|
|
Renaissance’s re-creation of “pastoral” aside, Rousseau represents the idealization, through a sustained, philosophical system, of the “natural” human being. We regard it as something of a great leap to extend this metaphor of the natural individual to the natural nation, but such was the contemporary ideal.21 The United States comes to be regarded as the Enlightenment model. It becomes all the more convenient when the chronology of American identity coincides with the United States’ coming into existence as the Enlightenment gives way to Romanticism. This trope of analogues is, of course, a representative positivist “given.”
For the past three decades, though, the insufficiency of this conception of “nature” has been put in the balance with the even more fretted-over definition of “culture.” If we look briefly at the Aufklarung for philosophical evidence regarding the “natural culture” of a nation-state, we must turn to Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803). Herder is a Sturm und Drang poet as well as a philosopher, and he works up his personal tastes into a cogent and highly influential vision of culture. What is more, he insisted that each country and even each period of history produced a unique flowering of culture. He rejected utterly the notion that Shakespeare is another Sophocles or that Milton is another Homer. In the 1840s, Ralph Waldo Emerson would popularize this idea in the United States. From Herder’s Fragmente (1767) through Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (1791), he propounds his theory of Volkskultur. Emerson posits that it is the arts of the people that are the basis for the fine arts in “form, spirit, and expression.” The forms springing from the people were the true basis for higher culture, even if the creators of high art were unaware of the “lower” forms. Thus, we have an almost intuitive notion of Volksstümlich22 (in Herder’s sense of culture that is “of the people”). Once again the