Philosophy

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PHILOSOPHY

Philosophy engages people in dialogue and dispute, seeking insights to questions both compelling and unsettled about human nature and divinity, about what the world is, how we know it, and how to live within it. Philosophical pursuits are common across the generations, but the context of early America shaped these questions and their answers in distinctive ways. The emergence of modern science, the American Revolution (1775–1783), and the creation of representative government blossomed within a nation built on religious foundations. This mix between science, politics, and religion has a rich and distinctive American cast and forged the new American nation.

religious foundations

From the 1750s to the 1830s, American philosophical dialogue was framed primarily by divinity school theologians. They sought to understand the human being's personal relationship to God within a Christian worldview, drawing on the Bible and theological reflection. They also sought to make sense of the new science of Englishmen John Locke (1632–1704) and Isaac Newton (1642–1727). They affirmed the supremacy of the Bible but were committed to reconciling modern science with traditional theological beliefs. Later philosophers would integrate science and speculative thought without Christian theology, but a religious orientation dominated early America.

Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) is often described as America's first philosopher and most influential theologian prior to the Civil War. Edwards inherited a Calvinist background and breathed new life into its doctrines. He defended basic Puritan beliefs in his writings and sermons, beliefs such as original sin (all humans are born depraved), grace (only God can save people from this condition), and predestination (God determines every aspect of our fate). Edwards confronted the most puzzling theological challenges, including an account of free will and responsibility in a predetermined world.

His writings sustained intellectual speculative conversation from the mid-eighteenth through the early nineteenth century, creating a distinctive tradition of American thought, often called the New England Theology. Competing theologies emerged at the leading seminaries, such as the New Divinity at Yale, the closest heir to Edwards's ideas. The New England disputes were intense, but they largely shared a religious orientation that all learning is based on theology. History, ethics, philosophy, science: everything is God's work, and so the attainment of knowledge is only possible when it is joined with religious reflection, based on the Bible.

The intellectual debates were fueled significantly by the writings of Isaac Newton, who offered an interpretation of all physical happenings as motions of material points, synthesizing scientific learning into a framework that guided intellectual progress in America for over two hundred years. Newton's science made belief in God seem increasingly unnecessary to explain what happens around us. Further, it raised a puzzle about how to reconcile the seeming impersonalism of a Newtonian universe with belief in the immanence of God.

Edwards's solution was idealism, a philosophical perspective attracting American philosophers ever since, many of whom also drew from a European idealist tradition that included Irishman George Berkeley (1685–1753) and Germans Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) and G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831). If the world is the motion of material points, then one might infer that reality is material. (Thomas Jefferson embraced this view.) But Edwards's idealism says that atoms, or whatever else science reveals as part of nature, are expressions of God. Ultimately, the world is in fact God, and the motions and movements contained within it are God's Ideas. The implication is that our personal daily experiences of the world are experiences of God. Another implication for Edwards is that the world we observe should be studied with intensity for all of its (divine) insights. Like Puritans before him (especially Cotton Mather [1663–1728]), New England theologians actively embraced science and were scientists themselves.

Leading intellectuals also debated the first Great Awakening (1739–1740) and other religious revivalisms of the time. How does one distinguish authentic religious experience from emotionalism? How does one come to know God (or anything else for that matter)? What is the best method for interpreting the Bible? Divisions over these and other questions led to the American Unitarian movement, committed to the rational appraisal of Christian beliefs.

One distinctive characteristic of early American philosophy is that intellectual thought from the beginning was deeply religious and communal and yet friendly to science and its investigations. Science tells us how God operates; reason and biblical revelation tell us why and provide further clues about God's purposes. This compatibility was important for supporting the industrial and technological development of the new nation.

political philosophy

It is astounding that this religious orientation existed alongside America's founding documents, which so carefully draw a separation between church and state. Explaining this incongruity is a deep task, but there are two initial remarks often made: first, that those who created the founding documents saw the terrible violence from a European history that did not separate church and state, and they learned from that experience; and second, that they were influenced by Enlightenment values apart from the orientations of theologians.

Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) is often contrasted with Jonathan Edwards to symbolize these divergent American sensibilities. A statesman and scientist throughout the Revolutionary period, Franklin abandoned his Calvinist upbringing while a teenager and, after an initial foray in metaphysics, steadfastly refused to be a speculative philosopher. Instead, Franklin emphasized practical achievements and used the tribunal of experience to guide his scientific, moral, and religious beliefs. Thinking was a means to action rather than reflective meditation.

The American statesman Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) was more interested in speculative thinking, but these speculations led him away from Calvinist beliefs and toward an impersonal Deism. Jefferson was influenced by the eighteenth-century Scottish Enlightenment, with its ideas of humanism, scientific discovery, and morality as a natural science rather than applied theology. He and his political contemporaries absorbed the natural rights and utilitarian traditions of England's John Locke and Scotland's Adam Smith (1723–1790) and David Hume (1711–1776). For these statesmen, the design of political institutions became a matter of debate and rational argument disassociated from biblical interpretation.

The constitutional designers are often called classical liberals. They believed in limited government, its authority resting with the people it serves rather than divine right. Government should secure a basic rule of law that allows people to lead their own lives in accord with their own religious conceptions. Reason showed that people were born free and equal and that they were endowed with natural rights. Freedom was thought the best means for securing individual happiness. As recounted most famously in Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America (1835, 1840), Americans both believed and lived these ideas, in contrast to European aristocracies. The great American exception was slavery.

American views about representative government spring from a particular conception of human nature at once optimistic and pessimistic. On the one hand, people left to themselves will create reciprocal and cooperative relations with others that improve the world and themselves. Individuals through their own efforts will foster community, cooperation, and good will. On the other hand, those who wield political power over others are likely to abuse this power. The solution was to devise a system of checks and balances and limited government that they hoped would allow individual efforts to flourish for the good while minimizing despotic tendencies.

Debates in political philosophy in early America were held in newspapers and pamphlets by famous public leaders and local citizens. The essays constituting The Federalist (1787–1788) were published in a New York state newspaper. Written variously by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, they are the most extended defense of the federal Constitution and one of America's great documents of political philosophy. The anti-Federalists (those who opposed the ratification of the Constitution) shot back, and the battle of intellectual ideas took place as pamphlet wars in the public square. Only after the 1830s did the movement of these debates turn to an increasingly smaller circle of university scholars. In early America the location of most philosophical debate was the public.

Remarkably, the greatest political leaders were also the greatest political philosophers. The ideals of liberty and equality were not distinctive to America, but the close relations between philosophical thought and the creation of America's system of government is one of the remarkable developments in human history.

emerging american traditions

Early American intellectuals looked to Europe for their sources and then made them their own. The European Romantics emphasized freedom of expression and the greatness of nature, important currents in American politics and religion during the early to mid-nineteenth century. Transcendentalism and pragmatism emerged as America's most distinctive philosophical schools of thought in the nineteenth century, supplanting the earlier New England Theology. The transcendentalists emerged in the 1830s from the Unitarians, who had reacted against the Calvinists. The pragmatists came after the Civil War (1861–1865) and Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859). They reshaped the exchange between religion and science and combined elements of Benjamin Franklin's (distinctively American) no-nonsense approach and Jonathan Edwards's idealism. These traditions are the beginning of a long arc from a religious to a secular orientation in American philosophy. The exception was the growth of Catholic institutions of higher education from the mid-nineteenth century onward, with intellectual roots in Aristotle (384–322 b.c.) and St. Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274).

Philosophy in early America had another lasting influence by creating two distinctive paths of philosophical thought. One path has a spiritual orientation that focuses above all on one's inner life and personal relationship to the world, a connection to America's religious foundations. The Second Great Awakening in the early nineteenth century was an important religious revival, leading to the establishment of many colleges and seminaries and a distinctive history of camp meetings—associations of thousands of people who camped out in search of spiritual renewal. These camp experiences developed into the American Chautauqua movement in the late nineteenth century. Another lasting historical legacy of religious revivals and their spiritual orientation was their association with and support of the abolitionist, suffragette, and temperance movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Another path of philosophy has an empirical and secular orientation that addresses problems of philosophy significantly through the lens of science in disassociation from any religious tradition. This path traces a connection to Enlightenment values of the eighteenth century and is found throughout academic philosophy. But whichever path one traces, the philosophical pursuit is the same, exploring compelling questions about ethics, religion, knowledge, and existence, from one generation to the next.

bibliography

Flower, Elizabeth, and Murray G. Murphey. A History of Philosophy in America. 2 vols. New York: Capricorn, 1977.

Hamilton, Alexander, James Madison, and John Jay. The Federalist. Edited by Benjamin Fletcher Wright. New York: Metrobooks, 2002.

Kuklick, Bruce. A History of Philosophy in America: 1720–2000. Oxford: Clarendon, 2001.

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

Needleman, Jacob. The American Soul: Rediscovering the Wisdom of the Founders. New York: Tarcher/Putnam, 2002.

Scalet, Steven, and David Schmidtz. "State, Civil Society, and Classical Liberalism." In Civil Society and Government. Edited by Nancy L. Rosenblum and Robert C. Post. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002.

Tocqueville, Alexis de. Democracy in America. Edited by Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.

Steven Scalet

Encyclopedia of the New American Nation