Nature in American Philosophy (review)

Although he had intermittently toiled over his translation of Hegel's Science of Logic for nearly half a century without finding a publisher, Henry Conrad Brokmeyer, the petulant visionary of St. Louis Hegelian fame, concluded it was naive to expect an infant nation to devote itself to philosophical reflection while it was "carving civilization out of wilderness." Brokmeyer's difficulties may have had more to do with his disdain for the grammatical and spelling conventions of the English language than he cared to admit.¹ Nonetheless, his observation about the culture of his adopted homeland brings into sharp relief a tension between high intellectual pursuits and more practical concerns. Brokmeyer's juxtaposition of "civilization" and "wilderness" also highlights the importance of nature in American philosophical thought.

There is a common perception that Americans are naively optimistic about their ability to master nature, and thus callous about their rapid exploitation of its resources. Of course, the chief problem with such a generalization is its oversimplification of a diverse people and the complex history of American thought. Rather than an identifiable "American" view of nature, we can, without great difficulty, uncover an array of conflicting and even contradictory American conceptions of the natural world. In the only way that an individual can justifiably presume to speak for such a nation, Walt Whitman demonstrated his insightful grasp of its disposition when he wrote:

Do I contradict myself?Very well, then, I contradict myself.(I am large, I contain multitudes.)²

From the time the first successful English colony was established at Jamestown in 1607, it is apparent that the colonists who would become known as Americans held profoundly ambiguous views of the vast natural setting of North America. During the "starving time" of the winter of 1609–10, some of the inhabitants of Jamestown were reduced to cannibalism in their life and death struggle with nature. Although the colony ultimately succeeded because of John Rolfe's successful adaptation of tobacco to the natural environment of Virginia, colonists in the South continued to face an astonishingly high infant mortality rate and short life expectancy for many decades. Northern colonists fared better, for a variety of reasons, but even New England Puritans, who settled in tight-knit outposts that revolved around church and family, frequently expressed abject fear of the surrounding wilderness and its indigenous people. By the late eighteenth century, many Americans had negotiated an uneasy truce with their natural environment, reflected in Thomas Jefferson's romanticized vision of the agrarian life that would reward hard work, foster economic self-sufficiency and, in consequence, nurture the republican virtues vital to stable representative government. This trend continued in the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau for whom nature was a manifestation of the divine. But even during the halcyon days of American Romanticism, Nathaniel Hawthorne's mysterious, foreboding forests and Herman Melville's malevolent seas cautioned Americans against a naive conception of nature. Even for Mark Twain, that seemingly lighthearted American humorist, the Mississippi River could be both a vehicle for escape from slavery and a watery grave for the incautious. As the nation's second industrial revolution reached a fevered pitch at the turn of the century, Americans remained at least two-minded about nature as Darwinian biology inspired the ominous fiction of Jack London and Frank Norris and, at the same time, the resolute assertion of inevitable progress in Charles Sumner's Social Darwinism. When we thoughtfully reflect on the nuances of this ambiguous heritage, it should come as no surprise that John Dewey, who is frequently misrepresented as naively confident about our ability to master the natural environment, described human experience within its naturalistic setting as both "precarious and as stable."³

Despite the complexities of Americans' assessment of nature, their fascination with it suggests that we can venture one generalization about American thought on the subject. More than other western intellectuals, Americans seem inclined to view humanity as inextricably enmeshed in its natural setting, for better or...