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Article Excerpt
If, as the German speculative philosopher G. W. F. Hegel once asserted, any civilization worthy of the name must contain its speculative philosophical moment, does California civilization meet such a challenge? (1) In Hegel's terminology, speculative did not mean simply a general philosophical orientation but rather a dialectically inquiring mode that simultaneously attempts a universalizing understanding of whole processes of history, reality, and spirit. Accepting Hegel's challenge, this essay explores the connection between California's emergence as a world civilization and European speculative thought.
That California today is a world civilization comparable to other such major civilizations--and that it may be the most distinctly twenty-first-century civilization of them all--is a claim resting on the prodigious growth and expanding influence of its economy and cultural components, particularly since American annexation in 1848. (2) If there has been a single unifying feature to pinpoint the unique nature of this civilization, it is the persistent theme of biodiversity, a notion encompassing characteristics that extend from California's natural environment and habitat ("the island of California") to the proliferation of human life, beginning with the astonishing variety of native Californian settlers and languages and continuing into the present characteristic of American California as an outstanding experiment in cultural pluralism: "on its cutting edge the creation of an ecumenical world culture," in the words of California historian Kevin Starr. (3)
It is not surprising, then, that as an essential part of its ascent to cultural prominence, California from the start has enjoyed a steadily enriching relation to Hegel's standard of speculative thought. This historical overview suggests three distinctive periods worth marking. The first period (1880-1910) is highlighted by native Californian Josiah Royce, who sought out superior European wisdom, both cultural and speculative, in German university centers, reflecting the rise to prominence of modern German culture and power in the heart of Europe during the nineteenth century. The second period (1920-1950) is the story of a major intellectual diaspora: the Central European emigration from an increasingly totalitarian Europe to more clement Californian shores, where asylum helped encourage at least three major works in European speculation: Bertolt Brecht's second version of Galileo, Thomas Mann's Doktor Faustus, and Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment. During the third period (1965-2000), European thinkers themselves came to California not only for the fiscal largesse of its thriving universities, but also for the stimulation of new social and cultural patterns that became embedded in a variety of notions developed by three major thinkers in the postwar European radical tradition of thought: Herbert Marcuse, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida.
As a result, what had begun as an understandable dependence by a younger civilization on the more ancient speculative traditions of the older has reached a far more balanced equilibrium. Indeed, as this overview shows, contemporary European thinkers increasingly have come to draw some of their more radical philosophical formulations on their experiences of postindustrial California, while it confidently can be expected that California, for its part, has made a permanent home for speculative thought in its unfolding sense of identity.
AN IDEALISM OF THE WEST
While California as a social and political phenomenon easily predates the American conquest of vast territories formerly ruled by Spain and Mexico, connections with formal speculative European thought begin only after the American annexation of 1848, linking up with threads of thought woven by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman. These threads are nowhere more prominent than in the transmission of the theme of a spiritual nature from the New England Transcendentalists to those whose first concrete experiences of California's nature came to be specifically associated with the discovery and celebration of the magnificent Sierra Nevada and its centerpiece, the Yosemite Valley. (4)
By the time Emerson himself made his first and only pilgrimage to Yosemite in 1870, it was in the company of the young naturalist, explorer, and writer John Muir. (5) Muir's friendship with University of California professor and scientist Joseph LeConte, with whom he cofounded the Sierra Club and whose own journey to Yosemite also took place in 1870, itself influenced LeConte's career as one of practical, theoretical, and spiritual geological celebration of nature for California's unique gift to the American-European imagination. (6)
Among those first graduates of the University of California at its campus in Berkeley who assiduously attended LeConte's lectures was Josiah Royce, a product of the immigration to California following the discovery of gold in 1848. (7) Born in the mining town of Grass Valley in 1855, Royce's later professional career and reputation at Harvard University would be based on an American brand of philosophical idealism that owed a great deal to the stimulus of his year of study (1875-76) at the German universities of Heidelberg, Leipzig, and Gottingen. (8)
A convinced Germanophile (at least until what he regarded as the unpardonable German act of sinking the neutral ship Lusitania in 1915), (9) Royce brought German idealism to the American academic scene, drawing above all on Immanuel Kant ("the good father," in Royce's homage) (10) and later the G. W. F. Hegel of the Phenomenology of Spirit. (11)
Ultimately, the German idealist in Royce formulated what he would label a "constructive Idealism." (12) Closely affiliated with his Harvard colleague William James's pragmatic bent, but committed to the primacy of a systemic totality he had derived from Hegel's historical dialectics, Royce's idealism retained the religious dimension of "God" or the "absolute" and the Darwinian theory of evolution as more scientific articulations of the romantic philosophy of nature (Naturphilosophie). (13)
More generally, Royce also took from the Germany of his day the cultural standard of the Goethezeit for a future Californian spirit. (14) The Germany he espoused--specifically the Weimar and Jena of the classical German authors Johann Wolfgang Goethe and Friedrich Schiller--showed a commitment toward literature and the arts as well as toward protracted speculative thinking. (15) This became the standard for Royce's later advocacy of both provincialism (regional enlivenment in cultural and creative practices) and the absolute (the goal and reality of speculative thought). For Royce, Goethe, and Kant (rather than Goethe or Kant) must be called upon to inspire Californians whose characteristic weakness of excessive individualism (a fault Royce thought had been glaringly exposed by the Gold Rush origins of American California) should be countered by more convivial and social tendencies toward community. (16)
The author of two early books on California, Royce remained obsessed with the unique traits of California nature as the key toward imagining a California civilization. (17) Especially in a later essay, "The Pacific Coast," he stressed the redemptive qualities of California nature. (18) More than just an extension of the American West, California nature was unique, according to Royce, for its "kindly nature," which could be grasped or visualized at a glance, with open clear views and outlines, and which inculcated a peculiarly "intimate" relation between humans and nature. (19)
Such a California encouraged development of what Royce called a "harmonious individuality of the Hellenic type." (20) Royce conceded that this distinctly Californian individuality did carry its dangers, but at its best, it implied people who were not easily caught up in enthusiasms and false prophets. Admittedly, with the new transcontinental railway connections and accompanying interweaving of U.S. industrial and world economies, California was no longer so isolated. Thus, Royce concluded, the story of a future "provincial California" would be one that...
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