Journal Article•
The Antebellum South as a Symbol of Mind
TL;DR: Faust's A Sacred Circle: The Dilemma of the Intellectual in the Old South, 1840-1860 is the most important inquiry into the mind of the antebellum South since William R Taylor's Cavalier and Yankee as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: Drew Faust's A Sacred Circle: The Dilemma of the Intellectual in the Old South, 1840-1860 is the most important inquiry into the mind of the antebellum South since William R Taylor's Cavalier and Yankee: The Old South and American National Character Emphasizing several of the same southern figures--Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, William Gilmore Simms, James Henry Hammond, Edmund Ruffin (Ms Faust makes an important addition to the roster, George Frederick Holmes)--both these studies suggest that the dilemma of men of letters in the Old South ultimately centered in their frustrated effort to create and somehow to motivate, set into action on its own, a South apart from the modern world--to which, nonetheless, save for its "peculiar institution," the South was inextricably joined Suggesting further that this situation induced a traumatic confusion within the southern literary psyche, both studies point to the ambivalence of--basically the failure of--the southern men of letters to fulfill themselves by becoming effective moral guides in their society In spite of their essential agreement about the failure of the southern literati, however, the Faust and Taylor books are significantly dissimilar in their understanding of the vocation of letters in the South Taylor takes it that the writers of the Old South more or less assumed the literary occupation as a given in their culture; that their anxieties arose not from their concern about the literary situation in the South but from their apprehension about the "historical predicament of the South within the nation" On the contrary, Ms Faust believes that the Old South men of letters--or "men of mind," an appropriately evocative term she employs instead of the usual one, apparently on the basis of its incidental appearance in Simms--were motivated by a desperate need to achieve vocational identity Seeking, generally speaking, to explore the sociology of knowledge and letters in the antebellum South, the author of A Sacred Circle moves from a treatment of the "context of intellectual discontent" (the South of the 1840's and 1850's as represented chiefly by Virginia and South Carolina) to a consideration of how "romantic genius and romantic friendship" bound and inspired the five men whom Simms dubbed "a sacred circle" She is interested in how these romantic elements mitigated the alienation of this group from a materialistic society, particularly with how the group's conviction of its genius, individual and collective, obligated it to be active in the improvement not only of the Old South society but of society as a whole As Simms said, the commitment to improvement was "the true business of genius" The members of the Sacred Circle, accepting the gift of genius as a mandate from God, had in view nothing less than a moral reformation of mind and its works The world awaited, said George Frederick Holmes, "an intellectual reformation analogous to the Instauration Magna of Lord Bacon" Since the Renaissance, Holmes held, the intention of the Novum Organum had been corrupted "The experimental philosophy has been the only part of his [Bacon's] labours that have been cordially accepted," he observed, "and the Baconian instauration, thus shrunk and withered has been made at once the tool and the divinity of the age" Unjustly narrowed to an empiricist, Bacon has been used to justify the "triune divinity of the nineteenth century, man, matter, and money" Eagerly embracing the need for "a new social science designed to illuminate transcendent moral and social laws that simultaneously prescribe and foretell the future course of society," the Sacred Circle conceived the foundation of the southern instauration to be a new version of history As Holmes put it, "A necessary preparation for a complete Renovation of Knowledge would be a Philosophical History of the Intellectual, Moral, Social and Political Progress of mankind" Regarded as a "series of Experiments" that afford a basis for selecting the "principles …
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TL;DR: Poe's philosophical leanings, while hardly systematic and shifting throughout his career, reflect a context of epistemological doubt of the sort that Descartes set as the starting point of his inquiry.
Abstract: With his famous theorem, Cogito, ergo sum, Rene Descartes initiated a modern conception of individual consciousness that signaled the divorcing of mind from a physical world that was now comprehended only by way of a method of doubt. In its dualistic conception of existence, Descartes' theory split the individual mind from the world of nature and society, resulting in a growing sense of uncertainty and isolation. In the decades following Descartes' death in 1650, European and American philosophers attempted to come to terms with the difficulties posed by his famous theorem and with the reliance on rational analysis that it implied. Among these philosophers, Pascal, Spinoza, Rousseau, Franklin, and Jefferson arrived at differing conclusions, but whether they experienced the Cogito as liberating or enslaving, each was profoundly affected by the challenge to conventional truths that it entailed. Edgar Allan Poe's philosophical leanings, while hardly systematic and shifting throughout his career, reflect a context of epistemological doubt of the sort that Descartes set as the starting point of his inquiry. Poe followed Descartes in pursuing a basis of certainty in the face of this condition of doubt, and he sought that certainty in the same place: in the clarity and conviction of the human mind. Yet the problem for Poe is that this approach failed to provide the conclusive proof of existence and order of the sort that Descartes claimed by way of ontological proof. The further Poe delved into the contradictions of the human mind, the more evidence he found not of a transcendent force of unity and arrangement, as suggested by the existence of human reason itself, but of selfishness, disorder, and criminality. Nonetheless, Poe, who lived two centuries after the French philosopher, spent a great deal of his efforts working out the implications of Descartes' Cogito. In his stories of the unbridled and isolated ego, Poe presses Descartes' point to its logical end: that is, the annihilation that follows the proposition that the non-communicative, self-sufficient ego may operate independently of the physical senses. Given the isolation of self from world implicit in Descartes' thinking, the self is both impotent to effect change in the objective world and beyond the restraining influence of that world outside itself. As the self becomes convinced of its total separation from physical reality, the world is transformed into a mere hall of mirrors for the self-reflecting ego, as in "William Wilson," or objective reality becomes enslaved to the monarchical ego, as in "The Gold-Bug." Through the narrator of "The Black Cat," through Monsieur Dupin in the detective stories, and through the insanely controlling figure of Prince Prospero in "The Masque of the Red Death," Poe explored the implications of Descartes' theorem, but having exposed its flaws Poe had few resources for salvaging the relationship of the ego to outside reality. A recognition of the implications of Descartes' distinction between essence and existence is to be found everywhere in Poe's writing, perhaps the most common feature of which is the recurring sense of the insubstantiality of the physical world. In "Descent into the Maelstrom," "M.S. Lost in a Bottle," "The Pit and the Pendulum," and "The Fall of the House of Usher," the material universe inhabited by Poe's characters is shifting, chaotic, and treacherous, and the narrator's knowledge of this world is consequently unreliable in ways that summon up the central philosophical dilemmas investigated by Descartes: the dream hypothesis (the inability to prove a distinction between waking and dreaming states) and the demon hypothesis (the possibility that existence is unknowingly controlled by a demonic power). A suggestion of both conundrums is evident in the passage in "William Wilson" in which the narrator, during his fifth year at Dr. Bransby's school, enters the bedroom of his rival with the intention of carrying out a malicious prank of one sort or another. …
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