Philosophemes

AUTHOR: Alcott, Amos Bronson

https://ia801904.us.archive.org/31/items/jstor-25665901/25665901.pdf

Alcott's Philosophemes comprise a series of essays published in The Journal of Speculative Philosophy between 1873 and 1881. Less fragmentary than his “Orphic Sayings,” for example, the essays are presented in titled sections that present arguments (and sometimes dramatic dialogues) in relatively extended expositions. The essay most relevant to the issue of ethical veganism was published in Vol. 9  (1875) and it is this essay that is summarized below.

KEYWORDS: Abolition, animals, labor, slavery, Transcendentalism

SUMMARY (Bryn Skibo, edited Deborah Madsen):

Much like Alcott's “Orphic Sayings,” this essay provides context for Alcott’s veganism and Abolitionism, without speaking directly to the issue of ethical veganism. As in his other writings, here Alcott repeats the themes of Nature as the manifestation of spirit and the human as the ideal of creation and the image of God: “Nature is the physiognomy of spirit, and man the image of God's personality” (10). The unity between the human and the divine underlies Alcott's lengthy references to the relations between humans and other animals. As a human departs from the Ideal the status of "brute"  approaches closer: “through Man all descend by degradation of his essence into their corresponding organizations – animal, plant, mineral, material atoms [...] And the lower man himself descends, the more he resembles the brutes; the higher the brute, the more he assumes the human likeness” (10). Alcott makes clear that the spiritual quality of brutishness is thus quite distinct from the category of animality. “Certainly there are some animals whose gifts (and virtues especially), as designated by human names, transcend those of some men of the degraded types, and we may await their transitions into the near and the next in the living economy” (11).