strives to cover up his suspicions even from himself? (90). And so to enlighten his fellow Americans, Melville portrays in Moby-Dick the haunting image of Ahab, a symbol of the catastrophic effects of unchecked power and independence. But ere he himself became guilty of the same flaw he observed in his peers, Melville intentionally and vociferously conceded, through the constant evolution of Ishmael?s ideologies, that his text did not and could not supply an ultimate life philosophy; for Melville, the New World Metaphysics was an aesthetic, rhetorical construct rather than a do-all end-all scripture of existence. ?I promise nothing complete; because any human thing supposed to be complete, must for that very reason infallibly be faulty? (116).
In an effort to magnify the subtle faults he found in the ideology being put forth by his contemporaries, Melville resorted to an in-depth examination of Ahab?s monomaniacal and unquenchable desire for retribution, making heavy use of symbolism in a rhetoric much less palpable than his counterparts. More than a simple narrative of whaling conquests, Moby-Dick is an allegorical scrutiny of the New World identity; Melville hints at this when Ishmael relates that ?some certain significance lurks in all things, else all things are little worth, and the round world itself but an empty cipher? (331). Many images of the novel have both literal and symbolic meaning, and the entire story is weaved into a fantastically complex fabric containing a significant critique of American society. In the great white image of Moby Dick, which can be paralleled to the great phenomenon of existence, Melville communicates the impossibility of reducing life to a simple philosophy through Ishmael?s inability to truly know the great whale, though he spends so much energy and time attempting to do so: ?dissect him how I may, then, I but go skin deep; I know him not, and never will. But if I know not even the tail of this whale, how understand his head?? (296).
In Ahab, Melville presents a rough, independent man in some sense consistent with the New World Metaphysics? description of a healthy individual, but one who in fact is completely dysfunctional and unhappy: ?all loveliness is anguish to me,? (143) laments the old man, who has degenerated from a ?grand, ungodly, god-like man? (78) to ?madness maddened,? (143) a demoniac slave utterly at the mercy of his maniacal urgings to gain vengeance upon a dumb brute of nature. Ahab, a figure of individualism taken to the extreme, has become so obsessed and maddened by his self-prescribed quest for atonement that he has become a slave, completely dependent upon the achievement of his goal. Contrasting Ahab?s socially acceptable repute as whaler and capitalist is Queequeg, the uncivilized savage, whom Melville portrays as a still developing conception of a satisfactory New World emblem. ?Queequeg, do you see, was a creature in the transition state ? neither caterpillar nor butterfly? (38). ?Queequeg was George Washington cannibalistically developed,? (55) ?the sign and symbol of a man without faith, hopelessly holding up hope in the midst of despair? (187). Staying true to his appreciation of subtlety, Melville presents in Queequeg a true independent, encumbered by nothing ? country, family, death ? not even a metaphysical philosophy itself. With these and many other images, Melville attempts to illustrate the tumultuous and evolving nature of life, thus illuminating the need for a likewise adaptive philosophy, an intuition perhaps uncontainable in any permanent ideology.
America?s unprecedented structural development and the diverse demographic composition of its population initially produced a somewhat amorphous and disjointed nation. Though they had securely obtained geographical and political independence, the country and its people had difficultly constructing a unique global identity that was suitable to the new lifestyles emerging within for many years. Numerous American intellectuals, struggling to develop a conception of life relevant to the original nature of the new nation, began voicing their desires and concerns regarding a more impressive independence as the country began to grow in strength and size. In Emerson?s call for an independence from America?s predecessors, Thoreau?s somewhat exaggerated achievement of independence from both preceding and contemporary societal constraints, Whitman?s bold creation of The American Independent, and Melville?s profoundly subtle portrayal of the possible dangers of unrestrained independence, an important evolution can be seen in both the nation?s literature and its identity. In striving to construct a New World Metaphysics, these writers questioned the extant ideologies and borrowed identities prevalent in the expanding country while presenting their conceptualized versions of the New World, of which many of the fundamental properties are still embraced by the modern American ideal.
Works Cited
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. ?Circles.? English 131AR Reader, University of California, Santa Barbara, 2002.
-- -- --. Nature. English 131AR Reader, University of California, Santa Barbara, 2002.
Jefferson, Thomas. Declaration of Independence. July 4, 1776.
Melville, Herman. Modby-Dick. New York: W.W. Norton & Company Inc., 2002.
Thoreau, Henry David. Walden. New York, Penguin Group, 1986.
Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass. New York, Penguin Group, 1959.
-- -- --. Specimen Days. New York, The New American Library of World Literature, Inc., 1961.
