My
affections are now less directed towards particular individuals. The object of
my love is the entire human race, though not, of course, as we so often find
it, namely in a condition of corruption, servility, and inertia. I love the
race of coming centuries. For this my deepest hope, the faith that keeps me
strong and vital: that I might stir the seeds of change that will ripen in a
future age—Holderlin
Alexis De
Tocqueville in his magnum opus, Democracy in America, is concerned,
among many other things, with the corrosive and debilitative effect of radical
individualism on true individuality. Tocqueville warns of the negative effects
of a mass democratic culture that breeds monadic, isolated individuals who are
weak and lacking in values. But just as much, Tocqueville in the first volume
warns of the tyranny of the majority. Tocqueville only dedicates one very brief
chapter of the subject of pantheism. However, it would be wrong-headed to
conclude that this concern does not pervade or bleed over into other areas of
the work. Pantheism, as we will see, is for Tocqueville the abyss or mire into
which democratic consciousness falls. We might say that Tocqueville is
concerned with the two oppositions the pantheism supposedly breeds:
separateness and unity. The pantheist mindset sweeps back and forth in a
bipolarity between nihilistic solipsism and its antonym, the loss of self in
the oceanic tide of the whole.
To begin
with, it is necessary to recollect and express more concretely the object
before us when we speak of the idea of pantheism. First, Pantheism is a
metaphysical and religious view that maintains that the existence of all things
is immanent in God. Or as Tocqueville puts it, “Not only does it [the mind]
come to discover only one creation and one Creator in the world; this first
division of things still bothers it, and it willingly seeks to enlarge and
simplify its thought by enclosing God and the universe within a single whole” (DIA
426). The world (creation) is either conceptualized as identical with God
(creator) or emanating in some way from God's nature. To put it most simply,
the pantheism thinks “God is all, and all is God.” Tocqueville identifies
pantheism with fatalism or determinism as will we later see.
In his own
footnote, Tocqueville notes that Pantheism tends to be associated with
Spinozism. Generally both are lumped under the category of rationalism in its
most extreme form. Leibniz, Fichte, and Hegel also contain pantheistic elements
(DIA 425). Hegel once famously wrote, "You are either a Spinozist
or not a philosopher at all." Whether or not that is the case is open to
question, but it gives us a taste of what Tocqueville meant when he associated
Hegel with pantheism in his footnote. The pantheism that concerns Tocqueville
in his chapter entitled “What Makes the Mind of Democratic Peoples Lean Toward
Pantheism” is perhaps, as Schelling once put it, “the dragon seed of
Hegelianism.” Tocqueville alludes to Hegelian monism, which supposedly swallows
up individuals (souls) and matter, when he writes of “ the system according to
which the things material and immaterial, visible and invisible that the world
includes are considered as no more than diverse parts of an immense being which
alone remains eternal in the midst of the continual change and incessant
transformation of all that composes it” (DIA 426). Though it is no
simple task, we will attempt to take a brief survey of the shape of the roots
of Hegelianism in America, and perhaps the direction of some of its branches.
To grasp the roots and branches is to capture the significance of Pantheism.
Tocqueville
tells us, “It cannot be denied that pantheism has made great progress in our
day” (DIA 425). What precisely could Tocqueville be referring to? To
make sense of his claim in its subtle richness, it is necessary to recollect
some forgotten or somewhat obscure history of philosophy. Hegelianism has had
an influence in many different cultures. America is not an exception, and
Hegelianism played no less an important role than anywhere else. Hegel's
influence can been seen on the fuzzy New England transcendentalists, who came
to dominate the American scene almost from the moment Tocqueville left its
soil. However, by 1850-1890 (ten years after the second volume of Democracy
in America was finished) most philosophy that existed during the pioneer
days of western expansion was primarily Platonist or Hegelian.[1]
In 1859-1860,
while buffaloes still freely grazed on the Great Plains, Henry C. Brockmeyer
was hidden away in the wilderness of Warren Country, Missouri, indefatigably
attempting to translate Hegel's Logic into English (Pochmann 12). He
even attempted to teach Hegel's philosophy to the Indians around Muskogee,
Oklahoma (Goetzmann 11). According to Paul Anderson, the first professional
journal of philosophy in the United States was published in 1867 by the St.
Louis Hegelians because W.T. Harris could not publish his critique of Herbert
Spencer's philosophy in the then fashionable North American Review (Anderson
3). The Journal of Speculative Philosophy helped make English
translations of American and German philosophers available to the America
public. According to John Dewey, the Journal of Speculative Philosophy was
“the only philosophic journal in the country at that time by the only group of
laymen devoted to philosophy for non-theological reasons” (Goetzmann 383).
Thus, far from being a parochial phenomena, the St. Louis Hegelians created
philosophical hubs all over the Midwest and, along side the Platonists, were
entrenched in various metropolises: Osceola, Missouri; Jacksonville, Illinois,
Dubuque, Iowa; Terre Haute, Indiana; and Cincinnati, Ohio. Between 1860 and
1890, William T. Harris, Peter Kaufmann, Mocure Conway, Johann B. Sallo, and
August Willich in Ohio were widely considered the leading American
philosophers.
The
Hegelians, perhaps as Tocqueville alluded to, made a significant cultural
impact. Anderson puts it thus, “The equalitarian attitude toward education and
culture tended to break down not only barriers between classes but also
barriers between the sexes. It was no mere accident that the feminist movement
had greater strength in the Midwest than elsewhere” (Anderson 19). Tocqueville
pointed to this, by way of his critique of pantheism. By trying to escape his
own solipsistic existence, the pantheist finds unity in God-- however, the
problem is that this new unity erodes his social connections which are, in
Tocqueville's eyes, fundamental to the functioning of society: family, church,
guild, and community. Thus by eroding these social connections, man finds
himself thrown into an even deeper despair. He ends up in the anomie and
atomism that Tocqueville warned about. Yet, it seems odd that this would be the
case. The Pantheist might respond that Tocqueville posits a false unity because
it mistakes the individual for all.
There is a
popular mythology that downplays the affect philosophy had on American thought.
Fredrick Jackson Turner's famous thesis, for instance, argued that the
practical and immediate needs of the western frontier and expansion conditioned
all of American culture and philosophical thought. Tocqueville makes (at face
value) a similar argument, maintaining that the American spirit is decidedly
interested in practical economic matters, to the extent that speculative and
philosophical thinking is relegated to secondary and relative importance. Because
of this banal obsession with acquiring petty material goods, Tocqueville sees
American religiosity as inauthentic and lacking depth. He imagines that
Americans when contemplating Pascal's wager interpret it as a cost-calculation,
which is to say as a fundamentally venal and practical affair. Americans do not
feel the full spiritual weight of their choices. American thinking remains akin
to that of Benjamin Franklin's homely aphorisms on self-interest. Philosophy
may have some truth, but Americans remain ambivalent towards it. Therefore,
philosophical speculation, as the argument goes, is useless to immediate
practical life, and it is better not to tarry with the negative. Tocqueville's
thesis differs with Turner's in obvious ways. Tocqueville argues that Americans
are fundamentally Cartesians without knowing it. Descartes, in his Meditations
on First Philosophy, seeks certainty by his own lights, to bracket any idea
that cannot be proven by his own reason. Tocqueville believes that American's
act in a similar way. They like to think of themselves as being immune from any
dogma, or system of beliefs, that they cannot establish for themselves. Tocqueville,
though, understands the absurdity of what American's think and the reality of
what they are. He already points out many of the ways Americans associate with
one another. Americans are blind to their own philosophical presuppositions and
their dependence of dogma.
Tocqueville
argues that democracy, in contrast to aristocracy, creates a predisposition to
view the world through general ideas. Democrats start from universals; whereas
aristocrats view the world through particulars.
The aristocrat's way of life is centered on drawing fine distinctions,
as opposed to unifying or generalizing. The aristocrat looks at the plebeian
and thinks, “I am made of different material, of noble blood.” The aristocrat
thinks of himself as a particular individual, like no one else. Where as the
democrat's attention is focused in on similarities across humanity. The
democrat thinks in abstract generalities. Like the epigraph by Holderlin at the
beginning of this paper, the pantheist sees himself as having a passionate
connection to the whole of humanity. Holderlin admits what Tocqueville
seeks to prove, which is that the pantheist's abstract feeling of connectedness
to humanity does violence to true connectedness. The reason being that he
scorns particularity. One does not love humanity as such, but real individual
human beings. Tocqueville, like Rousseau and Nietzsche, is an anthropological
nominalist.
We might
conclude tentatively after reading the last 5 chapters of volume 3 of Democracy
in America, that Pantheism is a formidable threat because it depoliticizes
the citizenry, and robs them of its seriousness for polemos (war). It
makes the world soulless and boring. Pantheism, which according to Tocqueville
is the “most appropriate to seduce the human mind in democratic
centuries”, has a penchant for draining
the world of “great ideals” like honor, pride, and courage. Tocqueville,
however, does note that these values get repackaged in commercial ambition,
which the American people has a heavy thirst for. Democracy gives honor, pride,
and courage a new character. Much of Democracy in America, in a way,
deals with the banality ushered in by the advent of democratic centuries. Tocqueville's
response to the threat of pantheism is thus, “all who remain enamored of the
genuine greatness of man should unite and do combat against it” (DIA
426).
I am of the
opinion that man's weakness is rooted in his misunderstanding the necessity of
how things are. Only by recognizing necessity will one be able to struggle and
effect real change. Hegel once wrote, "Enlightenment throws the bankruptcy
of faith into disarray by bringing in utensils and pure insight.” Personally,
and speaking more broadly, it doesn’t afford one much benefit to think in
outmoded categories such as"damned" or "saved", nor do I
see any rational reason to lament the fact that romantic notions of “Honor,
courage, or pride” fall away with the advent of democracy: they're too tied up
in atavistic concerns with providence. Tocqueville's lamentation of pantheism
comes off as peevish sentimentalism. To know and feel your own insignificance
does not necessarily invalidate the imperative to "overthrow all relations
in which man is a debased, enslaved, forsaken, despicable being", since logos
comes with its own ought, regardless of whether man is doomed or not. Success
does not mean something is correct, nor does being unsuccessful mean something
lacks truth. If it does invalidate it, Tocqueville does not present a sound
argument as to why-- as such, his claims are mere assertion. If we have to be, as
Ernst Bloch once put it, “the manure heap of history”, so be it. As Heidegger notes,
we choose our projects in full awareness that being is always
being-towards-death.
Perhaps the
most fundamental problem of pantheism for Tocqueville is this: when one adopts
pantheist views it becomes increasingly hard to reconcile the view that
humanity is something infinitely perfectible with the view that individuals are
finite. Humans are animals who come from the earth, and like animals we have an
expiration date. When we look back on time, into the distant past, we see that
many species come into existence and pass out of existence-- why are we the
exception? We do not remember our ancestors from 300 years ago. We don't know
anything about their particular lives concretely: who they loved, what they
felt, etc. Man comes from dust, and he will return to dust. As Tocqueville puts
it quite poetically, “The woof of time is ever being broken and the track of
past generations lost. Those who have gone before are easily forgotten, and no
one gives a thought to those who will follow." The pantheist concludes
that temporal connections are a distraction from the divine, from the realm of
ideas, from the One True Thing: God, which is eternal subsistence. The
pantheist is unable to grasp the irreversible direction of time's arrow, to
grasp the concrete meaning around him. The pantheist sees the whole
human race as being moved by an external force (the necessity of God), and for
that reason he must do aware with human choice.
Tocqueville has the attitude
that, from the perspective of absolute extinction, our own finitude, every
meaning collapses. It seems vain to pretend that what we do now will be of any
importance to anyone in 500 years. There is vanity in the very idea of wanting
importance, of caring about moral virtues like courage. To make a passing
reflection on more recent history that Tocqueville would not have been aware
of: when one gazes upon the 19th and 20th centuries, it is hard not to take
notice that capitalism has the capacity to invent ever more heinous forms of
violence and horror. It appears that modern times and thought offers most
people very little to soothe, and much to exacerbate anxiety and unease,despair
and helplessness. From this perspective of time and historicity, the universal
seems to be unreachable. But by grasping the rational structure common to all
epochs, and by grasping the developmental patterns and processes, we can relate
ourselves to the world universally because we will have become self-aware of
our position as historical beings.
This is all a way of saying
that from the perspective of the whole, the particulars fall away into
nothingness. Tocqueville argues that this is the natural thinking that befalls
the pantheist. From this pantheist perspective, how can one escape the crushing
weight of despair? One knows today about the lamentation against materialism, which would appear as the analogous complaint against pantheism. How
we can find consolation in the claims of technological science that confront us
today? We are all contingent products of evolution and chance assemblages of
elementary particles. Our sense of self is perhaps, at bottom, the correlate of
neurochemico-biological phase spaces. What is to be done when it is reason
itself, reflection itself, that leads to the rational, not irrational,
corrosion of our cherished image of the mind's "I"? What do we do in
the face of these thoughts and images that, as Lovecraft put it, "whose
merest mention is paralyzing"? Do we accept the consoling flowers that
religion offers us to hide our chains, or do we face our illusions soberly? Is
Tocqueville’s criticism of Pantheism a valid one? I’m doubtful.
Works cited
Henry A. Pochmann, New England Transcendentalism and St.
Louis Hegelianism (philiadelphia, 1948).
William H. Goetzmann Introduction to the American Hegelians:
an intellectual episode in the History of Western america (New York, 1973)
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