Rejecting Racism, Restoring Intuition
John Muir, Sacred Value, and Romanticism
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/jsrnc.22953Keywords:
John Muir, sacred value, intuition, Romanticism, racism, Indigenous peoples, G.W.F. HegelAbstract
John Muir continues to influence Americans to see the natural world as replete with sacred value. Yet Muir’s work is not without its shadow side: Muir’s racism against Indigenous peoples permeates his writing. I locate both the valuable and vile views inherent in Muir’s moral vision in his uncritical reliance on Romantic epistemology, and particularly the recourse Muir continually made to the power of his intuition. Applying insights from G. W. F. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, I offer an account of the various roles Muir’s intuitions played in his thinking so as to better contextualize the best and worst features of his moral thought.
References
Adams, Marilyn M. 1999. Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press).
Adams, Robert M. 1999. Finite and Infinite Goods (New York, NY: Oxford University Press).
Attfield, Robin. 1981. ‘The Good of Trees’, The Journal of Value Inquiry 15 (January): 35–54. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00136626
Beiser, Frederick. 1995. ‘Hegel, a Non-Metaphysician! A Polemic’, Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain 16.2: 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0263523200005504
Berger, Peter, and Thomas Luckmann. 1996. The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (New York, NY: Anchor Books).
Brandom, Robert. 1994. Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).
Brune, Michael. 2020. ‘Pulling Down Our Monuments’, Sierra Club, https://www.sierraclub.org/michael-brune/2020/07/john-muir-early-history-sierra-club
Carter, Alan. 2004. ‘Projectivism and the Last Man Argument’, American Philosophical Quarterly 41.1: 51–62. https://www.jstor.org/stable/20010138
Cohen, Michael. 1984. The Pathless Way: John Muir and American Wilderness (Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press).
Coleridge, Samuel T. 1834. Biographia Literaria, or Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions (New York, NY: Leavitt, Lord, and Co.).
———. 1872. Aids to Reflection, with the Author’s Last Corrections (New York, NY: N. Tibbals & Son).
Descartes, Rene. 1970. Philosophical Letters, trans. Anthony Kenny (New York, NY: Oxford University Press).
Dworkin, Ronald. 1994. Life’s Dominion: An Argument About Abortion, Euthanasia, and Individual Freedom (New York, NY: Vintage Books).
Eliade, Mircea. 1959. The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York, NY: Harcourt).
Emerson, Ralph W. 1982. Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks, eds. Ronald Bosco and Glen Johnson (vol. 16, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).
———. 1983. Essays and Lectures, ed. Joel Porte (New York, NY: Library of America).
Farneth, Molly. 2017. Hegel’s Social Ethics: Religion, Conflict, and Rituals of Reconciliation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press).
Fleck, Richard. 1985. Henry Thoreau and John Muir Among the Native Americans (Hamden, CT: Archon Books).
Gifford, Terry. 2006. Reconnecting with John Muir: Essays in Post-Pastoral Practice (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press).
Hegel, George Wilhelm Friedrich. 2019. The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. and ed. Terry Pinkard (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press).
Huber, J. Parker. 2006. A Wanderer All My Days: John Muir in New England (Sheffield, VT: Green Frigate Books).
Hunt, James B. 2013. Restless Fires: Young John Muir’s Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf in 1867–68 (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press).
Kant, Immanuel. 1998. Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen Wood (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press).
Keane, Patrick J. 2005. Emerson, Romanticism, and Intuitive Reason: The Transatlantic ‘Light of All Our Day’ (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press).
Lewis, Thomas. 2008. ‘Beyond the Totalitarian: Ethics and the Philosophy of Religion in Recent Hegel Scholarship’, Religion Compass 2.4: 556–574. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-8171.2008.00077.x
Limbaugh, Ronald. 2003. ‘John Muir and His Reading Interests’, The John Muir Newsletter 13.4: 1–9.
Lindsay, Brendan C. 2012. Murder State: California’s Native American Genocide, 1846–1873 (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press).
Madley, Benjamin. 2016. An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846–1873 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press).
Mills, Charles. 2007. ‘White Ignorance’. In Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance, eds. Shannon Sullivan and Nancy Tuana (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press): 11–38.
Muir, John. 1874. ‘Modoc Memories’. San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin (December 28).
———. 1915. Travels in Alaska (New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin Company).
———. 1916. A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf, ed. William Frederic Badé (New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin Company).
———. 1917. The Cruise of the Corwin, ed. William Frederic Badé (New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin).
———. 1979. John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir, ed. Linnie Marsh Wolfe (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press).
———. 1996. John Muir: His Life and Letters, ed. Terry Gifford (Seattle, WA: The Mountaineers Press).
———. 1997. Nature Writings, ed. William Cronon (New York, NY: Library ofAmerica).
Muir, John, and Jeanne C. Smith Carr. 2001. Kindred and Related Spirits: The Letters of John Muir and Jeanne Carr, ed. Bonnie Johanna Gisel (Salt Lake City, UT: University of Utah Press).
Oelschlaeger, Max. 1991. The Idea of Wilderness: From Prehistory to the Age of Ecology (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press).
O’Grady, John P. 1993. Pilgrims to the Wild (Salt Lake City, UT: University of Utah Press).
Otto, Rudolph. 1923. The Idea of the Holy, trans. John W. Harvey (London, UK: Oxford University Press).
Peterson, Martin, and Per Sandin. 2013. ‘The Last Man Argument Revisited’, The Journal of Value Inquiry 47: 121–33. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-013-9369-x
Pike, Sarah. 2017. For the Wild: Ritual and Commitment in Radical Eco-Activism (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press).
Pinkard, Terry. 1996. Hegel’s Phenomenology: The Sociality of Reason (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press).
Pippin, Robert. 1989. Hegel’s Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press).
Powell, Russell C. 2019. ‘John Muir and the Botanical Oversoul’, Religions 10.2: 1–13. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel10020092
Ruskin, John. 1916. Sesame and Lilies: Three Lectures, ed. C. R. Rounds (New York, NY: American Book Company).
Sachs, Aaron. 2006. The Humboldt Current: Nineteenth-Century Exploration and the Roots of American Environmentalism (New York, NY: Penguin Books).
Scarry, Elaine. 1999. On Beauty and Being Just (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press).
Sharf, Robert H. 1998. ‘Experience’. In Critical Terms for Religious Studies, ed. Mark C. Taylor (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press).
Simonson, Harold P. 1978. ‘The Tempered Romanticism of John Muir’, Western American Literature 13.3: 227–41. https://doi.org/10.1353/wal.1978.0010
Sinnott-Armstrong, Walter, Liane Young, and Fiery Cushman. 2010. ‘Moral Intuitions’, in The Moral Psychology Handbook, ed. John M. Doris (New York, NY: Oxford University Press): 246–72.
Stout, Jeffrey. 2011. Blessed Are the Organized: Grassroots Democracy in America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press).
Sylvan, Richard. 1973. ‘Is There a Need for a New, an Environmental, Ethic?’ Proceedings of the 15th World Congress of Philosophy (Varna, Bulgaria: Sofia Press).
Taylor, Bron. 2010. Dark Green Religion: Nature Spirituality and the Planetary Future (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press).
Warren, Mary Anne. 1983. ‘The Rights of the Nonhuman World’, in Environmental Philosophy: A Collection of Readings, eds. Robert Elliot and Arran Gare (St. Lucia, Queensland: University of Queensland Press): 109–34.
Williams, Denis. 2002. God’s Wilds: John Muir’s Vision of Nature (College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press).
Wolfe, Linnie Marsh. 1945. Son of the Wilderness: The Life of John Muir (New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf).
Wordsworth, William. 1846. The Poetical Works of Wordsworth (Paris, France: A. and W. Galignani and Co.).
———. 1850. The Prelude; Or, The Growth of a Poet’s Mind (London, UK: Edward Moxon).
Worster, Donald. 2008. A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir (New York, NY: Oxford University Press).
Young, Samuel H. 1915. Alaska Days with John Muir (New York, NY: Fleming H. Revell Company).
