"On One Fix'd Point": The Evolution of Philip Freneau's Rational Philosophy

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1992

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Although most critics who have examined Philip Freneau's work have contended that the poet's philosophic enquiries were scattered and therefore not worthy of critical attention, this dissertation asserts that Freneau's search for an ordered universe that included the presence of a supreme being and the immortality of the soul was in fact more structured than has been previously thought. It focuses on the disappointing results of Freneau's application of Scottish Common Sense realism to the physical world and the rational presuppositions he initially formulated in previously unstudied prose essays that would ultimately lead to the deistic tenets he embraced after 1800. Though much of his early poetry bears a strong resemblance to the work of English pre-romantics such as Cowper, Collins, and Thomson, Freneau's Common Sense empiricism undercuts both the pastoral romanticism and Berkeleyan idealism of these works with realistic images of natural decay and violence, thereby displacing romantic tendencies with empirical observation. But Freneau's hard-nosed realism proves disappointing during the 1780's, for his Common Sense approach, which posited that humans have direct contact with objective reality, finds no evidence of the existence of a deity, little hope of human immortality, and a natural world that both nurtures and destroys indiscriminately. The contradictions of renewal and decay in nature become so great that the poet questions humanity's ability to perceive and understand the physical world. But out of his pessimism Freneau constructs a rational solution that accounts for nature's contradictions and the limits of human perception. In a group of four "Philosopher of the Forest" essays appearing in the 1788 Miscellaneous Works, Freneau determines that discord in nature is part of a divine plan beyond human understanding that has been conceived and set into motion by a remote deity who is also beyond comprehension. From this seed Freneau builds over the next thirty years a rational vision of a universe that, while too complex for humanity's limited intellect, nonetheless provides the materials by which humans, through the active application of reason and science, can begin to comprehend nature's discord as part of a larger design that is necessarily perfect.

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