Tablets (1868)

AUTHOR: Alcott, Amos Bronson

KEYWORDS: food, diet, animals, women’s rights, land usage, environmentalism, Transcendentalism

RELATED TITLES:
Alcott, A. Bronson. “Orphic Sayings”
Child, Lydia Maria, Philothea: A Grecian Romance
Kingsford, Anna, The Perfect Way in Diet
Howells, William Dean, The Altrurian Romances

SUMMARY (Bryn Skibo, revised Ridvan Askin, edited Deborah Madsen):

In Tablets (1868), A. Bronson Alcott explicitly advocates for a vegetarian diet, arguing that the improvement of mind and character follows from avoidance of meat consumption. The paratactic style of the book, which features vignette-like chapters and a loose, associative structure, accords with Alcott’s professed preference for essayistic and aphoristic works that “we may open by chance, dip anywhere, read in any order, begin at the last paragraph and read backward as well” (130).

Tablets consists of a series of prose vignettes interspersed with verse. Book I provides advice on how to educate oneself properly, live the good life, and build and sustain a community such that it allows the greatest degree of personal and collective freedom. In doing so, this first part proceeds from the intrinsic relations between the cultivation of land and self-cultivation to nature as the source of morality to the relation between sociality and morality to friendship as the true model of sociality to the importance of (aesthetic) education to religious sentiment beyond dogma as the true source of a proper politics. The much shorter Book II provides the metaphysics undergirding the first part’s practical philosophy.

The book begins with extended musings on the cultural, social, theological, and ethical importance of gardening and the garden. The garden is not only cultured nature but the very source of the intermingling of nature and culture as, for Alcott, is evident from human mythologies stretching back to the Christian account of Paradise. Gardens and particularly orchards are symbols of “the perfect condition of mankind [sic]” (10), Alcott maintains. Hence, they have to be designed with particular care. The cultivation of land is also always a source of self-cultivation. Drawing on the authority of ancient authors, Alcott then claims a direct connection between ethics and choice of diet. The good life and particularly the pursuit of wisdom (that is, philosophy) go hand in hand with a vegetarian diet. Meat-eating is both immoral and detrimental to mental and corporeal health. “Especially should those,” Alcott writes, “who would apprehend the deepest wisdom and preserve through life the relish for elegant studies and pursuits, abstain from flesh, cherishing the justice which animals claim at man’s hands, nor slaughtering them for food nor profit” (37). He goes so far as to claim that “fruit has been the preferred food of the most illuminated persons of past times, and of many of the ablest” (35). The garden and orchard are morally relevant also in this respect. Accordingly, for Alcott, “[a] people’s freshest literature springs from free soil, tilled by free men” (50).

After a series of meditations in prose and verse on how nature is both nurturing and the very source of morality, how morality only thrives in companionship, how we only become true, social human beings through friendship, Alcott advocates for equal rights and “partnership in power” (90), as women not only complement men but are actually the source of civility and sociality. In other words, women facilitate and sustain a special kind of friend- and companionship. According to Alcott, a state is only well-founded if women take part in and contribute to law-making and administration. The family thus serves as model for the ideal state. Children are the embodiment of the future; they are manifestations of futurity itself. Accordingly, education is a central concern for Alcott. Unfortunately, America does not live up to the task. Education is not properly institutionalized yet. In addition, it is set up wrongly. The Socratic dialectic should serve as prime content and model pedagogy, with Pythagoras’ disciplinary regime as another model to follow. Emphasis should be placed on proper language use as language reflects the state of culture. The prime source of education is nature, books and schools come second only. Institutions of learning need to heed this hierarchy and facilitate encounters with nature.

Alcott also advocates for religious tolerance and on behalf of what he calls “pure religion” (142): religious sentiment, piety, love beyond any particular denominational and religious dogma. This “pure religion” basically amounts to what Emerson famously called self-reliance: being in harmony with one’s innermost self, which is tantamount to being attuned to God. And like Emerson, Alcott insists on a politics based on principles rather than circumstance and party interest. Alcott then begins Book II with the following diagnosis: America is swept up in a revolutionary time of idealism, reform, and reconstruction. This is a time of cooperation between nation states for the common good, with the global democratization of political power, knowledge, and economy, the worldwide introduction of humane laws, and an emphasis on universal religion (instead of sectarianism). Scientific empiricism is conjoined with philosophical idealism, with the latter leading the way (what Alcott calls ideal naturalism (165)). Only those dealing in ideas are proper thinkers. The rest are mere observers. Alcott here reprises the distinction between idealism and empiricism. Genius is the capacity that combines the two, that is, becoming an ideal naturalist is only possible through the use of genius. The ideal is the really real. The ideal is not static but in process and flux, a “flowing essence” (129, 175). Language represents this process but in representing fixes it momentarily. The ideal is thus only ever imperfectly represented. Since the faculty of genius is developed most fully in the poet (or artist), only the poet can accede to the realm of ideas. But true poets are few and far between.

Instinct, sense, memory, understanding, fancy, reason, imagination, conscience, and personality constitute personal identity. Mind, not body, is fundamental. Only humans can aspire to navigate the whole scale of (mental) powers. Animals, for example, only have the capacity for the first two, instinct and sense. In other words, humans are the prime manifestation and culmination of spirit, and human history is part and parcel of the history of mind or spirit. The One or God is “pure thought, without image” (182). This is what religion should aspire to. Attuning oneself to the “Spirit within” (184) is imperative. Love, freedom, fate are the modalities of this attunement. Animals (and empirical nature at large) are but “effigies and vestiges” (190) of humans’ essence, that is, even more imperfect images of Mind, Spirit, or God. These imperfections are due to and follow on from humans’ imperfections. Humans’ imperfections are the results of a failure in attunement to the “Spirit within.” Only such attunement can restore integrity and integrality. Mind is both form-giving and form-dissolving. It is the generative matrix from which material forms emerge and the “spiritual menstruum” (194) into which they dissolve. Depending on one’s temperament, one might be more or less well equipped to accede to Spirit, Mind, or God. Though differently well-equipped, we all have this capacity in principle. To attain this oneness is “the largest freedom” (206).

 

Last updated on January 10th, 2024

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