CSULA ENGL 560: Spring 2013

Sublimity and Alienation

In his chapter on “Sublime Nature,” Cosgrove describes the reaction of artists in the Romantic period against the increasing mechanization of England, as it was being transformed by capitalist production.  These artists began to privilege the organic and natural over the mechanical and manufactured.  Suffering alienation in society due to the capitalist order of production, they sought to flee society altogether and find integration in a natural, moral order.  This led them to more and more wild and remote places, which seemed to exemplify some essential moral order, which was being corrupted by the man’s greed.  As Cosgrove observes, “Romanticism seeks divinity in the mountains and sermons in the stones” (232).  This tendency is clearly evident in John Muir’s description of his stay the Sierra Nevada Mountains in the summer of 1869.  Like Turner and Ruskin, Muir’s emotional responses to nature are intimately connected to his careful and learned observation of plants, animals, rocks, and all kinds of natural phenomena.  Indeed, what Cosgrove says of Ruskin could be applied to Muir: “It is the duty of every individual to observe and seek to understand the messages written by divinity into natural forms and of that individual’s life and work to submit to them” (249).  Close observation of nature could also one to “see into the life of things,” that is, perceive the moral and providential significance of nature.

Alone in the wilderness, Muir does not feel alone. Deep in the mountains above Yosemite Valley, he paradoxically feels close to his friends and family: “The deeper the solitude the less the sense of loneliness, and the nearer our friends” (81).  Nature offers him an unalienated existence, but he can only experience it when he is separated from society and other people.  However, one must have the sensitivity and perception to see and feel the beauty and meaning  of nature, for he earlier had noted that the shepherd in California, “seeing nobody for weeks or months …finally becomes semi-insane or wholly so” (19).  Muir, on the other hand, attempts to read God’s writing in the pine trees: “Definite symbols, divine hieroglyphics written with sunbeams. Would I could understand them!” (18). He can also hear the “sermons” in the stones. The animals and plants seem to call to him, “Awake, awake, rejoice, rejoice, come love us and join in our song” (44).  The particulars of nature reveal the very being of the divine: “Every crystal, every flower a window opening into heaven, a mirror reflecting the Creator” (94). 

Many of us might have a tendency to look down upon such beliefs and such raptures as Muir expressed.  They must be self-induced, we say.  And indeed they might, since it is impossible to know the truth of his subjective experience.  However, the positivism -- “with its separation of subject and object and its search for causal laws modeled upon Newtonian physics” -- that came to dominate in the 18^th century is not more valid as a schema for understanding the phenomenal world (252).   Cosgrove effectively argues that causal reasoning was an ideology tied to the rise of capitalism: “The shift from analogical to causal reasoning is logically related to changes in social organization between pre-capitalist and capitalist formations” (252).  Thus as a hegemonic ideology, this form of reasoning cannot bring us closer to “truth” than previous forms of reasoning. 

I was troubled, however, by some elitist implications in Muir’s book.  He says that the shepherd Billy is “asleep, or smothered and befogged beneath pleasures and cares” because he does not want to see Yosemite Valley (90).  Billy considers the valley “a lot of rocks” where one would be exposed to the danger of falling.  Similarly, the Native Americans are seen as degraded, unappreciative of nature’s beauty: “A strangely dirty and irregular life these dark-eyed, dark-haired, half-happy savages lead in this clean wilderness” (124).  He’s most troubled by their uncleanliness, which he interprets as a sign of their unnaturalness, since “nothing truly wild is unclean” (135).

He goes into nature to escape alienation.  In the wilderness, he can experience his ecstasies and raptures before its divine beauty.  But he cannot tolerate those who don’t have the same sensibility as his, and so he experiences another kind of alienation: “To prefer the society of squirrels and woodchucks to that of our own species must surely be unnatural” (132).