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Seeing new worlds: The consilience o...

Walls, Laura Dassow.

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Seeing new worlds: The consilience of Emersonian wholes and Humboldtian science in Henry David Thoreau.

Record Type:	Electronic resources : Monograph/item
Title/Author:	Seeing new worlds: The consilience of Emersonian wholes and Humboldtian science in Henry David Thoreau./
Author:	Walls, Laura Dassow.
Description:	345 p.
Notes:	Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 53-09, Section: A, page: 3217.
Contained By:	Dissertation Abstracts International53-09A.
Subject:	Literature, American. -
Online resource:	http://pqdd.sinica.edu.tw/twdaoapp/servlet/advanced?query=9301480

Seeing new worlds: The consilience of Emersonian wholes and Humboldtian science in Henry David Thoreau.
Walls, Laura Dassow.

Seeing new worlds: The consilience of Emersonian wholes and Humboldtian science in Henry David Thoreau. - 345 p.

Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 53-09, Section: A, page: 3217.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, 1992.

Readings of Thoreau usually place him within a narrative of Romanticism as a liberating search for wholeness against the fragmentation imposed by an increasingly powerful materialist science. Yet this narrative effectively removes literature to the realm of cultural ornament and science out of culture altogether. Idealistic thought, or "rational holism," declared unity against materialistic fragmentation by subordinating the material to divine law as Logos. Simultaneously, an alternative or "empirical" holism, independently derived from Kant and promoted by Alexander von Humboldt, maintained that the living whole is not divinely given but open-ended and contingent, emerging from the reciprocal interaction of constituent parts, and thus to be studied by descriptive, not prescriptive, science. The empirical holistic alternative was suppressed and has since been lost to literary memory, while the division rational holism still imposes between science and literature marginalizes and thus fails to account for Thoreau's scientific activity. By re-examining Thoreau in the context of nineteenth-century natural science, this dissertation shows that, following his reading in the 1840s in Humboldt and Humboldtian science, Thoreau engaged in a quest for meaning not through Emersonian forms of rational holism, derived from Coleridge and German Romantic science, but through seeing, collecting, and connecting the particulars of nature into an egalitarian, republican, emergent holism much closer to Humboldt's. Both Thoreau's philosophy and his practice align him with the alternative, empirical holism. Thoreau experimented in Walden, the late natural history essays, and the Journal with new genres which attempt a consilience (or joining) of poetic and scientific modes of knowledge in an epistemology of contact rather than transcendence, in which the perception of the situated knower composes the world to be known. Meanwhile, the miltiplying and chaotic particulars of the examined world undo its bounded and socially constructed regularities, as Thoreau observes the self-organization of chaos into order and the reciprocal devolution of order into chaos. Thoreau celebrated this scandal of "the wild" as a necessary part of the creative act, and this redemptive theme can be traced into the twentieth century, even as the alternative offered by empirical holism is today being reinvented.Subjects--Topical Terms:

1017657
Literature, American.

Seeing new worlds: The consilience of Emersonian wholes and Humboldtian science in Henry David Thoreau.
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040 $a UnM $c UnM
100 1 $a Walls, Laura Dassow. $3 722748
245 1 0 $a Seeing new worlds: The consilience of Emersonian wholes and Humboldtian science in Henry David Thoreau.
300 $a 345 p.
500 $a Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 53-09, Section: A, page: 3217.
500 $a Director: Lee Sterrenburg.
502 $a Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, 1992.
520 $a Readings of Thoreau usually place him within a narrative of Romanticism as a liberating search for wholeness against the fragmentation imposed by an increasingly powerful materialist science. Yet this narrative effectively removes literature to the realm of cultural ornament and science out of culture altogether. Idealistic thought, or "rational holism," declared unity against materialistic fragmentation by subordinating the material to divine law as Logos. Simultaneously, an alternative or "empirical" holism, independently derived from Kant and promoted by Alexander von Humboldt, maintained that the living whole is not divinely given but open-ended and contingent, emerging from the reciprocal interaction of constituent parts, and thus to be studied by descriptive, not prescriptive, science. The empirical holistic alternative was suppressed and has since been lost to literary memory, while the division rational holism still imposes between science and literature marginalizes and thus fails to account for Thoreau's scientific activity. By re-examining Thoreau in the context of nineteenth-century natural science, this dissertation shows that, following his reading in the 1840s in Humboldt and Humboldtian science, Thoreau engaged in a quest for meaning not through Emersonian forms of rational holism, derived from Coleridge and German Romantic science, but through seeing, collecting, and connecting the particulars of nature into an egalitarian, republican, emergent holism much closer to Humboldt's. Both Thoreau's philosophy and his practice align him with the alternative, empirical holism. Thoreau experimented in Walden, the late natural history essays, and the Journal with new genres which attempt a consilience (or joining) of poetic and scientific modes of knowledge in an epistemology of contact rather than transcendence, in which the perception of the situated knower composes the world to be known. Meanwhile, the miltiplying and chaotic particulars of the examined world undo its bounded and socially constructed regularities, as Thoreau observes the self-organization of chaos into order and the reciprocal devolution of order into chaos. Thoreau celebrated this scandal of "the wild" as a necessary part of the creative act, and this redemptive theme can be traced into the twentieth century, even as the alternative offered by empirical holism is today being reinvented.
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650 4 $a Literature, English. $3 1017709
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773 0 $t Dissertation Abstracts International $g 53-09A.
790 1 0 $a Sterrenburg, Lee, $e advisor
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856 4 0 $u http://pqdd.sinica.edu.tw/twdaoapp/servlet/advanced?query=9301480