The Gift_ Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World - Lewis Hyde [102]
In the summer of 1742 a Massachusetts clergyman, Charles Chauncy, preached “A Caveat Against Enthusiasm.” The text is instructive in our approach to Whitman, for it bears an uncanny resemblance to the caveats that were later to be published, or at least spoken, against Whitman. In Chauncy’s day, a wild-eyed Christian, James Davenport, had emerged from the woods of western Massachusetts and started to stir up the Boston faithful, accusing the local deists, like Chauncy, of not really knowing the Word of God. Chauncy’s sermon warns his congregation against the dangers of enthusiasm in general and Davenport in particular. His critique returns again and again to the question of how we are to know the true meaning of Scripture. When two men differ in their sense of the Word, how are we to settle on the truth? Chauncy would submit divergent views to reasonable debate. “Nay,” he declares, “if no reasoning is made use of, are not all the senses that can be put on scripture equally proper?” (The enthusiast would reply that it is reason itself which leads us to differing conclusions—that in matters of the spirit we must be guided by an inner light. The enthusiast waits for a sensation of truth.)
Chauncy gives his flock instruction on how to recognize the enthusiasts in their midst. That you can’t reason with them is the first sign, but, interestingly enough, all the others have to do with their bodies: “it may be seen in their countenance,” “a certain wildness … in their general look,” “it strangely loosens their tongues,” “throws them … into quakings and tremblings,” they are “really beside themselves, acting … by the blind impetus of a wild fancy.” It is precisely the feeling that one’s body has been entered by some “other” that Chauncy wishes to warn against.
With this dichotomy between spirits that move the body and a prophylactic “reasoning,” we come to an issue we touched on in the last chapter, the destruction of the esemplastic powers by an overvaluation of analytic cognition and the related destruction of gift exchange by the hegemony of the market. The deist’s attachment to reasonable discourse and his caution before the trembling body place the spirit of his religion closer to the spirit of trade than to the spirit of the gift. In gift exchange no symbol of worth need be detached from the body of the gift as it is given away. Cash exchange, on the other hand, depends upon the abstraction of symbols of value from the substances of value. The farmer doesn’t move his produce until he’s paid, and if he’s paid in dollar bills (or checks or credit at the store), then he has exchanged embodied worth—wheat and oats—for symbolically valuable but substantially worthless paper. When the system is working, of course, the symbols are negotiable and he can convert them back into substances at any time. Both market exchange and abstract thought require this alienation of the symbol from the object. Mathematics, that highly abstract form of cognition, could not proceed if we did not replace the “real” objects of analysis with ciphers, just as the cash market could not operate if we could not convert apples and oranges into symbolic wealth and the symbols back into apples and oranges.
This affinity between abstract thought and market exchange seems to me the reason why Chauncy’s “reasonable” deism (or its immediate heirs, Unitarianism and transcendentalism) has historically been associated with the upper-middle class and with intellectuals. Cash exchange is to gift exchange what reason